Outside the previously robbed bank, every person in the vicinity opened their eyes in unison, their minds dazed for a second or two before everything returned to normal.
Their panic-stricken faces contorted to boredom, the guard with a hole burned through his thigh stood at his post with an inquisitive gaze, and as if nothing had happened, everyone went with their lives, continuing the monotony of their day.
Well, that would be the normal occurrence as per protocol, but this time, one of them appeared to notice the discrepancy, with their face morphed with confusion.
Braun, crouching on the ground, stared at the floor and his leather-bound journal with dazed eyes. Lingering at the back of his mind, he vaguely recalled a strange, seemingly intense emotion that poked through the veil in his head.
Taking a deep breath, he stood up and looked around, wondering if something was amiss.
However, besides the strange fleeting sensation at the back of his mind and the intense emotion he received when he stared at his leather-bound journal, he knew something had happened, something more than what the eyes meet.
He hurriedly distanced himself away from the bank, his mind wandering as it tried to grasp at that fleeting sensation that remained stuck. It seemingly tried to convey a message to him, a message that he intuitively knew was important.
Soon enough, he returned to the nearby park and sat on one of its numerous benches, journal clenched in hand. Taking a deep breath, he steeled himself, wondering just what secrets lay behind the strange veil that obscured his heart.
What could be this wrong feeling clouding my mind? It’s like I’m forgetting something, as if something was forcefully extracted from my brain.
His eyes glowed brightly as he slowly pried open the contents of his journal. Flipping through its numerous pages with notes written in a chaotic yet orderly manner which only he would understand, he finally arrived at the page he was looking for.
Written on top was one sentence written in all caps and bold letters, as if to emphasize its importance.
‘THE S.C. ERASED YOUR MEMORY’
Then, written beneath it was a rough, concise, and clear message with each word carefully handpicked to distill as much knowledge as possible, detailing the events that happened prior to his memory being lost.
“This…” Braun stared at the journal, dumbfounded.
In the next instance, the fleeting feeling at the back of his mind intensified and his eyes glowed green. As if a dam was broken, the veil that obstructed his mind finally broke, revealing the truth that had been hidden away.
Flashes of memories removed from his mind were replayed in a mixed mesh of fragments, creating an illusory video of the past.
Crap… Braun clutched his forehead with a frown. So this wasn’t the first time I got my memories wiped.
Turns out, there were two other instances where this happened, up in the north and another southeast. In the first instance, a crook gone mad with power wanted to commit mass murder in broad daylight using some toxic fumes, and in the second one, a superpowered individual seemed to have lost control in the middle of the street and sprouted out a burst of spikes from their skin.
Annoying. Braun grumbled.
To think his memories were erased without his knowledge. It brought him a sense of uneasiness, but in a way, he couldn’t help but feel slight bits of joy.
He grabbed his head and felt that his memory which was already enhanced before by his constant evolution, turned all the more clearer as if frozen, never to be forgotten.
Well, at least I managed to finally acquire eidetic memory and gained a little bit of resistance to memory erasure. The next time I get my memory erased, it won’t be too hard to recall my erased memories considering I already know what it’s like to get memory wiped.
An unexpected boon, fascinating. Braun hummed before he then contemplated his next course of action.
On the northern and southeastern parts of the city, two groups also arrived through a blue portal, but they differed in terms of overall stature and abilities. On the northern group, they had one woman controlling a wooden whip and a guy who could transform into a four-legged beast that could spew out ice. In the southeastern group, there was a man capable of conjuring translucent spheres that he could control remotely and another man capable of manipulating glass.
Considering the city is structured in such a way that the workforce could easily be split into different groups, it wouldn’t be too impossible to assume that different groups are patrolling different parts of the city.
This means the city is possibly under the regulation of three superpowered groups, each working under the same organization.
It showcases their deep control and great manpower. Potentially, this same system of regulation is done across the entire world, in every country, in every city.
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This realization made Braun take a deep breath, his eyes gleaming with light.
What to do, what to do.
He closed his journal and leaned on the bench, legs crossed and his chin nestled on his palm.
Okay, let’s take this nice and slow. Gather information during the day, and continue wandering in the night. I’ve already confirmed that those supers, beings with access to superpowers, hold a special, discernible aura, so as long as I encounter one without them causing trouble and attracting the organization’s focus… hehehe, it would be golden.
…
After the sudden encounter, Braun returned home and quickly finished the remaining commissions he had left in store, earning himself a nice amount of cash and further consolidating his status online as a god-level artist.
With high-quality art, insane commission completion speed, and decent prices, Braun’s following grew, and the number of commissions he received increased by a substantial amount every day. Besides the fact that most of his publicized art is just furry porn, he was an undeniably great artist.
When he finished his last order, it was already 4 pm. Gazing out and staring into the horizon where the sun set, dying the sky a warm orange glow, Braun yawned, cracked his neck, and opened a new tab on his computer.
“Coding for Pros: The Next Step to Become an Expert.” Reading the title of the video with false enthusiasm, Braun opened another tab on his second monitor where a long list of white-colored lines filled the screen.
“Sigh, I’ll probably finish this mega project by next week, but it would be worth it.” He cracked his fingers and began to code, his eyes gleaming with a subtle green hue as the video played in the background at four times the speed.
Information and knowledge passively entered his mind, with important tidbits being processed and etched onto his brain. While this method might be inefficient and frankly useless to a normal person, for Braun, it was different.
His brain could process information many times faster than the average Joe, with the world normally moving at a snail’s pace if he didn’t actively slow down his perception of time. Because of this, he could just listen to an audiobook or split his vision into two, where he could watch a tutorial online while doing another task.
Multitasking was a tool in his repertoire, and he was not going to waste such an opportunity to bolster his efficiency to greater heights. Every second was precious, and the more he could do in a single second, the more value he could extract from his time.
From 4 pm to 8 pm, he relentlessly wrote down lines of code while focusing more on sources online to facilitate his self-learning process in programming. He extracted experiences from his previous endeavors in self-learning, and utilized various sources of information online, deepening his understanding and skill in coding—more specifically, in the aspects of remotely connecting to other objects through a wireless connection like the internet.
When the clock struck eight, he took a deep breath and stopped coding.
He couldn’t just work without pause, he still had to take care of his health and gobble up heavy meals to accelerate his mind and body’s constant growth.
Moreover, it’s almost time for my nightly scouting. He entered his kitchen and took out a couple of plastic containers where he stored his prepared meals that he could just heat in a microwave and eat.
It was convenient, it was full of calories, healthy, and even cheap.
As he waited for the food to heat up, he drank his third bottle of protein shake for the day and enjoyed the sweet, tangy taste of mangos with a creamy aftertaste.
500 calories from the shake, and 3000 calories after this. Braun recounted in his mind as he scarfed down the fried rice covered in sauces, mixed with vegetables like carrots and peas, doused with numerous eggs, and moistened up by a few ounces of olive oil for added calories.
He swiftly finished his meal in less than ten minutes and left them on the sink that he’d wash later. For now, he still had other time-sensitive objectives to do.
Returning to his room, he put on two high-quality gloves made out of leather, a baggy black hoodie, black pants, black socks, and a black sling bag. He also grabbed a dark-colored umbrella, with its handle strangely similar to that of a katana.
Unsheathing his wooden blade from the self-made umbrella sheath, Braun grinned and opened the window in his bedroom. Stepping onto the edge, he inhaled the fresh, pleasant air of the night, and leaped out.
He grabbed the edges between bricks on the opposite wall, slid down to the ground with a near-silent thud, and swiftly departed from the light, delving deep into the shadows.
Just like any other night, it was mostly just silence, with no people in sight in the dark alleys. In fact, the more he did this, the more Braun found the idea stupid, but the occasional encounter with crooks and crime made him continue with it for a while.
This doesn’t mean he’ll continue to do this for the rest of time. He’s already working on a more strategized form of gathering information both physically and technologically, but his expansion on the technological side of things still has to wait for another week before bearing any fruit.
As his mind roamed to create various plans for the future, he heard a distant wail hundreds of meters away, magnified by the echoes brought by the closed walls of alleys, the silence of the night, and his amplified sense of hearing.
His figure hurriedly blitzed through the alleys, bouncing from one wall to another like a predator having sniffed a scent of blood. He landed on a tiled roof, his eyes focused on the criminal currently abducting a man deeper into the alleys.
The man currently being abducted remained unconscious, unaware of the fact that he was being hauled towards a car parked deep in the cover of the night. There were traces of alcohol on his lips and clothes, creating a rudimentary sequence of events that led up to this point in Braun’s mind.
Either human trafficking or rape, and the guy was probably captured after drinking a drugged drink. That’s a first. Braun smiled and slowly unsheathed the wooden blade of his sword out of its umbrella-shaped sheath.
Green flames kindled from the tips of his fingers to burn the wood, and as it disappeared, the wood gleamed with a metallic glint, with its edge appearing dangerous to touch. He pressed it against one of the tiles on the roof he stood on and watched as the blade easily cut through it with little resistance.
This will be fun. He softly chuckled, amused by his latest crook encounter.
Braun leaped down from the sky, blade pointed towards the heavens. His muscles contracted, with the sword held by both of his hands. As he rapidly descended toward the ground, the criminal, barely aware of the existence above, continued to pull with a lecherous smile.
A wide grin blossomed on Braun’s face as he swung the sword down in an arc, cutting through the criminal’s neck in one swift chop.
Then, in one swift motion, he pushed the unconscious man away before blood could leak out from the criminal’s severed head, and he threw away his sword to grab at the flying head, pounding it into the bloody flat surface of the crook’s body.
Preventing the blood from leaking out profusely by barbarically connecting the severed head to the stump on the neck, Braun opened his mouth wide and took a quick bite.