The Case 53 was barefoot, her costume nothing more than a motorcycle helmet, sleeveless shirt, baggy shorts, and a shit ton of highlighter yellow-green nylon rope that she used to swing from building to building like a brute-class cape or a person with a death wish. Her arms and legs were covered in eyes of all shapes and sizes, irises rainbow-colored like unto a bag of skittles. The angle of the security camera feed made it hard to tell, and eyeball lady's minimum-effort costume didn't make things easier, but I could guess the eyes covered pretty nearly every inch of her from the shoulders down.
Shuffles; minimizing contact with ground, has eyes on soles of feet.
Palms of her hands, too. Some people have none of the luck. I'd probably be feeling a lot more sympathy right now if I wasn't seventy percent sure eyeball lady wanted me dead or worse.
Minimizing contact with ground, decision to go barefoot, past knowledge of pain resistance, regeneration; old habit.
Yet to break old habits, low effort costume; new to being the Butcher, new to being a cape.
New to her powers and the cape scene as Butcher Fifteen may or may not be, she wasn't having too much difficulty handing Seir's ass to him. Hadn't had too much difficulty. I wasn't watching the mall's security camera in real time.
Quarrel's power couldn't tell the difference betwixt the fellow in the gross horse-head hat and the shadow clones he swapped for, so Fifteen finally gave up trying to hit Seir himself and started severing the lines connecting him to his clones, putting the metal hook at the end of her rope through them. But fast as Fifteen made short work of Seir's shadow clones, prior attempts at binding the cultist himself had given Seir time to build a small army of the things. They swarmed Fifteen, bouncing off the walls and mall displays and attacking from all directions.
I could have told Seir that wouldn't work.
What she couldn't avoid with her dangersense and, presuming those eyes weren't purely decorative, all-around vision, Fifteen simply tanked. Her retaliation was swift and brutal, half again half a dozen clones obliterated before they had time to retreat. Having finally landed some solid hits in to utterly no avail, horse-head hat finally realized that he was outmatched, if he was still a bit oblivious as to just how badly. He bailed, throwing a clone out-of-doors through the broken window they'd entered through and swapping for it.
Fifteen flickered and vanished from the camera's view. Heartbeats later, the shockwave from her reappearance outside knocked dust from the ceiling. The recording continued, but without Fifteen or Seir in it. I closed my laptop.
She could have used that power to end the fight at any point. I'd assumed she would, at several points in the video. Why hadn't she? I wanted to believe it was because someone had, at long last, beaten the Butcher, that she was the hero she presented as, that she hadn't wanted to use an explosive and incendiary power in a crowded shopping mall out of the goodness of her heart. But there was no precedent for that. More likely, it was a ploy, taking advantage of the new host's lack of notoriety to insinuate her way into the good graces of the heros and public.
And if that was the case, I had to be ready. Because after what I did to them, there's no way that Butcher wouldn't hold a grudge.