CHAPTER 2
Alex sat in the coffee shop near the university trying to focus on the notes he took two lectures ago, but it seemed that about halfway through he had stopped writing legibly, and now trying to decipher his earlier scribbles was like attempting to translate hieroglyphs from an ancient language. He looked up, trying to find something to distract him for a moment. The TV behind the counter had just changed over to an urgent news broadcast, showing helicopter footage of midtown Clarus City. The camera zoomed in, showing two armored figures exchanging blows on a rooftop. Alex signaled the barista. "Hey, can you turn that up?"
"… responded quickly to the threat," the off-screen reporter was saying. "Damage so far is limited to the Industrial Trust building and first responders are already on the scene." The helicopter camera rapidly panned away from the two armored combatants to show a Slaking bounding up a nearby building and then leaping over to the rooftop. The figure in red and gold armor turned away from his opponent and thrust his palm out towards the rapidly approaching ape. There was a flash as a blast of heat and light shot from the armored man's palm, and the Slaking fell in a heap.
Taking advantage of the red and gold fighter's distraction, the other armored man delivered a sharp uppercut, knocking the man in red and gold off his feet. The man in red armor fired off several more pulses from his hands, but his opponent shrugged them off. Alex and several other customers were all leaning forward in their seats, watching the fight unfold. The man in unadorned armor raised his fist to deliver the final blow, only to be tackled by a red blur. There was a flurry of quick strikes, buying the man in red armor time to stand up.
The Blaziken that had distracted his opponent jumped to the man's side, and they stood back to back, facing down the Slaking and its armored trainer. "Now that's what I'm talking about!" Alex crowed. "Blaziken Man's going to turn this around!"
The two men charged at each other again while Blaziken engaged the Slaking. The news anchor's voice broke in over the live footage. "We are receiving reports from Clarus City police that they believe Blaziken Man's opponent to be notorious criminal Marcus Braun. Police have cordoned off the area to reduce interference in apprehending him."
A murmur rippled through the coffee shop. "Sloth himself," Alex whispered, watching Blaziken Man and the criminal kingpin of Clarus City trade blows. He tried to remember the last time Sloth had taken an active hand in his own operations, and figured it had to have been at least a year ago. Normally if he needed muscle, he would send Pride or Wrath's crew, or if he needed something specifically, Envy or Greed. Whatever he had been after in the Industrial Trust building had to have been important.
Blaziken Man activated the repulsors on his armored legs, shooting up into the air to strafe the ground with shots from his gauntlets. Sloth nimbly jumped out of the way and waited as Blaziken Man descended before leaping at him. The two rolled across the rooftop, and Blaziken Man managed to kick his assailant off. Sloth's Slaking grabbed him out of the air and hurled him at Blaziken Man's partner. The fire type ducked down and came up with a punch that cracked the chest plate of Sloth's armor. The Slaking bellowed and charged at Blaziken, only to be tripped and sent sprawling. Blaziken Man fired a pulse at Sloth's chest, knocking the man down.
Blaziken Man stood over Sloth, his gauntlet glowing with another charged shot, obviously offering him a chance to surrender and come quietly. The two men regarded each other for a long moment, too far from the news helicopter for anyone to hear what they were saying. Outside the frame, a column of fire shot towards Blaziken Man, and the armored hero turned just in time to counter it with a blast from his gauntlet. He used his left hand to steady his shot, and in the momentary distraction, Sloth was back on his feet and delivered a punch to Blaziken Man's beaked helmet, sending him staggering back. Blaziken tried to go to his partner's aid only to become ensnared in the coils of a massive Seviper.
A woman with close-cropped dark hair and wearing black assault gear strode across the rooftop, a Pyroar on her heels. "We have confirmation that the woman we are seeing matches Braun's associate Julia Richelieu," the anchor said.
"Pride," someone in the coffee shop hissed. "This isn't looking good."
The woman pointed, and her Pyroar pounced. Blaziken Man fired on it again, only to be tackled by Sloth's Slaking. Sloth and Pride advanced as Blaziken Man tried to fight a battle on two fronts, but after his drawn-out battle with Sloth, it was clear he was starting to flag. The Slaking managed to get Blaziken Man into a lock as Sloth strode forward, his armored fist drawn back to strike. Before he could, the rooftop was bathed in intense white light. When the camera managed to refocus, Blaziken had been released and Pride's Pyroar was down.
A young woman dressed in white and red stood before Pride, a metal quarterstaff inches from the bridge of Pride's nose. With a quick turn, she brought the butt of the staff around and knocked Pride's knees out from under her. Pride's Seviper lunged at the newcomer, only to stopped with a blast of intensely hot air as a large white moth descended from the sky. The Volcarona kept up its Heat Wave, driving the snake back. The girl hurled another flashbang at Sloth, momentarily blinding him as the optics inside his helmet tried to adjust to the rapidly changing light.
"Yes!" a man two tables down from Alex shouted. "The cavalry's here!"
"Volcarona Mask!" another woman cheered.
Blaziken Man and Volcarona Mask stood back to back as Sloth and Pride charged with their pokemon again. Volcarona kept Pride's pokemon pinned with distance attacks as Blaziken sprinted to his partner's side. Blaziken Man and his pokemon bumped fists just before the armored hero caught Sloth's Slaking with a pulse in the center of its chest, sending the hulking normal type crashing to the ground again, its fur smoldering. Sloth himself targeted Volcarona Mask, whose costume afforded more mobility and flexibility but lacked the defensive plating of Blaziken Man's suit. To her credit, the masked hero nimbly dodged all of Sloth's strikes with a series of pirouettes, flips and acrobatic maneuvers. Using his broad, armored back as a springboard, she launched herself off of Sloth and towards Pride, delivering a kick to the middle of the woman's abdomen as Blaziken Man unleashed a full-power blast in the weakened center of Sloth's armor.
Sloth was sent flying backwards, his armor smoking. He bellowed something to Pride, and the woman tossed a small device at her feet. The capsule exploded into a billowing cloud of thick black smoke, obscuring the view of the rooftop. Volcarona swooped down low and used the beating of its wings to blow the fog away, but by the time it had, Pride and Sloth, along with their pokemon, had vanished. Volcarona Mask jumped to her feet and seemed to quip something to Blaziken Man before climbing onto her pokemon's back and shooting off into the sky, obviously to track down their opponents.
Blaziken Man turned to the news helicopter and held up his hand before he and his Blaziken jumped from the rooftop to a neighboring building. The newscast cut back to the studio, where the anchor shuffled her papers. "We have received word from the CCPD that Blaziken Man and Volcarona Mask are in pursuit of Braun and Richelieu. Due to the attack on the Industrial Trust building, streets will be closed from Third Avenue and Sixty Second Street to Sixth Street and Sixty Fifth Street while the police conduct damage control. Citizens are advised to seek alternate routes."
The crowd in the coffee shop began to disperse when it was clear that the action was over. Alex finished off his coffee and gathered his things so he could get to his next lecture. As he made his way back to campus, it seemed that everyone had seen the news broadcast, and the buzz of conversation was all about Blaziken Man and Volcarona Mask, and the reappearance of Marcus Braun.
Blaziken Man, also known as Jiro Sasaki, had been the first of Clarus City's heroes to start acting publicly to curtail the increasingly bold criminal underworld that had sprung up in the past few years. Sasaki was the president and CEO of Sasaki Industries, and had used his resources and engineering genius to design the Blaziken Man suit. After causing a large public stir with his first few appearances and his success in halting a massive riot started by some of Wrath's anarchists, he went public and revealed that he was the armored figure that had been keeping watch over Clarus City.
After Sasaki, other heroes had started to follow his lead. Volcarona Mask and the Hammer joined Blaziken Man in protecting the city proper, while the Dryad had used her seemingly inexhaustible stable of grass types to maintain order in Lenox Hills across the river, to the point where any disreputable characters fled from anywhere she established an arboretum. The rumor went that Pride had a deep, abiding hatred of the Dryad for driving her out of one of her primary bases of operation.
Those four were the originals, the ones who got the news coverage, the public acclaim, and the right to call themselves heroes.
The newscasters seemed to go back and forth on whether the Cavalier and the Gunslinger in Ridgewood were heroes or vigilantes depending on how successful they had been in the preceding days and how much collateral damage their actions had caused, or at least failed to stop. But people like the Ronin, or Echo and the Phantom in Greenpoint, were never anything better than vigilantes at best, as far as the public was concerned. At worst, they were menaces to society that were little better than the criminals and lunatics they brought to justice.
It certainly didn't help matters that out of all of the outer borough vigilantes, only Hawlucha Man had a good relationship with his borough's police force.
But just being a vigilante wasn't enough for Alex. He wasn't necessarily in the crime fighting business for the glory and prestige that the original four heroes got (though he would admit that the thought of it certainly sweetened the pot). He did it because even though Clarus City was growing into a shining beacon of progress and innovation, its growing light only made the shadows around it deeper and darker. Someone needed to put in the work to keep the city and its civilians safe, and the ability to work a little bit outside the structures of the law allowed Hawlucha Man and the other heroes and vigilantes to do some things the police force simply couldn't.
Alex got to his next lecture and took his usual seat in the back of the lecture hall. After he had set up the 3D rendering software on his laptop, he pulled up the Clarus Herald and the major local TV news website, scanning the headlines for updates on Blaziken Man and Volcarona Mask's pursuit of Sloth and Pride. While he waited for the lecturer to arrive, he saw a small block of text in the Avenbrooke section that talked about the mob on Milton Boulevard and how the terrorist using a potent biological weapon to incite chaos had been stopped by the combined efforts of the Eleventh and "local vigilante Hawlucha Man". He allowed himself a small smile while the professor called for the class's attention at the front. Alex minimized the news sites and turned to the lesson at hand.
Juggling the responsibilities of a student and superhero had proved a difficult task, but Alex had conditioned himself to sleep in short bursts and get by with the minimum number of hours possible. Making sure he could get all his work done on time was the biggest challenge, but he managed. Occasionally though, around especially pressing examinations, the Eleventh was left to patrol the streets of Avenbrooke alone. Though there had yet to be a night where the police couldn't handle the things that went bump on their own, Alex still felt a little guilty.
After putting together his first wingsuit with cast off scraps he gathered in the engineering labs, he had begun using some of his downtime to make improvements on his costume, allowing the sails under his arms to catch greater lift or making a new belt out of a lighter polymer to reduce drag. On his budget, Alex couldn't afford the kind of gear that the Cavalier or the Phantom had, let alone Echo, who relied on a high-end electric guitar and microphone as her crime fighting tools. When he allowed himself to indulge in fantasies, Alex dreamt that after graduating his program, he could work as an engineer at Sasaki Industries, with access to all the technology and resources that would entail, not to mention the generous starting salary the engineering and development department enjoyed.
But that was a long way off, and maybe by then, Hawlucha Man would have the same kind of respect and prestige some of the other heroes had, simply by virtue of his public service alone. That was unlikely, however, as most of the other heroes rose to prestige by facing down a powerful criminal element in a very public fight that was guaranteed to capture the public eye. But due to the underworld politics around Avenbrooke, all the Sins except Envy had learned to give it a wide berth, and the Kuromori Clan rarely had business on his side of the river. The Baron didn't need to call on outside mercenaries for extra muscle when he had plenty on his own payroll. And the Baron's methodology made a drawn-out public fight unlikely.
Alex sighed as he copied down the notation on the projector screen at the front of the room. He was just going to have to hope that the newspapers picked up a few more stories about his work, because he doubted his nemesis was going to give him his ticket to the spotlight.