There was no question that Aron was overpowered. He could have turned a mountain to gold and bought himself a country. He could have turned a mountain to bread and fed a country. Hell, he could just have taken down the White House with a single thought and declared himself eternal emperor of the United States.

Sometimes he considered those options. Especially in times like these when he felt horribly overqualified for the task assigned to him. Not that it was easy, just so excruciatingly boring. Lots and lots of paperwork.

Nuest and the surviving staff had relocated to a hastily assembled new headquarter, built in record time on top of a pre-existing, recently abandoned military base surrounded by mountains fifteen minutes away from Jade-Lion-City.

They were in China now, having felt that both the Korean and the Japanese branch deserved a while to recover in peace.

So it came that Aron – and a dozen Chinese agents – sifted through unsurmountable masses of spreadsheets, databases and contracts, trying to find irregularities in global financial transactions. The Shadow had money – with the futuristic equipment, the henchmen and the many false leads, it was impossible to overlook. And that wasn’t even considering all the facilities that might still be hidden.

Other than the organization which had been designed to serve as money maker and only had to do some generic obfuscating, the Shadow must have gone to great length to stay stealthy. There was no trace of how any of the phantom companies or underground labs had been created anywhere.

Aron couldn’t complain, exactly. He had asked for something to do, but this wasn’t what he had expected.

Although progress was slow on other fronts as well, so he wasn’t missing out on anything. There had been another radio signature in the Andean Mountains, but as soon as a team from the organization was even in reach, a huge explosion destroyed everything. The resulting rock avalanche hit a village. An earthquake in front of the Australian coast seemed to be another abandoned Shadow facility, since the quake’s source wasn’t on a fault line and the intensity fit. They were losing traces, even before they had them.

But the most frustrating part wasn’t the sitting around, or even the spreadsheet reading that made his eyes water. No, it was the fact that their team had discovered five different cases of blatant corruption in the amount of billions. And they had explicit orders to do nothing.

The American couldn’t fault Junior’s logic. The more they interfered all across the globe, the easier it would be to for the Shadow to find them again. Regardless, Aron kept a little notebook with names of people he would visit once this was all over.

Groaning softly, he leaned back against a stack of boxes filled to the brim with folders that were in turn overflowing with paper they had yet to investigate.

Jason was distributing coffee.

How strange, Aron thought, that the exuberant, young man who was clearly Chinese and didn’t speak a word of English was called Jason. He would have asked for the story behind it, but – as mentioned – there was a language barrier.

The steward with the English name refilled coffee cups, including Aron’s. The American did his best to say thanks to Jason in Chinese and sipped the lukewarm brew. The biscuits, he declined. He only needed to tear a bit of cardboard off a box and turn it into licorice or marzipan. He picked licorice for now.

“Mind if I join you?” Minhyun dropped to the floor next to him.

“I can’t look at any more numbers,” Aron said instead of answering. He downed the coffee all at once. “They kind of blend together now. There’s a reason I didn’t become an accountant. Besides being an all-powerful transfigurer.”

Minhyun took some of the offered candy and Aron turned his empty plastic cup into a lollipop.

“Junior and Ren left for New York,” the tall healer said with his mouth full of sugar stuff.

“What ever happened to our no splitting up rule?” Aron asked. “Those love birds were the ones who made it up. How come they don’t do as they say?”

“Junior wants to meet every single person working for the organization in a kind of speed dating system. If he looks into everybody’s past or additional information gets triggered, he could finally find every mole and double agent. There are already a few people who didn’t show up to work and have become untraceable.”

“Weird,” Aron said and turned his half eaten lollipop into bubblegum. He threw it high, opened his mouth and would have missed but helped along with a tiny bit of telekinesis. The taste of strawberry was still nearly impossible to imitate, but he was getting better at it.

Minhyun patted the American’s cheek. “Aren’t you getting a bit pudgy? All I ever see you eat is candy. Don’t you have a sugar shock twenty-four seven?”

Aron lazily pointed up and down his esophagus. “It’s not part of my body until it’s digested. I turn it into vitamin rich, low fat protein-concentrate on the way down.”

“That’s… that is just unfair!”

“That is unfair? Not my ability to create energy from nothing and to turn mud into gold or to explode the head of everybody in this room?”

“Yeah. This one feels unfair.”

Just to rub it in, Aron fashioned a few gummy worms from a pile of paper clips and dropped them in his mouth like a mother bird feeding her young. Jason went around with matcha tea. Spreadsheets were getting read.

Minhyun stretched, his shirt slipping up and revealing his lean mid-section. “If you’re finished for the day we might as well f***.”

A gummy worm got stuck in Aron’s throat and he coughed for air before remembering that he could just turn it into something near liquid to make it go down. “W-what? We… now?”

“Is there a reason to wait any longer?” It was a question that sounded half like honest curiosity and half like teasing. Maybe not half, really, more like ninety percent teasing.

“I- We… I mean we’ve already done it, right? That night when we had a .”

Minhyun made a motion that could have been a shrug or a cringe. “That doesn’t count. I really shouldn’t have stayed in that dream. I was just a bit curious how well-endowed your subconscious imagines me. And then I had to step in and correct you.”

“It was weird to have two of you all of the sudden.”

“But you didn’t send the other me away when I had made you lucid.” One hundred and ten percent teasing.

Aron looked around. “Can we take this conversation somewhere else, I think a few of these accountants might speak Korean.”

“How about we take it to the bedroom?”

***

[Mature content for the rest of the chapter. Mostly implication. Nothing graphic or detailed.]

The move to China had brought with it an upgrade in residence. The boy’s new bedrooms rivaled six star hotels in their luxury. It was Minhyun’s room they had gone to and Aron stood by the door he had just closed behind him.

“Come on,” Minhyun beckoned, walking to the bed without taking his eyes off his guest.

Aron made a few steps. It was true, the dream didn’t count. He was nervous. Actually that wasn’t really true. His mind was at piece, his mood was euphoric but his celiac plexus and amygdala kept insisting that it was panic time. Was it a normal occurrence to feel ones fight-flight reflex trigger before f***ing?

Maybe he wasn’t ready. His lower half certainly was sure he was ready – solidly sure. He tried to give himself an internal pep talk but it turned out he wasn’t that good of an orator. Briefly, he wondered what emotions Ren would have read in him.

“Well,” Minhyun said, looking down on him with a gentle smile. “Do something, Mister all-powerful. Where is your great mightiness now?”

Aron swallowed, but the lump in his throat remained. No matter, it was on. If this boy was teasing him, he would bear the consequences.

With a single motion Aron commanded Minhyun’s shirt to move in multiple directions at once. The fabric tore along all seams and rained to the floor in tiny pieces. The mind reader was visibly surprised but steadied himself immediately, his smirk growing bigger. His torso was astoundingly beautiful, the slender, lean muscled body moving with the rhythm of his deep breaths.

Aron made a lifting gesture and sent Minhyun flying backwards. Just when the slender boy was at the highest point in the air, halfway onto the bed, Aron let the rest of the clothes follow the shirt.

Fully , Minhyun landed on the soft blanket on the even softer mattress.

Tempted to repeat the trick, Aron instead opted for an even more blatant display of power. His own clothes vanished in bright light as he turned them to plasma.

One big leap and he was on the bed, on top of Minhyun’s legs. The boy looked hungry. What else could Aron do to show off? Well, a few things, but nothing felt desirable. Nothing felt fitting.

“You know what?” he said. “I think I don’t like being in charge.”

Minhyun chuckled. “I’ll take over then.”

“Okay, but how would-“

Aron’s mind was hit by a feedback loop and flipped inside out before shattering into a kaleidoscope of shifting experiences only half of which were his. He was Aron on top of Minhyun and Minhyun under Aron. He felt his touch on his boyfriend and his own hand as a foreign object from the perspective of Minhyun’s skin. And of all this he was so overwhelmingly, infinitely aware.

“What…”

“Nested links. I forced multiple connections between us.” Aron heard Minhyun’s voice but also felt himself as if he was saying those words. “Every sensation, every thought, every experience will loop back and forth several times, picking up intensity then slowly echoing out.”

“Woah!” There were many things demanding Aron’s attention. But having two s at once now, made it trivial to pick a focus. Mental communication revealed the mind reader’s masterplan. If they paid a bit of attention to time their s, at least one of them should always be , leading to an infinite cycle of turning on the other.

The night was young and so were they. No way would he get any sleep for the next few days. Aron wondered if Jason and his coffee pot did room service.