“You know, I saw a few movies where the hero did something like this,” Feyj looked down at the city below from atop the clocktower. Wind gusted by and blew his hair, a bit of color in the dark night sky. “But I always thought it a bit contrived that they could find anything meaningful from up high, looming over just a small section of the city. You’re saying that it actually produces results?”
“Not particularly,” Xard dismissed the notion. “Only thing I ever looked for up this high was a skycraft that had been stolen and was writing offensive messages in the sky. But in your case, it might be an ideal spot.” He then pulled out a small case. “Here, I had these made for you.”
“Earbuds?” Feyj looked at the small devices with confusion. “To block out the sounds of guns firing or something?”
“Quite the opposite,” the redhead rebutted. “They’re sound amplifiers, but for range instead of volume. It should let you hear clearly for several blocks, and you can adjust how far. I tried them myself, but it was pretty excruciating. With your processing power, though, you should be able to translate the bombardment of noise into something usable. I’d suggest starting small, just a block to test it out.”
“Oh wow,” the middle-aged man’s face lit up more than it had in weeks as his eyes turned monochrome. “I can hear the ticking of the clocktower. The janitor sweeping the stairs several stories down. There’s a cat digging through the garbage. A couple is walking together, talking about the food they just ate. This is incredible, and also a severe breach of privacy. If Phon ever had this, she’d reach full omniscience.”
“Well, there’s more to it,” Xard smirked since he was just getting to the best part. “The earpieces are synced up to the map on your phone. They’ll highlight any sources of noise that they’re registering, and you can focus them on a certain area within range, isolating everything else. It will also let you mark certain sounds if they’re a crime or something we should check out. My phone will see all the markers too.”
“Okay, let’s try it out,” Feyj eagerly slipped out his phone. “Let’s try a ten block radius. That should include some residential and commerce areas. The biggest spots for crime, or so I’ve read.”
“Wow, that’s a lot, even for me. I just need to mentally group what’s important and throw out the rest. Eliminate: Rhythmic mechanical noise, human and animal biological sounds, weather effects and ambience. Hmm, much better. Now I can focus… and the city is crying out.”
“A car’s brakes are struggling, and they might slip out of control. Someone just had their wallet pickpocketed. A bird has a clipped wing and is stuck on a nearby roof, unable to fly away. A woman is domestically abusing her wife in their apartment. Four gunshots were just fired, but at cans in an alley. A man is being beaten by three assailants. And there’s still so much more.”
Feyj stopped spouting every occurrence out loud. Xard watched the map on his phone light up with the incidents, each with a label and estimated level of severity. After about a minute, the eavesdropper took the devices out of his ears, unable to stand the endless noise any more.
“Where would you like to start?” Xard questioned him. “Obviously I’d say the man being assaulted is the top priority. From there we can go to the other urgent situations or work on whatever's closest by.”
“No, I think we can stop every crime!” His partner’s voice grew determined. “Here I’ve added a route for each of us. If we go fast, we can save them all! Let’s go, Xard!” The mask of his suit stitched over his face, ready for action.
Hard to refute his enthusiasm, the redhead grabbed the man and they blasted from the top of the tower. In seconds, Xard was dropping Feyj off in an alley before rushing off to perform his own vigilantism.
Feyj didn’t even give the three assaulters a chance to stand down or explain their actions. He whipped out his collapsed cane and extended it to its maximum length. Calculations not needed. Situation is trivial. In the blink of an eye, he subdued all three of them with quick jabs. After helping the victim to their feet and getting them to the street, the vigilante dashed ahead to his next caper.
“This woman was trying to hack your lottery ticket machine, call the police,” Feyj informed the clerk at a convenience store after knocking out the perpetrator. He then ran outside and held his hand up in the air. A second later, Xard swooped down and grabbed it, all according to their itinerary.
“I’ve stopped the car and caught the roof jumper,” The Artillery reported before dropping his partner off again and flying away.
Feyj immediately crouched down and pried off the manhole cover and then jumped into the sewers. It took him a second to adjust to the slippery terrain before he started sprinting through the tunnels. Even though he’d already memorized a map of the layout, the screams of terror guided his way.
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He zoomed past the surprisingly-good graffiti that the fleeing teenagers had been painting until just a few minutes ago. Feyj made it just in time to lunge in front of the snapping maw of the Crocigator that had cornered the two delinquents. He blocked the bite with his cane which was thankfully sturdy enough to withstand the sheer amount of force.
But even with his Fiend strength, there was no way he could wrestle the monster’s new chewtoy free. Thankfully, his cane was rather adaptable for just about any situation. Feyj snapped off the bottom shaft-piece and spun it causing the pointed spike to spring forward. He jammed the spike between the Crocigators eyes, and it went limp with barely any struggle.
The dissolving began right away, so The Royal tried to prop it away from the water, not wanting any monster blood to leak out and taint the supply before the carcass vanished. He then grabbed the two youngsters by their ears and tugged them to the closest access point, scolding them the entire walk to hopefully prevent any repeat stupidity.
Once they’d made it back up to the surface, Xard was already there and waiting. They’d fallen a bit behind in their schedule. So to make up for some of that time, Feyj had Xard adjust his next drop off point. Instead of setting the older man down on the roof as originally intended, Feyj was flung through a window of the domestic abuser’s apartment, shattering glass in all directions.
But despite that shortcut having put him back on track with his estimates, not everything always goes exactly as planned. He immediately ran up to the abuser, recognizing the sound of her breathing from his earlier surveillance. But what he didn’t expect was for her to be crouched up against the wall, her hands on her head with bloody knuckles, muttering to herself. “I didn’t. I’m so sorry. I didn't, didn’t think. Didn’t mean to go that far. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to!”
The vigilante turned around to check on the victim. They were face down on the ground in a pool of their own blood, unmoving. Maybe it had been so easy to distinguish the woman’s breathing because it had been the only source. By the way that the blood was still leaking, it seemed he’d only missed the mark by moments.
He slumped to the ground next to the fresh corpse, the feeling of his failure washing over him. It was crippling, devastating. If only he’d been a few seconds faster, adjusted his route ever so slightly to cater to the severity. Before now, this victim hadn’t really meant anything to him, but suddenly her death felt entirely like his fault.
His moment of grief was cut short. The wife, who was now a widow that had just committed uxoricide, seemed to have realized the gravity of what she had just done and that she had been caught in the act. Or maybe in her erratic state she believed Feyj to be an intruder. She bolted up from her corner, grabbed a youth sports trophy off the wall and bashed it against Feyj’s masked head.
But it did nothing, barely more than a clonk that caused him to notice her actions. Even though he wasn’t really feeling up to it in his current state, he was forced to retaliate, if just for his own self protection. He whipped out his reassembled cane once more and jabbed the spiked tip into the woman’s ankle. That caused her to collapse to the floor and begin wailing and agony, both from the pain and the situation.
The vigilante wanted to join her in her grief, but he also couldn’t quite get the tears to come. Instead, he remained where he stood for quite some time. Even with his Curse, all its processing power, this was still something he just couldn’t work through. Eventually, it was Xard who snapped him out of it, having come to check on him when he wasn’t at the next rendezvous point.
◆◆◆
Feyj sat on a bench outside a 10-hour emergency veterinarian clinic. Xard had dropped off him and the wounded bird a while ago. After getting the bird checked in and paying in advance for its treatment, The Royal unceremoniously declared an end to his own vigilante activities for that night. All momentum had been lost, and he just couldn’t bring himself to rush towards any more crimes.
Instead, he returned the noise amplifiers to his ears and resumed charting out any criminal activity. From there, he guided Xard through the remainder of the route until there wasn’t a single flickering light left on the map. Shortly after, the exhausted vigilante slumped down on the bench next to Feyj and handed him a drink.
“We can’t save them all,” the redhead was quick to address the lingering issue. “I’ve had lives slip away right before my eyes more times than I can count. But we can’t dwell on them. Instead, we have to focus on how many we did save, and tonight, that was a lot. We did some real good work, Feyj.”
“Yes, I understand,” the man nodded his head slowly. “I know that all we can do is try and be better.”
“Within reason,” Xard felt the need to reinforce that part. “We won’t be saving anyone if we kill ourselves along the way.”
“It’s just so strange,” Feyj really started to vent his anguish. “I didn’t know that woman. I’d never met her, and would never see her again, but it really hurts this time. I guess, I’ve just never really known loss like that before.”
“Well, that’s understandable,” his partner put his hand on his shoulder. “Even though you’ve experienced dozens of lives at this point, you’re still only actually a few years old. At your actual age, children don’t really understand the concept of death or are struggling to come to terms with it.”
“Hell, I never really experienced first hand until I became a Fiend. And even though he was a bastard, and even though I was the one who did it, the reality hit me hard—basically crippled me for about two weeks. But, experiencing death first hand makes you understand how important it is to protect, and what it really means to take someone’s life.”
“Take all the time you need, Feyj, and I think we should just head back to the safehouse for the night. But when you’re ready, I’ve found us a lead. That woman who killed her wife, the police ran a toxicology report on her right after her arrest, and I’ve pulled the file. She was under the influence of a new drug, produced and sold by the Red Eyes Gang. If you feel the need to atone, let’s uncover their operation.”