Challenger 3

Fortunately, the sketchy gauntlet did not snap backwards and turn my finger bones to dust. It also actually did live up to the promised claim of being able to rend steel… three whole times. Midway through the fourth demonstration of the glove's ability to crumple pieces of steel into rough balls, the scrap metal construct suddenly locked up.

Luckily, I was able to get my hand out without losing any fingers. Mei was a strange mix between irritated and elated to crack open her failing 'baby' and start ripping out and modifying its internals. She seemed to truly love building and tinkering, even when the results weren't quite what she was hoping for; I couldn't help but find myself admiring that passion. She glanced up at me as she played around with various wires, "Well, the hydraulics are rusted out completely; I maaaay have forgotten to take the sea air into account, and the material was sitting out in the open for who knows how long before I put them to use."

I frowned faintly, but ultimately shrugged my shoulders, "It also lacked finesse; while the strength to crush steel is useful, the fact you can only crush it into a rough ball is a bit of an issue. Anyone with an actual brute quirk won't need these, and anyone without one would prefer more fine control."

She hummed, looking up at me with a raised eyebrow, "What's a "brute" quirk?"

I blinked, embarrassed to realize I had instinctively resorted to internet quirk analyst terminology. "Er, well, it's a term that some quirk analysts use to describe powers that enhance strength and durability. All Might is typically considered the poster boy for such powers, though the exact nature of his quirk is a closely guarded secret." Like the fact my vague memories suggest he's actually a changer or possibly breaker of some sort who buffs up from a skinny little ghoul to the big buff form he presents to the public, but I kept that little detail to myself. I may not have the best opinion of All Might at the moment, but I wasn't about to leak potentially dangerous secrets about him either.

If anyone learned All Might had a timer for his power usage, the odds of him being assassinated skyrocketed. I may not have the most positive feeling towards the man, but I didn't want him dead. Mom had told me stories about what life was like before All Might came to power, the constant fear, the far more frequent random destruction, the violently shifting territories held by various warlords, the endless conflict, the possibility of winding up a causality in someone else's battle hanging like a sword over everyone's head… It was a time rife with chaos and horrorpotential where raw power reigned supreme.

'So not all that much different from now, but without the veneer of civility and law that keep normal people from panicking all the time.'

Something in my thoughts felt wrong. Why did the idea of ushering in an age of chaos and strife feel almost… appealing? Sure, without All Might in the way, attaining the place of Number One Hero would be easier, and chaos in the streets would make finding new powers and slavesallies easier, but… but it wouldn't be very heroic to conspire to assassinate my competition and bring about societal collapses just because it would make my own ascension easier. Even if it would be unconscionably easy to slip that tidbit out on the right forums (with a burner account and an IP and MAC spoofer to make sure it wasn't tracked back to me), ones with members I'd long suspected were information brokers and villains themselves, then take advantage of the chaos…

I shook my head violently, pushing the thought down into the deepest and most tentacle filled parts of the back of my mind. I'm going to surpass All Might by being better than him, not by orchestrating his death to open up the slot for myself; even if my half-assed ideas did work out, taking his place because he got killed would leave me with the bitter feeling that I didn't really surpass him. Mei didn't seem to have noticed my slip, looking over her 'baby' with keen eyes and showing total disinterest in her surroundings; of course, the way her eyes suddenly snapped up to meet mine called that idea into question. "You done mumbling to yourself, greeny?"

I only then realized I hadn't actually introduced myself. I let the embarrassment wash away the cloying thought of leaking dangerous secrets, "U-uh yeah. Oh, my name's Izuku Midoriya! Sorry I forgot to introduce myself!"

She waved me off, eyes still intent on my own, "What's your quirk? I need to know what I'm working with here!" She bounced on the balls of her feet impatiently, providing a very distracting visual to my already slightly flustered mind.

"Uh, well, you see, my, uh, quirk is…" I debated on lying, on claiming one of my stolencopied powers was all I had, but I realized immediately that if I intended to have this girl help with support gear, I'd need to tell her what I needed support with. "Er, my quirk is a bit… complicated."

I lightly flexed my right arm out in front of me, activating stone armour as I did; her unimpressed gaze felt like a cold knife in the gut, but I didn't let it rattle me. Instead, I activated steam hair, letting the scalding wisps circle around me for a moment -to her visible interest- before quickly swapping my armour out for my fire form. Shock overtook her face, the image of my fiery form surrounded in a swirling wreath of slightly lighter flames –the light produced causing the dust raining down off me to sparkle faintly– looking impressive even reflected in her wide eyes.

I felt a natural grin settling over my ethereal face, remaining firmly in place as my flames faded back into flesh. I swapped out steam hair for her own quirk, and traded my timed out fire form for white sand trickling out from between my fingers. "My quirk allows me to challenge people to a simulated battle, and if I win it gives me a weaker copy of their power." I didn't trust her fully, but that was nonspecific enough to probably not get me into trouble if she leaked it. I was very tempted to try and sweeten the pot by mentioning the enhancements the targets got from every other challenge, but given their retroactive nature it would be exceptionally difficult to prove.

Maybe if I find a way to prove what was going on I'd inform her in the future, or perhaps after a few more challenges she'll be inclined to believe me regardless of evidence.

A fascinated sparkle lit up in her yellow eyes, "Woah," She tapped her chin with one finger, eyes flickering around my body rapidly, "With such a versatile power, the kinds of babies you'll need will shift frequently, and they'll have to be very flexible in usage." Her lips pursed in thought, and for a second I was worried she would be scared off, the prospect of the work she takes so much pride in being rendered obsolete or nonviable at a rapid pace putting her off; then, a now somewhat familiar manic grin stretched across her face, "You're lucky I love a challenge!"

I met her grin with one of my own, glancing at her timer; just twenty more minutes. "Alright, where do we begin? I can run you through what powers I have so far?" Thinking on it, I wasn't really sure what kind of gear would really help me; when I found a gap in my abilities (and right now there were more gaps than posts) my thoughts always went to what powers could fill them, the idea of relying on gear felt inherently… temporary. Though, with my decidedly limited supply of slots for powers, mechanical solutions would probably be more reliable; even if I could find some sort of dark vision for instance, at present I'd need to hope it doesn't take up a primary slot or I'd need to choose between it or an offensive ability, and even if it wasn't I'd still be down another supporting power whereas a pair of night vision goggles wouldn't take up a slot at all.

Then again, if the way my power treated my phone was any indication, bringing in anything more complicated than a pointy stick may require me to supply the fuel; if the dead batteries my phone usually had is a sign of a trend, I could only guess any gear would come in unpowered more often than not. I could further speculate that projectile weapons may come without ammo, though I would need to test that; fortunately, I can get my hands on an airsoft or paintball gun much easier than a real one (and on further thought either sport might help with learning how to deal with armed combatants, though I would need to look for… shadier places that allowed quirk usage to get the most benefit; while learning baseline tactics would be great, learning specifically how to fight armed villains (which any criminal using their quirk counts as) would almost be more useful than the guarantee of finding combat oriented powers for my collection). Until I got a quirk that provides the ability to charge batteries (something somewhat unlikely; given lightning was already somewhat rare, finding one with the level of fine control needed to supply power without frying the devices would be very lucky indeed. Though, I suppose a skilled enough engineer could figure out how to turn a less safe charge into something usable) I'd probably need more analog gear, stuff relying on unpowered mechanisms; even though out of challenges I could use more conventional gear, it would be a bit of a waste to have gear I can't use for challenges (or train with in challenges, for that matter).

But do I tell her that? That kind of specificity is far more than I'm willing to give the government (years on quirk speculation forums had taught me their 'secure' records are decidedly… permeable), though I suppose I can't actually think of a way that information could be used against me. Even if she does learn the mechanics of my power (as much as anyone who doesn't have them can), nothing I've seen so far suggests a target can do anything in real life to make a challenge harder (short of maybe buying a doom fortress if their challenge takes their location into account; though, they would have no way of knowing if they had such challenges or not). I wasn't even sure training or even abusing quirk enhancing drugs would make a difference; I'd need to do some experiments to be sure, maybe try getting mom to train and see if new challenges show up, or maybe get someone to try a quirk booster and see if that alters their challenges. Though, that last one seems kinda morally dubious…

Ultimately, I decided it was better to risk potentially having relatively minor information leaked over wasting time and resources on gear I can't make full use of. Besides, once I get to her final challenge, I doubt I'll need to worry about betrayal; though, I suppose she could still let something slip if she wasn't careful or didn't consider it a betrayal. I wasn't actually sure how much control I have over those I've maxed out (yet another thing I'd need to test out), but even if it only made them madly in love and not actually subservient they'd be far less likely to deliberately screw me over.

Perhaps it was overly optimistic of me, but I felt someone who loves you probably wouldn't be inclined to knowingly do something against your interests.

She tapped her lip with an unmanicured finger, clearly about to speak up before I jumped in, "Ah, before we start, there is one possible limitation to consider; so far, in almost every challenge I've done, my phone has been dead even if it was fully charged in real life. While I'm not certain, this highly implies any gear I bring in will need to be unpowered or perhaps kinetically charged until I get a quirk that can charge batteries." While I was faintly nervous I was stretching her patience with just how many caveats there were to working with me, her apparent eagerness for a challenge did make me hopeful.

My eyes flicked to her timer as her grin seemed to grow impossibly wider, only ten more minutes and I'd have another shot. Her eyes shone with a manic light, "Ohoho, now that's a restriction! We'll need to test if you're right about those limits, but if so this will certainly be something to stamp on my resume! How many supporters can say they built a suite of purely unpowered gear! It's not exactly the niche I thought I'd carve out for myself, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that can't use powered gear for whatever reasons that I could exploit!" Shameless, this girl is utterly shameless!

I allowed a grin to stretch across my face in response to her enthusiasm, "Well, I suppose one simple way to check my theory would be to equip one piece of powered and unpowered gear for my next challenge and see if they work? I'd need a broader spectrum of test subjects to be absolutely certain, but it would be a solid start!"

She tapped her chin with a wrench, "Well, the simplest non-powered mechanisms to test would be wind-up gear like a clockwork watch, though we should try hand crank powered gear as well, maybe throw in a quartz powered mechanism too. Hmm, you've got your phone on you, why don't you challenge me now to see if that not working is consistent?"

My smile twitched, "Er…" Oh, fuck it, I've come this far, "Well, I already did," I gestured to my eyes, swapping to her power even though I wasn't sure it had any actual visual effect on my eyes, "that's how I got a copy of your power. But while I succeeded on the first two challenges-" Annnd it only just struck me that I only have one level of her power, admitting to completing two challenges is tantamount to admitting there's other rewards besides powers. Shit, shit! This is exactly the kind of screw up that can lead to… getting… caught.

Except my power cleans up after itself. Hell, the only reason I didn't tell her straight away that my power upgrades people is because of how hard its retroactive nature makes trying to prove it! At this point, so long as I leave out the personality… "enhancements" from the equation, her managing to figure out my quirk will make her healthier and stronger would only make her even more inclined to work with me.

"Let me guess, you failed the third challenge?" Luckily, Mei didn't seem too bothered by my sudden, mid-sentence pause; possibly assuming I stopped because I was embarrassed to admit I'd lost to a girl with no combat oriented powers. "Which means these "challenges" aren't as simple as straight forward duels; I don't rate my chances of beating you with my bare hands very high, so there must have been other factors involved." And suddenly I'm much more wary of this girl's mental faculties; building functioning gear from scrap could easily be a strange quirk reaction or savant nature, but to jump to the right conclusion with so little data? This girl isn't as oblivious as she seems.

She grinned up at me even as nervous sweat dripped down my neck, "My my partner, you just keep getting more and more interesting! You can put my babies through a variety of field conditions and even destructive stress tests without actually putting my darlings -or either of us- at risk! I can make a new baby, and have you test it out thoroughly with no risk or cost, slashing my prototyping budget by over sixty percent!" Her eyes seemed to glow with a feverish intensity, looking me over like the finest slab of meat on the rack.

I blinked, once, twice, then decided to not look too closely at this lovely gift horse's mouth; I wasn't entirely sure that plan would work out, but I wasn't about to discourage her from helping me find out. I nodded, "Yeah, that's true! So long as I have somebody around to challenge, I can test your gear in all sorts of conditions with zero risks!"

She jabbed a wrench at me, coming uncomfortably close to whacking me in the stomach, "Anyway, how does failing my third challenge stop you from challenging me again? Is it a one and done, you lose you're out kinda deally or are you on recharge or something?"

I leaned back slightly, scratching the back of my head awkwardly, "Uh, y-yeah, if I win I can take the next challenge again right away, but if I lose I get locked out for a while before I can try again."

She hummed, tapping her wrench against her palm in a vaguely menacing manner. "How long until you can challenge me again?"

My eyes flicked down to her timer, "Er, about five minutes."

She glanced around, moving towards a small pile of scrap. "That should be enough time to throw a simple clockwork mechanism together." She disappeared under a pile of scrap, her voice scraping through the gaps a few moments later, "What's the scenario, why'd you lose?"

I blinked, glancing warily around before answering, "W-well, we're in a place pretty similar to this, except it seems to extend forever. You're located roughly where we are now, I think, and you know I'm coming… Oh, but your simulated self doesn't have your personality; instead they have a mindset focused on lethality and efficiency. Right after the simulation started, you quickly built a sniper rifle, found a high vantage point, and shot me to death as soon as you spotted me."

An indistinct sound emerged from the shifting pile of scrap, "Hmm, that makes sense; Papa used to have shady military contractors –lot's a folks from something called "Executive Solutions" especially– inquiring about me and my sisters' capacity as snipers at work until he told Momma and their companies blew up." I blinked, questioning if I heard her right before she carried on in the same, nonchalant tone, "I can say for sure my powers lend themselves very well to spotting things from a distance, though I don't have unnaturally steady aim. I suppose my knowledge of basic physics might be enough to aim effectively over great distances if one removes my own inexperience with actually applying that knowledge."

She suddenly popped up from the pile, loose scrap rolling off her and flowing like a landslide down the small mound of metal. She raised a gloved finger, "I don't think we have time for me to make anything that would seriously help with actually surviving being shot; for one, spending hours making a proper set of even unpowered armour, only to find you can't actually bring it with, would be a massive waste of both our time, and that's not even mentioning that simulation me would probably just make an armour piercing rifle to compensate even if you can bring it in. A simple shield might still be worthwhile, even if it'll only block one or two shots before I adapt, but there's no guarantee you can bring such a thing in with you; and, quite frankly, if you want a big slab of unmoving metal you're better off wasting someone else's time."

I nodded along, "That makes sense, yeah." I certainly wouldn't go to a machinist for a basic shield better made by a blacksmith, after all.

She frowned, rubbing her oil stained chin, "You'll need to work on anti-sniper tactics for yourself, then. Hmm, you said I knew you were coming but not exactly where you were?"

I shrugged my shoulders with a nod, "Yeah, you start the challenge already alerted and know where I start from, but after that you need to actually find me." I paused, considering revealing more before deciding there wasn't really a reason to hide potential variables, "There is a modifier that gives the target unerring awareness of my location after you learn of my presence, but this challenge doesn't have it."

She nodded, "Alright, stealth tech isn't exactly my forte -I'll need to brush up on that before UA- but even if I knew how to make an invisibility cloak or whatever, I'm fairly sure this place doesn't have the requisite materials anyway." I briefly boggled at the idea of a technological option for invisibility, before rethinking what she said; while she implied such a thing is possible, I get the feeling she'd estimate herself as capable of making anything. I'd never heard of tech like that, though I-Island was coming out with fascinating new stuff everyday now; I had enough faith in human ingenuity to believe such tech could be made, but even so I suspected a proper quirk would be more reliable and quite probably easier to get.

She rolls her head from side to side for a bit, "How do you win the simulation?"

I blinked, fairly sure I'd adequately explained that, "I have to beat-"

She cut me off mid word, "Define "beat". What counts as a victory?"

Oh, that's what she wanted to know. I was a little uncomfortable even thinking about my victory conditions, let alone saying it aloud, but I suppose she'd need to know to help me with it. "Er, I uh… havetokillthetargettowin." The words exploded out of me all in one breath, my own discomfort with the topic mixing with my social awkwardness to make an IED loaded up with shame and fear. I jumped to add one more detail, grasping the thinnest of straws to try to assure her that my power wasn't grooming me into a psycho killer, "Um, usually anyway; I have had one challenge where I just had to win a scenario that didn't actually necessitate lethal force. Er, it did still allow a lethal solution though. Oh! There was also another challenge that explicitly failed if I didn't extract the target alive!" Nailed it, Deku, that'll definitely convince the pretty girl you aren't a lunatic murderer.

Fortunately, Mei seemed remarkably unconcerned with the idea of talking to someone who'd experienced murdering her in vivid detail. Instead of recoiling in disgust and fear, she merely rubbed her chin, "How'd you go about it in my challenges?" Her voice was unwavering, curious in the same excited but impersonal way she'd been the whole time, without a hint of discomfort over discussing how I'd go about killing her.

I scratched the back of my head, distinctly uncomfortable with this line of conversation. But, I suppose it could help… "I uh, snuck up on you while you were tinkering, grabbed a heavy tool, and whacked you over the head."

She nodded thoughtfully, "Crudely effective, I suppose, but inefficient for sure… Now there's an idea!" She grabbed a few random seeming pieces of scrap and ran over to a rusty tool bench covered in various half-built projects that she swept into the sand with a single careless wave of her arm. She moved in a blur, hands snatching tools and materials so fast she kicked up a small cloud of sand around her.

Scant seconds before her timer ticked down to nothing, she emerged from her haze of dust and unreadable movements with a triumphant cry. She lifted a strange gadget above her head, the clunky piece of congealed scrap looking to my uninitiated eyes like little more than an iron watch with an odd little metal bottle attached to one side. An inner voice that sounded an awful lot like Bakugo grumbled about putting off challenging her right now for whatever this piece of crudely slapped together junk this was, but I had long since made ignoring that particular voice a reflexive action outside open combat.

Deciding that honey tastes better than vinegar anyway, I chose to ask what exactly the blocky grey wristband was before writing it off, "So uh, what does it do?"

She grinned maniacally at me, nearly vibrating in place from apparent excitement. "Do you know how they put down cows for butchering?" She didn't wait for me to reply, wildly waving her creation around, "They still sometimes use pressurized gas to propel a rod into the base of their necks at high speeds, killing them quickly and cleanly so no pain or fear hormones taint the meat. This," she waved her free hand at the creation, "Is is a wearable version that you should be able to load up with your steam hair! While nowadays there are electronic versions, gas will be more convenient for our purposes until and unless you get a quirk to charge batteries."

I looked at the little gadget in a new light, part of me feeling deeply disturbed that this girl I'd just met had crafted me a tool explicitly designed for murder but the pragmatic part of me grabbed that portion by the hair and drowned them in a bucket of crude oil. "Woah, that's quite something! How do I use it? How do I load it?"

Her grin caught the light of the setting sun, her unnaturally perfect teeth gleaming red in the polluted light. "Let me show you!" Her voice seemed concerningly eager, and I flinched back as she rushed up to me. The next few minutes were a blur of explanations, demonstrations, and finally walking me step by step through how to operate the little gizmo on the mouth of the little bottle that could store and compress my hair in gaseous form.

I flexed my wrist every which way, getting used to the feeling of the roughly two pound bracelet Mei had gifted me while feeling the increasingly cool seaside breeze across my now bare scalp. Mei's grin hadn't so much as twitched, "Alright alright, now it's time to test it out! It won't help you sneak around or block bullets, but once you get close you can end the fight with one clean blow! Now, is my challenge ready yet?!"

I nodded, "It has been since you finished this device," I gestured at my fancy new wristband, "I just wanted to make sure I knew how to use it before heading in to test it."

She bounced on her heels, her hair and breasts bouncing right along with her in a most distracting manner, "Well, what are you waiting for?! Go go gogogogogogog-"

"Challenge," following her advice, I didn't wait another moment. Reality broke apart around me, fading back into the same scene as last time. After a quick glance showed the bulky contraption Mei had strapped to my wrist was still there (which I must admit, surprised me a good bit; though, a quick test proved my hypothesis to be unfortunately correct, the little pressurized air tank was empty), I set out immediately, moving with haste but taking greater care to be less obvious with where I was traveling through; last time, I made the mistake of assuming that just because she knew where I was coming from that meant I didn't need to bother with stealth, thinking that getting to her as fast as possible was the key before she could build something dangerous. I didn't realize just how quickly she could make something dangerous, and wound up stumbling like a drunken pheasant onto a shooting range with predictable results.

This time, I would try to stay a little more covert. Sure, an outright stealth attack like the first two challenges was off the table, but that didn't mean I couldn't still sneak up on her. She knows where I start from and that I'm here in general, but everything after that requires her to actually find me. Unlike last time where I ran full tilt at where she had been in the previous challenge, this time I darted off to the left and began moving in a wide arc to try and reach her. The necessity of maintaining relative stealth (anything too blatant and she'd detect me) slowed me down, but I was growing familiar with how to move with relative haste and quiet.

I had thought this was a race the first time, I hadn't realized it was an anti-sniper exercise.

My mind wandered to footage of the once hero turned assassin, Lady Nagant, as I ducked and weaved through hills and valleys of garbage. She wasn't the only long range combat specialist that had ever gone into heroism, not by a longshot, but she was widely regarded as the best of them. The most versatile and powerful sniper hero the world had ever seen, before she reportedly went off the deep end and killed a whole bunch of people, including the head of the Public Safety Commision anyway. I was a little bit skeptical of that claim, as I had heard a large number of rumours (that's I'd previously dismissed, but if All Might wasn't quite as sparkling pure as he seemed, a government agency was far from beyond doubt); but regardless of what her eventual fate had been, when people thought of quirk based snipers, her name came to mind first.

Mei was no Lady Nagant, much to my fortune. Mei had very sharp eyes, likely better than the lady assassin, but she had no practical experience shooting a moving target from a long way. The ruthless efficiency the Lust modifier granted her was enough to put the idea of sniping in her mind, but the delay between her spotting me and shooting even when I was standing still and silhouetted against the sky spoke to a lack of practical ability and experience. A dedicated sniper killer would not have needed so long to seize on such a cherry shot, nor would they have needed me to set up such a scenario for them to land a hit on me; Mei took long enough to fire that I had time to question what the glint of her googles in the light (another undoubtedly amateur mistake in and of itself) was while standing still in the open like a dumbass.

Now, I also had approximately zero practical anti-sniper experience (getting shot like a moron earlier notwithstanding), but I had seen a good number of old war movies, dozens of documentaries (many of which were censored, but a few… acquaintances online had led to a handful of American uncensored (or less censored, anyway) ones with actual contemporary footage) about the early Quirk Wars, and a few more modern crime thrillers, and all of them seemed to agree on a number of points; move quickly and erratically, put concealment between you and the shooter whenever possible, and cause distractions if you can. A couple of the more realistic one's also threw in details like worrying about spalling and bullets going right through weak cover (like cars, trees, other people, and some walls), but I doubted Mei had the skill to pull off a shot through concealment nor the practical knowledge to deliberately induce lethal spalling.

Not that I was going to rely on my opponent being incompetent or inexperienced to win; this was not just a fight for immediate power, but training for future real combat. Mei might not know where to shoot to hit me through concealment or to turn my shelter into a claymore, but teaching myself to ignore such dangers could be a lethal mistake if I ever came across someone who did know such tricks. I have effectively infinite chances in simulations, but learning bad habits here could easily lead to a game over via bullet to the head in real life.

I kept my head on a swivel even as I ducked low, keeping an eye on the general area I remember being shot from and staying tense and ready to throw myself into better cover the moment I caught so much as a glimpse of anything shiny over there. Fortunately for me, I managed to keep myself away from any direct lines of fire long enough to lay eyes on Mei herself from about a hundred feet away; I was half buried in a mound of garbage inside a rusted out car frame, peeking through the fronds of what looked suspiciously like a dismantled wind farm fan, and even then just peeking briefly was a struggle against my nerves.

Luckily, she wasn't looking in my direction; though I did note, to my great discomfort, she was clearly eyeing up part of my trail. She had a strange looking rifle in hand, using a padded crutch for a stock, a gallon soda bottle (stuffed full of bullets forged from all sorts of melted down scrap metal rather than uniform brass and lead) sticking out the side as a magazine, and a clearly hand forged barrel with the twisting scrap from the boring process still hanging off the muzzle like patchy silver facial hair.

The fact that abomination hadn't blown up the first time she pulled the trigger was a marvel, the fact it hadn't jammed on the second shot was an outright miracle. She must have either used a different gun or built something internal to sort out those randomly arranged bullets, otherwise she'd have wound up with backwards rounds at the least; although, given how long it took her to shoot me while I stood brazenly silhouetted against the sky last time, perhaps she simply ejected any upside down rounds each trigger pull until she landed on one that worked.

Yet, as I watched, she swept her eyes across the field (forcing me to quickly duck lest I be discovered), then set about tinkering with her crude rifle. Shaving off the scraps on the barrel to fall into the wind like silver confetti, fiddling about with something inside the receiver, and generally slowly but visibly improving upon it. It was crude and simple, but given the materials and time she had to work with it was still very impressive.

It must be said, for as slapdash as it looked, she had managed to make a functioning repeating rifle in less than ten minutes, with no heavy equipment and only rusty literal garbage to work with; that was a hell of a lot better than I could even hope to replicate. This girl's technical ability was not to be underestimated, if I give her enough time there's no telling what kind of technological horror she could create.

So I couldn't give her that time; every second she's not being actively harassed was a second her preparation got better and more secure.

Knowing I was on a timer until she built or improved something beyond anything I could manage added a small amount of haste to my steps. 'Small,' only because I was already moving about as fast as I could without completely abandoning the stealth that was keeping my body unperforated. There was a strong temptation to abandon the quiet approach and simply bull rush the girl -to trust my fate to my speed and my fire form- but I had no speed enhancing powers and five seconds of intangibility wouldn't be enough to cross an ocean of twisted, interconnected junk and score a kill once she had a bead on me.

No, for as much as it wore on my nerves, my best option was to creep around in a decaying semi-circle until I was close enough to rush her from behind. I could hear my heart pounding in my eardrums with every step I took, taste sweat dripping into my mouth as the simulated sun bore down on me, and every time I had to shift a piece of rubble I felt as if I would be interrupted mid-move with a bullet to the dome… but before long, I found myself crouched down roughly fifteen feet behind Mei.

I didn't waste a moment, activating my steam hair quirk and using it to fill the little bottle on my bracelet as Mei had very briefly instructed me. Taking a deep breath, I popped out of cover and began sprinting full tilt for Mei's back. She must have heard my footsteps in the sand, because she started to turn around when I was about ten feet away.

Unfortunately for her, the twenty foot rule worked to my favor; she barely managed to turn around and identify me as a threat before I was on her, wrenching her gun to the side before she could even bring it to bear properly. I swung full force for her head with my other hand, activating my stone skin and the device the real Mei made for me just before my fist hit her head.

A strange but somehow viscerally satisfying kachunk sound of metal scraping against metal in a rapid cycle accompanied by a hiss of released gas met my ears as my wrist mounted cattle killer fired, the iron rod whipping past my fist to punch through Mei's face just below her left eye an instant before my granite coated first met her nose. Her look of rage-filled surprise turned dull and unfocused; she didn't even hit the ground before the simulation started breaking down, killed instantly by the device she made for me.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Telescopic Vision (2)

Reality faded back into the scene of the same girl who's skull I'd just hole punched with a captive bolt gun grinning excitedly at me, "So, diditworkdiditworkdiditwork?!"

I chuckled, "Surprisingly, yes!" I ignored her indignantly muttered, "Surprisingly?" and kept right on speaking, "The bracelet came in with me, and I was even able to get it to work just like you said! As we speculated, it was empty when I spawned in, but I was able to fill it with my hair!" I didn't exactly want to describe how I used the wrist mounted cattle killer; even thinking about the hole I'd punched in this girl's head was uncomfortable, trying to discuss it with her would be far too awkward to continence!

"I'll be honest, I wasn't sure whether my quirk would let me bring a weapon in at all, even an unloaded and unpowered one." I matched her grin with my own, "This could be a game changer, although I've had challenges that inexplicably put me in a specific outfit before so I can't say for sure this will always work."

She shrugged, "Well, even if it only works a tenth of the time, that's still a significant improvement."

I nodded thoughtfully, my eyes flicking down to her new challenge as I thought that over. She was right, of course; even if I could only get an advantage like this on a tiny percentage of simulations, winning those challenges could skew the result of later challenges that I can't bring tools into in my favour anyway. Every victory makes another victory easier; well every other victory at least, I don't think I can bring allies in with me.

Mei Hatsume

Mother Of Inventions 4/6

{LUST} {PREP}

Prep? That's new, but mostly self explanatory. I can only guess it gives the target simulated time to prepare before the challenge's actual start, allowing them to start the fight with an advantage. My eyes rose back up to find Mei grinning at me, "Already looking for my next Challenge? Does it give any hints towards the modifiers involved?"

I hummed and nodded, "Yyyyes, yes it uh, it looks like you'll be bloodlusted and have prep to set up beforehand."

Her expression flattened for a second, before she nodded uncharacteristically gravely, "Expect bombs and gas, lots of them." At my raised eyebrow she continued, "I can picture how a version of me without any restraint would defend a position with time to prepare and no moral concerns, and it's a vision of automated machine gun turrets, landmines everywhere, a sky full of drones, and gas choking every inch of the air." She paused for a moment before shrugging and adding, "Presuming I can get my hands on the right ingredients anyway; definitely expect thermite bombs and napalm, those are pretty simple."

I frowned thoughtfully, slowly nodding as I thought it over. Her words made sense, I wouldn't be surprised if an evil version of anyone with even basic knowledge in engineering would be extremely dangerous with some time to prepare, let alone someone with as nearly supernatural a knack for invention as Mei.

I hummed thoughtfully, "Do you want to try making something before I challenge you again?"

She gave me a crooked smile, before glancing around and checking her watch. Her grin slowly faded into a frown, "Hmm, much as I'd absolutely love to, daddy swore he'd ground me until the entrance exams if I come home too late again." She met my eyes with a smirk, "We'll have to call it rain check! Ooh, we can meet up again tomorrow!"

I nodded, "Sure, sounds great!" Is this what making a friend feels like?! I've never had one of those before! Katsuki would always scare off anyone who started getting a little too close to me! HolyshitI'msoexcited- wait. It's likely she's only being nice to me because of my power's influence. That… that was slightly uncomfortable, but I would simply have to get used to it, despite the creeping feeling of cold oil oozing up my spine. Besides, there's no way a pretty girl like this would be nice to a worthless loser like me without arcane influences on her mind. As more thanfaintly repulsive as it feels, this evilpower is likely the only way I'll ever have a chance at making friends, or even friendly acquaintances.

No one would ever want to be friends with a vessel of worthlessness like myself without being mindfucked at least a little, after all.

I ignored the rain clouds pouring down on my heightened mood, offering to help Mei pack up whatever she was steali- requisitioning from this junkheap. She took full advantage of my willingness to help, directing me to pack up something not far from a literal ton of seemingly useless trash. As the pinkette watched me stuff scrap metal into an oversized suitcase -sitting atop an overturned abandoned fridge and kicking her legs while she did- she suddenly spoke up, "Hey, before we split ways, you may as well try out my next challenge, right? Even if I don't have time to build anything for it, the data you gain could help narrow down what I should make tomorrow."

I nodded, turning towards the grinning girl as I futilely attempted to brush oily grime stains off my hands, "Alright, that makes sense. Challenge." The world faded away once again, green scan lines consuming the growing shadows cast through the dumping ground by the setting sun. Notably, the sun was in roughly the same position as the world-simulacra settled in, indicating this challenge was at least somewhat keeping up with the outside conditions; not altogether relevant at present, but something to keep in mind for the future, I supposed.

I didn't move right away, even though I knew there was a very real chance of me getting sniped while I stood out in the open like an idiot; Mei knows I'm coming, but not where I am or where I start from… hopefully, anyway. A few moments of intense scrutiny of my surroundings with the assistance of telescopic vision showed that, true to the real Mei's word, her simulacra had spent whatever simulated prep time she was allocated creating as many simple but undoubtedly lethal traps as she could to litter the place. If she was as smart as I'm coming to believe she is, she'd also be located on an elevated position with a sniper; hell, she might even be behind me if she's cunning enough to guess I'd check the scrap ocean first, tricking me into braving a labyrinth of landmines while she watches from safety…

Oh damn, I really hope she's not doing that. If the Bloodlust effect leaves her with enough self control to watch me run the gauntlet and let me bleed myself out there for nothing, she could cost me several challenges before I can confirm she's really not out there. However, if I'm overthinking things and she's too lost in her artificial bloodthirst for such trickery, I could easily waste just as many runs combing the city looking for her just as fruitlessly. I glanced over my shoulder, scrutinizing the abandoned cityscape behind me seriously for the first time. Hmm, even if she's not out there, it might be a good idea to use this opportunity to just explore the city; though, given the ocean had seemingly been replaced by an endless scrapyard, I can't be sure the layout of the city was actually accurate to real life.

I shook my head, dismissing the idea; searching a modified version of the city would at best give me questionable information, and at worst completely wrong information –and as many a war game has told me, it's better to have no information than bad information. The next time I found someone with a World (and preferably Real) modifier without a power I'm desperate for, I'll spend a challenge just exploring as much as I can to see how detailed and useful these simulations can be for information gathering; a good test would be finding a door with a pin code, brute forcing a solution, and then testing it in real life to see if my power is making things up or truly drawing upon knowledge I don't have. Currently I'm leaning towards it just making stuff up as the more likely option, it's the only thing that would make sense… but I'm not willing to dismiss the idea that there's more to it out of hand, not after all this strange power has done so far.

For now, I'd treat this as a scouting mission; if I can actually win that would be great, but I'll consider this attempt a qualified success if I manage to learn something that'll help with future attempts. With a deep breath to steady myself and flood my veins with oxygen, I hopped the fence to make my way over to the scrap sea…

And landed straight on a landmine, one of undoubtedly a great many buried in the sand directly under the railing. I barely had time to register the hard object under the sand before it detonated, turning my legs to red jelly and sending burning hot shrapnel up into my torso from below, the force and the metal it propelled shredding my body up to the chest in a fraction of a second. I died instantly, a merciful piece of molten metal punching straight through my torso to blow a chunk out the top of my skull, trailing vaporized blood and churned brain matter behind. I watched from a third person perspective as my body flew across the air for a dozen feet, raining molten gore across the scrap ridden beach, reality shattering into green static around each chunk as they impacted the ground.

FAILURE

HINT: The Prep modifier gives the target basic knowledge of your abilities and simulated time to prepare before the Challenge begins. Look out for traps tailored to your abilities, and ambushes in the worst location.

I blinked dumbly as the real world faded back in, processing my quickest and most brutal death thus far. That… In retrospect, I probably should have seen that coming, but I was genuinely shocked. I knew she placed landmines, but the cursory glance I'd given my landing zone gave me no hint that there could be one less than two feet from where I spawned. I was just thankful I died too quickly for the pain of my body coming apart at the seems like that to register, yet even that was a galling reminder of the very real danger of the world; if that wasn't a simulation…

I shook my head, trying to physically dislodge the idea as I focused on the moment instead. Mei raised an eyebrow, "I take it from your lack of excitement you didn't win."

Something halfway between an incredulous chuckle and a snort erupted gracelessly from me, "No, no I didn't. You were right about the landmines, by the way; I have no idea where you got the ordinance for it, but the very first one I found blew me in half and shredded what was left."

She nodded thoughtfully, her earlier manic excitement absent as she stared at me. There was something I didn't recognize in her eyes, an emotion I'd not seen directed my way except… except when I was first diagnosed Quirkless. Was that… pity? I was used to scorn and contempt, pity had faded quickly from everyone but mom after a very short time. For once, I couldn't entirely lay that one at Katsuki's feet; hero society as a whole had a dim view of the weak in general, and no one was quite so pathetic as one without a quirk.

It was… strange to see something approaching an empathetic response, even if it was apparently due to a side effect of my 'quirk' rather than due to not having one. I… don't think I liked it. It was arguably better than the scorn or quiet disdain I usually see, but I still couldn't see it as a good thing. Pity is just positively flavoured disdain, just as superior and looking just as far down on its recipient even if they think otherwise; ultimately, it comes from the same place, it just takes a different route to the heart.

I physically shook the thought off, she wasn't looking down on me for being worthless, she was sympathising for the trauma I just suffered. That… that was a far more welcome feeling, even if just as alien. Being blown up had been a lot less painful than it looked, not quite painless but surprisingly easy all the same. Even so, having even a symbolic show of support for the suffering she could easily guess I'd gone through was… nice, I suppose.

"It didn't really hurt," I blurted out suddenly, "the blast killed me so fast I didn't have time to feel it rip me apart; I only know it did because I saw my body from a third person perspective as the simulation faded." I wanted to reassure her that I wasn't in excessive pain or anything, partly because I didn't want her worrying over me and partly just to preempt any potential appeals to stop using my power.

Her yellow eyes raked across my face for a moment, taking in details I doubt I'd be able to spot with a microscope before slowly nodding. "Alright, a little pain is a small sacrifice to further my research… but make sure you don't push yourself too far, I need you sane to help test my babies!" She jabbed a gloved finger my way like a sword to punctuate her words.

I grinned sheepishly back at her, "Well, I certainly don't have any plans of losing my mind!" I have no doubt sufficient suffering could damage my sanity, I've seen plenty of horror stories on line of vicious villain attacks leaving people mad or catatonic; even so, I wasn't going to let the fear of that potential outcome keep me from pursuing my dreams, not now that I have a real path towards them. Even if I have to live with memories of being burned alive or worse, so long as it gets me closer to becoming a hero, I will shoulder that burden gladly.

One last push managed to crush the rest of Mei's reappropriated junk down into her bag, allowing me to finally latch it shut with only some grunting and crunching. She shouldered the heavy duffle bag with a grunt, her back and knees bowing but not buckling under the weight. With a grin and a wave she turned to leave, before pausing, "Oh, we should trade numbers so we can keep in touch!" She unceremoniously dropped her freshly scrap laden sack on the ground –producing an uncomfortable metal on metal screech on impact that told me she'd just damaged whatever might have been of value within, not that she seemed to notice let alone care– rushing over to me while pulling out a rugged and weatherbeaten smartphone.

One quick exchange of numbers later and she was power walking off into the sunset, while I was still staring at the series of numbers on my phone in wonder. I… just got a girl's number! A girl just voluntarily gave me her cell phone number! Sure, I may not be a virgin anymore thanks to my power, but this was still a significant achievement for a loser like me! For the first time in my life, a woman who wasn't my mother expressed enough positive interest in me to want to communicate in the future! As I started to make my way home, I was thoroughly stuck on cloud nine.

That happy feeling didn't diminish as I trudged home, my eyes roving the shadowy but surprisingly populated streets; I suppose it was around the time of day adults get off work, so the throngs of dead eyed suits shouldn't have really surprised me. A number of them were streaming out onto the streets from a large building marked with the english lettering for "Horizon" in big letters on the side, some foreign company making a push into Japan most likely; considering the number of oddly uniformly glowing red eyed workers pouring out into the streets, they seemed to be doing a decent job of it.

As often occurred, I couldn't wait until I was home to start jotting down my thoughts. Ideas for quirks I already had danced with ideas for quirks I had seen or could speculate about, occasionally idly sketching out my favorite female heroes in the margins as I pondered how to arrange getting close enough to challenge them. I wrote about Mei quite a bit as well, thoughts on how to use her quirk, how to beat her current challenge, even some speculation on the type of gear she might help me make; occasionally I wrote down speculation on how I might help her build up her tech company. I'm sure I could master some rich folks to become investors, maybe the right people in certain companies…

It was as I was taking a break from writing (shaking a cramp out of my writing hand), idly glancing at people's challenges for any signs of powers worth trying for (despite the ache in my everything making me decidedly disinclined to attempt any of them just then), when I noticed the distinctive squealing of tires taking a turn much too fast. My eyes snapped from a random yawning office worker in the crowd to a nondescript black SUV whipping around a corner at dangerous and undoubtedly illegal speeds; the only distinctive feature of the vehicle was a red sigil on the front doors, a thick red spiral that ended in two points that didn't quite connect. I wasn't quite sure what was happening, until the car drifted a little too close to the sidewalk and the back window rolled down.

At first I didn't see anything as the car tore down the street past me –whipping up my hair and fluttering the pages of my notebook as they passed– but by activating Mei's eyes and zooming in I could just barely make out a faint warping in the air around the open window, a blur vaguely shaped like a man sitting in the windowsill. I was initially just confused, until something about the invisible man's posture struck a chord with faint memories of watching gangster… movies…

It was only as that thought echoed dully in my mind that I noticed vague shapes in the blurry man's hands; he was holding a rifle of some sort in either hand.

I barely had time to widen my eyes before the distinctive crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons fire met my ear. The cloaked man faded into view after the first few shots had already left the barrel, but his fully covering black tactical rigging (reminiscent of old war para-militaries but devoid of any symbols of allegiance and complete with a balaclava and heavily red tinted ski goggles) left him just as anonymous as his former invisibility. More so even, at least invisibility is a distinctive quirk that could be identifying; presuming he wasn't using some sort of technological means instead anyway, which would make things more complicated.

My heart pounded in my ears almost louder than the gunfire, though the screams that followed nearly rivaled it. Time seemed to slow down as I watched the hail of bullets cut through the crowd of office workers like wheat before a threshing machine, noting in the back of my mind that despite the rate of fire and speed of the car, each and every victim had been neatly shot in the head. As soon as the vehicle passed the Horizon building, the mysterious shooter ceased fire, cloaked themselves again, and retreated into the car. I watched them rolling up the window as the bodies hit the floor and the massive pool of blood around them began dripping over the curb, slowly flowing towards the drain.

I considered myself somewhat more inured to the horrors of disasters than the average guy, I was marginally more used to gruesome wounds and death after a thousand hours of disaster footage and a couple hours of simulated combat. And yet… I felt cold inside watching a crowd of nearly a hundred dreadfully real men and women die right before my eyes so quickly I couldn't think of any way I could have saved them. My mind played the scene on repeat, trying and failing to think of something, anything I could have done. Even were I amongst them, I barely even could have saved myself!

My mouth worked but no sounds escaped my teeth. Or perhaps I was babbling madly; either way, the only thing I could hear was the echoing gunshots and the brief, truncated screams of the crowd playing on repeat. I didn't even notice the sounds of sirens getting closer, my hands subconsciously moving to write down what I'd seen in my notebook.

I only realized time had even passed when a hand gently but firmly clasped me on the shoulder and shook me out of my stooper. I blinked stupidly at the police uniformed man giving me a grim but kind smile, like he was trying to reassure me. "Hey kid, we already checked the building's surveillance videos so you aren't a suspect." He made sure to tell me right away I wasn't taking the fall for this, though the very fact he felt the need to clarify as such made it so I wasn't entirely sure whether I should believe him, even though his words made sense.

Ignoring my doubts, the man continued, "My name is Detective Tsukaichi, can you tell me your name?" A distant part of me was slightly indignant at being treated like a small child, but a larger part appreciated his tact. Blurry memories of being viciously scolded by heroes and police for… something (that whole day was still fuzzy in my mind, but I got the impression I had put myself at risk to help… maybe Bakugou? I remembered fire and explosions, which tended to be a tell-tale sign of his involvement, but those memories seemed inextricably linked to a lingering sensation of cloying wetness that was certainly not normal), put me off of policemen, but it was good to see at least one of them actually trying to figure out what was going on.

In hindsight, the idea of putting my life at risk for that psychopath struck me as downright insane; I could only guess my less than stable mental state after hearing All Might murder my dreams had led me to some… questionable choices, perhaps a bit of full blown death seeking behaviour.

I blinked, pulling my thoughts back to reality as I realized the detective was patiently waiting for me to respond. "Uh, M-my name is Izuku, Izuku Midoriya."

He nodded his head, no signs of recognition forming on his face; though, I wasn't sure why some part of me expected a reaction. I'm no one, I've always been no one, it would be stranger for a cop to recognize me; strange, and concerning even. With his hand still on my shoulder, the cop gently but firmly guided me away from the scene and towards a more private corner out of sight of the still dripping bodies. "Well Mr. Midoriya, can you tell me what you saw? We've got the external footage, but cctv cameras are notoriously low quality so anything you remember might help."

I nodded slowly several times, the scene replaying behind my eyes as I fought to find words to describe it. I don't know how long I spent silently nodding and staring off into space, but eventually I got a hold of myself, "Um… I was walking home from the beach, idly watching the office workers pouring out into the streets as I went, when I heard the squeal of tires. I didn't think anything was wrong until I noticed the blurry image of a man sitting in the car window… He opened fire before I understood what was happening, and his aim couldn't have been natural!" It was surprisingly easy to describe the series of events, the trauma from witnessing the invisible man wiping out the crowd of innocents in a hail of bullets duller than I thought it should be when given something productive to focus on.

Perhaps my simulated experience with extensive violence numbed the pain somewhat? Part of me was disturbed by that thought, but I quickly filled it under "uncomfortable things that are probably helpful for heroism" and moved on. Heroes are often right in the thick of extremely traumatic and gruesome scenes, freezing up and going catatonic in the face of atrocities was a disqualifying trait for wannabe heroes. Then again, there's always the possibility I'm in shock, and all these misty emotions are going to hit me like a train later.

Tsukaichi listened and wrote down my words with only a few clarifying questions before patting me on the shoulder, "Alright kiddo, this is good information. Just to clarify, you say the shooter was invisible before he opened fire, then displayed supernatural aim?" His lips twitched downward as I nodded firmly, but he didn't outright frown. "Was there any sort of identifying marks on the man or his vehicle?"

I paused, drawing my mind away from the looping memory of bullets hitting bodies to the shooter's car. "Yyyyyeeeess, yes! The shooter wasn't wearing any visible symbols, but the car itself had a strange design on it; two red pillars twisted around each other, thicker at the bottom and narrowing to points at the tips."

The detective paused notably at that description, his pen stilling on his notebook for a moment before continuing, "You're sure that's what you saw?" I wasn't insulted that he didn't entirely believe me, even I wasn't completely certain of what I saw; even so, I nodded firmly, as sure as I could be at what I'd seen. He frowned, chewing on his bottom lip for a moment before reaching into his jacket to pull out a picture and presenting it to me, "Did it look like this?"

The small picture showed a larger and more ornate painting of the sigil I'd seen, ridges and strange symbols just barely visible in the texture work of the image. I nodded, handing the picture back, "Yeah, it was less fancy and detailed but this is definitely what I saw on the side of the suv. Why, does it mean anything? Will it help find these monsters?"

Detective Tsukaichi frowned, "It… could. That's the predominant symbol of a new religion coming out of Mexico lately, Unitology or something like that. There have been some less than pleasant rumors about them since they first started out, but they've never been linked to involvement in anything like this. It's possible this was religiously motivated, but it's equally as likely the killers either purposefully or uncaringly stole a Unitologist vehicle; we don't have enough evidence to say either way yet." I wasn't sure if he was trying to convince me or himself, but his voice sounded like he almost really believed that; but not quite.

The man shook his head, seeming to notice he was talking to a teenager and not a colleague, "Well alright then, that'll be all for now. We don't need you to come to the station, but if something comes up and we need to speak again, we'll call you. Do you want me to call somebody to pick you up or are you good to walk home on your own?"

I nodded mutely a few times before managing to stutter out a brief, "I… I think I'm okay to walk…" I didn't want to bother mom for something like this, she worked hard already and didn't need me making her day any harder. I knew she'd have come to get me without complaint, even before my power twisted her mind, but I didn't want to abuse that for something so… trivial. I wasn't even hurt, there was no reason I couldn't walk just fine!

The detective nodded slowly, "Alright, you take care of yourself now, okay? Take the next couple days off school, maybe the rest of the week; if any of your teachers bug you, give them my number and I'll set them straight." So saying, he handed me a phone card, ruffled my hair, and stood up to go talk to the crowd of cops looking over the scene of the massacre with uniformly grim expressions.

I stared at the gathered police, watching them step around the spreading pool of blood for a short while before shaking off some of my stupor and beginning to slowly shuffle in the direction of my home. The distance seemed to pass in a blur, my thoughts too busy playing and replaying that far too real massacre before my eyes over and over again to even bother looking out for potentially useful Quirks, and the thought that I probably should have challenged that cop only entering my thoughts far too late. By the time I reached the street my apartment sat on, I had been getting and ignoring strange looks for my vacant expression and zombie-like shuffling for quite awhile.

A loud bang knocked me from my stupor as I trudged through the door towards the stairs, drawing my gaze to the landlord's door flying open to slam against the wall. The elderly man had a surly expression on his face, the yellow stains in his ill-kempt grey beard twisting into something ugly under his beady eyes. He started to move towards me with his hand extended, and a vision of his face caved in from repeated blows to the head flashed before my eyes, the pooled blood mixing into the scene of carnage still replaying in the back of my mind.

I could tell he was building up to some kind of rant, likely about rent or utilities or something equally inane. I realized then, as I watched the old drunk stumble over his own feet, that I didn't want to deal with this, and more importantly, that I didn't have to. My eyes flicked away from his red face down to his lock.

Aleksandr Okohenjin

Scummy Landlord 1/6

{Real}

I didn't hesitate, muttering "Challenge," under my breath before the intoxicated old bastard got two feet from his likely damaged door. Reality faded into scanlines and I found myself standing outside the apartment just like I was before. I took a deep breath, glancing around for any sign of immediate threats, before checking my wrist to see that Mei's gift was still there.

In hindsight, it was lucky that the detective either didn't notice or didn't care about this little device. Sure, it definitely couldn't have killed a crowd of people like that, but somehow I doubt having a portable unregistered execution device was legal. Then again, I suppose it's just as likely he just didn't recognize the device for what it was.

Well, it was good to have that edge; eventually I'll find an offensive quirk that'll be more convenient (and easier to legally conceal) and my concerns over this gadget not following me into challenges will fade, but for the moment I'll take every advantage I can get. The thought was only in my head for a moment before my bubbling, broiling thoughts brought me back to why I was standing here.

This wasn't a calculated move; while there certainly were advantages to mastering my landlord, none of them were why I had challenged him, not really. I couldn't even claim this was about seeking a new quirk, I had no idea what quirk the crotchety old bastard had, if any. No, I came here for one reason and one reason only; to vent. My guts were churning like a snake mating pit, my thoughts kept twisting and whirling like oil in a hurricane, and my emotions were all ablaze, fear fueling anger fueling guilt fueling fear over and over again. I felt like I was bound to do something stupid if I didn't settle my feelings in a place free of consequences, fortunately I have access to such a place.

Seeing that drunken piece of trash storming up to me like he even deserved to talk to me, like he wasn't even lower than my worthless self, curled my confused emotions into a fiery rage only partially directed at the wastrel himself. I didn't waste a second planning or strategizing, I simply let my directionless fury guide my hand as I lashed out at the fake world around me. My body turned to flame as I threw myself at the apartment building, fingers turning to wracking claws leaving trails of fire licking across the peeling grey siding.

I wanted to destroy, to rage and cry and let my environment reflect my burning thoughts. I shouldn't feel like this, I wasn't even the victim of anything, just a bystander; how dare I feel bad for myself?! I felt guilty, for not being able to save any of those people, for not getting shot alongside them, for being too weak and too slow to do anything, for getting to go home to a loving mother and a warm bed while that crowd of innocents grows colder and colder on the sidewalk. I felt a strange, intense yet distant sort of grief for a mass of strangers, even as my rational mind consoled me that I never would have thought twice about them had the day gone as usual.

So instead, I pulled a trick from Bakugou's playbook and met my dark thoughts with unthinking rage.

My plan was simple: rage and attack and destroy until I burned myself out, until I was too tired to feel anything at all, or until the dark churning in my stomach settled down.

The landlord noticed my attack only as I reformed into flesh, ignoring the flames licking at my pants from the burning carpet and flipping the cheap front desk into and through a flimsy wall. The old man came stumbling blearily out of his room, clearing his eyes with one hand and pushing his door open with the other. I whirled on the man, mostly just wanting to destroy something that annoyed me without consequences, but a tiny, still goal oriented part of me whispered that I'd lose out on this freespace if the bastard killed me.

Before he fully cleared his eyes, I leapt upon him, coating myself in stone as I left the ground and driving my granite coated fist into his nose before I landed. The Real modifier was playing in my favour this time; unlike the last time I killed the apartment owner, this time he hadn't thought to bring his doubtlessly illegal sawed-off shotgun to investigate a strange noise. This made some amount of sense in a real life scenario where the danger of getting caught with an illegal firearm is usually higher than whatever caused that noise, but in a simulation like this all it did was leave him unarmed in a critical moment.

Evidently, the front door being kicked open was more concerning to him than something getting knocked over; useful information, I suppose.

He reeled back, shock and pain competing for pride of place on his face with the blood gushing from his nose. I didn't give him a moment to recover, driving my index and middle fingers into his eyes at full force. Eye goo squelched out around my fingers as the wretched man screamed in agony and fear, a sound that turned all the more high pitched as I curled my fingers down inside his sockets, gripping the bones in his face from the inside before yanking down with full strength to drive his chin straight into an uppercut from my other hand.

His orbital bones give out under the impact, snapping like wet drywood around my stone-covered fingers as the meat of his sockets tore away. The blow to the chin sent him toppling over backwards with a cry of hate and pain more fitting for a rabid boar than a man. Blinded and bleeding badly, he started to crawl towards his room; one might think he was merely desperately trying to escape, but this wasn't a Zone challenge so I was more inclined to believe he was going for his gun.

I leaned back, closing my eyes and listening to the fire spread around me; there was something enthralling about the sound of fire consuming wood, the crackles and snaps as things gave out under the hunger of the blaze. The landlord was babbling hatefully at me, but I filtered out his endless stream of barely coherent abuse with ease of long practice. For a moment, I felt almost at peace despite the chaos around me; there was something inherently cathartic about senseless destruction, something usually only violent video games could give those too sane to lash out at the world.

An outlet for violent urges and irrational thoughts, free of any consequence; I didn't even have to feel bad, none of this was real, no one was actually harmed by anything I did here. Even if part of me still recoiled at what I was doing, the miasmic whirlwind already raging in my tumultuous thoughts swept such minor gripes aside. Something… something about that didn't feel quite right, but that suspicion faded into the winds of my mind almost as quickly as it came.

Blood dripped from my fingers, but I couldn't feel the crimson stuff of life through the layers of granite coating my skin. Still, I could just barely hear the sounds of thick droplets impacting the floorboard beneath me. I took a deep breath, tasting the likely toxic smoke starting to fill the room and knowing I'd better hurry up or I'd burn to death before the landlord bled out. I wasn't concerned about him getting the shotgun; without eyes he'd have a hard time loading, let alone aiming it.

Opening my eyes, I quickly found the landlord pawing uselessly at the cupboard he undoubtedly hid his (probably) illegal firearm in. Blind or not, he still wasn't completely harmless just yet. This thought in mind, I turned my hair to mist and quickly strode over to him, placing my hand almost gently on his lower back; the facsimile of a consoling gesture faded into reality as I lined up my wrist and fired Mei's gift. The sharp metal spike slammed into his spine, shattering one of his vertebrae irrevocably and paralyzing him from the waist down.

With the threat neutralized effectively (presuming he didn't have a regeneration quirk, which it didn't seem like he did given his eyes were still nothing but bloody holes in his torn face), I took a deep breathe through my mouth and slowly released it through my nose as I stood over the howling and uselessly flopping man. Each agonized roar was like a flensing dagger to my soul, but their very unreality helped to anchor me; this guilt is not real, this world is not real.

That thought gave me something to latch onto, compounding faint whispers of ideas into a stable ground to push back the roiling clouds in my thoughts. It was a solid platform to assail the maelstrom of survivor's guilt and shock that had seeped into my spirit since the moment I'd realized what was happening on that ever so ordinary yet dreadfully fateful street. If this guilt, this pain in this moment can be shoved aside by simple rout repeated logic, then why couldn't I ignore the trauma of helplessly watching a herd of innocents get violently forced into the grave right before my eyes?

That wasn't a logical conclusion and I knew it; the two situations were very different for many reasons, but emotions don't always need clear cut logic to influence them. The idea, dangerous and illogical as a quiet voice may have whispered it was into the mists of my mind, helped me to center myself. The same thought process that allowed me to struggle through the horrors of these simulations wouldn't quite work –those people weren't fake and I highly doubt any of them will be coming back– but the same spirit of compartmentalizing and ignoring things that probably would have haunted my nightmares if I'd dreamed normally last night still helped.

I fiddled with the doohickey on my wrist for a bit as I watched the lamdlord bleed and squirm, allowing it to take my attention away from… everything. Practically speaking, this device isn't that different from just having a knife, less practical even given the lesser maneuverability and lack of other practical uses; with a knife, I can hold it in different ways, use it to cut things, block attacks, or even get a handhold in a softer wall, but this bracelet can do one thing and one thing only. It does that one thing well, but there are many times where that sole use will not be applicable. Still, it functioned well as a proof of concept; I'd need to test if I could straight up bring a knife with me, but the success of this device showed I had more options than I thought.

I stepped over the wordlessly screeching landlord, walking through the pool of blood slowly spreading out from his weeping facial wounds. He tried to claw at my heels as I passed, but a quick stomp on his fingers dissuaded him of such ambitions long enough for me to pass him by unmolested. It felt… strange, wrong, to cause and then ignore the screams coming from the pitiful man, but the discomfort of this false moment made putting the pain and fear of the very real massacre I'd helplessly watched from my mind slightly easier.

I idly opened the drawer I'd found ammo in last time, expecting to find the shotgun itself sitting amongst the shells. Instead, I was met by an empty drawer, bare wood almost mocking me for its lack of contents. I blinked, confusion knocking my melancholic mood out of whack at this new mystery. I embraced the feeling with both hands, seeking to shuck off my angry despair as quickly as I could for anything else.

Reaching in to feel around inside the seemingly bare drawer solved the conundrum very quickly when my hand met resistance a few inches from the base board. I couldn't see anything, couldn't smell gunpowder or maintenance oils, couldn't even hear my hand impacting something, but I could feel the now somewhat familiar shape of a sawed off shotgun laying in the center of the drawer.

Wrapping my fingers blindly around the barrels, I pulled the invisible weapon into the air. I shuddered slightly, subconsciously, from the parallels my mind started forming right away; an invisible gun was not helping to distract me from my spiralling thoughts. I shook my head, using the same mental trickery that helped me ignore the continued screaming buzzing in my ear to compartmentalize and ignore this real life trauma as best I could.

I got my hand around the shotgun's crudely taped up grip, managing to find the trigger from there with only a little blind groping. I didn't check if it was loaded, knowing I'd never find the ejected shells if it was; instead I felt around until I had a handful of shells to shove into my pocket just in case, before finally turning to face the searching sockets of the landlord. Something clicked in my thoughts as I watched the man blindly scrabble about, a dark idea flickering to life in the shadows of my mind as I spotted an old pc set up in the corner that I'd ignored as useless the last time I was here.

I walked over to the ancient looking computer, booting it up with a press of a thankfully close enough to modern standard power button. It asked for a password, and I immediately glanced over at the landlord slowly dragging his useless lower body towards where I'd stood a few moments ago, before dismissing the idea of interrogating him. None of my previous targets have spoken coherently to me (the random stream of abuse coming from the landlord currently barely counted) in their challenge and I hardly expected him to start now; even if I threatened or even actually tortured him, I doubt he'd do more than spit at me.

Instead, I started digging through his desk drawers and looking over his desk, searching for any possible clue to his password. I found an invisible plastic wrapped brick of what felt like some sort of powder I was fairly certain was cocaine tucked into a false bottom of one drawer that confirmed my suspicion that he was more criminal than the average neglectful landlord, but no password. His username was nondescript, just 'user1234'... I paused in my searching, staring at his generic username with slowly narrowing eyes. He couldn't possibly be so stupid, could he…?

Of course he could. My fingers waved over the number keys, putting in one of the most basic and common bad passwords in history. I tapped enter, and frowned when the computer accepted it and slowly started loading in. There was nothing immediately suspicious about his desktop, a normal looking sunny field background and a small smattering of apps. I clicked on his file explorer, moving straight to images and videos. Nothing popped up right away, except another folder with the default 'New Folder' name; inside that was another file with a file inside, and this continued for ten levels of useless obfuscation before I hit what I'd increasingly been dreading finding.

A folder simply labeled 'Merchandise,' inside which were hundreds -maybe thousands- of pictures and videos of naked and unaware women and men taken from strange angles inside their homes. I recognized some of the people in them, they were my neighbors. A scowl tore across my face, green lightning sparking the sweet ambrosia of justified anger into a bonfire that burned up my useless guilt and horror into oily black smoke. I scrolled quickly through the randomly arrayed pictures and videos before an icy chill went down my spine and I started desperately searching for something I hoped I wouldn't find.

Once more, hope was proven futile.

A blurry wall of green met my eyes, stopping my rapid scrolling dead on exactly what I didn't want to see; dozens of pictures of my mother, and footage of us last night. I grimaced, exiting the browser with hands shaking with alternating waves of rage and fear. The thought to turn the cretinous little cuck into the police barely entered into my thoughts before it burnt to ash at the realization that the ensuing investigation would definitely discover this footage; even if I snuck in and deleted it, they have ways of restoring even scrambled data very effectively these days. If they found this footage, mom would probably go to jail and I might go to juvie and get banned from every hero school in the nation. I couldn't let this get out, no matter what; the thought carved itself across my mind in jagged green crystal, leaving gashes that bled darkness into my thoughts.

A dark whisper to simply kill the man evaporated in an emerald spark of crystal clear ideation that overtook it; the solution was obvious, I had to max his challenges out as quickly as possible. Even if the changes my power made didn't retroactively make him a better enough person not to spy on people and presumably (based on the folder name) sell them to fiscally irresponsible perverts, it would probably make him loyal enough to turn on his former customers and compatriots.

By mentally unmaking and enslaving this one creep, I might be able to bring down a whole ring of villains!

I quickly searched the computer for any sign of any other criminal activity, but evidently he was wise enough not to use his email account (just as poorly guarded as his computer) for his illicit activities. With a disgusted sigh, I stepped away from the computer and turned to finally deal with the man who'd successfully distracted me from my bystander's guilt with far more personal dread and anger.

I almost wanted to thank him for that, but at this point I think I rather hated him too much to bother. Instead, I simply aimed my stolen gun at his head and pulled both triggers. A dark and seething part of me wanted to drag out his death, to shoot him in the neck or stomach or even simply throw him out into the fire to watch him burn, but efficiency danced with the virtues I'd been taught, delivering swift justice instead.

It was only after I pulled the triggers and watched his head split apart into wet red confetti that I realized I could have used this opportunity to safely search my apartment for where those cameras were.

Oh well, I recognized the rooms well enough to guess at the cameras' locations based on their angles. Finding them shouldn't be too hard, though that won't matter so long as this scumbag already has footage of us… making love. Preventing him from getting more is honestly more for my peace of mind than to gain any true barrier, he's already got everything he needs to ruin us… if he's willing to admit he spied on us, that is.

Suddenly, the situation isn't quite as bleak and desperate. I still need to max him out to get access to his contacts to try to bring them all down, but now I'm not in quite so much of a rush; his evidence also incriminates himself, so unless he's willing to take that kind of fall it's highly unlikely he's going to snitch to the cops. He still might try to blackmail me or mom though, so he's either getting maxed out or getting quietly disappeared.

I blinked as the false reality around me broke down, when did I become so quick to contemplate real life violence? I shook my head as the real world faded back in, I'm no killer! Maxing him out was both the logical and moral thing to do! I'd only kill him if I can't max him out before he does something… intolerable.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Conceal Item (1)

I was, strangely, significantly more clear headed now than when I walked in, having a clear and immediate goal that I needed to do allowed me to center myself. So when the very first thing to meet my ears before my vision had even fully faded in was an oily snarl from the same man I'd just learned was spying on everyone in the building, I managed to keep myself from either flinching or lashing out. "Oi oi, if it isn't the little motherfucker himself, eh?"

I didn't blink, didn't even give his next challenge more than a glance before quietly murmuring "Challenge," under my breath. I didn't want to hear whatever he was gonna say, didn't want to listen to him comment on my mother or attempt to blackmail me. There was no point in listening anyway, when I max him out he'll be singing a very different tune.

My mouth set into a grimly determined frown as I once more faded in just outside the apartment. Looking around and finding no immediate threats, I kinda wished I had bothered to check the modifiers; that was impulsive and stupid, a hero aspirant should know better than to jump into danger without checking what it was first. I let my emotions take the wheel without thinking things through fully, and now I'm paying for it with my lack of info.

Oh well, I know the basics of how the average challenge works by now; find the target, kill the target. The only times a previous mission had a different win state, it had told me so upfront during the challenge, so I highly doubted this would be any different. While there could be any number of new variables, more likely than not the landlord was exactly where he had been every other time I'd seen him in a challenge; sitting in his room, waiting to be triggered into action.

This thought in mind, I boldly marched right up to the front door, turned to flame, and crawled right through the cracks. I didn't put any effort into preventing the door or frame from catching fire, even actively encouraging the blaze to a small extent; I wasn't overcome with an irrational urge to destroy –anymore– but I knew the destructive power of fire could make a decent backup plan if the conventional frontal assault went wrong. Even if it brought the building down, that was just an opportunity to test which of us is more durable; if he dies first, I still win after all, though the reverse is also true.

The moment my head got through the door, I knew what was different. Three burly looking toughs stood outside the landlord's room; a broad shouldered bald man with nothing on his upper body save bandages wrapped around his arms, a reedy looking man with some sort of rat quirk (or just very unfortunate ancestry, I suppose) and long greasy hair donning a brown trench coat, and a shorter guy wearing concealing black leather and a biker helmet. They were already facing the door, and thus before I had even fully breached the room two knives and a nail-spiked bat were being brandished my way. I reformed with the first thug barely three steps away, improvised mace primed to take my head off.

Granite coated my skin even as I ducked under the bald man's highly telegraphed swing, driving my armored knee straight into his crotch without a second of hesitation as I sprang back up. He barely had a moment to squeal in pain before a knife hand thrust collapsed his esophagus (I'd have made that a little more permanent with Mei's gift, but I didn't have time to pressurize it). I grabbed his bat just above his hand, lifting it to block a slash from his rat-faced friend.

This thug was a little more cautious, jumping back with his leather fetishist friend and trying to circle me in different directions as I wrenched the bat from baldy. I hummed slightly as I watched them back up, testing out the landlord'smy new power on my newly stolen bat; before my eyes the weapon faded away to nothing, only a faint sense of connection telling me where it was beyond what my fingers could tell me. I knew the rough dimensions of the hidden bat by some power granted instincts, but even I couldn't see it anymore.

In the brief moment I spent studying my new power, the remaining thugs had managed to flank me on either side. Fortunately for me, their chosen weapons were far less of a threat to my stone armoured self than their actively suffocating friend's; unless these two had sufficient super strength or something more esoteric to buff their blades with, my stone armour should be able to shrug off most attacks relatively safely. It was never wise to take a hit you could have dodged, but armour was invented for a reason.

This thought in mind, I boldly charged rat-face while leaving my back open to his masked comrade. Predictably, the biker helmed thug lunged forward to slash at my back while his friend tried to backpedal, and just as I'd hoped both choices proved pointless. The leather clad thug's blade skittered harmlessly off the stone coating my back and the other thug misjudged the length of my now invisible bat, allowing me to slam its last four inches into his ankle with bone breaking force.

Alongside driving long nails into his flesh, the sheer force of the blow caved in the side of his leg and left his crumpled foot to hang uselessly by a few shreds of muscle and skin. This did come with the downside of firmly lodging the nails into the meat and bone of his leg, but the three stabs biker boy managed to get in while I twisted and pulled my improvised mace free earned him nothing more than a thimbleful of dust.

A sharp tug ripped my bat out of the rat-faced thug's heel with a new coating of clinging meat scraps and blood (both of which were already quickly fading away), yanking him off his other leg in the process. He hit the ground with a pained yelp that transitioned into a truncated wail when I stomped down on his stomach. The biker tried to stab me in the neck several times as I raised my mace, gripping his blade in both hands and driving it into my back like an icepick with all his strength. I grunted as I brought the bat down as hard as I could, feeling the very tip of the biker's blade bite into my flesh as the bat sank home in the rat-faced tough's skull.

The ugly man's head caved in like a rotten orange, bone splintering and flesh pulping beneath crumpled and torn skin. A spray of blood and brain matter showered the front of my body, leaving me blinking blood out of my eyes and spitting out foul tasting slime. I spat a chunk of gray matter to the side, shuddering at the residue left in my mouth.

Note to self: remember to include a face shield or full helmet in my hero costume.

I grimaced, giving a tug on my now slick bat and feeling bones grind against each other in protest, embedded nails stuck fast in the corpse's neck and thoroughly wrapped in meat. With the faceless goon behind me actually reaching my skin I didn't have time to finagle the bat free, so I let go at the same moment I turned on on my heel to kick backwards straight into the leather coated killer's stomach. Evidently their zipped up jacket didn't provide much padding, as the thug doubled over gripping their gut and groaning.

Their bent over position allowed me to pound both fists into the back of their helmeted head, sending them sprawling face first onto the ground. I didn't hesitate to jump up, fold my legs into my stomach at the height of my arc, and drive them down as hard as I could straight into the back of the goon's neck. A sickening wet crack rang out like a muffled gunshot, and with one last body wide jerk the thug went still.

It wasn't quite silence that hung heavily over the room after the distinctive sound of a spine breaking, but the dripping of blood and baldy's increasingly quiet and desperate attempts to draw breath through a closed throat barely broke the stillness. Thankfully, I only had a handful of seconds to take a few deep breaths, pick up a discarded knife, and start to contemplate what just went down before the landlord's door flew open to slam against the wall with a bang. While the loud noise drew a startled jump from me, I was far from surprised to see the greasy haired old man sneering at me from the doorway through bloodshot eyes.

I was somewhat surprised to see the gun in his hand, I'd have figured he would have tried to conceal it with his powers; though, I suppose he didn't hide it the first time he showed up either. Hmm, maybe he can't hide something he's actively holding? Is that the deviation between my copy and his?

I didn't have time to contemplate the specifics of our power differences just then, that same gun he couldn't seem to hide was snapped up to shakily aim at my torso almost the same moment the wastrel spotted me. I dropped both my powers, shifting to fire and mist an instant before he pulled both triggers. The feeling of buckshot pellets whizzing through where my chest was a moment ago was unsettling, but painless; with a distinct lack of gaping holes in my chest, I was able to direct my now flaming hair out ahead of me as I sprinted towards the creep.

Faced with a veritable (if thin) wall of flame rushing his way, the old drunkard backpedaled a little too rapidly; his ankle caught on the upturned edge of his carpet, throwing off his stride and sending him tumbling backwards into his apartment. I didn't give him a moment to get his bearings, spending the last second of my fire form engulfing him in flame.

Scalding mist is not much less distracting than fire, or at least the landlord didn't seem to think so as he carried right on screaming and flailing through the transition. He frequently pulled the triggers on his gun in his panicking, but he didn't have the wherewithal to even attempt to actually reload the spent weapon. Distracted as he was, he had no hope of stopping me from landing knees first on his chest (to knock the air from his lungs and disorient him further), slamming his head into the floor with one hand, and slitting his throat with the other.

I leaned back, keeping my face out of reach from his clawing hands as hot blood sprayed from his opened neck. With a tight-lipped grimace, I shifted my knees to his shoulders to hold his arms down. Taking my blade in an icepick grip, I drove it down through his eye to hasten his demise; while I could've just sat back and let him bleed out, I didn't want to risk him or his still living buddy out there getting clever or lucky. A quick twist of the blade to scramble his brains, and reality began to break down around me.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Aleksandr Okohenjin 1

The old man looked a lot younger and altogether better put together when reality faded back in; his hair was better cared for, his beard lacking the yellow stains and bits of grime, less wrinkles carved across his face and hands, and his skin seemed to be a healthier shade of pale. His expression had also softened, the faintest hint of fondness breaking through his surly demeanor as he looked at me. Whatever he had been about to say before, his tune was changed significantly by even a single enhancement.

He cleared his throat, glancing about the room to check if anyone was in earshot before speaking, "Look kid, you need to be careful. I ain't no snitch, but you might wanna take more care to keep your private life private; the gubbermint takes a dim view of, ah… close families, like yours."

I blinked at his downright reasonable advice, not used to anything but vitriol from the crotchety old pervert. He wasn't outright admitting he spied on me, but he also wasn't trying to blackmail me anymore. Have… have I already changed him sufficiently to be safe? The thought bounced around in my head for a moment before I dismissed it; I can't trust him at this stage, and even if he's no longer inclined to openly make a move against me, he's still selling naked pictures of my mom and neighbors.

I shook my head, the mission remains the same; until I max him out I can't be sure he's not going to ruin my life at any moment. His words may have become less hostile, but he's still clearly covertly referencing information he could only have gained via ongoing spying. Not only do I not trust him not to leak that footage, as an aspiring hero I can't just ignore the injustice he's committing; my own personal security benefits are of paramount importance, but I can't forget that the privacy and bodily autonomy of all of my neighbors hangs in the balance as well!

This time I did actually check his next challenge, not wanting to repeat my emotion and haste driven mistake from earlier.

Aleksandr Okohenjin

Candid Video Procuror

3/6

{GANG} {BZRK}

A gang of berserkers? That could be a bit of a problem. Those under the influence of the Berserk modifier are completely inured to pain and injury so long as they aren't dead, making pain compliance like I'd relied on last time wholly ineffective. While crippling wounds are still crippling and fatal blows are still fatal, I won't be able to reliably neutralize opponents without killing them outright and immediately. A slashed throat is lethal, but even my previous challenge showed it's not immediately so; while this normally wouldn't matter much, when facing a psychotic maniac with no fear, the few seconds between being fatally wounded and actually bleeding out may still be enough for them to return the favour.

If it were just the landlord, that would be difficult enough, but the gang modifier means I'll likely have to fight through at least a small horde of what are effectively semi-intelligent zombies to get to him. I'll need to fight smarter here; my previous tactic relied on human nature to win, on fear and pain compliance, neither of which will work on berserkers. Regardless, I wasn't about to quit just because the challenge promised to be difficult. "Challenge."

Once more I found myself standing outside the apartment, the setting sun casting long shadows down the street. This time, I didn't rush straight for the door; knowing there was almost certainly a pack of fearless psychotics waiting on the other side, I was not inclined to stick my head directly into the hornet's nest right away. Ideally, I'd find some way to seal the doors, set each side of the building on fire, and ambush anyone who manages to break out; unfortunately, I don't have a way to reliably seal off the exits, nor to ensure the building actually lights up. That leaves the hard way, and the sneaky way.

The hard way is trying to bulldoze my way through like I did before. However, even if their numbers haven't changed, their tactics undoubtedly will have. Last time they fought like experienced but not trained fighters, people with some idea how to go about killing somebody without putting yourself at over much risk, dangerous but following reasonable logic; this would not be the case with the veil of the berserker modifier hanging over their minds, not by a longshot. They would charge and attack all at once, putting their all into every single wild blow without a hint of caution or restraint; in many ways this made them more predictable, but with the unfettered strength of the human body behind their suicidal methodology they were scarcely less dangerous for it.

For example, Baldy wouldn't have given up just because I'd crushed his throat, rat-face wouldn't have tried to retreat when I rushed him, and the landlord wouldn't have backed up in the face of fire; that alone made a frontal assault much more dangerous, even if they'd likely be less coordinated.

The sneaky route, on the other hand, might let me dodge the horde entirely. You see, the landlord's apartment was on the bottom floor, and his room seemed to follow the same layout as every other apartment; meaning, he has a porch with a sliding glass door out back, in easy reach. Even if he locked it, smashing my way through (or maybe burning through the sealants and slipping inside that way) should be simple. I could even throw something to break the glass, then ambush the landlord if he comes to investigate; though, that does open me up to the risk of the whole gang coming to investigate (though, there were ways I could potentially use that to my advantage as well).

While I still lacked any true stealth quirks, I liked my odds of successfully assassinating one deranged old man more than I did of carving my way through a group of complete lunatics. Even if I manage to sneak in, I'd need to deliver a fatal blow and leave before I could get bogged down and ripped apart by his back up. This thought in mind, I began to walk around the back of the building as quietly as I could.

Identifying the landlord's room wasn't hard, his apartment was the only one on the ground floor, with his porch –complete with an overflowing ashtray beside a cheap beach chair– smackdab in the middle of the alley to the rear of the building and all alone save the fire escape. Though, if that hadn't been enough, I didn't even need Mei's eyes to see into the room itself. His ratty drapes were pulled aside, giving me a grime coated but decently unobstructed view of the room from the alley; the soot yellowing the glass made making anything out difficult, but the silhouette of the landlord himself standing a few feet from the door was easy to see. He was twitching erratically, clutching his shotgun in both hands hard enough to make his arms visibly shake while he swayed slightly from side to side.

Even just from the way he was acting, I had no doubt there was barely a hint of rational thought present in his mind; the fact he could even keep a hold of his gun already surprised me, I'd be downright shocked if he had the mental capacity to even consider reloading. There was something deeply wrong with the way he was acting, like some sort of deranged animal somehow being forced to wait for a signal before letting out its frenzied rage. It somewhat reminded me of the times I'd gotten outside of bounds in a horror game and found the big scary monster idly waiting to jump out and attack; the patience displayed was at odds with the ferocity in his every motion, showing my power hadn't bothered to add much in the way of simulated idle behavior to these deranged versions of npcs.

I shook off the pointless speculation; it didn't matter why the target was acting strangely, only how that behavior can benefit me. He's staring intently at the door and completely ignoring the rest of the room, meaning so long as I don't make enough noise to be heard over the pounding of his heart, I can probably sneak right up behind him and get a free shot. Just one free shot, however; he's clearly wired enough to snap around and fire the moment he hears anything, so I'd best make sure my first hit counts.

Getting up onto the slightly elevated deck was simple, the cheap wrought iron fencing was easy to grab onto, and from there it was no more difficult to pull myself up than it was to climb a ladder. Doing so quietly was a bit more of a struggle, but I managed to reach the top without revealing myself to the twitching husk of the landlord. I was extremely tempted to use my fire form to slip through the gaps and skip the whole climbing part, but I knew the light and roar of my flames would give me away far more effectively than a creaking fence.

Taking a moment to steady my breathing and just observe from outside, I quickly spotted that the door wasn't locked, wasn't even fully closed for that matter. Before trying to wriggle my fingers into the thin gap, I spent a few moments watching the landlord to be sure he wasn't about to suddenly look over his shoulder, then thought better of even attempting to just slide the door open; my own version of this door squeaked horribly everytime I opened it, and mom and I kept the house far cleaner than this lout. While I'm reasonably sure I can take out even a relentlessly psychotic version of the landlord, I have no doubt he'll howl like an animal and summon his buddies to gang up on me.

I planted my foot on the door as softly as I could before activating Mudslide. Immediately, the solid glass began to sag and melt beneath the sole of my shoe; much to my relief, as I wasn't sure if this idea would even work. Of course, that also meant the ground under my other foot turned slick and slippery just the same, forcing me to reach out behind me to brace myself on the railing. I was lucky the cheap bastard hadn't skimped out on his railing, the metal posts staying securely in place without so much as a creak even with all my weight on it.

With my hands firmly holding me up, I slowly pushed and deformed the glass door with my boot until I opened up a hole wide enough to fit through relatively comfortably. It was strange to watch normally solid glass warp as if it were molten with none of the heat. It was a slow process –the power clearly was not made for such destructive use, requiring me to manually shift material out of the way to soften the stuff below it– but the thinness of the door made it feasible to slowly mold it out of the way.

Still, the awkward position and slow progress didn't stop me, and soon enough I judged the gap wide enough, deactivated mudslip before it could send me sprawling flat on my face -again-, and slipped on inside as quiet as a mouse. Each slow step seemed to echo in my ears, yet the target didn't react. With their undoubtedly bloodshot eyes locked unerringly on the door, they never heard me slowly creep up behind them, steam-hair siphoning into Mei's gift with every step.

At the very last second something must have given me away, because the old bastard began to turn with an unintelligible growl on his lips. Unfortunately for him, it was already too late. A heavy 'kachunk' sound rang out as the finger thick rod tucked into my bracelet rocketed forth and punched a neat hole in the back of the old bastard's head.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Conceal Item (2)

I had to suppress a grin from rising to my face after such a perfectly executed victory. I… shouldn't feel good about being skilled at murder, but there's just something deeply, innately satisfying about victory, about a well executed plan. It feels wrong to be happy about successfully breaking into someone's home and killing them, but in the context of beating a challenge… well, at least it got my mind off-

Best not to go back down that road.

Good mood thoroughly punctured, a more situationally appropriate frown spread across my face as reality faded back in. While an improved power is always welcome, it doesn't actually change my situation. The old man wasn't any less of a reprobate, nor was he inclined to suddenly give up his life of crime.

Which meant only one thing, I had to keep going. Flames of grim determination burned at the cloying horror, guilt, and despair gnawing on the edges of my mind. It didn't matter that my powers were evilmorally questionable, it didn't matter that everything I'd gained in this faustian bargain had been useless the first time a true act of villainy occurred before my very eyes, it didn't matter that I was becoming increasingly comfortable with the feeling of blood on my skin, all that mattered was that mom and my neighbors are counting on me right now; I can do something about this evil, this crime, and for now that'll just have to be enough.

I can worry about the rest some other time, preferably never.

Aleksandr Okohenjin

Drug Smuggler 4/6

{GANG}{LUST}

Bloodlust instead of Berserk, eh? I'm not quite sure which is worse, in all honesty. While the simple minded psychotics the berserk modifier produced were easy to predict, that same consistent derangement also made them extremely dangerous to fight. So far bloodlust seemed to strip away the semblance of personality and morality targets usually retained, turning them into far more lethal killers by essentially putting killer robots in the driver's seat of their minds.

Between vicious zombies and focused terminators, I'm hesitant to call either safer; the choice between being torn apart in a storm of inhuman ferocity or getting blown to pieces with a calmly calculated atrocity was not an appealing one.

Even so, I barely hesitated a moment before diving right into this next challenge. A muttered word under my breath and reality faded into just outside the apartment building again, the sun just slightly lower in the sky. Wary of new tricks, I decided that stealth was the better part of valor once again; while anything could be different, I figured there was no reason not to at least try to repeat a winning strategy without a clear sign to the contrary. A frontal assault may be slightly more viable against ruthless villains rather than deranged ones (presuming they retain some self-preservation anyway), but a quick and clean assassination is always preferable if possible; if killing the target is all that matters, skipping as many unnecessary fights as possible is the best tactic.

That might not always be true, once I'm a full fledged hero there will be plenty of times where I need to take down each and every single member of an organization rather than just dodging past them to kill their leader, but for now it was a perfectly good strategy.

Sneaking around the side of the building into the alley just like last time, I jumped up to grab the railing once again. I managed to make it four handholds higher –just high enough to see over the lip of the deck into the house– before I discovered a very notable problem; rather than sitting at the door like a roided up guard dog, the wiry old man was pacing back and forth in front of his door. Unfortunately, I spotted him about the same time he completed a loop, turned around, and spotted me.

He didn't hesitate a single instant, immediately raising his gun to his shoulder and calmly sighting on what was visible of my head. I shifted to fire as I released my grip, barely subsonic metal pellets whooshing through the flames that were my arms not a second later even as I fell. I hit the ground lightly, letting my knees bend to absorb the impact as the landlord yelled out with a strangely emotionless voice, "Host spotted in rear alley!"

A grimace tore across my face as the sound of a door flying open and boots pounding floorboards reached my ears. Damn, the npcs are actually communicating! While I knew they were technically capable of speech, I'd never seen npcs make anything more than mostly meaningless sounds of anger and hate without the Real modifier. I didn't have time to ponder the full implications as I crouched slightly to move underneath the deck, but I knew armies had historically targeted communication methods because of just how big a difference being able to pass information along made in combat.

There was also his unusual word choice; he called me Host, not target or hostile or even just threat, Host. I had no idea what that was referring to and lacked the time to properly sit down and think it over, but something about that choice made it stand out to me. Maybe it was just in reference to me being the one with the power, thus hosting this simulated world? I shook my head, focusing back on the situation at hand; I could worry about npcs granting me strange titles later.

As the sound of the hallway door flying open and heavy boots pounding floorboards met my ear, I glanced up at the bottom of the deck just above my head. A part of me was tempted to try using Mudslip to dig into the deck, do a handstand and try to bring the whole thing down with the enemy on top; this thought only lasted a bare second under scrutiny before I dismissed it. Mudslip took minutes to mold a six millimeter pane of glass out of the way, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get through nearly a foot of concrete in anything approaching a combat viable timeframe; even if I could, I'd just be dropping a ton of cement down on top of myself, anyway.

Instead, I readied my armour and turned my hair to steam, sending the glistening gas into Mei's gift as I listened to what sounded like the same amount of thugs as before storming across the apartment above. I took a deep breath as the door above slide open with a loud screech of rubber dragging on partially corroded metal, taking a deep breath to steady myself even as faint trill of vindication arose from that drawn out squeak; not opening that damn door last time probably saved the run, proving my gut instinct correct. The buoying feeling of proving a theory correct warmed my stomach, but did nothing to settle the lightning racing through my nerves faster and faster with every audible step above; the nervousness dancing through me only got worse when the footsteps came to halt right above me, silence hanging like a dread veil over the little alley for a moment as I tried to steady myself.

Rat-face was the first to take the plunge, jumping the railing to land with knee-bending force, facing away from me; evidently, they thought I had run further away, a mistake that would cost them. Before he had time to even fully rise from his crouched position, I darted forward and struck out with my captive boltgun, the small iron spike driving through the base of the genetically unfortunate criminal's neck and up into his brian. He collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut, killed instantly before he could make a sound.

One down before the fight even properly starts, at least three more undoubtedly on their way.

I faded back under the deck, but shifted myself to the left in anticipation of needing to abandon my cover soon; I was very tempted to simply bolt for the alley mouth that instant, but that would undoubtedly give the landlord an easy shot on my back as I ran. My position was far from what I'd call defensible, but it shielded me from incoming lead and allowed me to move to a limited extent without being seen. I could think of a dozen different powers that could have trivialized this debacle, but unfortunately I didn't have any of them so I'd have to settle for doing this the hard way; I took a deep breath while I still had time, trying my best to reload my wrist mounted cattle killer in what little of that time I had.

Baldy and the biker didn't make their comrade's mistake, both dropping down side by side at the same time and facing the way they came –and thus, facing me. With their personalities replaced with wetware killer robots, they didn't hesitate a moment to advance the second they spotted me; fortunately, I was expecting exactly this kind of scenario. I abandoned my failed attempt to load my weapon, sending as much scalding steam as I could directly into baldy's face. Emotionless killer or not, the way he reared back and began swiping futilely at the steam burning his face told me he still felt pain; and that momentary distraction was all I needed to shoulder charge past him, knocking him back and to the side before he and his buddy could corner me.

I slid past the disoriented thug, ducking under a slash from his friend as I passed between them. I didn't want to go out into the alley proper like this, but I knew trying to hold my ground would only lead to me being cornered. Sometimes, putting your back to a wall to weather a storm is the right idea, but only if your defenses outweigh the enemy's weapons. My stone armour is decent, all things considered, but maces were practically invented to counter much better armour than mine; a nail-bat may be a poor mace, but it is still a mace.

A glance up as I slid around the bat wielder revealed exactly what I feared; the landlord standing on his balcony, calmly lining up a shot on me from above. I yanked the bald thug back by the arm, putting his torso between me and the old man; and not a second too soon, for the bastard's shotgun barked almost before he was between us. The pellets ripped through the muscular goon's chest in a spray of gore, the deformed buckshot slowed just enough by his flesh to bounce off my armour in a spray of wet dust rather than pierce clean through. It still felt like what I've been told being kicked by a horse felt like, though personally I'd compare it to being hit by one of Katsuki's nastier blasts point blank.

I slid back a few inches, the air leaving my lungs in one painfully swift exhale as I dropped the carcass in my shock. Still, at least it only bruised my ribs rather than tearing straight through me; the old man may have gotten a clean shot, but his questionable choice in illegal firearms forced him to reload right when he could have best capitalized on my stunned state. The bloodlusted AI running his body didn't panic or hurry like the real man probably would have despite this error, his motions smooth and measured rather than weighed down with urgency; yet they weren't especially efficient and he lacked the forethought to reload the single shot fired previously while I was hiding, even so. Whatever power granted software was running his mind wasn't actually a better fighter, just one unfettered by emotion and completely devoid of sentiment.

There wasn't a terminator holding that gun, just a frail old man. He wasn't any smarter, any more knowledgeable or more capable, he was just more ruthless and more level headed. Whatever software update the Lust modifier inflicted hadn't made him smarter or more creative, nor had it granted him a stronger grip strength or foresight; lacking these things, the very idea to be wary of reloading in front of me didn't occur to him. He cracked the gun open and reached for fresh shells, and the moment those shells cleared his pocket I dropped my armour and lashed out with my variant of mom's quirk, tugging the gun and shells right out of his incautiously loose grip as grey dust rained down around me.

The leather clad thug attempted to intercept the flying munitions, but he had been moving around to flank me and thus put himself out of reach. I lunged forward, snatching the gun and shells out of the air before taking off sprinting down the alleyway. A single set of heavy footsteps followed after me, indicating the now weaponless target hadn't decided to pursue with his colleague; inconvenient, but no true concern.

Loading a gun while running full tilt was harder than one might expect, but I managed to slot the shells into their tubes without dropping them. Pounding footsteps echoing in my ears, I snapped the gun shut and whirled around. The leather clad thug was closer than I expected (closer than I was comfortable with by far), but that only made lining up a shot center mass that much easier. A single pull of the trigger blew a hole straight through his thin leather jacket and the flesh beneath with equal ease.

I didn't hit his heart like I'd been aiming too, but I definitely blew a big chunk of his lungs out onto the ground. It wouldn't kill him right now, but even with bloodlust driving his mind, he only made it a few more unsteady steps towards me before collapsing to the ground in a heap. I didn't waste my last shot finishing him off, instead running a wide semi-circle around him and dashing back towards the porch.

I suspected a trap, to the point I was halfway convinced to go back around to the front door; but I ultimately figured that if there were any traps, anything setup on the deck would be simpler and more easily detected than the front door. With stealth out the window, I didn't mess around climbing the railing conventionally; instead, I took a running leap up towards it and turned to flame just before I impacted the side. With the malleability my fire form granted my body, I shifted my mass to slide in through the bottom of the railing.

I shifted to my armour the moment I reformed, and not a second later something invisible impacted my chest. By the clang it made on contact and the clatter that came a moment later when it fell to the ground, I figured it was most likely an invisible knife. A glance inside showed only an empty room, with the door to his bathroom ajar. So that was his plan, hide around the corner and throw things at me? Better than nothing, I suppose; points for effort anyway.

Unfortunately for him, he didn't have the throwing arm to pitch a knife through a layer of granite, let alone with enough force to punch through to the flesh beneath. If he had the accuracy and speed to aim for my eyes with something narrow enough he might have a better chance, but the broad carving knife that faded into sight at my feet was not sufficient.

My eyes scanned the seemingly empty room, looking for any sign that the landlord wasn't hiding in the obvious open doorway before deciding to risk it. I sprinted into the room, jumping over scattered garbage and haphazardly placed furniture. I was almost disappointed when I rounded the lip of the door and found the greasy old man waiting there, hands clearly clutching a surprisingly visible knife. He lunged to drive his unconcealed blade into my chest, but I didn't give him the chance to test his might against my armour; a single pull of the trigger and his hopes and dreams were ejected out the back of his head.

His body didn't even hit the ground before reality broke apart.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Aleksandr Okohenjin

The changes were more drastic this time, twisting the greasy landlord into something almost unrecognizable. The grey in his long hair was simply gone, leaving almost silky brown locks behind. The sickly pallor of his skin vanished, and his wrinkles and pox-marks had gone with it to leave him with a pale but unblemished complexion more fitting on a man thirty years his junior. Even his clothes had gone up a level in quality, better materials showing less signs of wear and far fewer stains. He was almost handsome, his bushy beard and lopsided grin lending him the bare scraps of a roguish charm.

The fact that he was smiling my way in and of itself was also a fairly large change. His expression was downright fond, a hint of something almost paternalistic in his eye as he looked at me. "Oi lad, a little birdy told me someone punched their V-card last night~!" He stage whispered to me in a gruff sing-song, devolving into full blown belly laughing before he stepped forward and patted me on the shoulder. He leaned forward, this time actually whispering, "Now you know ol' Alek would never narc in his life, lad, but you never know how well you can trust your neighbors. I'd invest in some soundproofing if you intend to have that pretty bird of yours sing so loud every night."

Interesting. He's acting like we're old friends, yet he's still not openly admitting to how he learned about me and mom's relationship. He tried to imply he simply heard mom moaning, but the neighbors definitely would have said something if we were loud enough to be heard from across the entire building down to the bottom floor. People around here generally mind their own business, but by that same token they very much do not appreciate anyone openly disturbing the peace and quiet; someone would have banged on our doors or called the cops if we were being that loud.

Which means he's still spying on us, and still not fully loyal to me. Which means I need to keep going, despite the trembling in my muscles and the ache down to my bones. In the face of this odd comradery, the rage that burnt up my shock and horror was already fading into a numb sort of exhaustion as I stood there. My adrenaline was crashing, the lightning bolt of terror and confusion from the shooting and the oil fire of discovering this slimebag had blackmail on me couldn't last forever; I was tired before walking all the way here, and the last four challenges had not made things any easier. Without a clear and visible danger, without a spark to keep me active, my limbs were starting to feel like lead weights.

I wanted to sit down for a few hours, maybe just curl up in bed with mom and go to sleep.

But there was absolutely no way I was going to rest easy until I got those cameras out of my home, and got control of the person in possession of blackmail fit to ruin mine and my mother's life. The mere idea of some creep watching me in the place I should be most secure made my skin crawl, tugging on some primal part of me that needed a place that was safe and mine. The fact this scumbag had watched me lose my virginity, watched my fall from grace,sickened and infuriated me.

So I didn't do what my body was crying out for me to do. I didn't smile, nod, and make an excuse to trudge up the stairs and go home. Instead, I smiled slyly back at the no longer quite so old seeming scumbag, as if I were in on his little joke instead of seething inside. I glanced down at his challenge, playing along as I quickly read it over. "Oh? Yeah that's probably a good idea. Do you know how I can get some of that stuff installed for cheap?"

To be fair, even though he was definitely lying about hearing me through the many walls and ceilings between us, his advice wasn't necessarily bad. It would be better to take some precautions now than have the neighbors calling the cops later. While I could max out all my neighbors to ensure they wouldn't tattle on me, I wasn't sure they all had quirks worth the pain and suffering for and, quite frankly, wasn't yetwilling to jump on such a mind control avalanche as that. Besides, if they all fall in love with me like mom did, not only would I be breaking up dozens of hopefully happy families, I'd inevitably wind up needing to master their neighbors to cover up the noise until I dominated the whole apartment.

That was too much of a time and suffering investment for me to be interested right now. Sex is great, love and loyalty are wonderful, and minions are very useful, but at this point I need more and better powers far more than I need raw cannon fodder and grunt labour. Maybe I'll change my mind in the future, but I don't see a need to cross that particular moral event horizon just yet. I'll definitely keep an eye out for any useful abilities, possibly even people with useful assets to make friends with; but unless I really have to, the idea of spending the subjective days of pain and struggle necessary to take over so many people for so little gain felt about as enticing as trying to french kiss a bulldozer.

I would still do it if I had to, but right now the idea of facing down so many challenges made my bones hurt. For now I just wanted to max out this one bastard for peace of mind, then go home and rest. Maybe eat dinner if I can muster up the energy to cook by then, though I suppose I could ask mom to make something; I didn't like making her cook after she came home from work, but I suppose she probably wouldn't mind after her… upgrades.

Aleksandr Okohenjin

Clandestine Contraband Smuggler 5/6

{ZONE} {PREP}

No gang this time? For some reason, that doesn't inspire confidence; Mei's rather quick challenge taught me that prep time can be far more dangerous than allies alone. While I don't think 'Ol' Alek' had the technical ability to create and set up landmines like Mei somehow managed, it would not surprise me one bit if he set up some sort of invisible boobytraps or something. His higher quality clothes line up with mom's higher quality car, telling me my retroactive improvements may have earned him a better position in whatever criminal syndicate he was part of; if that is the case, he could very well have access to cartel sourced guns and bombs rather than having to make them like Mei had.

The very thought of invisible landmines sent a shiver down my spine, but I didn't hesitate more than a few moments before muttering, "Challenge," under my breath as the not-so-old man guffawed in response to my query. Reality broke apart just as he opened his mouth to respond properly, cutting off whatever he was going to say in a wave of green scanlines.

Oh well, hopefully he'll be more inclined to help me sooner than later anyway.

The world faded back in just outside the apartment building once again, though this time the sun had long since set despite it still being just before sundown in real life. So my power wanted it to be dark for this challenge, heavily implying my thoughts on the possibility of traps were likely correct. Reduced visibility is generally a significant hazard all on its own, but it combines best with hidden dangers that can take advantage of the provided concealment. I grimaced into the dark, spotting the zone barrier a little over a mile into the distance easily but finding no evidence of traps no matter how hard I glared at the moon-cast shadows around me.

The only lights in sight were spilling out from every window of the apartment building, giving the tall brutalist structure and almost inviting air despite the obvious danger the building represented. That felt almost at odds with the idea that the dark was meant to help hide traps, but it didn't take me long to guess the lights could easily be turned off or destroyed, ripping away that false sense of security and plunging me into pitch darkness at a moment's notice. While I wasn't certain the old man had the technical ability to make traps nor the power to hide them in significant numbers, the very fact he got a prep modifier highly implied he could; otherwise, what else would he be doing with that time, hiding better?

Not impossible, I suppose, but certainly unlikely.

I stared at the door leading into the building, feeling a deep sense of foreboding about the idea of opening it despite the light spilling out from around the frame. If Aleksandr had the time and resources to set up concealed traps, he definitely would have put one in such an obvious position. While I'd yet to move from my starting point, it wasn't hard to guess the conceit of this challenge; find the target inside the (potentially) pitch black building, all while avoiding doubtlessly lethal traps hidden by darkness and his quirk.

I was tempted to try just burning the building down to avoid the risky hunt altogether, but the building is mostly made of brick and concrete, with wood in predominantly decorative places rather than vital structural support. Even if I had a more reliable firestarter than my five seconds of fire form, I'd need supernaturally voracious and hot fire to bring the building down. At best, I could set the inside of the building on fire and hope it spread far enough to either scare out or kill the landlord; and if it doesn't work, I'll have alerted the target and made getting to them vastly harder.

I'll leave trying that risky strategy for another run, though I really hope I won't need one's

I had no evidence the landlord wasn't still sitting in his room, so I decided to skip the front door once again and head for the back alley. Navigating the shadowy streets with nothing but moonlight and what light spilled out of the various windows on the apartment building was a bit of a challenge, but I managed to keep from falling on my face long enough to reach the landlord's back porch without getting injured or making any loud noises; I'd credit that in large part to the cleaning staff that swept the alley every week removing most tripping hazards, but I still felt it was something of a mild achievement at least.

Mei's eyes didn't pierce darkness any better than mundane sight, nor could they see around corners, but a quick scan of what little I could make out about the landlord's apartment from the ground didn't immediately trigger any warning signs (other than the lingering uneasy feeling this whole scenario invoked in me, anyway). I swung my arms in a circle a few times, both limbering up and psyching myself up for jumping into danger, before jumping up and grabbing the railing just as I had the last two challenges.

Nothing immediately exploded, so I set about climbing up the wrought iron rail, swinging my legs over when I hit the top and gently setting myself down on the rough concrete ledge. A moment before my feet hit the ground, I felt something briefly resist my descent before snapping and falling away. I didn't know what that was, but I didn't stick around to figure it out; the moment I felt resistance, I turned to fire and threw myself backwards off the deck. As my body passed through the railing, I saw a pile of pillows I hadn't paid any mind before explode up and away to reveal a mounted machine gun aimed straight at the back door, a moment later a stream of staccato bangs echoed in my ear loud enough to drown out the sound of glass shattering.

Concrete chunks exploded off the wall of the building behind me as I landed, my eyes wide with shock even as the dreadfully familiar sound of automatic gunfire rang out above me. It wasn't quite the same sound, deeper, louder, and closer by far, but it sent my mind flying back to that gruesome scene once again nonetheless. Concrete dust settled on my shoulders as I squeezed my eyes shut, shaking my head back and forth as if to physically dispel the scene replaying in my mind.

I took a deep breath, releasing it slowly through my nose as I forced my mind back to the present with an effort of will. There was nothing I could do to stop that massacre, not then and certainly not now. All I can do is get stronger, and make sure I'm never helpless like that again. If just the sound of machine gun fire was enough to send me into stunned flashbacks, I'll never make it as a hero.

I clenched my fists, glancing around for any sign the target was drawn in by the sound of a trap triggering. When I'd glared into the dark long enough to satisfy the paranoid part of me that always expected to be clubbed over the back of the head at any given moment, I grabbed my train of thought and forcibly shifted it onto pondering the mechanics behind the trap that off-balanced my mind.

It didn't take me long to work out what happened; he hadn't hidden the gun with his quirk, he'd hidden the tripwire that set it off. That strange resistance before I hit the deck must have been the invisible wire swapping under my weight! He must have a limit on either the amount of objects he could hide or the size of any given object (or maybe some combination of the two), so he hid the trap itself more conventionally but made the trigger for it metaphysically concealed!

That was clever, more so than I'd really expected out of the no longer so greasy bastard. And that idea was concerning in and of itself, perhaps more so than the traps themselves; was he always this clever and just hid it? Did my power make him smarter? I was heavily leaning towards the latter, but as of now I didn't have enough examples to be sure; it was always possible my power just made this simulated version a little more cunning, but I'd never seen it do that before and I would have expected a modifier if it did.

I suppose an intelligence boost would fall under a general improvement, so I shouldn't be too surprised. Really this just boils down to an extension of the concern I had earlier about accidentally empowering villains; as my quirk improves people, they quickly reach a dangerous state where they are notably more dangerous than they were before but not doggedly loyal enough to me for that to not be a concern. I'll need to be very cautious about challenging active threats, as getting part way through may actually make the situation worse; I'll need to weigh up if gaining their quirk (and making them positively inclined towards me, which could potentially save my life if it makes them hesitate to kill me) is worth the risk of them being a stronger and more cunning foe if I don't max them out in one go.

It was as I contemplated the dangers of my power, comparing mom's seemingly upgraded job to this scumbag's apparently heightened criminal position, that the spray of machine gun fire over my head finally devolved into a rapid stream of dry clicks. The trap must have run out of bullets, though a chittering little piece of me worried it could be a trick to lure me out; but then again, if the target was smart enough to make such double layered traps, there would have been something waiting for me under the deck for when I jumped to avoid the barrage.

Cautiously pessimistic, I dared to peak over the ledge. The turret was still clicking futilely, and nothing else popped up to blow my head off the moment I was vulnerable; that's a good sign, but there also wasn't any sign of the landlord's presence. Relatively sure I wasn't about to be shot right away, I carefully climbed back up and raised myself over the railing again; this time I took extra care to feel around and be extra careful for hidden tripwires, though I knew it wouldn't help if the creep was smart enough to set up a hair trigger.

Though, the amount of force it took to set off the turret heavily implied he didn't know how to do that.

Carefully measured steps slowly took me through the shattered back door and into the room proper, my head on a swivel looking out for signs of hidden traps. In retrospect, the pile of pillows hiding the gun was significantly easier to spot than the invisible wire, so I focused my efforts primarily on looking for any indications of such mundanely hidden dangers. My eyes swept the apartment over and over, finding nothing that stood out as potentially out of place aside from the still furiously clicking MG42; mostly satisfied with my immediate safety, I turned my gaze to inspecting the weapon.

Looking closer, this contraption barely earned the name 'turret', other than a basic mechanism to have the gun spring up and fire, it didn't have any moving parts; it didn't even have a means of shifting its aim, not even a basic back and forth motion! I'm sure Mei would have been either ranting about this insult to engineering, or tearing it apart and building a better one out of spite. Personally, I was just glad to not be facing a more competent trapmaker; Mei was bad enough, I don't need my sketchy smuggler landlord setting up invisible death robots or whatever.

A few minutes of observation later, I decided I'd learned all my technical ability allowed from the trap. Moving on, I kicked his bedroom door open, turning to flame the moment after my foot impacted the door and leaping to the side just in case. My precautions turned out to be unnecessary, no explosions set off, a stream of bullets didn't chase after me, and the old man himself didn't leap out to attack; instead, all I saw within the bedroom was an overlarge bed covered in ruffled fur blankets scattered about like someone got out of bed quickly and didn't clean up after themselves.

That could be a sign that the landlord started off in his bed but quickly moved away, but it could just as easily mean he's a messy sleeper and doesn't care to make his bed; neither option really helped me either way, so after a quick search I dismissed the room.

Midway to the door further into the building, my gaze fell upon the slightly more modern computer tucked away in the corner just like before. While a ringing little voice in the back of my mind whispered of unnecessary risks and painted images of the screen exploding out to kill me, I was decently confident the old man couldn't even begin to set up such a complex trap; a landmine in the chair maybe, but even that would require him to waste (hopefully) limited resources on boobytrapping something I'd have no mission related reason to inspect. I spent a moment grimacing, eyes flicking back and forth between the door and the computer before ultimately deciding it was worth the risk.

Even if the old bastard used the extra time I was giving him to make things worse for me (which he probably would after that cacophony of gunfire earlier tipped him off to both my presence and likely where I'm coming from), knowing how his operations have changed would be worth it. I carefully picked my way across the dirty clothes and pillow strewn room, kicking the chair away from the desk out of distrust and moving to log in. The old creep's username and password hadn't changed, showing whatever increase in intellect my power gave him hadn't been enough to make him tech savvy.

Finding the now ever so slightly better hidden (he actually hid the file, though that only delayed me for as long as it took to find and check the "show hidden" option in file explorer) containing untold thousands of illicit pictures and videos took only a few clicks, scrolling though it took slightly longer. That was in large part due to the higher quality cameras he had apparently started using enabling him to take significantly more and better pictures and videos. While a slithering part of me found the images arousing, most of my mind was focused on two things; finding where the cameras were, and spotting any useful quirks.

The latter idea only popped into my head as an image of a large chested blonde woman producing a soapy fluid from her hands to augment her shower scrolled past my eyes. Seeing a quirk in use like that made me slow down somewhat, consequently making the details of each image stand out more and burn into my mind slightly more. A voice like oily tentacles slapping wetly together in the back of my mind whispered about how all those women could be mine if I just challenged them, all that beauty could be dedicated to me…

I jerked back from the screen, only then realizing how close I'd gotten as I looked intently over the… evidence. I shook my head furiously, trying and failing to dislodge the idea from my mind; I'm here to stop this, not… not be drawn in by it. I shouldn't be looking at this kind of villainous pornography! I was just looking for useful quirks, and how to put a stop to this, not… not getting enthralled in the way my next door neighbor's ass jiggled as she went through a naked yoga routine, her unnatural flexibility on full display as she nearly crawled between her own spread legs…

Gods, these are really good cameras; you can see every ripple in her skin as she shifts positions, the footage not blurring for a moment as she moves around. My eyes keep flicking between the bluenette in the living room doing naked yoga and her wife providing her own soap for breasts larger than my head. It took a great effort of will to scroll away, though once I was past that couple the average beauty level dropped enough to be slightly easier to struggle past until I found what I had been initially looking for, the pictures of me and mom.

The first thing that stood out was the increased number and quality of the pictures. The second thing was that they were, uniquely, censored in ways the others weren't; mine and mom's faces were blacked out, and none of the camera angles showed the windows. I drummed my fingers on the desk, contemplating this change. So Aleksandr's increased opinion of me hadn't stopped him from taking or potentially selling pictures of me and mom, but it had driven him to protect our identities.

That… was potentially useful information. The landlord was one upgrade from being maxed out and he clearly likes me now, yet that evidently wasn't enough to make him cease his criminal activities nor even fully exclude me from his victims. He took unusual care to cover my identity –care not shown to any other victim– yet he didn't actually stop. His personality had become more favorable to me, but he hadn't become a better person.

I can assume that would also apply to more serious and dangerous villains in the future. Perhaps a lunatic killer would spare me if I upgraded them enough, but they probably wouldn't stop being a murderer; hell, they'd probably be a more proficient killer given the way my powers upgrade people. I'd have to hope I could either convince any harcore villains I max out to give up their life of crime and join me or defeat them, because I was starting to get the sinking feeling they might not be willing to turn themselves in…

And that I might not be willing to give them up once they were mine.

I'd sworn I'd do right by everyone I mentally mutilated, everyone includes former villains. Could I look myself in the eyes and call that oath fulfilled if I just abandoned them to sit in an iron box for the rest of their lives? Would it not be a horrendous waste to lock potential allies away forever because of what they did before I improved them?

I shook my head, standing up from the partial crouch I'd naturally shifted in while scrolling through those… horrible… pictures. I didn't even know if maxing a villain out would let me command them and this was certainly not the time to get distracted by such thoughts. I'd deal with that can of worms when it cracked open, for now I had more immediate problems.

Problems like figuring out where in this death trap the perverted old bastard was hiding. My first thought was that he would be in the place farthest from the door; namely, my apartment. His illegal master key shouldn't work on our changed locks, but it wouldn't surprise me if he got through anyway. If he didn't clone the key (I remembered an old hero procedural talking about making an imprint of a keyhole to reverse engineer a key or something like that), he could always either kick it open or pick the lock.

And that was assuming this simulation didn't just start with the door unlocked.

Still, that was such an obvious tactic I was almost tempted to think he would hide somewhere closer to the start or middle just to throw me off. I strode across the room to glare at the apartment's still tightly shut front door. If he was hiding in my apartment, then taking the time to search every room between us would be a dangerous waste of time; time the enemy could use to set up more traps, if he was capable. On the other hand, if he wasn't hiding there then skipping straight to the end would put the enemy at my back, where he could either ambush me or make a run for the zone border.

I was getting more and more tempted to just try burning the building down, despite how little of it was flammable.

I bit back a groan with far too much effort, realizing I couldn't justify not searching the building thoroughly. The consequences of skipping to the end and being wrong outweighed the wasted time if he really was all the way in my apartment. Better to be too thorough in victory than too hasty in defeat.

That logic didn't exactly make me any more excited to sweep and clear an entire apartment building undoubtedly peppered with lethal traps. I… was beginning to have doubts about whether I was going to be able to handle this in one go. With an unknown amount of prep time and supplies, I had no illusions that the landlord hadn't transformed this building into a deathtrap; this simulation seemed built to be a grueling test of trial and error, or reaction time. Though, I suppose raw durability or destructive power could also solve the issue; not that it mattered, I didn't have either.

I don't know how long I simply stared at that door, envisioning hundreds of different ways I could meet my gruesome and sudden death in this labyrinth. Mundane traps would be bad enough, but with the landlord's quirk the only way I could detect a hidden trigger would be to physically touch it! Wait, physically touch…

I might have… well, not a solution to this whole problem, but a way to mitigate the danger to some extent at least. I didn't exactly have supernaturally good senses (with the partial of exception of eyesight when using Mei's quirk), but even when touching that bat only my sense of touch could detect it at all. However, when gore got splattered on the bat, it took a short while for it to start fading away. Normally that wouldn't be very helpful, I don't exactly have a bucket of blood to splash around so I'd have to literally stumble upon a concealed item to find it; but, I do have something else that could do the stumbling for me.

I cupped my hands at just above waist height, grains of fine white sand seeming to pool in them from nowhere as I did. A grin slowly spread over my face as I looked at the handfuls of powdered silica beginning to overflow my palms; with this, I could scatter handfuls of sand out before me, hopefully revealing any hidden mechanisms! If the dust landed on anything that wasn't visible to the eye, then the creep's quirk must be at play!

With a short but triumphant laugh, I tossed a handful of sand out into the short hall between the doorway and the main body of the apartment as I walked forth. Only for my blood to freeze in my veins as some of the white sand landed on a small, barely elevated disk of air about a foot away from the door. I was no expert in explosives, but it wasn't hard to guess what that was; a land mine.

A flash of very recent memories danced behind my eyes, of the ravaged ruins of my corpse pirouetting through the air on a trail of gore and fire. It would seem my little plan was more prescient than I had hoped. I had kinda figured he might have been able to do something like this, but knowing I would not have –and had not– noticed that mine until I decided to throw that sand on a whim settled over me like a cold jacket weaved of crawling dread.

Fuck searching, I'm going with plan "burn everything."

Frozen ants crawled winding trails down my spine as I stared at the implement of explosive death sitting ever so innocently before the door. I wasn't sure how safe it was to walk around the deadly disk; was it pressure sensing? Motion sensing? Maybe it was tied to a laser tripwire or something?

My mind drifted to ever more unlikely possibilities before I shook my head; no, this wasn't some mad scientist's pet bomb, this was more likely than not a standard issue military surplus mine stolen or purchased from some nation or factory. It probably just had a normal pressure activated trigger, like most landmines; while the technology existed for fancier triggers, it was more expensive and more likely to break or misfire than the simple analog solution.

I still went and pulled a cushion off the couch, then tossed it slightly to the side of the mine just in case. When nothing exploded, I decided it was most likely relatively safe to walk around the explosive; it certainly wasn't comfortable standing within the lethal range of an armed landmine, but it wasn't immediately deadly either. I didn't even try opening the door conventionally, shifting to fire and slipping through the cracks; I made no attempt to prevent the wooden door from catching fire around the edges, instead actively attempting to grow and encourage the flames

While the structure of the building was mostly concrete and steel, much of the floors were covered in decorative carpets and wood paneling, and many non-load bearing walls were made of flammable drywall. As my chemical attack/arson against mom and her friends proved, enough of the building was flammable to get an effective blaze going, even if it was unlikely to take the building down entirely. Fortunately, I didn't need to raze the building to the ground, just kill the only other occupant.

Justified paranoia made my progress across the room slow, swapping between throwing handfuls of sand out in front of me before I took any steps and using my fire form to both rush around and spread more fire. While waiting for either ability to recharge, I donned my stone armour (more for peace of mind than out of any real hope it would be able to save me) and shuffled my feet to kick existing sand around ahead of my very careful steps. Despite my growing desire to get out of this death trap, I spent a few extra minutes taking a wide loop of the entryway to spread as many fires as widely as I could before making my way out the front door.

The only other traps I found in the entry room was another landmine on the second stair leading up, and a tripwire hooked up to the entrance. The latter, perhaps fortunately, was triggered by the flames spreading across the walls and floor eating the thread away while I was quite far away; this caused a bundle of live grenades to tumble out from a hidden slot in the ceiling above the door. Nearly a dozen small, vaguely pineapple shaped bombs rolled awkwardly across the ground for about two seconds before each and every one of them detonated in a dome of force and shrapnel.

That very well may have been the end of my run, had I not been on the other side of the room already in my fire form. As it was, the wave of lethal pressure splattered my intangible form across a wall, chunks of jagged metal punching holes in the plaster covered concrete behind me but dealing no permanent harm before I phased back into far too feeble flesh. Despite the fire raging around me, licking at my clothes and catching in my hair, a cold chill swept through my veins; if that had happened three seconds later, that bouquet of bombs would have killed me outright.

Yeah, if I wasn't dedicated to bypassing this death trap already, that would have sealed the deal.

Wasting no more time, I threw on my armour to smother the flames spreading along my hair and clothes (and in the vague hope it might protect me from any traps), and sprinted out of the room, dashing through the burning hole in the wall that used to be the door. In my haste to get out of the fire and the deathtrap it was consuming, I didn't swap from my armour to pocket sand to check the mostly decorative stairs outside.

I made it three steps before I heard an ominous, familiar click. The moment the sound passed my ear to register in my mind, my armour was collapsing off me and my flesh changing to fire. It wasn't quite fast enough.

Pain erupted from my legs almost the same moment uncountable ball bearings ripped through the roaring flame that replaced me, a sensation of such agony it turned my vision white for a moment before it faded back in with darkness around the edges. That was a good sign, in a way; it meant the mine hadn't killed me. Pain stops when you die, so being in agony just means you still have a chance.

No amount of rationalization could keep the scream behind my teeth. The fire that made up my being writhed along the stairs like a burning amoeba, before suddenly shifting back into my flesh and blood self. At that point my scream turned from the roar of a crackling fire to a warbling screech of mortal agony. The pain had been somewhat diffused across my fiery body as I'd writhed aimlessly, but now it all focused into my legs and became all the more intense for it.

I don't know how long it took me to muster the strength to lift my head from the staircase, but I was woozy and light headed by the time I got a look at my legs. My left leg was mostly intact, there was a quarter inch wide semi circle gouged out of my thigh and I was missing three of my toes, but compared to the right leg that was downright superficial. My right foot was simply gone, the shin above it splintered apart and blackened like a tree felled by a stroke of lightning.

I wasn't bleeding as badly as I'd feared –the burns likely staving off some of the blood loss–, but there was still a slowly growing puddle of life fluids trickling down the stairs. At this rate, I would bleed to death before the fire even reached the old perv. Fuck, fuck, I fucked up. Stupid fucking Deku, I got too hasty, didn't check the stairs, didn't react quick enough to the landmine's trigger…

Okay, that last one might be slightly unfair; the mine detonated pretty much the same instant that click reached my ear, unless I had literally supernatural reflexes (not impossible, I've seen some heroes (and villains on darker days) dodge bullets after they were fired, but it wasn't common) I couldn't have reacted faster. Sound only travels so fast through the air, and impulses only travel so fast down your nerves; while I'm sure training could help somewhat, so long as those two facts remained true there was only so fast your reaction time could get…

Or at least, that's what logic would dictate. Yet, I reiterate, I have seen people dodge bullets in mid flight. And not just people with crazy speed quirks, but just insanely highly trained combatants with completely unrelated quirks. I still recall watching helicopter footage of some lunatic slaughtering a swat team with a fucking sword! The guy's quirk let him shift his personal gravity, which he used to walk on walls and occasionally jump really far; nothing to do with cutting fucking bullets out of the air!

Even if his quirk did let him lower gravity's pull on himself to enable faster movements, that wouldn't explain how he could notice and react to a bullet in time to cut it out of the air! That doesn't make-

I'm rambling. My thoughts are swimming. I'm bleeding to death, aren't I? My other deaths had been quicker, didn't leave me with so much time to think while my thoughts got slower. I decided then and there that I didn't like this kind of death, and not even just because of the pain.

Fuck, I need to do something! I let my head fall back onto the stairs, the minor sting in the back of my head from hitting the lip of the top stair not distracting me one bit from the pulsating agony in my legs. My eyes fell upon the ruins of the doorway, watching fire curl around the mouth of the building; it made the small apartment building look like some gateway to hell. It felt like one too, given the danger inside.

Wait, the fire! Cauterizing wounds tends to have dramatic negative effects long term, but I don't need to survive, I just need to win! With a potential path to victory open, I felt a renewed energy jittering along my nerves, giving strength to my limbs. With a groan of misery, I rolled over onto my stomach, lifting myself on shaking arms and beginning to drag myself towards the entrance.

Every 'step' dragged my raw flesh and mangled bones along the rough concrete, drawing a low, throaty moan of agony from me as I tried my best to keep my worst leg elevated as I crawled. Fortunately, the door wasn't far, and my low profile kept me below the growing cloud of smoke wafting out from that gaping maw of the inferno. Once I was on the landing before the fire-bleeding wound in the wall, actually twisting myself around to get my legs into the fire was only the second hardest part.

No, the hardest part was convincing myself to actually do it. Shoving a limb into a raging fire goes against every primal instinct the human animal has; getting past the screeching lizard part of my brain that very helpful reminded me that fire hurts and pain bad over and over again at full volume was harder than you might think. Especially considering the blood loss was handing more and more of my brain over to my core functions, with extraneous details like long term considerations becoming hazy.

It was that very same haze that finally allowed me to bypass my natural animal desire to avoid pain by thrusting the bleeding stump of my leg into the fire. A roar of agony even worse than the first tore through me, animal panic waging a sudden and bloody war against my will power as I deliberately let the flames scorch my skin. I grit my teeth until my gums bled, only giving into the screaming lizard in the base of my brain when the pain finally started to die down and I knew my nerves had burned away.

I dragged myself backwards as quickly as I could, sliding down the blood slicked stairs to settle in a heap at the bottom. My legs felt cold where they weren't feverishly hot, but I wasn't getting woozier by the second anymore. I could see from my crumpled position that I had succeeded, turning the ragged meat making up my right leg to a burnt husk; a blackened ruin of flesh that no longer bled freely, however. I had pulled my left leg out faster, as it was mostly intact; even so, if this were real life I would certainly never walk again without either expensive prosthetics or even more expensive healing quirk blessed doctors.

But this wasn't real life, so it didn't matter; I was alive, and thus victory was still within reach.

Something shattered on the ground behind me, the familiar sound of glass shards raining down from a broken window drawing my attention away from the veil of pain and numbness pulsating up from the ruins of my legs. I blinked at the sight of transparent shards raining down to shatter into smaller pieces on the road, before it dawned in my head that that glass had to come from somewhere. My head shot up to search the windows up above, quickly finding a silhouette standing in my own room's windows. That must be the landlord, but why would he…?

The thought didn't fully form before the answer clicked in my head, not a second later I rolled straight over the side of the railing just in time to avoid a spray of lead impacting where I'd just been. Chips of cement rained down from where the subsonic spray of pellets sent them up into the air, bouncing off my skin and getting tangled in my hair.

I army crawled as fast as I could, hugging the side of the building to try and foul his shot (or at least force him to lean dangerously out the window) as I raced for the same alley I'd first entered the building from. I took the effort to toss handfuls of sand out before me as I crawled in an attempt to not repeat my earlier –aching– mistake, but I wasn't that worried as I hadn't run into any traps when I first went into the alley.

Something invisible hit the ground next to me with a metallic clang just before I reached the corner. The sound didn't even fully register before my flesh shifted to flames, a wave of force splattering my intangible form against the wall an instant later. Thankfully, while disorienting and uncomfortable, my fire form was not extinguished (if that was even possible, though I had to assume it was), and I managed to skuttle around the corner before my flesh faded back in.

I leaned against the wall, breathing heavily both from genuine exhaustion and exhilarated terror. He's attacking me. Why is he attacking me, instead of trying to escape? Does he not know about the fire yet? How would he miss the smoke gushing from the lower levels? He's in my room –which very notably does not contain the entrance to the fire escape– shooting out the window at me, while fire creeps closer and closer to cutting off his every viable escape route. Why?

Does he know something I don't? Or is he just stupid? Is he also aware of the simulation's mechanics and decided to bet on killing me before the fire reached him? He's not under the influence of artificial bloodthirst or berserker madness, so he should still be generally operating off the same lines as he would in real life; which makes it all the more confusing that he isn't trying to escape. What made him think choosing to fire down from the windows was a better choice than making his way down any of the fire escapes while I was… distracted?

The fire escapes… It couldn't be that simple, could it? The one connected to mom's room had felt a bit rickety when I jumped out there after crashing mom's party, but was it really… No, this cheap bastard would know, wouldn't he? He must have cheaped out on the damn things and doesn't consider them a viable way out at all! That or I'm overthinking things and he's just dumb, but underestimating your enemies is a quick way to wind up a tragic example of the dangers of overconfidence in some highschool-aimed documentary.

The main entrance only has one staircase, and it was very much engulfed in fire last time I saw it. Presuming he really doesn't think the fire escapes are trustworthy, he may just be trapped up there! In all likelihood, he won't just sit still and let the fire take him when it reaches him; which leaves four main options. Number one, he panics, tries to hide, and dies of smoke inhalation; not likely, but never impossible. Number two, he panics, jumps out a window, and hopefully goes splat on impact; not unlikely if he gets trapped, but I shouldn't bet on it. Number three, he panics, tries his luck on the fire escape, and either plummets to his death or makes it down here to become a problem; much more likely, and a much bigger problem. And number four, he heads for the roof to try and delay the inevitable while most likely shooting down at me.

If he heads to the roof, that could be bad; I'm fairly sure there isn't really anything flammable up there, and I'm not convinced the building is going to collapse anytime soon. If he's got sufficient ammo, especially explosives, he could sit up there and rain hell down on me until I'm red paste on the sidewalk. If I'm very lucky, maybe he'll die from smoke inhalation, but I'm not feeling very lucky right now.

A clang drew my gaze upwards once again, and a sardonic grin spread across my face; perhaps I'm luckier than the nearly numbed agony radiating from my legs suggested. "Option three it is, I see." I hadn't heard mom's bedroom door opening over the sound of the blood rushing through my veins, but I certainly did hear the landlord awkwardly stumbling out onto the top floor of the rickety fire escape.

He didn't seem to notice me yet, so I took the opportunity to hide under his deck once again, peeking out cautiously with one eye to watch him descend. He seemed unsure, hesitant, gripping the windowsill with one hand while slowly inching towards the stairs. Inevitably, he had to abandon his grip on the sturdy concrete structure, trusting his fate to the rusty iron cage he'd deliberately skimped out on. I wished I had some means of attacking or even just harassing him at range –some way to bring the structure down under his feet– but as it was all I could do was hunker down out of sight and try to think of what I'd have to do if he actually did make it down.

The landlord moved carefully, slowly, never moving too quickly or putting undue strain on the rickety structure between him and a deadly fall. It took him nearly fifteen agonizing minutes –by the end of which fire was roaring out every visible window– to reach the bottom level and kick down the ladder, with the structure very disappointingly never collapsing the whole time despite the numerous ominous groans it released. While the wait was uncomfortable, it did at least give me time to position myself as optimally as I could to ambush him the moment he was in reach.

I didn't wait for him to get all the way to the ground, crawling forward as fast as my arms could carry me when he was still three rungs up. He didn't see me with the ladder facing the other way, but he evidently heard the sound of my burnt and blood stained clothes dragging across the uneven ground by the way his head whipped around. I saw his eyes widen when they landed on me, uncomfortably human fear lighting up in them before it was swallowed under supernatural hatred. He reached for the shotgun hanging on a loop from his belt, desperately fiddling with the jury rigged holster he'd made for himself as he shifted his course to move back up the ladder.

His panicked flailing availed him none, his gun too tightly tied by the trigger guard and his last second redirection far too late. I pushed off the ground as hard as my arms could throw me, shifting to fire before my legs left the ground. My intangible form swirled around the now screaming man, my burning touch catching his clothes and long, shaggy hair alight as I arranged myself just right.

When my fire form ended, I reformed with one arm wrapped around the old man's neck and the other looped under his gun arm's shoulder and through the railing. I squeezed as tightly as I could, donning my stone armour before beginning to headbutt the squirming smuggler, trapping his skull between the iron bars and my stone helmet over and over even as I strangled him to the best of my ability.

As I'd half expected, the fire escape shook violently as we struggled, and barely six seconds after I'd reformed the bottom of the ladder was bouncing off the cement and the whole structure was groaning in complaint. Heart pounding in my ears almost loud enough to drown out the sound of cheap rivets coming out of the wall one by one, I spread my jaw as wide as I could, feeling the armour on my face crack jaggedly open into a rough facsimile of a mouth. I didn't allow what I was about to do to solidify in my thoughts, didn't let disgust drag me into fatal hesitation; I simply adjusted my grip to shift the target's head to the side, and drove my teeth –both stone and real– as deep as I could into his neck.

Blood splashed over my armoured face, forcing my eyes closed but doing nothing to loosen my grip. I shook my head like a dog with a toy, clenching my jaw and pulling back until my teeth came free with a chunk of feverishly warm flesh caught between them. I spat the glob of meat to the side, trying my best to ignore the metallic taste of the blood coating the inside of my mouth. From the crimson jets erupting from his wound, pulsing with each rapid, panicked beat of his heart, I'd guess I got a vein, possibly an artery; that should be fatal enough that I shouldn't need to bite him again.

I didn't let go, however; I didn't want to risk him managing to free his gun and getting off a lucky shot. I held tightly to the old man as his thrashing grew weaker and weaker, feeling his hot blood splash against my armour less and less as his heartbeat began to slow. It was strangely, disturbingly intimate holding him like this, as his breath began to hitch and his skin got cold and clammy; I tried very hard not to think about that as he slowly went still in my arms.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Conceal Item (3)

I took a deep breath as the real world faded back in, the coppery taste of blood seeming to linger in my mouth even with the fluid itself gone. I had the irrational urge to spit, to gargle water, and maybe to vomit profusely. Instead, I very deliberately swallowed the saliva in my mouth and turned my focus back to the present; more specifically, back to Aleksandr's last challenge.

Just one more. One more victory and I should have enough influence to at least make him stop spying on me and mom. I can work on the rest later, for now I'll be happy to not be constantly watched in my home. I won't be able to sleep easy until those cameras are out of my house, and I'm reasonably assured this fucker won't try setting up more.

Which means I need to max out his challenges, and find out if that really will secure his loyalty. If that all works out, it'll be a perfect test model for a plan to put an end to villainy the world over! If my morally questionable power can be used to bring about world peace, I'll be the greatest hero ever! Of course, that all depends on my power actually working that way and me being able to consistently beat deadly criminals; but with every (other) victory, I'll build the right set of tools for every occasion, every villain.

If it doesn't work that way… well, I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

Aleksandr Okohenjin

Duke Of Contraband 6/6

{PREP} {GANG}

That was a frightening combination, to say the least. If I had to guess –and I did– I'd say this challenge was going to be very similar to the previous one, but with the added hassle of living guards to join the traps. Even more than last time, fighting my way through conventionally would surely be a losing proposition; so I'd simply have to take a less conventional route. "Challenge," I muttered as quietly as I could, hopefully for the last time today.

Matching my expectations, I faded back in outside the shadowy apartment building, the dark streets lit only by the dim light spilling out from veiled windows. Nobody was outside, but I was decently certain a familiar trio of thugs would be waiting in the lobby. They could be spread throughout the building, but my gut was telling me there would be additional guards for such roles instead. Fighting my way through the building was clearly the expected choice, and I honestly suspected I could succeed that way even without any powers if I spent days bashing my head against this challenge until I knew it inside and out.

I opted to skip that grueling slog, turning away from the front door and heading towards the opposite alley to the one I had gone in previously. My first thought had been to go for the fire escape, but even if I could bridge the twenty foot gap between the ladder and the ground, the landlord had clearly demonstrated the thing was far too noisy and rickety to try to sneak up. That wasn't even taking into account the possibility the cunning old creep may have rigged the fire escapes up with some traps; just because he didn't last time (or at least didn't seem to dodge any on the escape he took), didn't guarantee he hadn't this time.

Instead, I decided to take a more unconventional route; a route so frankly dangerous and unorthodox I doubt the landlord would have even thought to rig anything up to prevent it. I knew for as good as fact the old man's back porch was boobytrapped, but he wasn't the only one with a deck; in fact, every apartment in the building had one. While the old man's deck was uniquely situated in the rightmost alley due to his position as the only room on the ground floor, most people's apartments had their decks on the back of the building; more important than their location however, was the fact that they were stacked right on top of eachother.

Normally, the full story gap between the bottom of one deck and the top of another was sufficient to keep anyone from attempting to exploit this little fact as I intended, but I was reasonably sure I could pull it off. This wasn't even one of the many things I had seen done by remarkably physically fit folks dedicated to such pursuits, I knew the gap between the top of one railing and the bottom of the next floor was a few inches shorter than what I'd already jumped to get over the school's exterior wall. No, the most challenging thing here would be the timing (both when to turn to flames and how to spend the time between shifts), and getting around the awkward angles involved here; in order to get a grip on an upper deck, I'd need to jump up and slightly away to get around the deck's lip.

It was dangerous and frightening, even just the thought of leaping out into danger like that sent tingling chills down my spine; but it was a hell of a lot safer than trying to fight my way through a web of invisible traps dotted with autonomous obstacles in the form of thugs. Besides, at least if I fuck up the jump or grab, I'll most likely land on my head and die instantly; or I'll get unlucky and drive my shins through my neck, but either way I doubt I'll need to live with the consequences for long.

Failure is obviously not what I'm aiming for, but a quick death would be far preferably to a slow one if I do fuck up.

I shook my head, trying to get the image of myself plummeting to a lingering death out of my mind as I approached the lower level decks. Fortunately, the angle of the hill the building sat on meant these concrete slabs jutting from the building were about level with the landlord's deck. That made jumping up and grabbing the bottom most deck below my own top floor one relatively easy; just a running leap and a solid grab, and I was on my way to pulling myself up.

I didn't dare actually step foot on the platform proper for fear of traps, instead precariously propping myself up atop the thin iron railing. It took a bit to get my balance, and even longer to be remotely confident in that balance, but eventually I was relatively secure –as much so as anyone can be without any handholds, anyway. I took a few deep breaths to steady myself, bent my slightly shaking knees, and launched myself up and ever so slightly out before I had time to quadruple guess myself.

I shifted to flame at the apex of my jump, twisting my now intangible form around to slither between the bars of the next floor's railing. For a brief moment, panic seized my heart as gravity took hold and the bars began to slip through my insubstantial fingers; fortunately, I had timed my shift well enough to lock flesh and blood hands around the very bottom of the second floor railing. All my weight suddenly came down on my gripping fingers, but I managed to keep my grasp with only a slight jolt.

For a few moments, I allowed myself to simply hang there and breathe; both to catch my breath and to let my racing heart calm down a bit. Once I no longer felt like my heart was going to burrow out of my chest and sprint off down the road, I began climbing the railing one upwards shifted grip at a time. Four more heart pounding leaps, each feeling nearer to death than the last even as I improved my technique; the ground getting further and further away may have had something to do with that.

Several minutes of bloodchilling terror later, and I found myself hanging five stories up by my white knuckle grip on my apartment's railing. I wasn't certain he would be hiding in the same place again, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption to make; besides, even if he wasn't, I'm fairly sure this place was not designed with the idea of me attacking from above in mind. Still, I had learned the hard way it was better to be safe than sorry, so after I pulled myself up to the top of the railing, I chucked a handful of fine white power created sand onto the back deck, watching it settle over the area with a keen eye.

I didn't even try to keep the scowl from my face when I saw grains of sand landing on invisible strings woven between the rain-proof furniture and grill; tripwires, possibly all the same wire or possibly multiple traps. So the paranoid old creep did think up the possibility I might climb up here then, but either didn't consider or decided against trying to set up defenses against climbing in the first place? Maybe he just didn't want to risk falling himself getting the traps into place? Or at least, whatever algorithm simulated his decisions during the prep time before the challenge started took into account that he wouldn't have been willing to take that risk?

Regardless, it turned out in my favour, surprisingly; well, mostly anyway, based on the density of wires crisscrossing the deck, whatever supplies he'd saved by not stringing up the space around the decks, he'd dedicated to his own direct defense.

I threw my other handful of dust over the tiled floor, scrutinizing the trap laden deck with a gimlet eye as the white powder settled in over a few thin wires the first handful missed. I tried to trace along the path of the wires to find the trap, but with no idea whether they even all came from the same place it was a monumental task. I found a few wires darting off through the slightly opened door by just skipping the whole "tracing" part and just looking to see possible end points; I couldn't track them inside without the sand to give them away, but I figured it was reasonable to assume at least some of these wires, if not all, lead to the same sort of trap I'd encountered in the previous run.

Of course, this time I wouldn't be able to safely hurl myself off the deck to dodge the hail of gunfire. Well, as I dared to look consideringly down towards the distant ground (and gripped the railing tight enough to cut off blood flow at the sight), I wasn't actually sure if that fall would last more than fifteen seconds; I wasn't planning on testing it either.

I glanced up at the roof, judging I could probably make that jump even without my fire form (though I wouldn't risk it in case me smacking into the door made enough noise to alert the target, which it definitely would). If I jumped up there, I could theoretically use Mudslip to burrow through the ceiling, granting me a route that I can be sure isn't trapped. Unfortunately, that would take hours; while I'm personally willing to spend that much time ensuring a safe victory, previous experience told me npcs tended to grow agitated when I take too long.

The question that immediately popped into my head was whether or not that would be worth it. Nothing says my targets have to remain stationary, nor should I assume the guards wouldn't roam about; if hours go by and they've had no sign of me, there's a more than decent chance somebody will get the idea in their head to check the roof. Even if I am uninterrupted for however long it takes to dig my way through the ceiling, and even if the landlord doesn't move the whole time, there's absolutely no way I'm gonna be able to open a drippy-slimy hole in the ceiling one millimeter at a time without attracting anyone in the room's attention!

Well, people do have a tendency to not look up, but once the ceiling starts to drip slime someone's bound to notice before I get a wide enough hole to slip through. If I risk putting my best defensive ability on cooldown to slip through a smaller gap, the heat and noise would be even more likely to attract attention than a melting ceiling. I have no reliable way of ensuring whatever room I'd burrow inside wouldn't be occupied, nor could I really steer away from any traps that might coincidentally wind up directly below my entry point.

No, while it might have been viable if I had a better burrowing or phasing ability, my current skill set just wasn't suited for that sort of ingress. I kept a sigh behind my teeth on the off chance anyone heard it; I hadn't seen any guards in the rooms I'd passed on the way up (though, with the high likelihood they were hiding I couldn't be sure they weren't there), but I highly doubted the old man would be hiding completely alone; however, I also highly doubted that every guard would be huddled up in the same room.

With any luck, the guards not directly adjacent to the old man would get caught up in traps; the whole point of planting those traps was preventing movement through the building, if they were so easily bypassed that guards moving en masse can get through with anything approaching haste, they're probably not very good traps. Even if I'm not lucky enough for anyone to actually fuck up and die, navigating the gauntlet of traps between them and me should at least eat up valuable time. Hopefully that would be enough, even if I'd prefer not to alert them at all.

Just because burrowing through the roof was unlikely to work didn't mean I would risk trying to waltz on in through the back door. No, even discounting the veritable spider's web of crisscrossing wires scattered about the deck, I had little doubt the door itself was trapped in some way. So I avoided the issue entirely, carefully walking along the railing until I was close enough to quietly hop up and grab the lip of the roof.

From there, I carefully shimmied along, taking care not to swing too hard nor lose my grip even as I passed around a corner of the building two times. It took every ounce of will in my body to shift my hands every time, the instinctive dread of hanging over a deadly drop gripping my heart with icy fingers as I fought to keep my breathing steady. It felt like eons before I finally found myself situated directly above my room's window, gently resting my booted feet atop the windowsill with great care to not make noise.

As I hung there, allowing the window frame to take my weight off my arms, I went over exactly why I was dangling fifty feet above unyielding and unsentimental cement in my head. Not for the first time –and undoubtedly not for the last time either– I wished I had found an invisibility quirk, and preferably some sort of sound dampening to go with it. Lacking such safety nets, I simply took a deep breath, and slowly released my grip on the roof… with one hand.

I wasn't confident enough to attempt to legitimately drop down and catch myself on the windowsill! No no no, I did the sensible but far less dramatic thing; I carefully shifted my position, reaching down until I couldn't stretch any further before letting go with my other hand. I was only lacking in hand holds for a scant few seconds before my other hand got a firm grip on the top of the window. From there, all I had to do was monkey crawl down a bit, then lower myself until my feet were on the bottom of the windowsill.

Even were I not dangling dangerously high over unforgiving stone the entire time, I'm sure my heart would have been pounding all the same; I was vulnerable to any attacks from within the window and had no way of preventing anyone inside from noticing me with a single glance out the window. Fortunately, while last time the bastard shot down from my window, this time he either wasn't in the room or he had hidden himself in such a way that he couldn't see out the window. While that did less than fortuitously mean I couldn't see where he was, it did mean I didn't receive a blast of glass and buckshot to the face the moment I dropped in front of the window.

This was where my point of egress got a little bit tricky –well, trickier, I certainly wouldn't consider any step on this journey simple or common. I knew from both real life and my very first challenge –the feeling of cold steel scraping between my vertebrae would haunt me to my last breath, I'm sure– that opening my windows was anything but quiet. This left three options: I could try to burn my way in, potentially starting my room on fire and equally possibly failing outright. I could break the window and jump through, giving myself away and abandoning the stealth I'd so painstakingly maintained. Or, I could do what had worked earlier on the sliding glass door; while Mudslip was slow enough to make burrowing through at least a foot of concrete a less than viable idea, I could spare a few minutes to mold the glass out of the way.

Of course, that plan came with one distinct side effect, aside from the time consuming nature of it; mudslip effects both feet, turning any potential footholds into slippery death traps. The best way to get around this rather dangerous inconvenience was to carefully flip myself over so I was facing away from the building (I was definitely not flexible enough to do this facing the window), take both feet off what passed for the ground hear and gently press the soles of my boots against the window before activating the power. This had the unfortunate byproduct of forcing me to stare out into the open air, ensuring I would almost definitely not be able to grab another ledge if I slipped, preventing me from seeing exactly what I was doing, and exposing my back to the direction danger was most likely to come from.

Every single second of the six minutes it took me to mold a hole wide enough to comfortably fit though felt like I had ice water flowing through my veins, jagged shards of solid fear scraping along my veins as I very pointedly didn't stare at the ground lethally far below me. I let out a sigh of relief the moment I could fit both legs through the gap I had made, spinning myself back around and tossing a handful of sand in first before pushing my way into the room when no traps manifested.

I landed quietly on the soft green carpet, my eyes carefully sweeping the room. I saw no sign of anything out of place at first, no guards in the shadowy corners or machine guns popping out from under the bed; it was only as I swept my gaze across the carpet that I noticed a trio of round depressions in the fluff. I grimaced at the display, tossing another handful of fine sand around the room.

Fortunately, there were no trip wires. Honestly, the mines seemed almost perfunctory, explosives placed nearly as an afterthought near the door. I took a few moments to quietly toss my room, cautiously checking in the closet and under the bed to be sure the target wasn't hiding in here like he seemingly had last time. To my more than mild surprise, there was no sign of the man or any guards aside from the land mines around the door.

Was he not hiding in the apartment this time? Was he in a different place this time? Or had he moved to my room when he heard me screaming last time? I didn't know enough to say, which left me with only one option available; investigate further.

Or… I could start the room on fire. Though, it only took me a few seconds' thought to decide in all honesty that seemed like a rather poor decision. While setting the apartment on fire could be a decent idea –I'd certainly be setting the front door on fire if possible to cut off that avenue of escape for the target and entry for reinforcements–, my room was not a likely route for the old perv to run to in the first place. All setting this place on fire would grant me was the mild catharsis of burning all my All Might merch without actually committing to losing it forever and giving my position away.

So while the whispering firebug within me was disappointed, I ultimately decided to save burning everything for slightly later. It was still part of the plan to be sure, but putting my room to the torch wouldn't block off any exit paths (last time the landlord gave no indication he even considered trying to climb out my window and clamber up to the roof; even if that changed when every other route was cut off, that would only put him in a precarious situation I could take advantage of) so it wasn't a priority.

I spent a few seconds eyeing up my door, taking in the trio of mines around it and considering what might be on the other side. The mines were placed just outside the radius of where the door reached, most likely to avoid giving away their presence via the door banging into them. Despite their distance, they were well placed to catch anyone carelessly walking through. The door itself didn't look like it was wired up, but neither had the front door last time.

So did I want to risk the door setting off some trap or even just being noisy enough to set off the target or their guards, or slip through the cracks in my fire form and risk being vulnerable on the other side, prematurely setting the building on fire, and still risking the sound of the flames giving me away?

I tried to play out the scenes in my head for a moment before sighing and admitting I didn't know enough of the variables to accurately guess beyond the very most basics. With a shake of my head, I stepped over and around the mines and quickly yanked the door open; ultimately, the only thing that could reliably keep me safe if the door was trapped was my fire form, I couldn't afford to use it for transversal when I may very well need it for defense at any time.

Of course, that was a problem that could be solved by getting a different fire power explicitly for setting fires or getting another phasing power; but even if I did have any solid leads on such powers, that wouldn't help me now.

Nothing immediately exploded upon the door opening; no bouquet of bombs, no spray of machine gun fire, nothing. I was almost disappointed, all that worrying for nothing almost makes me think I'm getting paranoid! The hall outside my bedroom was seemingly totally empty, not one indication that anything was wrong or out of place whatsoever. I didn't trust it for a second.

Glaring mistrustfully into the innocently empty hallway, I threw a handful of sand to either side. The white sand fluttered down to reveal a spider web of criss crossing invisible wires stretching this way and that across the hall. I sighed softly, shifting to Mei's eyes to get a closer look at the various dusted wires, knowing damn well I undoubtedly wasn't so fortunate as to reveal every wire in the first go. A few minutes and a few more handfuls of sand later I was thoroughly convinced trying to tiptoe through the hall was a lost cause; I was also convinced the old man was either hiding in mom's bedroom, or really wanted me to think so.

The increasing density of invisible trip wires as you look closer to the master bedroom implies he either started there and became more sparing later, or took extra care to ensure getting through that door would be as close to impossible as he could manage. Which means he's either currently hiding there and threw down this gauntlet as a last ditch defensive measure, or that entire room is a trap and the heavy protection is just to make me think he's hiding in there as bait.

Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, I lamented my lack of dedicated people-finding and general enhanced sensory quirks (Mei's notwithstanding); mentally adding finding some to my already long list of desired quirks did very little to assuage that feeling.

Unfortunately for me, the only way I could figure out if that door led to a trap or my target was to go through it. With a weary sigh, I softly planted the sole of my shoe against the doorframe and leaned forward to lower the distance I'd need to lunge to plant my hands against the opposite wall as quietly as I could. There was still a soft but distinctive sound of flesh hitting painted drywall, but after a few seconds without anyone coming running and no alarms pounding I felt relatively secure that no one heard me.

With a smothered grunt of exertion, I twisted my free leg behind and above the one on the doorframe, keeping me a few feet out of reach of the web of wires. Shuffling my hands and feet slowly and quietly, I made my way down the hallway without tripping any traps. It was slow going, especially as I had to take extra care not to make too much noise. By the time I reached the door, my already aching limbs were shaking notably and I was quite literally dripping with sweat; fortunately, the wires were keyed to much greater impacts than a few stray drops of sweat landing on them or I'd have found myself in deep shit.

I didn't bother even attempting to open the door from my awkward position, simply leveling one hand at the gap between the door and the frame and thrusting forth as I turned to flame; I didn't want to waste my fire form like this, but I didn't want to even try to twist that handle. My now incorporeal body streamed in through the door frame in a way only a formless flame can. I had somewhat gotten the hang of moving through tight spaces in my fire form by this point, spreading my insubstantial mass out both to enable more of me to get through the door faster and to deliberately spread fire around the frame.

If the target really is hiding in here, I want to cut off this potential escape route; if this is a trap, I want to delay reinforcements as much as I can.

I made sure to reform within the arc of the door, where I could be reasonably sure no landmines would be hiding. I had to crouch down to avoid the bouquet of grenades hanging from invisible strings just on the other side of the door, most likely connected to the handle if I had to guess. After a few seconds, those strings became very visible as flames raced along them, creeping through the air for a few feet before the base gave way and the threads snapped.

Panic gripped my heart like icy fingers as the bundle of bombs, now wrapped in burning strings, fell to the ground with a heavy thunk. I didn't think, I just ran; only a screaming voice of caution got me to even throw two handfuls of sand out into the room, but I didn't wait for it to finish falling before taking off at a dead sprint for the window. I took long strides, jumping over faint depressions in the carpet and just hoping against hope that lack of any sand landing on strings meant there wasn't any to be found. Heart pounding in my ears, I leapt for the closed window, covering my head with my arms and donning my stone armour at the very last second so as not to slow myself down.

The window gave out an instant before an earth shaking boom nearly threw my bones clear out of their fleshy prison, sending me rolling across the checkered grating of the fire escape in a shower of glass shards. I felt something cut into my legs even through my armour as I tumbled through the air, likely shrapnel from the grenades, but by the time I settled onto the ominously groaning and shaking fire escape my armour had sealed itself back over the wounds. By the lack of warm wetness trickling down my legs, I could guess that either my wounds weren't that bad or my armour came with the side benefit of providing a sort of ad hoc bandage when it resealed over top of injuries and effectively pressed them shut; that was useful to know and helpful in the moment, but if this power really was all that was keeping me from bleeding out, that severely limits my options.

Of course, it was entirely possible the cuts I'd felt weren't that serious, that I could freely swap out to another power without risking bleeding out after my wounds came unplugged. I really, really wanted to believe that… but, I wasn't willing to take that risk. In the best case scenario, all my wounds will be superficial and after a few minutes they'll clot and scab and I'll be perfectly fine when I drop my armour; in the worst case, a piece of shrapnel nicked or outright bisected a vein or artery and the semi-solid granite dust molded against my clothes and skin was the only thing keeping me from bleeding out in a handful of seconds.

I had only the basics of medical knowledge from a smattering of in the field explanations in footage of rescue heroes at work, a handful of PSAs from various heroes and doctors, and some knowledge I went out of my way to find out. Fortunately for me, these wildly inconsistent sources had informed me about what to do in the case of severe lacerations; put pressure on the wound until bleeding stops, which, if Recovery Girl was to be trusted, should take between six and twenty minutes depending on if any veins were nicked.

If any of my arteries were cut, waiting for it to heal without prompt medical assistance was simply not on the table.

Which meant that my primary power was more or less locked in for the foreseeable future. I could probably swap to my fire form and put my stone armour back up quickly enough to keep my blood inside me, but even that relied on an uncomfortable amount of assumptions and very narrow time windows. Of course, I could be worrying about nothing, all the burning lines I could feel across my legs could just be shallow cuts that would be fine in a few minutes. Technically, I could take that risk; if I die here, all I'm really losing is some time before I can try again, and next time I definitely wouldn't be falling for this trap again.

But if I do succumb, I'll have to live with the unsettling feeling of being watched by a creepy old pervert in my own home; and worse, if mom wants to… show her affection again tonight, the thought that this bastard would be watching me the whole time will weigh on me like a dark cloud. The thought of it soured the entire experience, made me feel like tendrils of frozen sludge were creeping down my spine to wrap around my pelvis. Even if I got rid of the cameras, not only would that tip the apparent 'Duke of Contraband' off that I knew he was spying, but it would do nothing to get rid of the footage he already had and the memories in his greasy old head.

I wanted both of those factors mitigated, and only maxing this scumbag out could possibly see that done.

Which meant that I couldn't afford to fuck this up. If I bleed out here, given how long each challenge's failure timer had grown previously, I could only assume I would have to wait until tomorrow to get another shot at this bastard. That simply wasn't acceptable, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to get any sleep knowing this creep was watching me, that he was watching mom, and that he had blackmail (even if hopefully difficult blackmail to actually safely use on his part) hanging over both of use like a rusted and slimy sword of damocles.

I sighed into the cool night air, hearing shouts ring out as people across the building began to react to the massive explosion that just shook the apartment block. More interesting by far was the series of additional explosions and gunshots that started popping up at random, often punctuated by truncated screams; it seems the guards weren't any better able to maneuver this trap-ridden hellhole than I was. That tilted the equation in my favor somewhat, thinning the number of npcs that would be able to reach me alongside slowing them (and hopefully the target) down.

WIth a groan of pain and exhaustion, I leveraged myself up to a sitting position, grabbing the slightly shredded windowsill to pull myself up to my knees. Agony shot up from my perforated legs with each move, enforcing the idea that I probably was being held together by my armour even as I forced myself to rise to my feet. Still, after some ginger shifting of my weight I managed to get as close to used to the way my legs screamed at me with every motion as one could reasonably expect.

There was definitely shrapnel lodged in my shins and thighs, but the tiny pieces of jagged metal only made it excruciating to move, they didn't physically prevent me from moving. My tendons and bones were intact, and a quick and painful test showed I still had full range of motion. I could live with that, if only for a while; hell, Bakugou had hurt me worse on a couple bad days. Still, it took everything I had not to scream as I crawled my way back inside through the smashed out window, but by the time I had staggered my way over to the four foot wide hole in the floor leading down into the kitchen below, I was only gritting my teeth and swearing internally with every step.

That was progress, of a sort anyway.

I wasn't so lucky as to find the landlord staring up at me from the kitchen, meaning the old bastard was either hiding somewhere closer to the front door, in another apartment entirely, or… My eyes shifted, creeping across the badly mauled bedroom to settle on mom's small closet. I could hear thugs just downstairs stomping my way, indistinct sounds of rage and alarm reaching my ringing ears as mist swirled around my right fist.

Either the creep had anticipated I would bypass his tower of horrors and set this room up as a trap, or he set that little bouquet of bombs up as a last ditch attempt to kill a weary intruder who just ran a five story gauntlet of traps and goons. If he had thought to counter me potentially climbing up and sneaking into the house from above by sacrificing the farthest point from the front door as a trap (and thereby making himself more vulnerable to the direct approach), it was entirely likely I was about to walk right into another trap or even just waste precious time. However, I didn't think he was that clever, nor that willing to bet on off chances.

I threw the folding door open with my right hand, lunging forward to grab whatever I could find before I even met the bloodshot eyes lurking within. Seems my gut was right, the old bastard hid himself just far enough away as to be almost something close to safe; well, outside the guaranteed fatality radius anyway. He had hidden himself under a pile of mom's clothes, which combined with the wall and bed between him and the bouquet had protected him from the worst of the shrapnel.

I shifted my aimless lunge into a grab for his neck as his arms snapped up from under a pile of jackets. He didn't hesitate an instant, hate burning bright in his dull brown eyes as he let loose with both barrels of the same shotgun I'd killed him with thrice now, and I instantly lost feeling in my legs. I could hear my intestines splashing onto the floor behind me as my suddenly limp lower body began to drop out from under me. He must have hit my spine, but my grip on his neck kept me from collapsing long enough to slam my other fist into his face, Mei's gift deploying with a now familiar 'kathunk' of air displacing metal.

The hateful spark in his mud coloured eyes went out as a thin metal rod drove through his forehead, and reality began to break down around me.

SUCCESS

REWARD: Sasha Okohenjin

I couldn't keep the grin from my face as the real world faded back into existence. That was far, far too close, but the rush of victory was nearly as nice as the instant relief from my pain; though neither trumped the hesitant sparks of hope that I'd just safely resolved my fears of being blackmailed. Now, if my power is consistent, I just had to leverage the landlord's newfound devo-o-o-...

My vision came back and my thoughts ground to a halt. What was standing before me was distinctly not my landlord; for one, I don't recall the old man having a heart shaped face, let alone breasts the size of my head. Her clothes were even nicer than before, and her skin was so flawless it nearly glowed; my power had replaced the greasy old pervert with a busty, female version of himself. One that, by the lecherous grin on her face, was still very much a pervert.

Her tight, brown and gold striped shirt hugged her large chest, the clear imprints of her nipples making it abundantly clear she wasn't wearing a bra. She was wearing a pair of dark brown jeans so tight they almost looked painted on, the brand name stretched across her thigh recognizable as something expensive mom had once lamented not being able to justify splurging on. The rugged but practical boots the old man used to wear had been upgraded to a newer, though still notably quite practical set; apparently her outfit wasn't just sexulized, her preferences had remained mostly the same as what I vaguely remembered the original landlord preferring.

The vaguely familiar looking woman very clearly noticed me looking her over and downright purred, "Mmm~ Does the little momma's boy have some wandering eyes? Well well, I don't think I mind~" Her half lidded eyes trailed languidly across my body in return, the appreciative hum leaving her lips sending a shudder down my spine and leaving an almost uncomfortable warmth in my groin that faded into bubbling ice.

I felt… sick, horrified more even than when my own mother sent me a similar smouldering look. Not because the woman before me wasn't exceptionally attractive, but from the utter horror of what I'd done. This was a far more drastic change than what mom had undergone, to the point where the end result bore only a loose resemblance to the man it was crafted from. Could this even be counted as an alteration of the original? I couldn't think of any way to find a functional difference between changing the old man so dramatically and just murdering and replaci-

A warm hand settled against my cheek, and my shock at the landlord's transformation into a much younger looking landlady suddenly found itself the target of a vicious guerilla war launched by the lonely child and lustful monkey within me. Crystal spears pierced my discomfort and cut down my racing thoughts, leaving room for a torrent of lust and loneliness to surge through my mind. Soft lips pressed against my ear, and a breathy whisper slithered into my brain, "How's about you and me go on up to the penthouse? Maybe I'll let you keep it if you make me howl like your mommy did last night~!" Her other hand pawed at my chest playfully, and my face went so red I was surprised I even had enough blood left in me to make my pants so tight.

Wait, penthouse? Does this building even have a penthouse? My eyes wandered away from the landlady's wavy hair settled over my chest and over towards the stairs, only to freeze on something unexpected; an elevator, tucked away right next to the staircase. This building was old and cheaply constructed, it never had an elevator and the landlord had never been willing to have the entire building renovated to get one installed (I suppose he preferred to just bribe the building inspector every year), so why was there one now?

Did maxing out the landlady retroactively improve the apartment building? Something along the lines of altering choices she made in the past to change the present in my favor, perhaps? That would fit with mom having a better job and nicer car after I maxed her out, but how far did this extend? If maxing out the landlady had improved my apartment building, would maxing out a car manufacturing CEO improve every product their company makes? Would maxing out a serial killer make them retroactively spare their victims and thus bring those people back to life? If I find and max out the people who own the company that makes concrete around here, could I improve the infrastructure of every single concrete structure in the entire city?

I knew only one sure fire way to find out, and now I was unabashedly excited by that prospect.

While I couldn't deny the smouldering embers of shame and doubt crying mournfully in the back of my mind, this side effect of my power presented me with an opportunity to do good on a potentially massive scale! If my hypothesis was correct, if my power really does go so far as to have far reaching impacts from me maxing people out retroactively making them better people, I could save thousands, maybe billions of lives! What if I maxed out a farming conglomerate's leadership, retroactively making them more efficient in producing greater quantities of food and more active in feeding the hungry? Or maxed out a bunch of doctors to retroactively grant them better skills so more patients lived? Or villains and dictators, to prevent the destruction they wrought from ever happening?

Or even heroes, so that more competent versions of them might have more success saving people.

If I could have even a fraction of the impact I was hoping I could, the greater good of my actions would easily outweigh my concerns about the ethics of brainwashing people. Okay, so yes, maybe twisting people into beautiful and very healthy female versions of themselves that seem to be in love with me might be somewhat morally questionable at the very least; but, but but but, if doing so means that said person cured cancer, or stopped a terrorist attack, or cracked FTL travel as a result of my improvements, wouldn't that be worth it? Isn't making people better versions of themselves contributing to a better world something that should be rewarded?

The soft, warm hand crawling under my waistband and starting to caress my inner thigh definitely didn't have anything to do with my suddenly… lubricated moral fibers. No siree, not one bit. Definitely, absolutely, uh huh, yep yep.

Okay fine, maybe the fact that the spawn of my crossing a moral event horizon was a beautiful woman who was very unsubtle in showing her affection had something to do with me being a bit more open minded to my evil powers potential for good. Before I got this wickedly tempting power, the only thing approaching physical affection I'd received were hugs from my mother. Now, not even forty eight hours since I woke up with these sinister powers, I've lost my virginity to the most beautiful woman I'd ever personally met and was being all but outright molested and propositioned by someone almost equally as gorgeous.

The fact those women were my mother and formerly male landlady who's minds I'd irrevocably twisted didn't matter at all to my hormonal teenage body. Going from starved for affection to drowning in it had a way of changing one's perspective, and a young man's penis always gets a vote on his decisions. The soft fingers gently coaxing mine to life even as the landlady shifted our position to look like just a particularly intimate hug in case anyone walked in had my cock sending one very clear vote; the pink haze of lust running red hot through my veins didn't care whatsoever why this gorgeous woman was slowly, appreciatively stroking me down from my base to the very tip and back, only that she continues doing so, and preferably faster.

"Mmm, come on, let's go break in the new bed~!" I could have resisted the gentle pressure with which she walked me over to the elevator, but my hazy, pink-tinted thoughts saw no reason to. I let her push me all the way into that mysterious lift before my eyes caught on something that drew me from the sparkling fog; the control panel, and more specifically the amount of buttons on it. Thirteen total buttons, two at the bottom labeled B1 and B2, ten in two rows of five with only numbers next to them, and a single button above and between the rows of normal floors labeled simply Penthouse.

The building had more than doubled in size, and I could think of no other plausible reason than my maxing out the landlady. Said grinning land owner tapped the penthouse button with a sparkly gold painted fingernail, "Now cutie, why don't you tell aunty Sasha what had you so shaken up when you came in?" The concern on her face looked genuine, and disturbingly similar to looks I'd gotten from Mitsuki in the past.

She called herself 'aunty?' She's definitely not related to me, so she must mean it the same way as Bakugou's mom. Does that mean she's friends with my mom now? Or rather, has been friends with my mom long enough to be considered extended family? Is that just because that makes for a convenient excuse for her to be close to me, or is my power deliberately fostering connections between other people I've altered?

I didn't have much time to think on it, my new "aunt's" raised brow and suddenly ceased molestation demanding an answer. Of course, I couldn't tell her the most pressing truth that was weighing down on me, but if my power truly had made this woman someone as close to me as Mitsuki there was one thing I could pull off my shoulders. "Uh, w-well, I… witnessed a driveby shooting. I didn't get the exact count, but a lot of people died and I… I was helpless to do anything about it. "

The quiet sound of the elevator climbing roared in my ears, why the hell did I tell her that?! Sure, maybe my power had retroactively made her close to me, but I had no memories of her like she might have of me. I don't even know if we really are that close in this warped timeline, she could have just been playing up her position! This woman was a total stranger to me, was I really so desperate to get that weight off my shoulders that I'd spill it to the first person to be nice to me?

Oh who am I kidding, of course I am.

At first her expression was flat, as if waiting for me to elaborate on what about that made me upset. Shortly after, a spark of realization lit up in her warm brown eyes and her face morphed into a mask of sympathy, as if it took her a few seconds to see anything abnormal about watching a crowd of people die. "Oh my god, sweetheart, are you okay? Does your mom know? Did you talk to the cops? Did they catch the guy?"

I shook my head, "I'm okay, they didn't shoot at me. The cops questioned me, but I didn't see anything the street cameras didn't; they thought it might have something to do with some new religion coming out of Mexico, uni-something. Unitology, I think? Regardless, they weren't sure if they were really involved." I took a deep breath, trying and failing to swallow the dryness in my throat, "I uh, I haven't had time to talk to mom yet, I just got home."

A strange look briefly flashed across her face, something between anger and curiosity that barely registered in my mind before her look of concern settled back into place. "Unitology, huh? I think I heard something about them donating to all sorts of charities lately, something about a number of celebrities joining up and donating huge portions of their vast fortunes to the church. Sounded like your average money-grab cult to me, but a mass shooting… that sounds wildly outside their MO, but I suppose you can never really tell with religious looneys; no one suspected the Quiridians were anything more than druggy weirdos before the gas attacks, either."

Her once groping hand slithered up to settle gently on my chest, "Oh honey, I'm so sorry you had to see something so horrid!" Her expression twisted, her eyes flicking back and forth as if she were thinking hard, "Well, um, I think the best thing for a tragedy you can't change is to get your mind off it!" The elevator dinged, and the landlady's shaky smile shifted into something more solid, "I just had this place renovated after the last renter… had to leave suddenly, how 'bout I give you a tour, I'm sure the hot tub will suck all your worries right out~!"

Something about that sounded vaguely ominous, but the way her fingers gently tweaked my nipple under my shirt at those last words sent the thought flying right out my ears. "U-uh, y-y-yeah, that sounds like… like a good idea to me." It's not like I wanted to be dwelling in that swirling pit of blood and shame in my mind, I'd take just about anything to pull my thoughts from that whirlwind of echoing gunshots and truncated screams. The fact "anything" in this case seemed to be a beautiful woman eager to distract me with better thoughts made her far more successful than my own attempts, even if her origin was one of the skulls screaming accusations at me from the blood tornado in my head.

Grinning, she dragged me by the arm out of the elevator and into what seemed like a reception area more than any foyer I'd ever seen; it was as if someone took the entire hallway that every other floor got and turned it into an extended antechamber, with the singular door in the entire floor all the way on the other side of the long room from the elevator door. I wasn't sure if that was some kind of security feature, or simply pretentiousness on the builders part, but with the array of baroque decorations and crystal chandeliers it did make a suitably impressive entryway. One I barely got to look at as Sasha dragged me through, barely pausing a moment to kick open the dark wood door.

The proper interior blew my expectations away thoroughly, with even the very first sight that met my eyes shocking me for many reasons. Directly opposite the door was a thirty foot tall window, stretching across an entire side of the massive room and revealing this singular apartment was at least three stories tall. The landscape visible beyond the window was nothing amazingly special in and of itself, but the view of the sun setting behind the cityscape was spectacularly clear and bright nonetheless, especially with nothing to obstruct our view from so high up. I knew there were buildings taller than this in the city, but evidently this window had been angled such that there was nothing taller in that direction, giving the illusion that we were standing on the top of the world.

The sound of running water drew my gaze -rather reluctantly- away from the window, my already wide eyes nearly popping out of my head at the two waterfalls dominating the center of the room, running alongside a glass stairway leading up to the second and third floors. One went straight from the third floor to what looked like an olympic sized swimming pool fitted with hundreds of jets that stretched from the far right wall all the way to the middle of the massive room, while the other landed in an infinity pool on the second story with a see-through bottom and sides. Off in the far corner, a relatively small part of the pool was sectioned off and loaded with a higher concentration of jets than the rest, marking it as a dedicated hot tub if I had to guess.

Strategically placed lights behind the waterfalls splayed shifting caustic patterns of light onto the dark floors, drawing the eye to the dark marble tiling. The bottom floor –or at least as much as was visible from the entrances, based on the doors set into the wall the apartment was even larger than it seemed– was coated in black marble shot through with spindly lines of jagged gold akin to kintsugi. Looking closer, the tiles seemed to have an iridescent shine to them, and I caught myself leaning down to inspect the floor before realizing what I was looking at; every tile had been laminated with what looked to be a layer of artificial opal!

The staggering (and frankly rather gauche) wealth on display put me so off balance I could do nothing but stumble along as Sasha dragged me behind her. My head lolled about as I staggered behind my host, eyes taking in abstract artwork hanging on the walls and strangely shapeless statues topping scattered plinths. This was insane, the kind of luxury available here would look less out of place in some CEO's supermansion, not the shabby apartment block I'd lived in all my life. There was no way mom could have afforded to live in a place even a tenth as expensive as this (well, at least not before I upgraded her; I'm not sure what her job is now, but judging by her new car this kinda place may actually be more fitting than were we were before)! Nor the neighbors for that matter…

Oh shit, I'm gonna need to check if I accidentally displaced all my neighbors by suddenly making their cheap apartment block into a place of exorbitant luxury. As my eyes dazedly danced over a gold encrusted fireplace two stories tall and twice as wide taking up a significant portion of the wall furthest from the door, I sent a silent prayer to my powers that whatever odd logic it used to twist the timeline such that people I altered were still where I found them would also apply to the people peripherally impacted by this massive change. I'm not exactly sure what would happen to them, and I'm sure they wouldn't notice themselves, but I'd still feel bad if I'd retroactively made it so they couldn't afford to live where they had all my life…

Not to mention, some of that… horrible… footage earlier convinced me that some of them might be worth challenging.

The question of how, exactly, maxing out my landlord had led to such a major change to the building hung over everything. Maybe some of this could be justified by her merely being more proactive and generous in renovations (like the elevator, I suppose), but this level of excessive wealth? This wasn't even luxury, this was a display of power, of some sort of status to metaphorically assault anyone who entered with. Is… is this because I made her… what, a more competent criminal? Was this her flexing that strange title my power gave her, 'Duke', or I suppose it would be 'Duchess Of Contraband" now; was this a place to meet with or house other high level criminals, and the decorations were meant to intimidate such guests?

I suppose I'd need to see how her actual apartment had changed before I can make such an assessment. This might just be her actual taste in decoration, especially considering all the sparkly gold she had splashed across her body. If that extravagant title she'd gained is any indication of just how much more competent and successful my power had made her, I couldn't refute that it was possible she'd earned enormous wealth off whatever it was she smuggled; if she's retroactively been moving narcotics in large numbers for a while, it's not implausible she's a multimillionaire using this building to launder her profits…

My newfound and highly suspect supposed familial figure pulled me towards the stairs fast enough to jolt me from my thoughts, "Come on, the master bedroom just got renovated, so we get to be the very first to try out the new bed! We can put whatever you want on the tv, I'm sure we won't be paying it much attention anyway~!" She all but purred the latter part, her intentions clear. Yesterday I'd have had no idea what she was insinuating, but after mom opened up my eyes to the wonders of the female form, the breathy tone to her voice had my heavy heart pounding in anticipation of a future full of enough delight to hopefully drown out the screams echoing softly in the back of my mind.

Sasha paused so suddenly I nearly crashed into her back. She silently turned around to look me over, before shifting her gaze to the massive, nearly boiling hot tub taking up a quarter of the room. She tapped a manicured finger against her chin thoughtfully, "Hmm, maybe we oughta take a dip first, eh? Let the waters soothe away the aches of the day before we go make some better ones in that new bed, ya know?"

Grinning at me, Sasha made no attempt to pretend she cared at all about propriety, rapidly devisting herself of clothes as she pulled me towards the massive pool taking up the center of the room, "So, I'll leave it up to you; do you wanna try out the custom heated pool, the dedicated hot tub, the infinity pool, or… we could still skip straight to breaking in the new bed?" She pulled her striped shirt over her head, only briefly releasing her grip on my arm to enable her to wiggle her arms free of the sparkly cloth, causing her breasts to bounce free right as she got those last words out.

To say I was tempted to take her clear invitation and jump straight to the main event would have been a massive understatement, but the ache in my every muscle made the bubbling siren song of the pool sing just a little louder than the fleshy song of the bed. "A-ah, actually, I think the hot tub sounds really nice; my muscles are still sore from exercising earlier so…" God I felt awkward; what kinda fucking weirdo puts off bed breaking sex to lounge in a tub? Then again, with the way every step felt like my leg muscles were cracking apart, I rather doubted I'd have been fit to break any beds without at least some rest.

Fortunately, Sasha just giggled, running a hand down my arm and occasionally squishing my muscles. "Mmm, I can tell you've been putting in some work~! Your mom tells me you're committed to becoming a hero, and it seems like you're already making progress on the physical conditioning aspect!" Her eyes lidded heavily, dark eyeshadow making her brown irises almost seem to gleam yellow in the dim lighting, "Mmm mm mmmm~, I think you make quite the dashing hero already; you'll be making damsels swoon in no time, mark my words!"

I felt something warm bubble up in my chest at her words, and somehow felt even more pathetic for it. God, what kinda loser am I that all it takes is a pretty woman telling me she believes in me for my heart to surge? Hell, considering she was molded by my power, this is like feeling good because the chatbot you built to compliment you, complimented you! I'm such a fucking worthless-

No, that's being unfair, both to myself and to Sasha; my power so far seems to leave people's personalities mostly intact, meaning I'm not just talking to an embodiment of my own powers piloting the mutilated body of my landlord(… I think), but an edited and improved version of the original man. While this woman may have been essentially built from nearly scratch by my power, saying she has no agency of her own is getting far too close to completely dehumanizing my victims; she's her own person, even if that person was… enhanced to my power's tastes. If I let myself start thinking like that, it's only a matter of time before I fall into a nihilistic doom spiral of villainy and despair.

Luckily, my spiraling thoughts were interrupted by Sasha resuming pulling me along, "I can almost see the dark clouds behind your eyes, sweety; you may not have confidence in yourself, but know that your mom and I think you definitely have what it takes to be a big hero!" She grinned as we came to a stop just a few steps from the dedicated hot tub's edge. I could see a mischievous light enter her eyes, before she glanced at the bulge in my pocket formed by my phone and visibly withheld a pout. She gestured towards a nearby door, "Well, go put your clothes away in there, then hurry out to join me; you wouldn't want to leave your aunty Sasha all wet and alone, would you? Oh, and you should probably call to tell your mom you're here, we wouldn't want to worry her. Hell, maybe you should tell her what happened and invite her up? I think she'd be plenty happy to help me cheer you up!"

I got the distinct feeling she almost pushed me in fully clothed before realizing that would damage my phone and deciding not to. While waterproof phones did become a much bigger industry due to the advent of people cursed with aquatic or semi-aquatic quirks, I did not have such an expensive specialty item, just a regular old smartphone. I nodded, "Alright… a-aunty." The word tasted strange on my tongue, but I suppose I'd have to get used to it if she really had been retroactively slotted into such a role.

Her grin widened at my words, but she merely shooed me away. I just shook my head and followed her instructions, my thoughts swirling rapidly. She encouraged me to call mom, when she clearly intends to have sex? Wait, 'she'd be happy to help cheer me up'!? She couldn't possibly be implying mom would want to join us like that could she?!

Well, only one way to find out, I suppose. Closing the door behind me, I found myself in a strange mix of shower room and lounge. The place was just as richly decorated as outside, tiled floor and clearly waterproofed black furniture. Before I started stripping out of my clothes, I pulled my phone from my pocket and quickly hit mom's number.

"Sweety? Where are you? You never came home from the park and Mitsuki says she hasn't seen you!" There was an edge of panic in her voice, but less than I was honestly expecting. It seems my power had made her somewhat more emotionally stable, or perhaps just more accepting of my decisions.

I took a deep breath, "Yeah, I uh, well I think I made a new friend." Best to start with the good news, at least I felt as much. "We hung out on the beach for a while, kinda lost track of time… but, uh, that's… that's not really the reason I'm so late." Another deep breath, through the nose this time, "I'm up in the penthouse with Sasha, she thought it would be a good idea to take a dip in the hot tub… because I, uh, kinda… witnessed a drive-by shooting on my way home from the beach."

The line was silent for a moment, just long enough I was about to ask if she was still there before I heard a shuddering breath over the phone. "Are you okay?"

I nodded, then remembered she couldn't see me and verbally replied, "Y-yeah. I didn't get hit, and I don't think the killer knew I was there. The police took a statement from me and sent me on my way, I… I don't think they're expecting to catch this guy."

Her response was immediate and decisive, "So long as you're okay, everything is fine. How are you feeling, I know you said you didn't get hurt but that can't have been easy to witness. Oh, my poor baby! I'm so sorry you had to see such a thing!"

My breath shook as I drew it in, "It…" I rubbed a hand down my face, squeezing my eyes shut as if to drive away the memory of the looks of horror and fear frozen on far too many faces. "It made me feel powerless, useless; more so than usual, anyway."

"You are not useless, honey." Her words came out firmly and immediately, with not a drop of doubt or hesitation in her voice.

A smile flickered across my face at that, a warmth blooming in my chest pushing back a chill I hadn't even noticed creep over me. "Yeah, I know, and I vowed I never will be again. My resolve to be a hero has never been greater, but it still felt awful to watch an atrocity play out before my eyes and not be able to do anything about it."

An aborted chuckle met my ear before a deep sigh drowned it out, "That's how most people feel whenever they watch the news, sweety." I could almost hear her shaking her head, "Alright, it sounds like some relaxation is exactly what you need right now. You have fun with Aunty Sasha, I'll be up in a few minutes to join you two. Love you sweety!" So she did refer to Sasha as an aunt, meaning the smuggler's claim to being a close friend of my mom seems likely to be true.

I blew a breath out through my nose, "Okay mom, love you too! See you soon!" And with that the call ended, and I set my phone down on a convenient table. For a moment I simply sat there, letting my head fall into my hands, before I abruptly stood and stripped out of my clothes. I didn't have a swimsuit and a quick check of the room didn't reveal any, so I simply took a quick shower to wash the oils and grime of the day off, and strode out into the main hall naked as the day I was born.

Sasha, already floating naked in the massive hot tub, raised her head at the sound of my footsteps and purred at the sight of me. Her eyes swept over my face and chest quickly, moving down to swing back and forth in rhythm with my steps. "Mmm mmm~, would you look at that~!" I didn't need to guess what her eyes were tracking, though the way she stared like a hawk sighting prey was slightly disconcerting.

I hesitated at the edge of the pool for a moment, long enough for Sasha to take a deep breath as she raised one arm to give a clear 'come-hither' gesture. Water flowed over her as she did, the swell of her chest rising above the churning surface and exposing her pink nipples. Her pale skin almost seemed to glow under the water, the underwater lighting dancing across her flesh tantalizingly. "Oh, do come on in, the water's more than fine!"

I smiled somewhat awkwardly, still not used to positive attention at all, let alone positive attention from a beautiful woman. I felt heat travel down my body from her gaze, and my cock twitched at the tantalizing sight just barely visible above the water; something Sasha definitely noticed from the way her smirk grew. I tried to ignore the heat on my cheeks as I quickly got into the pool, letting the feverish warmth of the just barely below scalding hot water wash away my aches and discomfort.

I settled into the bubbling water, sinking down to my neck and just allowing myself to float and relax. For a fleeting eternity, I simply closed my eyes and melted into the heat. Then, something more substantial than the bubbling water around me touched my thigh, and my body jerked as if I'd been shot, electric surprise ripping down my nerves.

I shot up from my position laying in the water, eyes wide and searching. Of course, it only took me a second to find the source of my disruption; I'd forgotten Sasha was in the pool with me, and from the amused giggles leaking from her gold painted lips she'd definitely noticed that. The buxom smuggler grinned widely at me, "Mmm, you seemed so relaxed there, I had to check you hadn't drowned while I wasn't looking~!" The mischievous look in her eyes told me that was a lie.

Something poked me under the water again, despite my eyes being locked on Sasha lounging across from me. Once more I jumped, and once more Sasha's smirk grew, but this time the foreign contact remained in place on my thigh. I reached down to grab whatever was stroking my thigh, realizing only as my fingers closed around it that it was Sasha's foot. "My my, you're really jumpy, aren't you?"

She giggled, toes scrunching against my skin as my grip slackened. "Oh, are you gonna give me a massage, little hero? No? That's alright, I think you need a little comfort more than I do." She grinned, her other foot coming down to rest on my other thigh as the one loosely held in my hand slipped free to settle back into place. "You just lay back and relax, let aunty take care of all that stress."

Her shins brushed my thighs, pushing my legs apart as her toes trailed along my inner thighs before coming to rest gently on my cock. I wasn't quite sure what she was doing at first, but when she began to trail one foot up and down my shaft I started to get the idea. It was an unusual sensation, different from the sex I'd had with mom or the times I'd masturbated; while the feeling of her trapping my glans between her big and little toes was similar to holding it in my hand, there was something distinctly different about it.

After a few languid strokes with one foot, she trapped my cock between her soles and began to stroke in earnest. It was a strange but pleasurable feeling, the bubbling warm water heightening the feeling of her wrinkled soles tugging on my skin. I took her advice, leaning back into the water and just enjoying the sensation, feeling the pleasure build up in me as her soft feet stroked up and down.

Tired and very recently virginal as I was, I didn't last long. The gentle pressure of her soft soles rubbing me under the hot water had me holding back a moan in seconds, "A-aun-" It was still awkward to call this near stranger such a familiar title, especially while she was doing something so… unfamilial, so I was outright relieved when she cut me off.

"It's alright baby, just let it all out. Let aunty soothe away aaalllll your worries~!" She pumped faster, gripping the side of the pool as she grinned at me over the swell of her breasts. I groaned and her smile grew, "That's it baby, let it all out~" Finally what little resistance I had crumbled and my orgasm came upon me like a bolt of white lightning, my hips jerking as I sprayed ropes of cum into the rushing water. "Oho~! There we go baby, reeelllaaaaax, spill your seed into the warm water baby~!"

I sighed, letting myself just melt into the warm water as I came down from my peak. The water shifted and Sasha came to lean against me, pressing her tits into my arm as she ran her fingers playfully along my chest. "Mmm, you like that baby?" Her lips brushed my ear, her voice a sultry whisper, "Why don't we dry off, and go test out the bedroom like I-

She was cut off by a knock on the door, the sound somehow carrying clearly across the massive room. "Well, that's probably your mom then." She sent me a wink, "I guess we'll have to go let her in!" So saying she pulled herself out of the pool and began outright strutting to the door, her bare hips swaying with every exaggerated step. She made no effort to cover herself, though she did take a second to peer through the door's peephole before throwing it open with a flourish.

The door opened to reveal mom, dressed in a silky green dress, standing there with a nonplussed expression. Even from my place halfway across the room, I could see her slowly look Sasha's nude form over, before looking past her to make eye contact with me. She sent me a smile, then locked eyes with my new aunt. "Well, it seems you two have been having fun."

Sasha burst out laughing, the force of her amusement sending ripples through her slick skin. "Oh, I think I managed to cheer him up a bit! But you know, I think he'd feel even better if you helped~!"

Mom shook her head, but the fond smile on her face only deepened. "Oh, you want me to intrude on such an intimate bonding moment?"

The grinning smuggler bounced on her heels, drawing my gaze to her rippling ass even as the sound of her tits clapping against her chest reached my ears, "Bah, I think Izu-chan needs as much loving as he can get right now; the more the merrier, I say! Besides, it's not like it's his first time, aye?"

Mom chuckled, "You're such a perv, Sash." She tapped her lip, eyeing up her apparent old friend for a moment before shaking her head with a fond sigh. "Alright, you two take a shower and meet me in the bedroom."

Sasha let out a booming, exuberant laugh. "Gaahaha! I knew you'd be down! This is gonna be so much fun!" Grinning widely, she twisted on her heel and all but sprinted over to me, wet feet sliding slightly on the tiles before she managed to right herself. She grabbed my shoulder, tugging insistently, "Come on, come on, let's go have a quicky shower, eh?"

Mom, clearly reading her intentions better than me, shook her head in fond amusement as she strode towards the stairs. "Don't have too much fun, you two! Remember to save some for me!" She laughed lightly at that, sending me a wink as she passed me being all but pulled from the hot tub.

I didn't resist as Sasha all but dragged me over to the very same shower room I'd stripped in earlier. She threw the door open with one hand, grinning over her shoulder at me as she ran to the largest shower with me stumbling after. Twisting the knob and ducking out of the way when a stream of cold water burst from the tap, she waited a few seconds before cautiously putting her hand under the flowing water after it started to steam.

Throwing me a wide and sultry smile, she backed into the shower with her arms spread, "Alright, why don't we help wash each other; you know, to speed things up~". If the lust in her half lidded eyes weren't enough to tip me off to her true intent, the way she started 'subtly' swaying from side to side to send her tits swinging certainly would have been.

I simply smiled, deciding once again not to merely passively accept the fruits of my fall but to indulge in the rewards of my labours while I can. "Why don't you turn around and I'll wash your back."

Her smile widened and she eagerly bent over to lean against the wall, all pretenses of innocent intent abandoned as she shook her round ass. I chuckled, thankful that our dip in the tub had soothed much of the ache in my everything as I walked up and, with only some hesitation, grabbed her thick ass. It was soft, though not as plush as mom's; my hands didn't sink in quite as far before meeting surprising hard muscle underneath, but I appreciated the feeling nonetheless. I spent a few moments just kneading her soft flesh, spreading her cheeks and letting them clap back together, before I took my cock in one hand and lined myself up with her wet slit.

With a sharp thrust, I buried myself to the hilt in her burning warmth, drawing something between a moan and a gasp from the brunette. I tried to give her a moment to adjust to my intrusion, but she had other ideas; without pausing a beat, she began slamming her hips back into me, the impact sending the water trapped between us spraying everywhere. Taking her queue, I matched her pace and began to thrust back each time she pushed into me. A breathy moan slipped through her lips, "MMmmmMMMmm~ That's it baby, harder! HARDER!"

My legs were still a little shaky, but something about having my cock buried deep in the slick heat of a beautiful woman made my aches and pains fade away even better than the hot tub had. I felt Sasha cum around me, her warm tunnel's grip pulsating around my cock as I found myself moaning alongside her, increasing the pace by sheer, animal instinct. Something that might have been words escaped her lolling mouth as I continued to thrust through her orgasm, and some instinct I didn't know I had drove me to lift one hand from where it was still kneading her ass to deliver a sharp spank.

A tiny piece of my mind froze up at that, guilt and worry beginning to bubble up through the cracks in my lust hazed thoughts before a moan even louder than before erupted from her mouth. "OooOOOooooH YYYyyyeeeAAAhhh! HArdER! SpANk me HARder! Choke me!" My thoughts stuttered to a stop, though my hips kept moving even as my train of thought smashed straight into a twenty car pile up on the tracks.

"Wha-wha-what?!" Did I hear her right? Did she really want me to… to strangle her? That… felt wrong. Yet the same strange instinct that told me to spank her a moment ago was tingling that I should just go with it, even as my heroic desires cringed away from the thought of doing such a thing. Do… do women really like that kind of thing? I thought it was just a weird porn thing, to be honest.

She blinked, her reverse thrusts slowing slightly "Oh, uh, you don't have to if you don't want to… I just kinda like it, you know?"

I did not, in fact, know; but I also wasn't in the state of mind to ask too many questions while her soft, slick passage was still massaging my dick. With more than a touch of hesitation, I wrapped my hands around her neck and began to slowly squeeze as I kept thrusting away. To my mild surprise, she began thrusting back even harder as I tightened my grip, and before long my reluctance faded away into the pink haze overtaking my thoughts. I pulled one hand back and delivered another quick spank on her ass, drawing a shudder from her as another orgasm tore through her.

Her pussy rippling around me was enough to send me over the edge, my thoughts going white as my body tensed. Rope after rope of hot cum burst forth to paint her insides white as we shuddered and moaned together, leaving us both gasping for breath in the aftermath. Though, her voice seemed noticeably more strained than mine, which was enough to bring my thoughts back down from that white hot heaven to the moment. My eyes slowly opened, only to fly wide with panic as I realized I'd accidentally clamped down harder on her neck in my euphoria.

I sprang back, hands flying into the air as my eyes landed on the very distinct handprint emblazoned around her neck in reddened skin. "OhmygodI'msosorr-"

"Don't be! I asked you to do that, you have nothing to apologize for." Her voice was slightly raspy, her breathing audibly strained as she leaned on the wall for support. Even so, she was smiling wide, her cheeks flushed and eyes slightly hazed with lust and pleasure as the water flowed over her. She was breathing heavily, the motion of her diaphragm causing her chest to heave and drawing a twitch from my only barely flagging cock. Her eyes flicked down and a laugh burst out, "I knew inviting your mom was a good idea, if you're still ready to go after that I think I'll need all the help I can get." She paused, moving a strand of wet hair out of her face, "Ah, speaking of, we'd best not keep her waiting too long."

She reached behind her and twisted the shower knob closed without looking, cutting off the water before it had time to turn cold. Grinning hazily, she quickly moved to a small cabinet and pulled out two towels, tossing me one. She gave me approximately five seconds to pat myself down before grabbing my arm once more and insistently pulling me towards the door. "We'll dry on the way, come on!"

I let out an amused huff, but couldn't keep the smile from my face as I followed along behind her. While this whole situation still slightly baffled me even with the knowledge that my power was definitely pulling strings to make it happen, any resistance or reluctance I had was thoroughly shattered and expelled deep in Sasha's pussy. I don't know, I guess there's just something about mind melting sex that had a way of changing one's thought processes. Before, I'd been worried about mom being angry that I was "cheating" on her, but her reaction to seeing Sasha nude at the door had heavily implied she was okay with it; now, after fucking my newly made aunt in the shower, all I was thinking about was burying myself in a pile of soft flesh.

At the pace Sasha set, it only took us a few minutes to reach the apparent master bedroom on the third floor; decidedly not long enough to fully dry off, but I rather suspected neither of us truly cared. With a flourish, my new aunt threw the double doors open as I was still toweling off my hair, delaying me from seeing what was within for an extra few seconds until I pulled the cloth from my head. What met my eyes had them widen, though by this point the wealth of this strange penthouse no longer staggered me; while the spires of kitsugi'ed black marble and the small waterfall set before a glassed-off fireplace were certainly impressive, it was the woman sitting upon the immense bed in the raised platform in the center-back of the room that drew my gaze.

I had seen my mother's new body naked several times by now, but I'd never seen her in lingerie. She was draped in green silks, light and sheer enough to be almost entirely see through, yet the fabric did more to emphasize her curves than hide them. Personally, I found myself preferring full nudity, but there was something to be said for clothing designed to accentuate her voluptuous body.

Noticing my attention, mom smiled and stretched languidly. The motion very deliberately drew attention to her large bust and thick thighs, carrying the gesture through from the tips of her fingers above her head and her curled toes pointing right at me. I chuckled, tossing my towel aside and striding towards the bed with only the barest hesitation over my nudity, "Well, I wasn't expecting the show, but I certainly approve!"

Mom giggled, "Ah, I figured I might as well go the extra mile if my boy's had such a rough day. Tell me, is it working?"

I smiled, "This is certainly far more pleasant to focus on than that… awful moment." I didn't think the memory of that helpless instant would ever truly fade from my mind, but drowning out the screams and gunshots with moans and wet slapping sounds seemed to be helping keep the dark thoughts at bay, to an extent. "It helps, I think; at the very least such a pleasant distraction helps quell the memory."

She hummed, "Well, hopefully we can make this night pleasant enough to overbalance that awful event." She spread her arms, pushing out her chest and beckoning towards herself, "Well sweety, why don't we get started?" So saying, she slipped her shoulder's free of her translucent dress, baring her already mostly visible breasts to the air.

I gulped, but fell into an easy smile as I walked up the short flight of stairs to the bed. Sasha followed behind me, laying a gentle hand on my back and stroking my skin aimlessly as we walked. Mom spread her arms in welcome, and I sighed as I sank into her embrace. My head sank between her massive breasts and my hands came up to fondle them. Sasha grabbed my cock from behind, giving it a few languid strokes as she lined it up with mom's pussy while I played with her tits; with a moan of pleasure, I sank easily into her warm wet depths and began to thrust back and forth.

Sasha didn't stay passive as I mauled mom's chest, moving from whispering lustful nothings into my ear to licking down my back before coming down to -in a move that drew a gasp of shocked surprise from me and a giggle from mom- spread my cheeks and lick my ass. Her tongue went wild, licking places I'd never been touched before even as I continued to pound away at mom's cunt. It was a strange and slightly uncomfortable feeling, but the oddity swiftly faded beneath the pleasure as she all but tongue fucked my ass.

Mom orgasmed around my cock at the same time Sasha reached between my legs to start massaging my balls, the combined sensation sending my thoughts briefly to sweet nirvana. For the second time that day I dumped a hot load deep inside a beautiful woman, my balls churning in Sasha's gentle grasp as jets of cum poured out into my mother's womb. Sasha pulled her tongue from my ass and dived forward to begin lapping around where my cock joined with mom's pussy, licking up any of our mixed fluids that flowed out.

Green hair clung to my face (both mine and mom's) as I heaved for breath, the exhaustion of the day blending with the far more pleasant ache of sexual exertion. Giving mom's left nipple a lick, I slowly pulled myself free of her sopping pussy, chuckling as Sasha didn't waste a moment to start licking my now freed cock. The moment my no longer flagging cock was cleaned, the voracious brunette wiggled under me to begin lapping at the white river pouring from mom's pink slit.

I let out a breathy laugh at the sight, pawing at her ass when she shook it back and forth in front of me. She pushed back against my hand before briefly leaning her head back to speak, "Mmmm, why don't you stick that thick dick right up Aunty's ass, eh?"

I blinked slightly, before shrugging and moving to shift my aim with my free hand. Mom laughed, "God Shash, you're such a whore!" She pat the brunette's head from where she had resumed eating her out, shaking her head as leaned back into her pillow. "Sweety, don't just stick it up her ass like that; you'll both want some lube for something like that. Friction burns are no joke!"

Sasha laughed into mom's pussy before pulling back, "Bah! Don't listen to spoilsport here, there's plenty of juice on that cock to slide right in! 'Sides, I like it a little rougher!"

Mom shook her head, pushing the woman away by her forehead, "If you're trying to tell me you don't have any lube in this tower of sin, I don't believe you… but if you really don't want to get out of bed to go get it," She sent her a playful glare as the smuggler wilted slightly, "Then why don't you put that mouth to use wetting his cock while I… lube you up myself."

I stared dumbly at the unfolding scene, my mind trying to run the numbers on what exactly was happening and coming up 'ERR' every time. Did… did my mom just offer to… to lick my sorta-aunt's ass to get it wet enough to fuck safely? Is this really happening? Am I in some sort of 'reward challenge' or perhaps under the spell of some dread succubus?

I didn't have time to spiral furtherinto madness, Shasha's gleeful squeal as she flipped around while mom crawled backwards out from under us pulling my mind back to this delusion called reality. The women rearranged themselves under my stunned and hazy eyes, Sasha getting on her hands and knees and staring almost hungrily at my now half-hard cock while mom lay under her. The brunette lowered her hips slowly onto mom's face, juices dripping down even before my mother's thick tongue touched her folds and slid it's way lower.

My thoughts on the absurdity of this moment faded when Sasha wrapped her gold painted lips around my glans. Her tongue swirled like she was licking a lollipop, and my mind swirled right alongside it. As she slowly took me deeper, effortlessly sliding past the gripping ring of her throat, I found my head lolling back and my fingers fisting in her hair.

Without thinking about it, I began to thrust my hips faster and harder. Before I realized it, I was full blown face fucking her, pounding away at her throat as she gagged and spluttered. A giggle met my ears, and a voice brought my hazy thoughts back to reality, "Well sweety, I think you're more than wet enough now; you wouldn't want to waste that load, now would you?"

I blinked, my hips slowing as the words pierced the veil of lust clouding my thoughts. "Uh, y-yeah yeah, you're right." I twisted my gaze down from the distant heavens beyond the ceiling to the woman sucking my cock. For a moment I simply stared dumbly as I enjoyed the sensation, before something clanged in the back of my thoughts and I pressed my palm to her forehead and gently but firmly pushed her away.

She whined disappointedly, but quickly perked up when mom and I spun her around. Her ass was outright dripping with saliva and femcum, more than wet enough for at least mom (who seemed experienced, a thought I chose not to think too much about) to seem satisfied. With her sending me an encouraging nod and smile, I took my cock in one hand and Sasha's ass in the other as I lined myself up.

Mom spoke up just as I lined my tip up with 'aunty's' sphincter, "Now sweety, don't just try to bottom out right away; your aunty may be a slut, but you wouldn't want t-"

Sasha nearly snarled, slamming her hips back with a roar as she made her opinion known, "Fuck that pussy shit! Ram me, big boy!" It was tighter than her pussy, but not quite as wet or accommodating. Despite (or perhaps because) of the difference in sensation, I found myself just as enwrapped in the pleasure of the moment as I had been before. The way her anus gripped so tightly while the folds of her intestines gripped and pushed rhythmically around me as she fucked herself on my cock had the very same pink haze settling over my thoughts.

With a moment to adapt, I began to push back against her thrusts, meeting her halfway just as I had in the shower. Our hips met with an audible clap as mom began playing with the slightly less voluptuous woman's breasts, tweaking her nipples just so as to draw a squeak or squeal of pleasure from her apparent old friend. While the previous orgasms in quick succession had somewhat numbed my seemingly supernatural libido, the alien but oh so sweet pleasure quickly had me stumbling closer and closer to the edge once again.

Mom, seemingly noticing me lingering on the lip of that sweet abyss, sent me a sultry smirk, "That's it baby, go ahead and fill this slut's ass with your warm cream! Cum for me, no cum for your aunty!" I couldn't claim the words alone sent me over the edge, but I did just so happen to slip over that ledge and collapse into another mind melting orgasm right as she spoke them.

Now thoroughly spent and more exhausted than before I came up here to relax, I allowed myself to simply collapse atop the mixed pile of warm flesh. My flagging cock slowly softened inside Sasha, allowing her to easily pull forward and away. Mom and my newly made aunt crawled about, pushing and pulling my limp form as I simply allowed myself to be shifted around. Finally, I wound up wrapped in a warm embrace from either side, laying partially atop mom and Sasha as I drifted off into restful slumber.

There were no gunshots in my dreams, though nor were there any moans of pleasure. Instead, I found myself standing alone on the very edge of a seemingly endless platform of green crystal surrounded by fathomless darkness. My eyes wandered the abyss for untold moments, finding nothing but crushing and absolute darkness stretching on into eternity wherever I looked.

I looked away before the abyss could stare back into me, turning my mind's eye back to the strange and dimly luminescent crystal beneath my feet. I strained my eyes, trying and failing to call upon Mei's vision as I just barely made out the impression of something in the distance. It was like… strange and massive… bricks? Not like those of a modern wall, but like the massive things that made up the pyramids. I couldn't make out what they were made of, but each one I could distinguish seemed to be different.

Curious, and feeling the eyes of the dark on my back, I began to walk towards this distant mirage. And walk. And walk. It felt like hours passed, or perhaps days, but the strange blocks remained ever distant. They were so far away I couldn't tell if they were even getting closer, or if I was simply imagining them…

Imagining? Something in the word twinged an offkey cord in my thoughts. Isn't this a dream? Isn't all of this imaginary? Why would this be any diff‐

I awoke with a gasp, morning light spilling across my face and entombed in soft, warm flesh.