The Superhero's Son (Book 1): The Superhero's Test by Lucas Flint Read Free Book Online Page A

about Master Chaos but excited about the fact that Dad was going to train me to be a superhero. I didn't think I'd be getting any sleep tonight.

Chapter Five
     
    W aiting until Saturday was pure torture. I was never any good at patience, but this was worse than usual, because how many kids get to be trained as superheroes? It was like waiting to go to an awesome concert you've been looking forward to all year or for Christmas, except ten times worse.
    I tried to focus on school, but it was hard. Returning to school the next day, I found out that Dad was right: No one remembered what I had done. No one looked at me and ran (though the popular girls, as usual, ignored me). No one seemed afraid that I would punch them through the cafeteria wall if they annoyed me. I was treated like the new kid, like nothing strange or out of the ordinary had happened on my first day at school.
    But that didn't mean there weren't any clues about what happened on my first day. The most obvious was the Robert Candle-shaped wall in the cafeteria, which had been covered with a tarp until the school could hire someone to repair it. Some of the wiser kids outlined Robert's hole and drew stupid-looking faces on the tarp, which I guess meant that Robert hadn't been exactly popular.
    The biggest clue, in my opinion, however, was Robert's complete absence from school. Malcolm—who had basically become my best friend—told me that Robert suffered some pretty critical injuries from the 'air bomb' that had gone off and was going to be in the hospital for the next few weeks. That meant that I would probably not see him for a while, which was fine by me, because I didn't want to see Robert ever again. It wasn't that I was afraid of him, necessarily, because I knew I could beat him in a fight if he came after me again. It was just that I knew that Master Chaos would probably get even angrier at me if I beat his son again and I was in no mood to give him another reason to kill me.
    Speaking of Master Chaos, I eagerly watched the news and kept tabs on any updates about him. So far, no one knew where he was. The NHA had members all over the country looking for him, while the government-sponsored superhero team known as the G-Men were working with them to find him. I saw a lot of the talking heads speculating endlessly about what Master Chaos's message meant and where he was going, which I guess meant that the government had not told anyone about Robert. Or maybe even the government didn't know about Chaos's son.
    In any event, I kept expecting to see Master Chaos walk into my classroom any day now and attack me. I knew what he looked like, because I had searched for pictures of him on the Internet. Unfortunately, it turned out that there had been no new pictures of Master Chaos since he was thrown into Ultimate Max, so I had to rely on 16-year-old pictures that showed a man in his late thirties with wild, crazy gray hair and a mismatched outfit that made even my lame style look like the height of fashion. I figured Chaos had to look older now, though, but the news hadn't shown any new pictures of him, although I figured he'd still be recognizable if I saw him in real life.
    But Master Chaos never showed up, which made it easier for me to focus on my school. Over the week, I spent every lunch period with Malcolm and Tara, who basically became my only friends at school. Neither of them mentioned me punching Robert through the cafeteria wall, which meant that they had been as effected by Dad's memory altering tech as well.
    Malcolm, however, couldn't stop talking about the news of Master Chaos's escape. He kept talking about how various neoheroes compared against Chaos and which one was likely to recapture him. It was from Malcolm that I learned that there was an entire subculture of teenage guys like him who spent endless time, both online and off, debating the strengths and weaknesses of different heroes and villains.
    It was actually really cool. They had this