I woke to the delightful orchestra of seagulls choking on garbage and the less-delightful crunch of my spine protesting the tenement’s concrete floor. Day two of “Operation: Become Discount Batman” began with a luxurious breakfast of protein bars purchased from the closest gas station.
Bon appétit.
The first order of business was more punching. Yesterday’s Haschel cinema-in-my-brain had shown me how to string together combinations without embedding stray teeth in my knuckles. Today, I needed those combos to feel natural. Muscle memory instead of clumsy cosplay.
So I cleared a rectangle of floor, muttered thanks that the building’s only other occupant was a family of indifferent pigeons, and hit play on the psychic projector. Violet obliged with a new loop: Haschel demonstrating a sequence of moves that I never would have been able to replicate without out-of-context assistance.
Each strike was a blur, each recovery precise. The old master kept pausing to correct indistinct students made of shadowy blobs.
I mirrored him. Jab-cross, pivot, low chop, spinning backfist, snap kick. The first attempt looked like I was trying to swat mosquitoes while tap-dancing on marbles. By the fiftieth repetition, sweat dripped off my chin and my strikes started landing in the same invisible coordinates Haschel marked. Close enough that I could almost hear him grunt in approval.
Hours bled together. My new hoodie became a portable sauna. My lungs complained in Morse code. But somewhere around repetition #200, it was all coming together. My hips turns felt more natural. My guard snapped back with less conscious effort. And, for the first time since arriving in Earth-Bet, I felt a flicker of confidence that wasn’t bravado.
Progress, I told myself, collapsing against the wall. I’m making progress.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m well aware of my shortcomings. Claiming any kind of mastery over everything Haschel knew would be delusional in the extreme.
Fortunately, I don’t need to be a master. At least, not right now.
I just needed to be good enough to get started.
Speaking of, over the course of my exercise, I discovered a fascinating aspect of my inherited abilities. First, limited–and I do mean limited–strength, toughness, and agility. I knew I could take a bit of punishment in Dragoon form, but I wasn’t sure how much that extended to my regular, pasty self.
Striking a pillar with considerable force without breaking my hand? Yes, please!
Does this make me bulletproof? Absolutely not.
After a little experimentation with a shard of broken glass, I discovered that I can still be cut with some effort. Yes, I did disinfect it in boiling water and a brief application of flames. I’m not that stupid.
With that said, I won’t be tangling with Hookwolf anytime soon. Or, any of the bigger threats out there, for that matter.
Regular thugs, though? Not as big an issue.
-----
Overconfidence is a dangerous thing to hand an eighteen-year-old with superpowers and no adult supervision. By sundown the next day, I’d decided the best way to cement my new skills was live practise, a.k.a. beating up criminals for pocket money.
Very Robin Hood, if Robin Hood’s loot financed deodorant and burner data plans.
- No Dragoon transformations. If the Spirits so much as glimmer, I shove them back in the toy box.
- No fatalities. Knockouts, broken noses, and existential crises only.
- In, out, thirty seconds. Stealth trumps style points.
- Equal-opportunity pain: ABB? Great. Empire? Naturally.
- Bail if bystanders appear.
I picked my first target at 11 p.m. the next night. A solo ABB runner handing off baggies behind a shuttered laundromat. He had two goons who I assumed were supposed to be muscle, but neither seemed particularly alert.
This area was predominantly Asian, though, so they probably didn’t expect too much trouble. Clad in a thick shirt, dark jeans, and a hoodie, I surveyed the area from an alleyway one street over.
The place was dark enough and foot traffic was practically nonexistent. No working security or traffic cameras for several blocks, either.
Good.
With Haschel’s muscle memories and some practice from the day before, I managed to silently skirt around the building. From there, it was just a matter of causing a distraction. One thrown quarter hitting a lamp post attracted three sets of eyes at just the right moment.
From behind the trio, I was a blur of movement, hitting three chins. After that, it was just a matter of dragging the bodies to a less visible spot and making off with my spoils.
All in all, I relieved my victims of two hundred dollars, a burner, and an unsettling amount of Fun-Dip packets.
Not too bad, but I wasn’t in the mood to celebrate my success. I was too busy trying to slow my racing heart and shaking off my disbelief that the night didn’t turn into a disaster.
My second outing went even better than the first. A pair of white-supremacist geniuses had the bright idea to tag windows near the Boardwalk. It went quickly enough since neither was really paying attention to their surroundings. One took a punch to the gut and the other got kicked in the face. I then stripped them of their wallets and used their own paint to scrawl “E88 Eats Paste” on the wall before I left.
Petty? Yes. Cathartic? Also yes.
By night four, my movements felt slippery-smooth. Drag the target into the shadows, knock them out, lift their wallets, and exit stage left. Repeat.
The cash flowed. It wasn’t Kingpin money, but enough to upgrade my wardrobe from Dumpster-Goth Chic to Respectable Drifter. I even snagged a tactical messenger bag for storing and carrying my semi ill-gotten gains.
After the first night, I operated strictly between midnight and four a.m., choosing alleys with zero CCTV and acoustics so dead you could commit a war crime without an echo. I left my victims alive, mostly intact, and vaguely convinced they’d been mugged by a ghost with a martial-arts commentary subscription.
Despite my efforts, rumours still sprouted. Though, considering no one’s actually seen me, they were kind of all over the place. “Some ninja kid” hopping gangs indiscriminately. A “red-eyed demon” who vanished when flashlights swept.
The PRT chalked it up to cape hysteria, bless their bureaucratic hearts.
At dawn, I would limp back to my tenement, loaded with crumpled bills and assorted knick-knacks. The funds went to necessities: canned food that didn’t taste like defeat, thick flannels to mask Spirit nodes, and a prepaid data plan so I could doom-scroll PHO without bumming café Wi-Fi.
By the seventh night, I’d turned a profit and only dislocated one thumb (mine, resetting it hurt like tax season). Heightened abilities didn’t completely save me from a badly thrown knife hand. Still, one minor injury after multiple outings? I’ll take that win.
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Not bad for a week’s work, I thought while heating beans over a Sterno can. Time to use this momentum for something actually heroic.
This is where I hit a snag.
Heroics, alas, require intelligence work, and my investigative skills ranked somewhere between CSI: Teletubbies and Where’s Waldo? but Waldo’s on fire. As far as tools and sources went, internet cafés, scuttlebutt from half-conscious dealers, and eavesdropping on corner chatter didn’t yield the best info.
PHO wasn’t really giving me much beyond the usual conspiracies and Void_Cowboy shenanigans. Online news stories weren’t much better (seriously, when are they going to stop covering my run-in with the heroes?).
Brooding on rooftops while listening in on groups of criminals shooting the breeze was, unsurprisingly, unenlightening.
Still, patterns emerged:
- Bakuda sightings were nonexistent. In canon, she’d be kidnapping people by now, turning them into walking explosive experiments. The ABB’s brutality should be skyrocketing. Instead, street whispers said the mad bomber was still “building something big” in hidden workshops. No mass abductions yet, which was objectively a good thing. But it was suspicious AF.
- Lung was confirmed in custody, heavily sedated, occasionally belching smoke in a PRT infirmary. Bakuda’s leash holder is gone, but her atrocities not in motion? Timeline skew.
- Smaller ABB crews took up the slack, pushing more drugs to compensate. Good for my wallet, bad for my moral fibre.
- Taylor’s anonymous crime tips kept appearing on BNPD blotters. Consistent style, always bugs reported nearby. She was working, but solo.
Knowing that miss protagonist was still out there looking out for the little guy put me at ease. The other stuff, not so much.
I didn’t like the smell of it. If Bakuda was behind schedule, something more dangerous than head-bomb hostages might be brewing. Maybe a bigger bomb, maybe a new drug, maybe both. She was extra credit incarnate.
The rational move was to meet Taylor, pool intel, maybe convince her I wasn’t actually Satan. If this were a week before, that’s exactly what I would have done. Unfortunately, I’ve already seen what that kind of thinking gets me.
While it makes sense, I would have to prove that there was a threat to begin with. That would require actual evidence, which I currently don’t have. I would also have to introduce myself in a way that wouldn’t trigger another super swarm.
And what if she’d already met Tattletale? I’ve already fucked the story up every which way. Who’s to say that Lisa dearest hadn’t already turned Taylor against me?
I didn’t know and that’s the problem.
So I made a compromise: keep tailing ABB activity and look for Bakuda clues. If I figured out what she was building, I could present Taylor with proof and ask for help. How I would go about approaching her, I’ll figure out later.
For now, duty calls.
That’s how I ended up spending two nights shadowing ABB safehouses. Listening through cracked windows taught me new Asian swear words, but no Bakuda intel. Their runners were jittery, though. Talk of internal audits, Oni Lee “cleaning house” abounds.
Great. Because what my anxiety needed was a teleporting murder-ninja with obsessive-compulsive decapitation disorder.
-------
Thursday, 3 a.m. The docks slept under a blanket of sea-fog-flavoured misery. I crouched atop a rusted crane, tugging at the itchy fabric of the simple cloth face mask I'd hastily bought. At least now the ABB wouldn’t get an easy ID if they spotted me.
Below, two ABB goons smoked lazily outside a corrugated warehouse. Every few minutes, one radioed inside, murmuring in Vietnamese too soft to decipher. So far, my stakeout had yielded a grand total of nothing, zip, zero, zilch. Bakuda was being suspiciously quiet, and that worried me far more than any manic bomb threats ever could.
What was she waiting for? And why hadn’t she already plastered her deranged schemes all over PHO? Her silence screamed danger in bold, neon letters.
A sudden flicker of movement shattered my brooding. A silhouette blinked onto the warehouse roof and my heart froze mid-beat.
Oni Lee.
A white demon mask streaked with crimson, bandoliers bristling with knives and grenades, twin pistols strapped to his thighs. Lung’s shadow, the ABB’s resident teleporting assassin.
Someone who I definitely wasn’t ready to meet.
My mouth went dry. The Spirits stirred beneath my skin, clamouring eagerly for action.
“Stay put,” I muttered under my breath. “No pyrotechnics tonight.”
I started slowly retreating, but a sharp whisper of displaced air cut me off. A clone of Lee appeared beside me on the crane arm, knife flashing.
“Crap baskets,” I hissed, then jumped.
I dropped ten feet, landing hard atop a shipping container, my knees howling in protest. The clone leapt after me, knife slashing downward. I spun aside, Haschel’s reflexes guiding my limbs. The knife scraped across metal, sending sparks cascading. Pivoting, I drove a snap-kick into the clone’s chin. Poof, a burst of ash scattered in the wind.
Main Lee appeared behind me instantly, pistol raised. I ducked just as the silenced weapon spat rounds over my head, gouging the metal with a series of dull thunks. Scrambling forward, I vaulted off the container’s edge just as another clone appeared, grenade pin already spinning away.
"Seriously?!" I complained mid-air.
The grenade detonated behind me, and the force hurled me forward, sending my awkward leap into an uncontrolled tumble onto the pier. Splinters and shrapnel sliced my hoodie and peppered my back. Pain bloomed hotly, but I staggered upright anyway, fighting dizziness.
Lee teleported onto the pier ahead, blades drawn and gleaming maliciously in the weak dockside lighting. I charged, feinting left, then twisting sharply to deliver an elbow strike at his ribs. But Lee vanished mid-swing, leaving me stumbling. A clone appeared instantly behind me, machete swinging downward in a vicious arc.
I barely spun in time. The blade scored a shallow gash along my shoulder, fire racing along my nerves.
“Damn it,” I grunted, retaliating with a knee strike.
Another poof of ash.
Lee’s original form materialized in front of me, guns blazing. Bullets screamed past, tearing through fabric and flesh alike. One grazed my thigh, another bit deeply into my side. I gasped, staggering, vision swimming.
The Spirits roared, pushing toward the surface. Wings flared in my mind, begging release.
"No," I growled, teeth clenched. "Not tonight."
Lee blinked out again, reappearing directly above me, descending like a murderous angel. I barely caught his wrist, deflecting the knife that had been aimed at my heart. His free hand swung around, another knife slashing at my face. I jerked back, but too slowly. The edge cut across my cheek, hot blood spilling down my neck.
I reeled backward, gasping. Lee followed relentlessly, creating clones at rapid intervals. Each new form was armed differently. Grenades, knives, pistols. All attacking in seamless concert, driving me steadily toward the warehouse lights. I couldn't let him push me into his reinforcements' view.
Ducking a pistol whip, I grabbed his wrist, pivoting sharply to fling him toward the edge of the pier. Lee teleported mid-air, landing gracefully atop a container stack. He stared down at me, mask impassive.
Breathing raggedly, I scaled another container, keeping distance and obstacles between us. Lee teleported again, this time planting himself atop a stack just meters away. His head tilted slightly, considering, before he drew another grenade. My stomach sank.
"Oh, come on!" I shouted.
He hurled it toward my feet, and I dove sideways, barely clearing the blast radius as fire and metal erupted behind me. Landing hard, the Spirits surged again, angry and desperate. Red and Violet screamed for action, promising salvation and victory.
I squeezed my eyes shut.
"Stay down," I whispered, forcing them into silence. "I can't afford you right now."
Oni Lee appeared inches from my face, pistol already aimed. Panic spiked. Haschel’s instincts surged and I punched upward, knocking his weapon aside, then swept his legs. He teleported mid-fall, appearing behind me, blade flashing. I felt cold steel slice into my back, a deep, brutal wound.
I collapsed onto the rooftop, vision tunneling into a dark haze. Lee stepped closer, preparing the final strike.
Suddenly, a crimson blur slammed into Lee, knocking him backward. Velocity skidded to a stop beside me, tense and poised.
"You okay?" he called urgently.
"Just peachy," I groaned, blood pooling under me. "Thanks for the timely save."
Armsmaster roared onto the scene, halberd blazing with arcs of superheated plasma. Dauntless descended, his spear poised and bathed in charged particles.
Seeing the heroes converge, Oni Lee hesitated briefly before rapidly blinking between positions. Clones appeared and exploded into smoke bombs, obscuring vision.
Armsmaster lunged forward, halberd slicing through shadows.
"Contain him!"
But Lee was already retreating, teleporting from rooftop to rooftop, vanishing quickly into the night’s darkness.
Despite the agony, I forced myself to stand. Now way was I lying around while surrounded by potential enemies. I was rewarded with spasming legs and a whoozy head. Velocity was at my side in a heartbeat, propping me up.
It wasn’t the best way to “officially” meet the heroes, but considering my track record, it wasn’t the worst. Now, I just need to figure out how to talk to people I effectively put in the hospital a few days ago.
This is gonna suck.