The next week was a hectic time of handshakes and congratulations, thanks to my actions in the tunnels and the fact it had been caught on camera I was being raised to a B rank hero.
My cover job, a damage consultant for the union, was over and I was being supplied with my own apartment and there were talks of joining a team. For the time I was staying as a lone hero while I waited for Monk to join me, he had been left behind, being less in the action than me.
So here I found myself with a new second, Shadowstep, her powers complimented mine. She could create some kind of shadowy copies that fought for her, and whip around shadows like a solid object. So together we could overwhelm most opponents by taking them out faster than they could react.
We were clearing the quarantine zone from the recent attack. The chromatic serpent had given a number of buildings life and smaller monsters always followed in the wake of a larger one like this, making the tunnels dangerous. Which is where we found ourselves.
Currently we were tracking the marks on the ground made by one of those copies, Shadow was a surprisingly good tracker, apparently one of the classes the union offered. Though even I could follow the massive scratch marks on the floor.
“So what's your gimmick? '' asked Shadowstep, after nearly an hour of following trails.
“What do you mean” I responded
“Everyone in the Bs has one, only way to stay relevant and if you want to get above you go to lean into it, this’ll be the last chance you get to change your name.”
“I think I can survive as I am” I replied, incredulous at the change in tone from what I was used to.
“Nah man, speedsters are a dime a dozen, you gotta get something better than just another one. Like Dragonfly, with how you skip around.”
“Quickstep serves me well” I felt a little hurt by the implication.
“Too generic man, you gotta be distinctive, nobody’s gonna buy merch-” She was cut off as I gave sher a harsh shove to the side and, in a moment of slowed time, stepped out of the way of the furred creature dropping from above.
“Boggarts” I shouted, before moving into action, sending a spark at the furred creature, it was about the size of my head and somewhere between a fox and a bear, the ugly creature snarled at me and exploded into smoke and cobwebs as struck my mark, but it was too late. Another stepped out from behind a pipe where it definitely hadn't been before and slashed at Shadowsteps legs.
The false Shadowstep dissipated and exploded into blades but already a half dozen more were crawling from unlikely spaces and dropping from shadowed corners.
One bit into me as it landed on my shoulder, coming from by blind spot. It barely got through the armor but I could still feel the warm blood underneath. I threw the creature off and with a flick of my wrist the body faded back into the cobweb like stuff they were made of.
“Quick, this way!” Shouted the shadowy hero, throwing one of the monsters back down the corridor and running towards the junction we had just passed through.
I followed flitting from place to place and making attacks behind me but as I reached the junction I lost her, seeing nothing except the red light of a security camera.
A harsh pain reared from my foot, another boggart holding a screwdriver had somehow driven it through my foot into the concrete. These creatures played a game of their own.
After killing it I was still nailed to the floor, the pain nearly blinding as I slowly managed to lever the makeshift weapon out of my foot. I tumbled down just in time to see another two holding a sledgehammer, almost comically large compared to them, together they swung it down towards me and I scrambled away. The hammer shattering the concrete where my head had been. I tried to roll to my feet but slipped and saw the absurd sight of a spinning bear holding a hammer flying towards me, but at the last moment a thread of shadow whipped out. Grabbing the hammer and swinging the boggart about by it.
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“Keep your eye on the game rookie” She joked, winking at me before smashing the two monsters together “and thanks for setting that one up for me”
Desperate and in pain I flung out sparks behind her, taking out one dropping down and in a moment pushed myself forward to strike another. The last two fled from me, stepping just out of my range as the spark dug a hole in the concrete.
“Give it a bit more show, kid” shouted Shadow, her duplicates chasing them back towards us.
She flicked a hand, a shadowy shape flinging them into the air, and she theatrically posed before slashing at them with her weapons. The red light of the camera behind her drew my eye as, with a flourish, she made the sword disappear .
“Clearly you're new to this, how’d you get up to this rank?” Asked shadow. Grabbing a first aid kit from her belt and helping me out.
“Big fight down here with some snakes made of steel, I went in to save civilians. How did you?” I asked, wincing at the antiseptic.
“Man you know fuck and all. Listen, you want to stay in this biz you got to get showy. Sounds like you were lucky, the shelters are filled with cameras. Most of the time you have to seek them out. Find a spot like this to duke it out so people can see. I had a high profile thing at a bank, a dozen guys, Non-powered, trying to rob the place. Place was filled with cameras. I did a circuit on the news.”
“Seems a bit shallow to me” I said, Monk had often claimed similar things but never to this level.
“The people talk, that's how it goes.” she replied, flashing a cocky smile to the camera and helping lift me up.
“You’d like my friend monk” I said, dryly, but she took it as a compliment
I nursed a cup of tea to warm myself up. Getting stabbed in the foot tends to get you a day off and this kind of morning, where you can see your own breath but the sun drives the chill out of your bones was always my favorite kind, especially when I was alive to see it.
I was waiting for Andrew, Monk to the public, after our talk a few weeks back he claimed to have found something and wanted to meet up, to talk over it. He claimed it was a ‘conspiracy and not safe to talk about over the net’ but he was often like that. It takes a rare kind of person to archive the entirety of a webforum in case it gets taken down.
“Okuda!” Shouted the boisterous man, seeming unconscious of the way people slid out his way as he excitedly moved through the cafe, and slid next to me. “You won’t believe what I found”
“I take it the search was fruitful?” I replied
“More than you know, first thing I searched through for the keywords you mentioned, ‘Level X Breached’ a dozen matches. All taken down now” He rifled through a messenger bag and handed over a tablet with a number of sites on them, recorded as plaintext.
“That’s exactly what I heard, are these all different people” I asked.
“Yep, each one off the site, I checked with a friend of mine that’s an admin, they are all ID bans too. None of them can get back in, even on a public computer.”
I read through the forms, most of them simply mentioning the strange words with no replies but a few, mostly with incorrect versions of the phrasing, had managed to get a few comments but nothing fruitful.
“Judging by your excitement I guess you didn’t stop here?” I asked
“You know me well. I asked some of my friends and next thing I know I get in contact with some people, encrypted chat. Apparently when someone gets strong enough they ‘Break a limit’ and get more powerful.” Andrew’s words were coming out rapid fire now, he only took a break when his coffee arrived and he took a sip. “The thing is people who talk about it too much tend to disappear from the web and few claim they disappeared IRL too”
“What do you think it is?” I asked, more to humour him than anything else.
“It’s gotta be one of the big teams, Olymipains maybe. I think it's the Task Force '' I could sense him getting sidetracked into his favorite conspiracy, about the supposed group of elite heros who protected government officials.
“So they are hiding this, ‘limit breaking’ because?” I asked
“They don’t want competition. If everyone can boost themself up to an S rank hero they lose all power. So they grab those who figure it out and offer them a job or make them disappear”
We were getting off track at this point, so I brought us back onto topic.
“What does this mean for us though?”
“We know and are smart enough to keep quiet, this is our ticket to S rank, we get into a stressful but not super risky situation. Once we break some limits we jump up, after all you got right into B rank, no questions asked”
I did not like where this was going, it was not the first time I had to talk Andrew out of a scheme to gain popularity. His last one took the idea that ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ too far and wanted one of us to become villains to fight the other.
“What specifically are you meaning here?” I asked
“Fight clubs” he all but whispered to me, “We head into an underground club and pump the odds, go five to one and see what happens when we are against the wall.”
“Come on Andrew” I burst out, “It is way too dangerous and if you get found out. You are done from the union; no jobs, no insurance, no backup.”
The conversation lapsed with the finality of that and an awkward silence passed over the table. I knew he wanted to be where I was, fame was always his dream. After a second the conversation moved on, but as we left I caught something in his eye, something that concerned me.