Loud. It was so loud. The roar of fire and steel and the breaking glass; the screaming and the crying that came before the whimpers and groans. The noise made it all the worse, even though the world was dyed grey. Everything in grayscale, except for the blood which was bright red. Too bright, just as the noise was too loud. He stepped through the glass and the man raised a gun towards Mira, he raised his hand but his power did not come to him. He tried to move towards her, but an elegant cane barred his path and the hooked mask of the plague doctor hovered over his right shoulder. One shot and Mira fell, the grey world splashed with red. The man aimed at me and-

I woke up and tried to raise a hand to rub my bleary eyes to clear their blurry vision, but I found myself pulling against something slightly. I blinked, started thinking that my bed should be more comfortable than what I was lying on, and then looked around at the room; it wasn’t my room! Panic hit me like a mallet, but it didn’t take me long to realise I was in a hospital room. The tug I had felt at my wrist and hand were IV’s and it stood to reason that a hospital bed wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable as my own!

How long had I been out? I shifted slightly and winced. My chest still hurt so it could not have been too long a time. There was something on my chest actually, and I had to awkwardly use my left hand to shift the sheets and hospital gown to see an absorbant pad taped there. I didn’t remember bleeding - though to be fair I had difficulty remembering much after meeting the police - so did that mean I was in surgery? It couldn’t have been too terrible if I got out of it with this.

On the bright side, having lived in Rochester my whole life, and being the son of a pair of doctors, I had more than a passing familiarity with hospital rooms; finding the “call nurse” button didn’t take long. It wasn’t a long wait for the nurse either, but during that time I noticed that the sunlight through the window seemed brighter than it should. Had I been here through the night? Mom was going to kill me; I probably had a couple dozen missed texts and calls on my phone.

“Ah, your awake.” The nurse interrupted my train of thought when she came in, moving to check the monitors I was hooked up to. “I’ll let the doctor know; is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

“Wha-?” I croaked, before realising that my throat was painfully dry and coughing.

“Here, let me get you some water,” the nurse said kindly and I nodded thankfully. Being able to drink water after a procedure meant it couldn’t have been too bad either. I mean, it had obviously hurt when the mutant hit me, but in the back of my mind I was worried I had been hurt worse than I had thought. Adrenaline can keep people moving through some pretty horrific injuries and not all injuries are instantly lethal either, still, I should probably just wait for the doctor instead of guessing.

The nurse came back with the plastic mugs - with lids and straws - that the hospital used filled with water and ice. Once I had become aware of it, my dry throat was hellish, so I gratefully accepted. Idly, I wondered why I felt this thirsty; in theory, and often in practice, a saline drip could supply all the hydration the body needed.

“Doctor Karl will be coming in shortly,” the nurse said as I took a long drink. “You woke up at a good time, he was just doing his morning rounds.”

“Thank you for the water,” I replied with a smile. First rule for being in a hospital: always be polite and kind to the nurses. “My mouth was so dry I couldn’t even talk! Can I ask what happened to me? I don’t really remember much; I think I got into an ambulance…”

Wait, wasn’t Mira with me? What happened to her? I had a short moment of panic before realising that she really hadn’t been hurt, so her parents had probably picked her up and taken her home. If the doctor was doing his morning rounds, it was at least the next day.

“I’m sorry, I really don’t know,” the nurse was slightly distracted by the brief spike in my heart rate on the monitors, but sounded apologetic as she replied. I should have known better, the nurses would know my condition and what they could and could not do to make me comfortable, but they were rarely informed why or how a patient ended up in the hospital or what the prognosis would be. “Doctor Karl will have all the details when he comes in. Is there anything I do to help you get more comfortable in the meantime?”

“Well, if I could have my phone that would be good,” I grimaced slightly, hoping that it still had a charge. “My family is away right now, and my mom is probably worried sick.”

“Of course,” she replied, handing me my phone from a basket on a nearby table. “And here, let me help you sit up.”

When I was younger I wanted to have a hospital bed for myself at home. Sure, they were not quite as comfy as a proper mattress, but the bed controls allowed the top part to sit up and young Max thought that was awesome. They had a couple of other interesting features as well, one example was the built in speakers on the side bars. The nurse had also put the television’s remote within easy reach. Assuring me that the doctor would be in soon and that I could use the call button if there was anything I needed, I thanked the nurse again and she left the room.

I sighed, my polite smile fading quickly. I really was not anxious to check my messages, but sitting in silence, even for a few minutes, was not something I could do. I turned the television on and put the news on in the background; a commercial for the latest Eternity action figure was playing.

I sighed again, it was time to bite the bullet. My phone was sitting at a nineteen percent charge, so I could get some use out of it if I did so sparingly. I checked and was surprised at the sheer number of messages I had gotten, even my mother wouldn’t have texted and called me this much…

Indeed she hadn’t; Mira must have let the group know, because I had well wishes from all of them, even the extended members. I had a few worried texts from Mira as well, but first things first, I had to text my mom and let her know I was ok.

“And we are back, with more breaking news about the attack in Southern Minnesota yesterday.”

I sent a text to my mom letting her know I was fine and paused on a similar text to Mira when I heard the national news. Heroes and villains were everywhere, what happened at the gallery to make it worthy of the national news?

“-and authorities are tight lipped, but local sources suggest a concerted attack by villains all over the patrol area of the Rochester Fellowship Chapter. Villains from around the country participated, and now the latest breaking information is that the local Fellowship Headquarters was invaded during the attack. Fellowship spokespeople have refused to comment, but experts suggest that the villains may have been after sensitive data on the Fellowship servers. With the next election only a few-”

There was a knock at the room’s door. The door was open, but the doctor was being polite and letting me know he was there.

“Max? I have to say I am a bit surprised to see you here.” Doctor Karl wasn’t an old man - late forties at most - but he was almost entirely bald and what little hair he did have was white or grey. The glasses he wore contributed to him looking older, but I knew better. Doctor Karl was a friend of my dad, and had been over to our house for dinner and sports on more than one occasion.

“I am surprised to be here Doctor Karl,” I admitted. “I can’t say that what happened was really what I had planned for yesterday, although I am not entirely sure what happened?”

I used the tone of my voice to say the last part in a questioning manner, and the doctor took the opening provided. After a bit of a chuckle, anyway.

“You know you can just call me Steven. When your sister was younger she used to call me ‘Uncle Stee!’” Doctor Karl said, but I felt it was very awkward to call him by his first name. I know that my friends and family think I am strange when I argue this, but I feel that given his profession and age, calling Doctor Karl ‘Steve’ would just be too informal and rude. Thankfully, the doctor didn’t press the point and continued instead.

“You took a pretty hard hit,” he said as he double checked my chart. “It isn’t too obvious yet, but you are going to have some large bruising on your chest and back. It won’t be very comfortable, but it shouldn’t affect your day to day much.”

Not great, but not terrible. I had expected at least this much, so I just nodded along.

“Some small lacerations on your chest, but not much worse than you would get by trying to hug an angry cat.” That explained the pad then, so I guess I hadn’t been in surgery and was just a bit beat- “When you came in, you were in shock. It is difficult to be certain, but I am confident with the original diagnosis of having both psychological and physiological causes. Normally, a minor hemothorax wouldn’t result in shock, but given the situation it may have been a contributing factor.”

“I’m sorry, what is a hemothorax?” I asked, confused. Sometimes I wish I had taken latin so that I could understand medical terms better, but I did know that ‘hemo’ meant blood. Thorax, I was less sure about. It was a part of insect anatomy, and at a guess I would say it might be throat or chest.

“Sometimes, when someone takes a hit to the chest from one thing or another, there can be damage to the blood vessels allowing blood to leak into the pleural cavity.” Karl explained calmly; although the only thing I understood about it was that I had been bleeding internally, which sure as hell didn’t sound minor to me. “You were unconscious at the time, but a pleural tap was performed to drain the fluid and was very successful. Imaging shows that once drained, there was not a quick fluid build up again, which means that the damage was likely quite minor.”

“Wow…” I was still trying to process everything, and I don’t think I was doing all that well right now. “That is… A lot to take in all at once.”

“Well, normally we would have to have a talk about your prognosis and after care,” Doctor Karl smiled as he put the charts down. “But you lucked out in some ways; you got a visit from Stitch, and aside from some nasty bruises you are good to go. We just have to handle some paperwork and you can be discharged.”

If that was the case I really had been lucky, I thought to myself as I exchanged a few more pleasantries with Doctor Karl and he left the room to arrange the paperwork. Stitch was one of the most famous medical heroes and his schedule was packed. He could do surgeries that no other surgeon or doctor would even consider, much less dare, and do them quickly and easily. This meant that Stitch rarely bothered with anything that a regular doctor could do, only focusing on the cases they could not handle.

According to Karl, Stitch had visited all of the injured from yesterday, my attention wandered back to the television as I wondered how many people had gotten hurt. Then, with a start, I recognized the costumed villain on the screen. I quickly turned up the volume to catch what they were saying.

“-footage was just released and analysts confirm the supervillain Germ was present in yesterday’s attack. Appearing in Rochester, Germ attacked a recently opened art gallery and was intercepted by local heroes Whipersnap and Flipside-”

On the television screen was the villain in the plague mask from yesterday. Mercifully, the footage did not include the part where I got slammed in the chest, but it also very strangely did not include the other villain who I remembered being there.

“Germ’s powers have never been confirmed, but they are believed to involve the manipulation of microbes. With tentative ratings of Tinker 11, Enhancer 2, and Thinker 2, Germ is the most powerful villain currently identified from yesterday.”

Tinker eleven!? Fuck me, that is terrifying. The Fellowship rating system for powers was not perfect, but it did allow people to ballpark how strong a super was in a way that can be easily compared. Those comparisons don’t always hold up in the real world, because of how different powers can be, but a difference of three ranks in the same category is generally considered insurmountable.

I had the categories memorized; which was not impressive, really, most people did. I know that I am a Manipulator, although I have no idea what rank. Probably something depressingly low, honestly.

Manipulators were supers who could bend the rules and laws of physics around them. Myself, with making the aether interact with matter and Flipside with her control of gravity, were Manipulators. She was a Manipulator 7, if I recall correctly.

Enhancers well, enhanced, themselves. Enhancer powers are those that make someone stronger, faster, more durable, more regenerative; basically anything that made the human body better than before. Whipersnap was an Enhancer, although I do not remember his rating. Mutants are automatically counted as Enhancer 0, and some of them can rate up to three, although that is extremely rare. Enhancers are often considered the most common type of super, and they were generally the most well known.

The second most well known, and in my opinion, the most dangerous, were Tinkers. Tinkers gained a supernatural affinity for technology, but only in one field. They could learn other things, and were perfectly capable of understanding each others work, but getting a Tinker to work outside their specialisation is incredibly difficult. A Tinker might like to work with plasma, and only plasma, or in Germ’s case, with microbes and only microbes. They excel in their fields, and rarely care about anything else.

Thinkers had powers related to intelligence and mental abilities. They could be anything from precognition and clairvoyance to advanced strategy and mind reading. Supers with a Thinker power as a main classification rarely were physically strong and also rarely had damaging abilities, but could often be far more terrifying. A broken body can be far less horrifying than a broken mind.

The Creator classification belonged to powers that could produce something from seeming nothingness. Northernwind was a Creator; well, she was technically a Manipulator/Creator hybrid, but the water that formed her ice and snow had no source that anyone had been able to discern. The Manipulator/Creator hybrid classification was very common, even more so than either Tinkers or Thinkers.

Controllers could subordinate and command minions. Several decades ago, it was believed that only living organisms could be affected, but the emergence of Controller/Creator hybrids revealed a far larger range of powers than previously believed. It can be hard to tell the difference between a Controller and a Manipulator at times; a rule of thumb is that someone is a Controller if the thing being controlled is able to act on its own, but even that didn’t cover all controllers. Catspaw was a Controller, though not exactly a powerful one. She was Controller 4, if I recall correctly.

Finally, there are Transformers. Transformers change one thing to another, or the form of a thing to another form. Transformers were a broad category, including both shapeshifters and a super that could change air to stone. Unlike Creators, Transformers require some material to use their powers on and unlike Manipulators, they do not bend the laws of the universe so much as violate them outright.

“Whipersnap was reported to have been injured during the fight, however Fellowship spokespeople have stated that the Hero has already recovered. However, many of the heroes hurt in yesterday’s fight are still being treated at the Mayo Clinic. No official numbers have been released, but at least five heroes have been confirmed dead at this time, at least one of which was a minor.”

Powers were rated starting at zero, although aside from rating mutants as Enhancer 0, it is extremely rare for a power to have a zero rating, or even a one. If a power is expressed at all, it is usually two or higher and most supers floated around the four to six range. Seven to nine are powerful supers, often earning the moniker of superhero or supervillain, but Germ was even beyond that. Anything rank ten or above was in the realm of monstrous; even Northernwind was only rank nine, and she was able to hit an entire city with her power! All I can say is that I am glad I got away from the fight as soon as I possibly could; I really do not want to know what a rank eleven of any category was capable of.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

My phone vibrated and I saw a text from Mira; she wanted to let me know that she was glad I was ok. I let her know I was going to be released soon, groaning as I shifted on the bed. Almost immediately, I got another text back from her, asking if I would like a ride from her parents back to the parking garage where I had left my car.

Honestly, I had completely forgotten about my car. Fuck, I don’t even want to know what the price for parking overnight was going to be; the parking prices in Rochester sometimes felt like pure theivery. I gladly accepted, but it took a couple of hours before the hospital released me.

Meeting an ex-girlfriend’s father while wearing dirty clothes and without having a shower would have been uncomfortable- especially because Mira’s father really had never approved of me in the first place- if I wasn’t too sore and mentally tired to really care. Still, I really was grateful for the ride. The whole family had come with him, Mira’s father and mother in the front seats and Mira herself in the backseat.

“Thank you for the ride Mr. Thompson,” I said as I entered the back seat next to Mira. “I really appreciate it.”

“You are quite welcome Max,” it was Mrs. Thompson who answered warmly from the seat in front of me. It was a bit awkward that I didn’t know her first name, but I never would have used it anyway, so I guess it did not matter. “In fact, it us who should be thanking you. Mira told us about yesterday; I can only describe it as heroic.”

“It was,” Mira quickly agreed as I opened my mouth to downplay it. “And you even got hurt doing it. How are you feeling Max, are you going to be alright?”

Sometimes I envied Mira’s darker skin, as pale as I was my blushing was obvious. Mr. Thompson had never really liked me, and Mira’s mother had honestly been ambivalent, to suddenly be warmly praised by someone I had always thought of as a bit cold and stiff surprised me and caught me off guard. It didn’t help that I had Mira praising me and watching me closely as well; there might not be romantic feelings between the two of us anymore, but being praised by a pretty girl when I was off balance like this was a bit more than I could handle.

“It really isn’t anything worth praising,” I protested, although I suppose it probably was to some extent. They didn’t know about my powers after all, so they didn’t realise that my actions were far safer than they appeared. “Anyone would do the same for a friend!”

I really had never thought about it before, but I really had no idea how to deal with such profuse gratitude. Normally, someone would thank me and then I would give some sort of reply and that would be it, but yesterday seemed to overshadow today and the topic was hard to get away from. I was desperate to change the subject, and the smoke I saw out the window was as good as anything else for that, but I quickly learned it was more serious than I initially thought.

“The gallery was not the only place attacked,” Mira sounded worried, and more than a little nervous. “Every hero in Rochester, even the ones patrolling out as far as La Crosse, were ambushed yesterday. Apparently, some of the fights inside the city itself got pretty violent.”

“Why though?” I was stunned. Large scale fights just did not happen in cities like Rochester, but I guess I had just been complacent and reality had come to smash my chest in. “I guess there is money here, but there can’t be anything worth this, could there?”

“The local news reported that many of the villains were not even locals,” Mrs. Thompson added from the front, as the car was waiting at a stoplight. “With the injured and… and the dead, there might be twice as many villains as heroes in the city right now.”

That was… Terrible news. I doubted that there were really twice as many villains as heroes, but even if the number of active heroes and villains in the city had just swapped it was not going to be manageable. Local villains were going to try and spread their influence before the Fellowship could get back on its feet, and that was not going to be a long time. At first, it might seem like a good thing that the Fellowship would probably regain strength very quickly, but the villains would know that too. That meant that if the villains wanted to make gains they were going to have to push hard and fast, and that translated to violent and bloody.

At the parking ramp, the Thompson family brought me to my car and I thanked them for the ride. I promised Mira I would text her as soon as I got home and keep in touch, and I left the car while fishing for my keys in my pocket.

“Max.” Mr. Thompson had rolled down his window, speaking for the first time since I had entered the car. “Thanks for helping Mira yesterday, truly. Take care of yourself heading home.”

I was so surprised by this that I missed the chance to reply before he had driven off. I had never thought I would hear thanks or concern out of Mira’s father’s mouth; he was a man I would more expect to break my kneecaps with a baseball bat than ever say something positive.

I sat down a little too hard in my car and winced. I winced again as I left the parking garage and ended up paying the man at the exit booth. On the bright side, my annoyance at being charged fifty dollars distracted me for a time from my still aching chest and back as I drove home.

Now that I was in the driver’s seat, I noticed just how little traffic there seemed to be. Downtown Rochester had fairly unpleasant traffic, but today the roads felt almost empty. I guess I can’t blame people not wanting to head out unless they had to after yesterday.

On my way home, I had to pull over twice for police cars speeding by with their sirens on, but the lack of traffic kept up the whole way. There were few people on the sidewalks as well, and those that were had drawn faces and moved quickly. Everywhere I saw had a strange air about it; an underlying worry that seemed to soak into the very air.

Still, I made it home just a little after one in the afternoon. I plugged my phone in, first off, and sat down heavily on my bed. Which turned out to be a mistake, I would have thought I would have been more conscious of how tender my back and chest were, but my mind was simply too busy to keep it in mind.

In fact, I hadn’t really been thinking when I sat down on my bed at all. I groaned, but forced myself back to my feet and walked over to my computer. The bit of news I caught in the hospital left me with more questions than answers. First and foremost was why did this occur at all, but there were other puzzling questions like how that many villains had been wrangled into working together.

Sure, it was probably related to the first question. The easiest and most common reason that villains would work together was mutual gain, but the payout has to be enough to get past their mutual distrust of each other and the risk of fighting heroes. Still, there were other reasons that could be in play. More powerful villains might be able to force lesser ones to do as they want or perhaps they had been hired as mercenaries for the task.

I needed more information, and I needed to think about my own plans.

Originally, when I had planned this week out, I had set another small drug den as a target for today. Honestly, it wouldn’t be wrong to call my first strike to have been a practice run for tonight, and I was loathe to give it up. I was hurt, and there were extra villains running around, but on the other hand, this one was a personal target for me.

I typed in my password and waited for my computer to log me in as I thought. My extended family was large, and I got along fairly well with them even if I sometimes felt I didn’t see them enough. My parents and sister were visiting some of my cousins further away, but I also had more than a few relatives just twenty miles south of Rochester, in Stewartville.

They were good people, but one of them got caught up in the wrong crowd. Connal, who was a few years older than me, was a very popular guy and was invited to all the parties. At one of them, he was introduced to drugs and it was downhill from there. Some people can handle using substances and then go on about their lives, but Connal was one of the ones who could not.

The dealers in the house weren’t hardcore gangsters themselves, but they paid the “Dhiig ka badan biyo” gang for protection and product. The Dhiigs were a Somali gang, although with how they terrorized the local Somali community in Rochester and their tendency to use non-Somali people to handle their dealing, it was sometimes hard to tell. Their name roughly translated to “blood over water,” and blood is what they dealt in.

I doubt that the dealers in Stewartville would have much worth taking, but I hoped that they might know some choice spots if they were “encouraged” enough. Just a bit of vengeance wrapped into my business, I don’t think it would be hard for me to tackle this job emotionally.

Physically on the other hand… Well, I’m not sure if it is the best idea any more.

Some searching and browsing had me trawling through news sites. There wasn’t a whole lot of information out there; quite a bit of the information was repeated from one site to another. Maybe two dozen villains had entered Rochester yesterday and joined up with some of the local villains to draw out and ambush the heroes. Among the villains that came to the city was an impressive number of supervillains, and speculation was rampant across forums about the reasons, but nobody knew why.

I read through some of the theories, and I thought most of them were either unlikely or utterly ridiculous. The only theory I thought might hold any water was that a superhero from elsewhere had gone to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, and that the attack was a smokescreen so that they could target the hero. The only issue was that the heroes at the Clinic had repelled the villains that struck there; it wasn’t a very powerful group of villains if that was their main goal.

I pushed away from the desk and leaned back in my chair, closing my eyes. So basically, no one knew anything and I was in the same boat. So did I stick to my plan or give up for now? My own condition was… Good enough, probably? Sure, I had massive bruises developing on my chest and back, but that only made them sensitive and tender. If I just gritted my teeth and was extra careful I should be fine; I would be sore in the morning, but that was already guaranteed anyway.

I ended up making my way to the kitchen for a meal. A sandwich and soda, although the soda was the more important of the two. I didn’t take my medication this morning- on account of me being unconscious in the hospital- but caffeine had roughly the same effect, even if it wasn’t nearly as potent.

Actually, I was probably pretty lucky to have the bruises, I mused. If it wasn’t for the constant twinge, the withdrawl from my medication would have me in bed already. I honestly found it completely incomprehensible why other people would want to take drugs, I’d do just about anything to not take them, but I had been on them for so long I really couldn’t just stop anymore.

Today wouldn’t be so bad, especially if I took the edge off with caffeine, but if I missed another dose tomorrow I would be incapacitated. Without my medication, I would end up with splitting headaches and become incredibly exhausted. Even now, as I considered this, it occurred to me that this kind of tangent was probably my ADHD in action.

I had to focus, and I needed to come to a decision. Dithering was not going to be productive, I had to be decisive; I would do it. Even more than Rochester, I knew Stewartville like the back of my hand. In particular, I knew the parks and woods in Stewartville very well. I could pop out of the woods and into the yard of the house I was heading targeting and disappear back into it after I was done.

The target was not even as well connected as The Devil’s Boys I hit last time, they were just local pushers. My only worry would have been a faster response from local police to the gun shots; Stewartville was a small town, most villains stayed in Rochester and so the police had a freer hand in Stewartville.

In that regard, maybe the current turmoil worked in my favor. The Fellowship was understrength and the police would be wary about their responses. If anything, this was the perfect time to strike. I hoped that if I told myself that enough times I would even start to believe it.

I cleaned up the kitchen- a habit my mother drilled cleaning up the kitchen after myself that it was just automatic at this point- and headed back to my room. Most of the rest of my afternoon was spent answering texts from friends and family. I almost feel like I sent a hundred texts to my mother alone! I ended up having to tell the story to just about everyone who had my number; I have no idea how the news had spread so fast. Having to retell and retell the story was exasperating, and I have to admit I ended up being a little short with some of my later replies.

I had to convince my mother not to panic and come home early, and I also had to argue with my father who wanted me to stay with my nearby relatives while they were away. I failed to convince him that I shouldn’t, which really only left me with simple refusal. I felt bad about it, and I was going to catch hell for it later, but my plans would fall apart under the watchful eyes of my aunts and uncles.

“We will talk about this when your Mother and I get home,” was the last text my dad sent. Honestly, that was the kind of text that scared me more than kicking down the door of a drug den. Dad was pretty lenient about what I did- so long as my grades remained good- but when he did put his foot down, he really put it down. I guess I had dug my own grave on this point, I suppose I could have just changed my plans, but I sincerely didn’t want to.

I sighed, putting it out of mind; checking the time, I got up and made my way downstairs and out to the shed out back. I was certainly right that my armor was not going to be comfortable. At least the weight was mostly on my shoulders and not resting on the sore spots, but it still was unpleasant.

I had a longer drive ahead of me this time, but it was not a very long one in the grand scheme of things. Stewartville was roughly twenty miles south and I could take the highway the whole way, but I turned off a little bit before I reached the town. The road was a bumpy- a consequence of many Minnesota winters and poor road budgets- but not unmanageable. I passed the bowling alley on my right and then a small cemetery on my left and after another couple of minutes of driving I saw the turn off into Bear Cave Park.

I ignored it, and kept driving. Another couple of minutes and I turned off onto a nondescript gravel road; one of the benefits of spending so much time with my cousins in town was knowledge of more than a few shortcuts. In this case, the gravel road petered out into a dead end with nothing but a couple hundred feet dormant grass and melting snow between the road and the woods.

My boots crunched on the gravel as I got out of my car; the only sound in the silent night. Mask on and gun ready, I made my way over the field to where it intersected with a snowmobile trail near the trees. In summer and fall, the grass was waist to chest high; in the winter, the snow was deep and treacherous; during spring days, the melting snow turned the ground into mud. This small stretch was essentially impassable except for spring nights, and I had to admit a certain amount of smugness in knowing that.

When I was younger, walking through the woods at night scared the crap out of me. It didn’t help that a few of the times I played with my cousins outside at night, Connal took a great deal of joy popping out from behind random trees and watching me jump out of my own pants. Oddly, I was far more comfortable here in the woods now than I was the day before yesterday, walking on the sidewalk at night. Maybe because I was less worried about being watched from a house? There was a certain amount of confidence that wearing body armor and having a rifle gave me, and this time I wasn’t nervous that someone would call the police on me and I would end up arrested.

I followed the trail for a while before breaking off through the woods and damn it was dark. Between the clouds and woods and my mask I could barely see the ground. It made me want to use a flashlight, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of me coming through the woods in the first place. Maybe I need to look into night vision goggles? I somehow doubt that would be easy to integrate into my mask; it would probably be impossible for me.

The silence of the night, broken before only by my own stumbling, now was filled by the sound of running water. The Root River really wasn’t more than a stream really, but it wasn’t easy to cross without a bridge. It was wide and deep enough to require most people to swim; I suppose I was tall enough to ford it most of the time, but the strength of the current would push me off my feet anyway. With the snow melting in spring, however, it was at its highest point of the year and given the equipment I had on that wasn’t an option. Still, that did not mean I had to take the bridge over to Florence Park.

Instead, I followed the river upstream just a little bit from where I emerged from the woods. Here, the river was far wider and shallower, to the point that a lot of rocks poked out of the water. I had planned to walk over the rocks to the other side, and honestly now that I was here I thought that I might have underestimated just how difficult this would be. The extra sixty some pounds of equipment pressing against my forming bruises didn’t help either. On the bright side, it was shallow enough here that I would only get my boots wet, but that sounded like a good way to lose my toes to hypothermia.

I took my first step out onto a rock, making sure to keep my balance before moving on to the next one. There were a few close calls, especially when I made it to the other bank, which I had to climb up. I almost fell back into the river when a bit of the grass I grabbed onto tore out of the ground; I suppose it is my own damn fault for trusting dormant grass that had not even regrown from the winter. I ended up having to crawl up, and it was way fucking harder than I thought it would be. Body armor and a rifle might be fairly easy to walk around with, but trying to climb or crawl while holding both was a hell of a lot more difficult. Is this what soldiers had to do? Fuck me, and I had thought I was decently in shape before!

I took a minute to catch my breath before I struggled to my feet; getting up was another thing that was difficult wearing armor. A few feet in front of me was a bit of a cliff, but that made it sound much larger than it was. Really, it was just a small hill, and this part next to the river was so steep as to be vertical. But it was only a short walk to where it changed from a vertical face to a gentle slope.

Another short, yet unpleasant, climb later and I was on the side of a street in a residential neighborhood. The house across the street was my target, and all the little annoyances involved in reaching here seemed to merge with my original feelings; I was angry, furious even. I hadn’t been before, I was just a bit mad and felt they were a deserving target, but now? I wasn’t nervous, no, I was looking forward to this!

I strode across the street, safety off, and walked right up to the front door. It was locked, of course, but I had a solution to that. Doors weren’t exactly airtight, and I materialized the aether touching the lock and extending out a few inches from the door, where it became a little wider. Against both the doorknob’s and the deadbolt’s locks it would act like a chisel; two gunshots shattered them and I pulled the door open and stepped into the dark house.

I was in a small entry room, with jackets and boots in a half open closet beside me. I moved forward, towards the shouting and screams that I heard ahead of me. I glanced over the living room but then a light turned on in a nearby hallway and a naked man rushed out.

“What the-” he started to say before catching sight of me raising my gun and his eyes widened. “Oh shit! Please don’t shoot!”

A woman had followed him out from a room that was similarly unclothed, and they both raised their hands in the air when they saw me. Despite my anger, I was honestly a bit worried now, did I get the wrong place? This was nothing like the last place I had struck; just a quick glance around the living room proved it to be a decently nice space. It really did not give off the look of a ratty drug den, it seemed like just a normal house…

“The fuck is this?” a feminine, if severe, voice came from the hallway. “I thought this shithole was supposed to be safe!?”

At least, it seemed like a normal house until a woman in a costume and mask pushed the cowering woman aside and stepped out into the room.