4/12 Evening
I only just barely managed to dodge to the side, avoiding the talons that came inches from my face. I had no time for reprieve as the tail came towards me, ready to skewer my midsection. I opted to grab it at the sides, the force of the blow sending tremors throughout my body. I ignored it and twisted below the appendage, then began to squeeze inwards, the metal beginning to crack and groan. It didn't last long as the armor-clad assassin spun around, using the tail as leverage to hold himself up when he brought the back of his heel across my face. My body was launched into the side of one of the few cars in the parking lot, the crumpling metal and shattering glass mixing in my ears alongside the stab of pain.
I felt him jump from his position, the blade on his tail singing in the air. On pure instinct I cartwheeled back, the tail embedding into the remains of what was once a car, its back end breaking upwards from the impact center. I forced down whatever unpleasant imagery threatened to surface and launched forwards, plunging a kick into the underside of the vehicle and sending it straight into my attacker. The sound of breaking and twisting metal rang out over the roaring flames of the building, the heat overtaking the chill of the evening rain.
A crescendo of metal shearing through metal rang out through the empty lot, my attacker's tail ripping itself out of the wreckage and splitting the car in two, the pieces soaring past his body harmlessly. His tail coiled around him as he stood in place, tilting his head as he stood at his full height, hands resting at his side. I crouched lower and brought my hands up to cover my face, the lenses of my mask narrowing into sharp slits as they bored into the unchanging orange orbs.
"I'll admit, you're not a complete amateur." He began to circle me, and I stepped in tune with him. His electronic voice differed from mine, adding a higher pitch that made it seem as if he had a playful lilt to his voice despite the lack of emotion in it. It was complimented by the chittering of various pieces of machinery in his armor making noise as he moved, his tail swaying behind him as he walked. It gave a predatory like grace to every action he made, contrasting against how he was treating this like another day at the office. "Definitely more sport than those dealers would have given me." My spine chilled at the reminder of yesterday night, how I almost let a man in my hands die.
"Why did you try to kill him?" I doubted this person would tell me anything substantial, but his reactions would hopefully give me something to go on.
"I wasn't strictly speaking supposed to. Only if he talked." He gestured towards me, holding his hand out like he was giving out a ticket. "You can blame yourself for bringing me to that." I could feel my nails digging into my palm through my gloves, threatening to draw blood. "Then again, I guess I should be thanking you." My eyes widened, struggling to comprehend what he just said. "Being hired as a lookout for gun deals is a waste of my skills. You're the most challenge I've gotten in a while."
"You almost killed a man!" I couldn't stop the rage that broke through my synthesizer, making me sound like a bellowing demon.
"And?" His tail came to his face, the green glow from the lights on the end bleeding onto his expressionless helmet. "You weren't exactly being a saint, if I recall." I recoiled, and the feeling of a throat being crushed in my palm came over my left hand. "Ah, you flinched. I win."
He lunged towards me, and I only just managed to jump above him to miss the slash of talons aimed at my throat, but didn't have enough time to miss the tail as it smacked into my side, sending me spiraling against the concrete. I brought a hand down and stuck it to the surface, bringing me to an abrupt halt. The momentum forced a section of the ground to break off in a large chunk as I was still sailing through the air, and when I heard the chittering of metal coming towards me, I quickly spun around and brought my opposing arm across my chest, hitting the side of the tail and sending the blade to stab into the ground. Landing on my feet, I deflected a side kick that came my way and shot the hand holding the concrete slab into my attacker's face as he spun towards me. I heard a yell of pain as the slab broke into fragments of rock and dust, and I didn't give him any time for reprieve, throwing my left fist into his other cheek in a sharp hook. My knuckles strained from impacting the metal of the helmet, but I didn't let up, the crumpling visage on the armor giving me enough encouragement to send an uppercut into his chin.
It lifted him off the ground, and I could see one of his lenses had cracked from the force. I shot out a line of web, and when it attached to the helmet, I wrested downwards and jumped, bringing my knee up in a backflip that met purchase square in the armor's blank face. The sound of breaking metal rang out in my ears, and I could hear the clattering of broken pieces hitting against the concrete. My knee exploded in pain, and the warmth of a forming bruise was quick to follow it, but it didn't impede me as flipped through the air and prepared to land.
However, I wouldn't have the chance as the tail that embedded itself in the ground instantly shot out in a shower of concrete and whipped me across the face. I violently spun through the air before I felt a trio a familiar barbed knives stick into my leg, flinging me before I was slammed into the ground face first. Before I even had a chance to recover, the knives left my leg and plunged into my back. I didn't even get to scream as I was lifted up into the air and then harshly thrown back down, the lot underneath me cracking into a web of jagged lines.
Every inch of my body was pain. The heat from the fire didn't register. The rain drops didn't register. There was nothing else my body was experiencing in that moment. The last time I had felt like this, it was when I was just a boy and had yet to adjust to my powers. I only recognized that I had been thrown through the air when my back impacted a wall of concrete, shattering it and falling against jagged edges of rebar and drywall. Red was beginning to overtake the white of my costume, going through my black undershirt as I sprawled out on the floor of the building I was thrown into.
Concrete cracking, mechanisms whirring into place, air billowing away from-
I forced whatever pain I felt away and shot a web to a far wall, pulling myself along the ground as my adversary slithered through the hole I made, the blades of his tail just missing me as I slid away. Bringing my hands behind me and flipping myself into a crouched position, ignoring the protesting of my strained and torn muscles, I quickly surveyed the building I was launched into with my powers.
It was another office building, similar to the one currently on fire, but it was empty, not even a single desk in the area. I noticed the scraps of a 'For Lease' sign in the rubble that followed me in my entrance. We were on the third floor, and the walls were lightly painted over pieces of drywall, and the space we were occupying was what appeared to be a main work area, completely devoid of any clutter.
Good. That meant no civilians would get hurt in this predicament I found myself in.
I looked to the broken faceplate of my attacker, the twisted, shorting out circuitry and metal of his mask glaring at me with its sole unbroken eye. The bent metal of his tail was pointed towards me, and I saw my blood drip down the three blades as they retracted back into its sides. The single blade extended out from an opening in the center, the green lights around it casting the dark, empty room into an eerie glow.
"That hurt." When he spoke without his synthesizer, broken from my attack, his voice was shockingly soft and quiet, yet no less clear. It reminded me of my own in some ways, and my stressed-out senses only just picked it up over the roar of the fire outside and the encroaching sirens I was just now hearing come closer to the scene.
"My heart bleeds." My warped reply tore through the room, and I was shocked at my words. I wasn't one for pithy comebacks.
"You're lucky that my paycheck will cover for this." He crouched down, his tail flicking back and forth behind him as he arms brushed along the floor. "Otherwise, I'd make that joke a bit more literal than intended." I stayed crouched to the ground, tilting my head.
"You weren't here to kill me?"
"You, no. The people in that building, yes." He pointed over his shoulder, and as if to emphasize the action, I heard a large collapse of wood and metal as the building started to fall apart. "However, I was tasked to monitor you." He brought his hands up in a shrug. "Figured that you wouldn't resist the classic 'save people from burning building escapade.' Might as well kill two birds with one stone, after all." Every word out of his mouth made my blood boil, and the pain from before was violently replaced with seething rage. "Again, thank you for that."
"Who hired you?" I growled out like a blood starved animal.
"My boss." He drawled. "You ought to work on your interrogation technique." He tilted his head, and the arrogance in his tone made my spine shoot up in hot fury. "Take last night for example," he shot himself towards me after he said that, and I responded by jumping onto the wall behind me and vaulting above him as he got closer, shooting a web line to his back and pulling him towards me as he embedded an arm into the wall. I whipped a leg in midair towards his head, but he twisted along with it and blocked the attack, grabbing my leg and my throat with his opposing arm. He spun and threw me onto the ground, pinning me down with his knee digging into my stomach, his claws tightening into my calf and throat. I barely managed to catch the stinger of his tail as it came hurtling towards my head, the sharp point inches away from one of my eyes as I wrestled with the end, the green dots of light overtaking my blurring vision.
"You asked the man, 'Why are you bringing guns into Tokyo?' Not a bad question, but not the right one either." His hand clutched tighter around my throat, his knee pushing into my diaphragm quickening the loss of air. The blood pooling from the wounds in my back made my clothes stick to me, forcing bits of dust and broken concrete into open gashes. "You don't even know if that was the only shipment." The lenses of my mask widened in conjunction with my own eyes, and I could feel the sneer stretch on this bastard's face. "Let alone if it was the first."
Suddenly, his tail lurched upwards, lifting my arms and torso up with it while his grip on my neck tightened. The stinger retracted back into the end and was quickly replaced by the former three prongs, and before I had the chance to recover, the tail plunged into my chest, stabbing into my sides and lifting me into the air. My scream was cutoff as the tail thrashed me into the office walls, embedding me halfway through and thrashing me across its surfaces. Every inch of my body was practically singing in new forms of pain that I hadn't experienced before, punctuated by every change of direction causing the serrated blade in my body to twitch and tighten their grip.
It got to the point that I recognized that I was pulled back through the wall more than felt it, and recognized the I was thrust into the ceiling before being let go, falling through the air before I recognized the sensation of the tail hitting me in the back, sending me to the ground so hard that I bounced off the floor. I was only able to tell that I was flung back out to the parking lot because I heard a wall collapsing around me and smelled the mixture of ash and rain hitting my nose.
When I felt the prongs enter my back again, I felt more annoyed than anything at the dulled stabbing sensation as I was spun through the air and flung towards the ground. The back of my shoulders ricocheted off a vehicle, causing my ears to ring from the cracking of metal and blaring car alarm as I spiraled onto the cold, wet concrete.
Every inch of my body felt like it had been replaced with molten lead. Whenever a drop of rain landed on my open wounds, it felt both refreshingly cooling and invasively stinging. Moving was another matter entirely, as it felt as though my muscles would fall off my bone with one wrong flinch. I powered though it as best I could as I brough my arms in front of me, slowly peeling myself from the pavement. Thin lines of blood stuck to the dirty surface as I did so.
I metal boot slamming into my head sent it back down, cracks rippling out from the impact around my face. One of my eyes went below the broken asphalt, and the other looked up to the side to glare at my attacker. His head was tilted, the single orange orb looking down at me, judging me. As if he was contemplating whether or not I was a worthy enough pray.
He brought his foot away and kicked me in the side, flipping me onto my back and stifling my groan by bringing his hand back around my throat and lifting me until I was above him. I didn't make any attempts to strike back or wrestle against him, instead letting my arms go limp at my side. 'Let him think I'm done for. He'll get careless.' There was no way I could engage in a protracted fight in this state, but I could at least injure him enough to make him flee if he let his guard down. He lowered me back down, my face inches away from his as he brough his tail towards us, the green light highlighting our broken and bloodied masks in a sick color.
"To think," he let out a small chuckle, and the blades on the tail retracted back, "he was actually somewhat worried about you."
"He's not the one who should be worried right now." I grabbed his wrist and twisted, then shot my other hand up and grabbed the tail, making it stick to me with my powers. He let go of my neck and I used the opportunity to bring my arms down, forcing him to edge closer to me as I wrestled with him. I used his own appendages as leverage and wrung my knee across his face, rupturing metal springing out from the impact center. I let go of his arm as he shot to the side, but kept my grip on his tail as he got further away from me, a chunk of it ripping off and exposing circuitry and mechanical parts, the blades on the one side falling down onto the ground as he crashed into a car.
I managed to land on my feet, but my knees buckled after I felt a wave of muscles tighten up, needing to catch myself as I fell back down to the ground. 'Damnit.' I could tell with my senses that if my body was in no condition before, it was past the point of no return with that one move. My stab wounds felt like they were about to tear my back and sides right open if I moved anymore, and my vision was beginning to swim from the blood loss. Even just holding myself up on the ground my limbs were shaking uncontrollably, struggling to support my weight and protesting every bit of movement.
The sound of metal being torn apart rang out across the lot, and I lifted my head up to see a shower of broken car parts raining around the dark blue assassin, his orange eye glaring at me from the broken shard of his helmet. Even with that attack, there was still and underlayer of armor that was left unaffected, despite pieces of it jutting out from the impact and lines of damage flowing along its surface. A large portion of a vehicle was skewered by the broken tail, the end shooting out sparks of electricity from where I ripped off a section of it.
We stayed where we were for a moment, not moving an inch. He didn't make any attempts to remove the debris from his tail, and simply stood in place, hunched over and arms limp in front of him, almost brushing the pavement. His seemingly default stance. I agonizingly lifted myself onto my legs, stopping in a kneeing position to catch my breath.
"It just came to me," he spoke up, and his voice was devoid of any of his previous levity. Now, only a cold, clinical tone came through over the dying fire and evening downpour. "We haven't introduced ourselves." He brought a hand to his chest, talons edging along its dark blue, segmented breastplate. "You can call me Hadogenes." He brought his hand out, gesturing it toward me.
"Pale Spider." I came to my full height, bringing my hands in front of me and preparing for the oncoming fight. My body was well past exhausted, but I didn't care. I was bringing this monster down.
"Pale Spider." He, Scorpion, tested my name, sounding it out before an empty chuckle came from his throat. "Nice to meet you." He leaned further towards me, his tail coiling behind him with the broken car piece still attached. The single, unbroken orange orb flared as it stared into my own white lenses. "I look forward to when I'll kill you." The words were so empty, yet somehow filled with enough intent that I wondered if this is what Death would sound like were I to meet him.
Three sets of steps, one woman, two male. Revolvers on hips. My eyes widened, and my head whipped around to an alleyway that led into the parking lot. Three uniformed officers came round the corner, and all of them stopped dead in their tracks at the scene before them. One of them, a middle-aged man, recovered first and brought his revolver from its holster up.
"Both of you, freeze!" His subordinates followed suite, nowhere near as confident as their superior.
"Get out of here!" I waved an arm at them, trying to shoo them away like unruly animals. These people didn't stand a chance against this monster.
The rending of car parts tore my attention away from them, and I only just saw the broken piece hurtling towards them. I jumped from my position and tackled it with my shoulder, shooting a web to the ground and pulling downwards, bringing the car down in a heap of broken parts.
Tail cutting through air, heading for-
I lean back, balancing all my weight on my legs as the broken tail grazed my face by mere centimeters. I felt it changing directions, so I fell onto my hands and pushed up as it came back, flipping over the return swipe. Feeling its owner rushing towards me, I held out an arm and fired a ball of web to his face. He ducked under it, and I could feel his tail coming from behind to hit at my back as he brought a hand up to claw at me. I quickly spun a web towards the side of a building, pulling myself away from the surrounding blows, and landed behind my opponent. He turned, looking ready to charge again, but a gunshot ricocheting off his dented armor put a stop to that.
He sharply twisted his head towards the trio of police officers, all of them pointing their weapons and firing upon him. None of the shots penetrated, let alone made him flinch, harmlessly bouncing off his armor despite its damaged state. His one orange eye turned back to me, and my skin went cold.
"No, don't-!" I shot a web out in desperation, but he flicked a broken section of car shrapnel at me with his tail, intercepting it as it raced towards me. The last thing I saw of him was a large blade springing out from the raised sections of the armor on his left forearm before the car hit me. My feet slid along the ground, arms and wounded leg straining from the impact as I caught it, and my heart sank when I smelt iron hit the air.
I ripped the broken piece of the car in half and bolted into the alley, scanning the entire area for the bastard. The only thing I got was the all-encompassing heat of the flames, ash coating the air, and my head feeling like it was about to be split open. My breath came in quick gasps, and I turned to look back at the officers.
All of them were on the ground. One, a woman, was clutching her shoulder, hissing in pain as blood pooled from the new hole in it. Another, a young man, barely looking older than twenty, was on the ground, clumsily pawing at the wound in his stomach, blood replacing the light blue of his uniform blazer and Kevlar as he whimpered out choked sobs. The last, the senior officer, was choking on his own blood, twitching on the ground, arms trying to go to his neck before weakly going back down.
'No, no, no nononono.' I rushed over to him, kneeling down next to his head. His fogging eyes looked to me, and it was the most damning gaze I had ever been subjected to. "You're going to be alright, sir." I didn't stutter, and I was devoid of any emotion as I put the man's head on my lap, trying to elevate him at least a little bit to slow blood flow. Right now, there was nothing else that mattered. Not the cindering building being doused by the firemen, not the fact that I let the monster who did this get away, nothing. All that mattered right now was making sure this man would be able to go home again.
"Stay the fuck away from him!" The woman yelled at me, falling down on her side as she tried to lurch towards us. I ignored her, using my senses to scan over the man's wound to find the worst source of the bleeding.
External carotid artery pulsing, blood flowing from open wound. Will bleed out in seven seconds. My fingers moved on instinct, digging into the cut and pinching the vessels closed. The man gasped and moaned in pain, his breaths coming out as whimpering gurgles, bubbles of blood spilling from his mouth. His blood squirted out the slit in sputtering lines, traveling up my arm and splashing across my chest and mask, one of the shots landing straight across one of my lenses.
My body didn't shake, didn't tremble one inch. I was acting with cold and calculated precision, like a machine preforming a task it was specifically designed for. Whatever fear and apprehension I felt was rooted out and excised with contempt.
"What the hell are you-"
"Listen," she quailed at the power I put in my voice, "right now, the only thing keeping this man alive is the fact that I'm pinching his carotid closed." All the color left her face when I finished, and I used the opportunity to continue on. "Call it in, get EMTs down here, and put pressure on his stomach." I jerked my head towards the man lying on the ground, his hands having stopped moving. "NOW!" She flung herself back at my sudden shout, but listened as she hit the button on her radio, fumbling with it due to her hand being coated in her own blood. When she reported 'officers' down,' she went over to her partner and applied pressure to his stomach, a wheezing cry coming out of his lips as he tried to push her off the gushing site.
For the few seconds that it took for emergency personnel to arrive, it felt like time had slowed to a crawl. I looked behind me and past the alley, the fire that brought me here beginning to fade into dying embers. The rain had increased in intensity, the once soft wash turning into a fervent pelting. Despite it all, I only heard one thing. A heart, beating in slowly decreasing tempo. I was confused, because I knew that it wasn't mine. I was wholly familiar with the sound of my own heartbeat.
As I felt another gush of blood hit against my chest, covering one of the eyes of my emblem, and a slight puddle of red liquid squeezing between my fingers and seeping from the ugly gash and streaming onto the pavement in a slimy puddle, I recognized the weakening beat as belonging to the man who was lying before me. I could feel his life literally slipping from in between my fingers, his eyes starting to lose color alongside his skin. His hands were fumbling around his chest, grasping at one of his pockets.
My free hand left his head, propping him on my knee, and moved to hold one of them, gripping it tightly. He let out a whimper, tears streaming down his face as he grasped it as hard as he could.
"You're going to be okay." I hate the fact that I say this with my synthesizer still on, and I begin reciting a prayer in the back of my mind in a desperate effort. 'Merciful Father, I beg that you give your grace to this man tonight, this man who was harmed from my negligence. Please, have mercy, if not for me, then for him.' A small part of me can't help but think that I'll go unanswered.
After all, why would He start listening to me now?
The sounds of squealing wheels and footsteps rushing down the alley bring me out of my invocation, and I look up to see paramedics hauling stretchers and med-kits with them. Some of them pause at the sight of me, but shake off whatever hesitations they may have felt and perform their duty. Eight of them went to the other two officers, attending to them as four others surrounded me, wheeling the stretcher for the man in my arms to be taken and awkwardly stumbling around me to try and see how they could take over. One of them, a man in soaked glasses, kneeled in front of me.
"I'm sorry sir, but we need you to move so we can take over." He fumbled the words, focusing his attention on the wounded officer.
"I can't. His carotid artery has been severed, so he could bleed out in seconds if I stop pinching the wound unless he gets immediate attention." He blinked.
"How'd you... Never mind." He pointed to the two personnel operating the stretcher. "Set it up right here." He moved out of the way, the EMTs getting to work at setting it up in front of me. "You," he pointed to a man that was behind me, "secure his head." I didn't need to see him to tell that he hesitated for a brief moment, before ducking beside me and grasping the officer's head in his hands.
"Okay, so here's what we're going to do." The man leading this operation knelt to my side, putting a hand on my back. I was too overcome by the pain of the fight and my focus on the situation to flinch from the contact. "Yuto and I are going to help move him onto the stretcher; you're going to grab him by the belt like this," he slipped a hand under the officer's belt, yanking it up lightly, "and keep your other hand as steady as possible as we lift and move him. After we're done, I'm going to need you to leave the wound as carefully as you can. Stop pinching," he mimed what I was supposed to do with his own hand, moving his fingers apart then pulling back, "and pull back so I can jump on the gurney and get him ready for stitching."
"Understood." He nodded at my affirmation, and I gently took my hand out from the man's grasp as I wrapped it around his belt. The EMTs moved into position, grabbing his legs and putting their hands around his head in a tight grasp.
"On three." I tensed up, and I could hear the man's heartbeat go weaker by the second. "One, two, three!" In one smooth motion, we all lifted him and set him on the stretcher, the man coughing up blood at the sudden motion. As soon as his head hit the pillow, I let go of the artery, blood spilling into my palm as I pulled back. The leading EMT replaced me in what looked like nanoseconds, straddling the officer and moving his own clean glove into the wound. The stretcher was raised, and I followed as he was carted off into an ambulance, stumbling as I felt my injured leg tense up. I waved off an EMT that tried to help me up.
When we left the alley, there was a plethora of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers on the road and sidewalks. Whatever straggling people were out at this hour were being cordoned off by officers in yellow raincoats, and the moment I came into view, a choir of gasps and shuttering phone cameras rang out. I even spied a news van, the reporter on site and cameraman honing in on my appearance, fighting with one of the uniformed officers to get a better look at the scene.
I ignored the pathetic sight and continued to shadow the EMTs, listening to the heartbeat of the officer as he was loaded into an ambulance. One of the EMTs looked me in the eye as he put a hand on each of the doors, muttering out a "Thanks" as he slammed them closed, the ambulance speeding as fast as it could down the road.
I was left standing in the rain, a wide berth being formed around me as emergency personnel continued with their work. My breath came out in shaky, electronic, but even intervals, and my own heartbeat was hammering in my chest. I began to breathe through my nose then out my mouth, calming myself down from the adrenaline shock. I looked down at myself, the iron scented red on my body mixing into the white of my costume from the rain, turning into a disgusting mix of scarlet and ivory. I raised my right hand up, and I could still feel the blood that threatened to burst from the closed veins in a violent rush. I futilely rubbed at it with my other hand, trying to clean it off an-
I heard a series of hammers being pulled back, and a loud groan from a boom mic being turned on. I slowly craned my neck around, and my eyes strained at the rotating red and blue lights that shown in my face.
"Put your hands up and get down on the ground now!" My ears strained from the volume of the microphone. There was a semicircle of uniformed policemen surrounding me, arms steady as they aimed their revolvers. "This is your only warning!"
…. 'You can't be serious.' I stayed rooted to the spot, not moving an inch. I could hear the lenses of the news crew's camera zooming in on the display, and the reporter began frantically describing the scene in his mic.
"What's this?! It appears that the police are attempting to apprehend the masked man! Are you getting this, Kazu?! I don't know about you folks, but this could get dicey, so be warned that what you might see could be disturbing!" I barely had the restraint left in me to not laugh at that.
'Yes. It is disturbing.' My hands lowered to my sides, and other hands tightened their grips on their guns. 'It's disturbing that you're treating this like some kind of spectacle.' I crouched down and shot into the air. A cloud of rain was disturbed from the force of my jump, and the police hurriedly raised their revolvers. When I heard a hammer striking against its chamber, I could feel my ears tighten before the gunshot rang out, soundwaves bouncing off the city buildings and ringing in my head. I spun in the air, avoiding the shot, and fired a web line and yanked on it, ascending higher into the dark sky as more shots followed after me.
"Hold your fucking fire!" The leading officer's voice was interspersed between the bullets digging into the concrete of the surrounding buildings, and whatever other orders he was going to shout out was drowned by the steady rainfall and roaring downpour of fire hoses doing their work.
I darted across the skyline of Tokyo, going nowhere in particular. Streams of rain water fell off my body, tinted red as they mixed into my costume. The wounds on my back and calf were making themselves known now, and every movement sent a torrent of pain across my body, feeling like I was going to tear my wounds open even further. Eventually, the pain became too much to deal with, and I had to direct myself towards a sequestered building rooftop to rest.
As I came down from my web line, I foolishly landed on my injured leg, and the torn sections of muscle spasmed in pain, sending me tumbling down on the roof, the puncture points on my back and side sending waves of their own crippling sensations down my spine. I twitched and arced my back up from the ground, childishly thinking that if I stopped the wounds from touching the ground that the pain would go away.
I thought I had discarded that line of thinking years ago. Old habits die hard it seems.
Forcing my overwhelming agony down, I lay flat on the ground, ignoring the squelching noise the open gashes make when they make contact on the wet surface. I start taking deep, slow breaths. My neck tenses and throbs at the action, the small intrusions on it protesting every breath I take. Soon though, all the pain I feel subsides, and I can feel my healing factor getting to work at subsuming the pain in endorphins. Even so, when I get up it doesn't take long for the now familiar twinges and waves to follow me, but I manage to power through them, sitting upright and propping my left leg in order to inspect it.
There was a collection of small puncture wounds, five in total, on the calf. Four on one side, and a single one where the thumb of my assailant would have been. It wasn't a major injury, but significant enough to bleed thoroughly, the entire lower part of the limb covered in blood, and given my poor landing, I would have to deal with a limp for the next couple of days while it healed. I forced myself to get up using it, getting a measure of how much pain it could tolerate, and the overwhelming fire that erupted in my leg told me all I needed to know, and I had to hop to the edge on one leg due to it seizing up. Every single hop sent stabs of agony down my back, and it didn't die down even as I sat on the edge, taking pressure off my injuries as I rubbed my leg.
As I sat there, weakly kneading at my new stab wounds, the shock of my fight finally wore off, and all of the senses I had been holding back or ignoring came to the fore in full force. I was already dealing with the input from my stab wounds, but now it was being complimented by the throbbing buildup of various bruises and welts forming all across my body, with the other minor cuts and scrapes I had received after being thrown around made themselves known, every twitch of movement and inhalation of breath agitating a newly discovered abrasion. My throat was raw not just from the smoke coating it and clinging to my lungs, but the surface level scratches and cuts left by that bastard's clawed hand.
My fingers moved to my neck, brushing along the torn shreds of my costume and breaking off bits of dried blood and broken skin. 'Who the hell was that?' In all my time acting as a vigilante, I had never encountered anything that would make me believe that I wasn't the only superpowered individual acting in this city. Not a whisper, not a story, hell not even my powers clued me into the idea that wasn't the case until last night when I had to stop one of them from murdering another human being. 'The way he talked, it sounded like he's been operating in Tokyo for a while.' I brought my hands in front of me, holding them open and inspecting the red-brown stains that made home on them. 'And all that time, and I haven't been aware of him.' They tightly clenched, and what blood that hadn't dried yet oozed out from my fingers and dripped onto the ground. 'All that time, and I hadn't been aware of gun shipments coming into my home.'
Two years. Two years, I've been doing this; going around, righting whatever wrong I came across. It was almost pathetically simple, my powers making it easy for me to locate and identify whenever something illegal was going on, or whether someone was in trouble. And yet here I was, licking my wounds from an assailant that had escaped my notice, managed to sneak up on me, twice,despite my abilities, and only last night had I come across was apparently my first gun deal, but not the city's.
'Right one wrong, two more take place. All the while I'm left floundering between them.' A snort came out as an electronic crack through my nose. Three days after moving, and I've been caught up having to deal with human traffickers, gun smuggling, and now a high-tech assassin who I had no idea where they came from or how to handle them in the future. I managed to get a few lucky blows in, but overall I was the one who came out worse from the fight, with him only sustaining some damaged equipment and a broken arm, while I was bleeding like a wounded animal, turning my shredded and ash covered white costume completely red. It didn't help that the heavy downpour landing on my back sent a small sting of pain with every drop.
'I need to get back and treat these.' I twisted around and tried to look over one of my shoulders to get a view of the several puncture wounds on my back, grabbing my shoulder and bringing it forward slightly. Every bit of movement was protested by a fresh wave of pain, but I ignored it as I performed my inspection, seeing a few spots of torn costume and equally torn skin and muscle. 'Leaving them as is would only worsen them, and having my blood spilling over the city streets is a good way to get caught.' Given my medical history, it wouldn't take long for police to locate me if they were to get a sample. I was lucky enough that the rain would wash away any traces of it, but I didn't want to push my luck.
'That, and I don't want another unfortunate run in with the police.' A terse flow of air left my nose, and I resist the urge to shake my head in anger. 'What the hell were they thinking, opening fire into the air like that?' They were lucky that the bullets impacted into solid concrete and not simple drywall, otherwise some civilians might've gotten hit by them. 'Granted,' I moved my shoulders up and took of the overshirt of my costume, muscles searing with every movement, the blood on the fabric sticking to the undershirt and producing a sick squelching sound as it slid off like a wet towel. I inspected the black spider emblem on its front, covered in lines of blood and glaring out at me. 'I'd probably do the same seeing a masked man drenched in blood.' Still, didn't make getting shot at any less annoying.
…. I don't know how to feel about being able to say something like that so easily, but I ignore that and focus on my tattered shirt. With the sate it was in, I wouldn't even bother trying to fix or clean it. The idea behind wearing two layers of clothing was that, due to my senses, it would act as another layer of protecting from external stimuli, allowing me to better control my perceptions. Another was that, in the event I was injured, whatever blood loss I would suffer would be caught in the first layer of black clothing, keeping the red from seeping into the outer white layers. Evidently, that was not to be the case. My wounds had stopped bleeding by now thanks to my healing factor speeding up the clotting process, but the damage had already been done given how deep they were.
Just then, as I was staring into the thin slits of my emblem's eyes, something clicked in the back of my mind. Something that I had neglected to remember until now. That something being the entire reason I was out here tonight.
"Kamo-!" I shoot up from my spot, but my entire back went rigid at the sudden motion, muscles tightening like piano wire. My arms seized in front of me, and my legs went taught right as I took an awkward step forward. I slowly edged forward, eventually falling face first onto the harsh stone of the roof. I agonizingly brought myself back up on shaky arms, and I could feel my fingers digging into the rooftop as if it were dirt.
'Again.' A growl came out through gritted teeth as I brought myself to my knees. 'I missed him again.'My hands rose into the air and came down as I screamed out, and the ground under me broke out into a series of jagged rocks and lines, my overshirt splaying out on top of it. "DAMNIT!" I ignored the tearing sensations overwhelming my back and my throat feeling like it was grinding sawdust as I yelled out. 'How pathetic are you?' My hands clenched shut, crushing bits of stone to dust. 'Three days of opportunities. Three days missed. Three days, where she's stuck with him.' I looked down at the eyes of my emblem, and they bored holes straight into my soul. 'Because of you.'
I stood upright on my knees, my vision blurring from the sudden motion and gripped my shirt in both hands, then wrought my arms to my side as I let out an animalistic scream. The tearing of fabric replaced the torrent of rain, and I could see my breath come out as quick, ragged wisps of air through my drenched mask. Whatever pain my body was in no longer registered, replaced by a sickening swell of guilt and failure that felt like it was going to make my stomach collapse.
I stayed there... I don't know how long. Shivering in the rain and adrenaline withdrawal. My torn costume and body giving me reminders of what I had failed at this night.
Author's Note:
And I'm back! One day, I'll update without half a month passing. One day...
Anywho, our first supervillain fight! And against Hadogenes, my fic's version of the Scorpion. Like I said before, I'm not a fan of the way Marvel has treated a guy who, on paper, is supposed to be physically superior to Spider-Man, and on just a surface level acts as a good foil to him simply due to the choice of animal he's named after. One thing I had in an earlier draft of this chapter is I had Pale Spider come out somewhat more evenly, specifically the bit where he gets thrown out of the building with having him break Hadogenes' arm. I scrapped it as it would make him come off as less threatening, as he's going to be a recurring villain in this fic, and I want Kurokuya to feel trepidation whenever he faces him again. After all, like he said, he hasn't faced any superpowered people yet in his time as a vigilante.
Also, I want to ask you people reading this something. As you can see, this chapter is much shorter than the others. My question is; do you prefer this, or more bulky chapters. I'm more inclined to longer ones as I feel it helps due to how long I tend to take in between updates, but I'll wait for your own input.