1.25 – Sneaking like rats

The sewers were surprisingly nice. He didn’t know what he expected, but it was enough to say that it was far clearer than even his nicest imagination. Perhaps it was one of the differences between Tokyo and New York, because he was sure that this place would be swarming with rats. Instead, he could barely see any animals at all. The putrid stench still permeated this whole area here, and he had to pinch his nose so he wouldn’t gag, but it didn’t make him want to leave immediately.

Alicia did gag, but to be fair to her, she did still stay there. For a rich girl like her, that meant something, Nathan supposed.

Vermillion Strike seemed not affected at all. She looked in the distance. Nathan couldn’t see a single thing, but… should he quickly grab his phone and turn the flashlight on?

“I can smell him.”

He went dead silent. Strike pointed to their left. There was an intersection: a path to the left and a path to the right. The way forward was blocked by an iron gate.

“Wait, smell? In this environment?” Alicia asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, what are you, a dog?”

“Rude. Don’t underestimate my abilities, okay, kiddos? Just follow and don’t lag behind. The man is moving quick.” Strike lifted off into the air and zoomed forward, making Nathan and Alicia exchange a look before they started into a slight jog, doing their best to keep up.

It was so eerily quiet here. By now, he was used to the sounds of a city, both in New York and in Tokyo. Tokyo was quieter, but compared to this, it was still as if he was standing next to a boom box. The only sounds audible were the drops of water hitting the slightly flowing sludge and the steps of Alicia behind him. The man, their quarry, was nowhere in sight.

“You’ve been on the track of the Onis for a while, right?” Nathan asked, talking to disperse some of his nerves.

“No, but I have been given a task. These people have become a bit more rowdy these days. They’ve always been a problem, but now they are trying to set up shop in districts that they haven’t been in before. They are pushing out some of the other gangs, and it seems like they are trying to expand.”

“Let me guess,” Alicia groaned as some sludge stuck to her boot. “This happened after the Red Lily started showing its fangs after the explosion. And after Barrage had died.”

“Bingo. We don’t know how they are connected, but me and several other heroes have been set by The SHRA To find out their goals, or at least dispatch them, as quietly as possible.”

“Quietly? Is that a common description of your missions?”

“No,” Strike chuckled. “Usually they want a spectacle out of us. To make money, you know? You’ll learn all of this later. But this time around, we have been ordered to take care of this quietly.”

Nathan thought that he understood what this meant. “So you are about to kill them all?”

“Yes, all of them. Every single Oni I meet. That’s why I didn’t want you to be here; you’ve seen enough death in these last weeks already.”

“We can take it,” Alicia proclaimed. Nathan didn’t feel so inclined, but he was already here, and damn him if he was going to back out now.

It did go against his understanding of superheroes somewhat. There were a lot of settings and a lot of heroes, but throughout all the comic books that he had read, one of the common denominators of being a hero was that the hero didn’t kill. There were a few franchises that focused on the opposite narrative, but they were the outliers, not the rule.

Here it seemed that it was common, though. It did make some kind of dark sense to him. Why fill the prisons of Japan with super-powered people when you could just be rid of the problem once and for all? But still it rubbed him the wrong way.

He picked up a rock from his new ability, the Astral Inventory, and immediately began rolling his arm. One of the theories that he had came up with this last week was that this ability would allow him to store the momentum as well. The momentum itself had a strict time limit, after all, but with this ability, he could pick out as many rocks as he wanted, just chuck them in there and then pick them out as ammunition when needed. Well, not as many as he wanted, but just enough to fill the weight limit.

In theory, this should make him far more powerful. The Strike he unleashed on Vermillion Strike was still his single most powerful attack, but it wasn’t repeatable unless his opponents were to throw him several hundred feet into the air.

“Are you okay with killing?” Alicia broke the silence, the question aimed at Strike.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Okay, no, I don’t think any hero should be okay with killing, Alicia.” Strike said somberly. “But you do get used to it a little, and at the end of the day it’s either that you kill the super-powered freak in front of you or you risk several hundred people getting hurt the next time. Have you taken history lessons yet?”

Nathan nodded. “Just one. We went through how super heroes started appearing about 20 years ago.”

Vermillion Strike shook her head. “So you haven’t learned this part yet. At the start of the super-hero era, once the organizations started forming, the heroes were ordered to always capture the supervillains. Any super powered person that wasn’t in an organization, really. Anyone that wasn’t registered. Do you know how this ended?”

“I somewhat recall hearing a few things, but no,” Alicia said, and Nathan noted that this part of the game hasn’t been mentioned at all. And if it was, then he skimmed it and he wouldn’t let that part of his lack of knowledge show.