Purely for effect, Aron raised his arms.

Then he revealed his well-kept secret.

He hadn’t even hidden it on purpose. It had just been kind of a habit to summon things with telekinesis before he transfigured them. After the official experiments, he had run his own tests. Creating a vacuum was trivially done by expanding a solid body without breaking it.

In truth, he didn’t need to touch an object to apply transfiguration. He just had to be close enough. And the small distance between him and the floor was no hindrance. So was the distance to the ceiling. He had never been truly trapped.

The concrete plates above and below the cage nearly liquefied as the boy commanded them to take on a new quality on an atomic level.

Thick, moldable lead sheets enveloped his prison from top to bottom like tendrils growing along an invisible sphere. The second he was fully cut off from the outside, his cage disappeared. A snapping thunder crack occurred as the vacuum was instantly filled.

Aron dropped to the ground. He was illuminated by light of his own making.

One more step and he was out of reach of the cage in case it reappeared the second he opened his lead cocoon. He told all electric lines in the building to quit their job. If he stepped outside the metal sphere, stuck between floor and ceiling, he would find darkness and dysfunctional cameras.

The air was chilly. Rubbing his hands happened out of human habit even though he remembered right away he could adjust the temperature of the air on his skin to his wishes.

Aron opened the lead encasing and entered the white room he had seen around his cage.

It was full of toxic gas.

The Shadow had shown foresight again and made sure that even escaping from the confine wasn’t going to safe Aron. The boy cursed. He had already breathed in the substance before realizing what was going on.

Now he could feel his muscles tense up, then relax entirely. He sank to the ground, almost landing with his face on the concrete.

Not again. This time he reacted faster.

Aron surrounded himself with temperatures worthy of hell. Plasma burned a truck-sized, round hole into the wall next to him and all walls behind that one. The outside became visible – blue sky – three rooms away.

The intense heat burst also served the purpose of tearing the atoms of the toxic gas apart, burning it as efficiently as only the center of the sun could have done. The walls glowed.

Outside air streamed in to fill the vacuum.

He didn’t lose consciousness. But he was nearly paralyzed. Why-oh-why couldn’t he have gotten telekinesis that applied to himself? How was he supposed to move if his limbs weren’t under his control?

Aron moved the floor. A ripple served as headrest, letting him look ahead. He expanded on the concept until he was sitting – or leaning – in a crude chair made from PVC that he turned into something more akin to wood. There was no time to get the details right.

The entire level’s floor bent and twisted until it formed a hill that Aron in his ugly chair slid down, having transfigured the surface perfectly smooth. The hill moved with him, always letting him slide further as he laid there, muscles lax.

It was a ridiculous way to travel, like a mockery of a wheelchair. But if the agents in the building found him, they might have a way to finish the job of putting him to sleep. Or worse.

Within a minute of careful maneuvers he made it to the hole to the outside and looked down. Fifty floors, roughly. There was a plaza below and other skyscrapers around it. The one he was in was standing on its own at the rim of the square.

Should he build himself a slide? Well, stairs wouldn’t work in his condition. Unless he found the actual staircase so he could turn that into a slide. Greatly preferable, since it didn’t require him to construct it on the outside of the skyscraper for all the world to see.

He made his way back into the prison room by the same method of ‘floor sliding’.

Maybe there was a way to figure out where the staircase was. Aron poked the building with his powers, sensing where and how his kinetic impulses traveled, got reflected and vanished. He wanted to take the walls apart, but had to be careful not to collapse the whole thing.

Telekinesis radar was too unrefined to tell him anything more than the vague size of adjacent rooms – usually. This time he got a surprising piece of additional information. There was one anomaly – a single, small object he could not affect, somewhere five levels down. It remained unresponsive to his attempts to move it. Why would something so small have a force field?

…Because it was the generator!

Then he smelled fire. He must have blown a few fuses in the desolate hack job of a construction when he turned off the electricity. Or the Shadow had activated a self-destruct mechanism.

Regardless of current danger, Aron tore a small slab of concrete from the wall and transfigured it into cloth. Not too elegant, but it would do. Since he lacked the time and finesse to turn it into a proper set of clothing, it ended up more like an oversized overall, but it covered what it had to. He could only move with immense effort and if anything the paralysation was getting worse over time.

The boy wanted to get to the ground floor with a detour to the generator. There were five floors between him and his side objective.

Aron selected a convenient rectangle of floor and cut it at three sides, leaving a short one for the embedded steel carriers to hold. With a loud thump, the improvised ramp connected his level with the one below.

As soon as he slid down, he saw a group of armed agents. They opened fire, which was as futile a thing as they could have tried. Aron didn’t bother to count them, he just exploded the men into a fine mist sprayed across the unfurnished environment. No time for niceties.

The smell of burning cables was getting stronger.

And he was getting sleepy. Whatever the toxic substance had been, it was something different than the one from the mission, because he didn’t remember getting paralyzed the first time. Should he turn debris into a caffeine bar or something? There was no telling if that would counteract the toxin at all. And even so it would likely not take effect before he succumbed. Why hadn’t he learned how to transfigure adrenaline?

Another ramp down, another bunch of agents, easily exploded. By now he was able to see a faint layer of smoke, rising from lower levels. For once the armed agents were a real threat. If he wasn't awake to redirect the bullets they would penetrate him like any non-superpowered person. So much to take care of.

Three to go. Aron built the next ramp. This one broke. Metal rods complained loudly and ripped the surrounding floor apart as they were torn downward.

He turned himself around and tried again at a different spot. Sliding down to the level below, a subconscious idea surfaced. He attempted to envelope the entire skyscraper with his mind – more material than he had ever accessed before.

Every human in the building exploded. One less worry.

To make sure the construction would stay up until he had made his way down Aron cooled the cables to freezing temperature. Ice formed along the lines in the ceiling and chilly air sank down on him. His breath came out as little clouds before the cool air dissipated. The cold cleared his head a tiny bit, but he was still getting drowsier. At least this permafreeze should put out all fires.

Detonations downstairs, causing vibrations throughout the tower. So it was a self-destruct mechanism. That bastard.

Muscle spasms threw Aron back and forth for a moment, uncontrollably flinging him out of his chair and onto the ground. His baggy overall did little to cushion the impact.

There was no time. He felt his consciousness slip. And he still couldn’t move more than a finger.

It would probably hurt, but constructing another chair and sliding down more ramps wasn’t doing the trick. Especially now that the smoke got thicker and his eyes were getting teary. He had to fall.

Aron transfigured as much of the ground below him as he thought necessary into the fluffiest cashmere he could manage. In the second of falling, he tore walls out of the floor below and commanded them to go under him and his supersized pillow. Just as he impacted, he turned the debris into a small avalanche of colorful balloons to act as airbags for the cashmere mattress.

He sank deep into the pile and barely felt an impact, well cushioned by squeaking balloons. Only a few popped. Unfortunately he had rotated while falling and was now face down. It was already hard to breathe with the smoke in his lungs and the toxin acting on his respiratory muscles.

Only one level under him, the eldritch device was awaiting its destruction by his hand and he would not fall asleep before the deed was done. The boy turned the floor below him and his pillow pile to marshmallows – truckloads of them – and fell.

The rain of sugar-fluff braced his fall and he managed to land face up, almost in a sitting position.

There was absolutely nothing on the next level. Not even partitions or windows. Only steel carriers held the ceiling. The cables running along the inside of the exterior wall were on fire, serving as the sole light source.

The device was the only thing in the entire, massive, empty room. Disturbingly ugly, with tendons and ligaments, looking half organic, half mechanical, the device was wrapped in its blueish field.

It was obviously a trap and obviously too late to react.

Out of its many protrusions, the horrific thing shot the boy with forcefield projectiles, landing multiple hits.