I'll admit, I wasn't entirely fond of the superhero world I found myself living in. The genre of fiction had always frustrated me, and the reality, such as it was, didn't look to be shaping up into anything much better. But the one thing I'd give it in its favor was that, as a bounty hunter, I didn't have to try very hard to find work.

"Goddamnit," I muttered, as the pancake landed wrong and folded in half. I grabbed the spatula and set about fixing my mistake- and beating up the pancake pretty badly in the process. "I hate that air-flipping these goddamn things is practical enough to justify trying, time and time again."

"You're making pancakes?" Akane asked. She'd finally gotten out of bed, probably because of the smell of breakfast.

Akane was a mixed blessing. She was the lovechild of a golden retriever and a ray of sunshine, and also looked extremely good in the stretchy tank top and shorts she apparently wore to bed, but she was also a person I barely knew who was intensely curious. If I wanted any semblance of privacy- and I most certainly did- then I had to do my research with the computer implanted in my head, and I had to multitask, not letting her realize I was up to anything at all.

"Poorly, but yes. This amount of batter makes four, and three are already done," I said, pointing to the plate I'd warmed up in the microwave, piled high with flapjacks. "I trust you can do some basic mental math, even this early in the morning?"

"I get three, for being such a gracious host?" Akane suggested.

"Suck my dick."

"You drive a hard bargain," Akane said. "Very well, I accept your price."

I snorted. "You get two pancakes. Pick whichever ones are least burnt, that's the most favor you're getting out of this deal."

I tuned out the sound of her rummaging for a second plate and a fork as I cooked, and went back to trawling the local list of supervillains. Austin was a major hub of the tech industry, and in this universe, had even managed to eclipse Silicon Valley. As such, a lot of the local supers were some sort of superscientist or gadgeteer- and from my years of experience fighting such beings, I knew that they were not quick and easy money, even if you happened to have general-purpose anti-technology weapons. That was the thing about gadgeteers, they almost always had some random gadget stowed in their pocket that you failed to account for.

"So what kind of errands are you planning to run today?" Akane asked.

"Looking for freelance work," I said. Wholly true, but not the whole truth. And now for the actual lie. "I figure with my tech skills, scrounging up a quick IT job shouldn't be hard."

"Sounds like a good idea," Akane said, before digging into her pancakes. She had an early morning class, so not too long after she finished eating, she got dressed, grabbed her keys, and left.

I utilized the privacy to hack back into the systems of that 'Liquid Courage' AI who spotted me the first time, and spent a few minutes carefully weaving triggers into the dimensional breach scanners. If my mark came through, I'd know as soon as he did, and unlike him, I'd be able to protect the data from deletion.

Ten minutes later, I was done with that. I stepped out the front door myself, and idly noted that Akane had failed to give me a key to the front door. I'd have to correct that sooner or later; I didn't want her realizing too soon that I was a technopath who could pick pretty much any lock.

I further used my technopathy to doctor the security camera footage, retied my keffiyeh around my face, and headed for the elevator. I finally had my target.

----------------------------------------

"Hell's bells you're heavy," I grunted, hefting the unconscious, mind-controlled man toward somewhere more discreet.

Austin was home to one of the biggest names in the hero business, a psychic superscientist named Valiant. Being a hero everyone's heard of apparently had downsides; whereas celebrities mostly only had to deal with mundane stalkers, big-name heroes had to deal with idiot villains taking a swing at them for nothing more than sheer pride and arrogance.

"Urgh. Should be the last of 'em in my way. Where to next..."

Being as Valiant was a psychic, the flavor of villain he tended to attract was other psychics. Sometimes it was oracles bringing misfortune upon the city. Sometimes it was telepaths, trying to suss him out to sell his identity to the highest bidder. This time, it was a mind-controller calling himself Hordemaster, who'd been mind-controlling random citizens to act as human shields for his crimes. The heroes were stymied by the human shields, and the fact that one of these minions was one of their own, under a more long-term thrall.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"...Ah, hell, this scan is two minutes old. Gonna have to run another one."

Hordemaster's mind control seemed to wear off over time, if not continuously reapplied. The going theory was that he had a smaller core of longer-term thralls, and only went out and recruited a whole bunch more in the lead-up to a job. Therefore, the best time to hit Hordemaster was in his downtime, when he didn't have many minions. Which was true of pretty much every villain, really; the problem was always finding them in their downtime.

I fired up my scanner again, to get an updated headcount of mind-controlled people in this apartment complex.

Because I wasn't some superscientist whose repertoire consisted entirely of esoteric ways to shoot people in the face, I had a solution to this problem. An artifact of mad science, of my own artifice, a technosorcerous crystal ball. It could find anything I could describe within a ten mile radius; red trucks, copies of Animorphs Book 7, poker decks in their original packaging manufactured in 1947... and, in this case, people under the control of Hordemaster, which included Hordemaster himself.

"Alright, jackass, it's showtime," I muttered, following the halls towards the apartment Hordemaster was camped out in. He pretty much owned this entire floor of the building, with nobody still remaining escaping his control. He had minions standing guard to deal with intruders, and as such, seemed to feel completely safe here. Safe and bored; scans showed him passed out on his couch, surrounded by empty beer bottles and bottle caps, and it wasn't even fucking noon yet.

Oh well. That useless lush was never going to be the real threat. The real threat, obviously, was going to be the hero he'd kidnapped, Iron Beak. I'd hoped that his minions would be stationary puppets while he slept, but considering the three minions who'd tried to shoot at me before I was able to seize control of them myself, I was pretty sure that wouldn't be the case.

The door unlocked and swung open under my control, and I stepped over the threshold, stun-gas pellet gun in hand, and shot Hordemaster in his sleep- didn't want him waking up and complicating things while I dealt with Iron Beak. Speaking of whom...

There was substantial debate on what the best martial art in the world was. Shotokan karate, muay thai, jeet kune do(which wasn't actually a martial art in the typical sense of the word), arnis... Personally, speaking from the experience of someone who practice martial arts in a legitimately martial capacity, to hurt people who did not want me to hurt them, I held firm to the belief that the best martial art was judo. Punches and kicks are quick, sure, but they're also worthless against anyone wearing any sort of armor. But armor is far less effective at stopping you from grabbing the bastard wearing it and throwing him over your hip, or wrestling his arms behind his back.

That wasn't to say armor was always useless in the face of a properly-trained judoka. In this case, because Iron Beak's power was sprouting sharp steel knives that were shaped like feathers, the notion of grabbing him was one of the stupidest I'd considered this week.

Ordinarily, I'd be fucked. My usual non-lethal weapon was an electrolaser stun-gun, and metal armor was actually an excellent defense against electricity. My options from there would be limited to trying to kick him, and hoping his ribs broke before my boots, or hitting him with random objects in the environment.

However, Iron Beak's helmet wasn't airtight, and he needed to breathe. So I shot him in the face with the stun-gas pellet-gun, and he fell over without much of a fight.

Time to collect that bounty.

----------------------------------------

"What? Why the hell do you need a copy of my birth certificate?" I asked. "I thought the whole secret identity thing-"

"Secret identities are a polite fiction that exist mainly to enforce work-life separation," the desk jockey informed me. "In order to pay you for the bounties you collect, we need to verify your identity. Your driver's license will also suffice, if you have that with you."

Bounty hunting back home had involved registration with a central authority; that it was the case here too wasn't terribly surprising. Annoying, because bureaucracy, but unsurprising.

"...Gimme a few minutes and some privacy in the bathroom," I said. "I put my wallet somewhere inconvenient to get to so that people couldn't pickpocket identifying information."

"By all means. Bathroom's right over there."

I followed his pointing finger, and entered the bathroom, finding a stall and locking it behind me. This wouldn't be the first time I'd hacked a government database from inside a bathroom, but I really hoped it'd be the last. Whatever chemical they used to clean these things smelled like poisonous bubblegum.

Step one, find the database that held records like driver's licenses and birth certificates. Step two, fabricate new records in my name. Step three, pause to consider how best to arrange the details so that nobody thinks to try something like calling my parents, without arousing suspicion. After some deliberation, I decided the best answer was to declare myself both an only child and an orphan, whose parents died in a car accident when I was 16.

Step four was to realize that I did in fact need to go to the bathroom for perfectly legitimate reasons, and step five was to doctor my own driver's license while valiantly ignoring the dump I was taking at the same time.

After wiping, flushing, and washing my hands, I walked back out to the lobby, approaching the desk once more with my driver's license clenched firmly in my hand, so that nobody could see it. I placed it face-down on the desk, and the desk jockey nodded as he took it.

"Alright, that should be sufficient. Here's a form for you to fill out, with your banking information for the account you'd like to receive payments to," the clerk said, taking my driver's license back out of the scanner and handing it back along with a loaded clipboard.

"I... do not have a bank account," I said carefully.

"In that case, we can open one in your name," he said. "We operate a bank for government contractors, which happens to include bounty hunters. Take the clipboard with you- I'm afraid the bank is down the street."

Well, this will teach me to think anything in this life is easy.