Returning to his room, he throws off his clothes immediately, leaving them on the floor. Mentally, Kane notes to wash them later, but not how much later that will be. Before tomorrow, he decides. As far as a tour of the campus, Lucy made a fantastic guide, as he’s now pretty confident he mostly knows the general layout and the theories behind where things were placed. He may not have had any actual classes today, but he has two tomorrow, as well as his evaluation at the gym and arena, respectively.
He doesn’t look forward to that. He’s just not sure if ‘I literally can’t manifest my powers here’ will be accepted as an excuse or not, or if his passive absorption will be what they count for his abilities. Either way, he doesn’t want to go. At least his technical scores in Buffer and Ignition techniques should carry him to a middling rank on the school’s board, purely based on the assumption that the evaluators treat knowing how to do something as being of equal value as doing it.
Kane would claim that his Freezing knowledge needs a bit of a touchup, but it would also be completely meaningless for him to learn it as is. What would he even use it for? Lucy probably has dozens of pieces of gear by now, but she’s also focused on lightning, something which lends really well to designing tech. His own skills wouldn’t lend well to that, even if he could use them.
Ultimately, he just sighs, shrugs it off, and pulls his naked body off of the carpeted floor. He didn’t bring that many changes of clothes with him, but he probably has enough to safely go for a walk out on the city tonight without issue. Probably.
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Sanctuary might as well be a maze, Kane thinks. The moment he’d left the campus and apartment areas, the random sprawl took over. He started walking toward the main commercial blocks initially, but quickly found himself in the banking district, with its ominous glass-paned skyscrapers and dead-looking employees. He silently figures that if he looked hard enough, he’d probably find a Baelirus branch office somewhere around here, probably underneath one of the bank offices, but doesn’t bother looking.
Instead, he occupies himself in a different way. Being away from such a relatively high concentration of psychics, his aura is much easier to contain. However, being around such a high concentration of normal people, who know that something is wrong when they stand near him, but not what, poses its own interesting challenge. The challenge of picking out of the crowd how sensitive different people are to psychic phenomena.
He has a mental tally going, sorting people into one of four categories. He’s passed 16 people who were able to identify him as the source, 13 who got sick and fled to trash cans, 24 who unconsciously retreated their psychic presences without even realizing it, and 3 who were strong enough to just not care, but who also weren’t actually psychic. For actual psychics… There are two following him, and he’s passed another 5.
Kane isn’t worried about the two tailing him. They’re not particularly powerful, and he assumes they’re just with Sanctuary’s law enforcement anyways. It would be entirely reasonable, in his eyes, to have someone figure out whether the source of an aura like Kane’s is hostile or not.
Ultimately it is still annoying to have two people so obviously follow him, but without any real way of shaking them off, he just keeps walking. The people seem to be thinning out now, about an hour after he left, and Kane is feeling more confident in his own knowledge of the city. Even if he is still lost, he could find his way back here but just doesn’t know how to go back home. He doesn’t know any of the street names, but he could identify all the ones he’s passed if he went back in the same direction, he’s sure.
Eventually, though, he stops to take a look at a map of the city in a now scarcely populated common, and turns to face the direction of the SAPG campus indicated on it. Coincidentally, he catches a full look at his two tails as he does so, which distracts him from actually remembering which way to go. Instead, he assesses the men.
The two walk side by side, which he supposes is another point for some sort of organized effort, and they have black windbreakers on, so he counts another point. The man on his left is probably just as tall as him, and is clearly of asian descent, whereas Kane can’t make out the ethnicity of the shorter man beside him. None of this information means anything to him, but it is knowledge he didn’t have before. He can’t tell anything about their psychic presences, they’re both standing just barely outside of his own aura. Another point, he supposes, for them just investigating his aura and its source.
Dismissed as harmless, Kane remembers why he was looking over in that direction to begin with, nods to himself, and begins approaching them. As he gets closer, he watches the asian man shiver, before apparently steeling himself. The shorter man doesn’t react to his aura, but does whisper something to his companion. Kane, for his part, does his best to ignore them in an attempt to make real progress towards going back to his apartment. Alas, he finds it is not to be.
“You, Kid. My name is Jeralt Iglis, I’m a Counter-Psychic with SPD. I’m going to need to ask you some questions.” The shorter man, evidently Jeralt, introduces himself with several terms unfamiliar to Kane, which prompt him to stop in his tracks and turn to face them. His mind whirls for a moment, as he remembers reading that Sanctuary’s dedicated police force was called Spectre, not the ‘SPD’, and tries to quantify who these men might be.
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“I’d advise you turn it off, kid. We need to get some answers from you, and we can’t do that if you keep-”
“Who do you work for?” Kane cuts off the asian man with a pointed question and a glare for interrupting his thoughts. He turns on to rest his weight on his left leg before continuing. “Since it isn’t the police, clearly.”
Kane points at the workboots, jeans, black jackets, and lack of radios or guns that informed his judgment. The look of indignation on the asian man’s face makes him smile lightly, before ‘Jeralt’ speaks.
“Enough, kid. We work for SPD, as I said. Will you turn off your aura and cooperate, or not?” Kane gives Jeralt silence as his only reply, prompting a glance at his partner and a command. “Junu, level one permitted.”
Kane mentally jumps for joy at three useful pieces of information. One, Junu, formerly just ‘asian man’ in Kane’s head, now has a name to match the face. The second useful tidbit is the phrase ‘level one’, which probably refers to nonlethal psychic attacks. In other words, final proof that while these men do work for someone, it isn’t Sanctuary itself. This is because of the final piece of information Jeralt just revealed to him inadvertently. They don’t know who he is.
Kane watches Junu flex his presence a bit, before starting an obvious ignition technique. Kane doesn’t know what it does, but he guesses it to be a stunning technique. Not that he has any intention of sticking around to find out, as he leverages the weight he’d been resting on one leg to drop into a dead sprint towards the nearest isolated-looking alley.
“Bastard! Chase him!” Jeralt’s cry from behind his head puts a smile on his face for a moment. While being chased by two psychics of unknown affiliation is certainly a new experience, fighting two weaker psychics in low light conditions is not.
A burst of psychic energy shoots out from behind him, clearly the technique Junu was charging cleverly re-aimed at him. Rather than reveal his hand too early, Kane instead drops into a slide and lets the ball of blue energy fly over his head, to get a better look at it. What at a glance looks to just be a thrown ball of psychic energy reveals itself to be a cleverly disguised stunning technique, as predicted. He doesn’t have time to analyze how it works, but Kane suspects it's effectively a baseball plus a taser in terms of effectiveness.
Digging his heel into the very painful pavement, Kane launches himself to his feet with his arms. With no time to mourn the shredding of his favorite jeans from the slide, he stomps his left foot into the ground with a huff of annoyance, in further attempts to ignore the pain. The next stun-ball is aimed dead at his chest, and Kane has just enough time to see both men charging them up before he needs to act. A couple plans come to mind, but ultimately he decides to go for the most reliable option.
Sticking out his hand towards the oncoming attack, he releases his up-to-now suppressed aura, and instantly watches the stun-ball deteriorate around four times as fast as the previous one had. By the time it reaches his hand, he’s able to swat it aside harmlessly. He lets the second two come as close as they can get. Only Junu’s actually has enough force to make it to him, and even then, it’s lost enough velocity for Kane to dodge it by casually stepping to the side.
“Figured out why I didn’t ‘turn it off’ yet?” Kane taunts before swatting aside another identical attack, then turning to run once more.
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Finally reaching a dead end, Kane turns after taking a short breath. He’s not sure how far exactly he ran, but he’s sufficiently confident in the isolation of his location. At least, confident enough to actually fight back instead of defending and running. He does remind himself to read up on how self defense laws work in Sanctuary, so that he hopefully doesn’t need to sprint for thirty minutes every time someone tries to mug him or something.
“End of the line kid. You pulled some nice tricks, but we’ve got you cornered. Just come quietly.” Junu’s ‘demand’ doesn’t impress Kane even in the slightest.
“Hey. You’ve both been firing off that ignition technique to no effect the whole time, are you sure you even have an advantage anymore?” Kane does his best to sound as threatening and critical as possible, but neither man flinches. Rather, Jeralt looks emboldened to speak by it.
“Level two, then. Unless you want to come quietly.” Kane hesitates at that, then shrugs.
“Fine by me. Neither of you is strong enough to hurt me.” Level two means anti-personnel attacks, like Lucy’s lightning bolts, so that isn’t the cause of his hesitance. Instead, he’s more confused that the two men would still be hypothetically interested in the idea of a ceasefire. Kane watches Jeralt build up another ignition technique, but this time, he gets a clear view of it. Fire, vector targeted, probably a flamethrower. Junu’s is some sort of air-compression blast, which Kane doesn’t even need to look at to tell.
As the airblast is let loose with a boom, Kane lunges forwards towards Jeralt, narrowly dodging the half-strength attack by the time it reaches where he was. The look of surprise on both mens’ faces at his speed and forward rush is vaguely familiar, and wholly welcome. With a mere two feet of space between them, Jeralt launches his flamethrower early, but sees the psychic flames dissipating into nothing inches before Kane’s body. The next second, Kane’s left fist slams into the man’s chin with an uppercut, and his right arm launches forward for a straight to the nose right after.
Kane doesn’t dodge the second airblast from Junu, instead opting to let the man see how it turns to a light breeze before becoming absolutely nothing at all just moments after passing him. The third blast Kane meets by running into it, which does briefly stagger his step, but he recovers by dropping to a lunge. Seeing Junu raise his arms to block the punch Kane had just readied, he pivots his weight to his back leg, then raises himself up into a thrust kick to the man’s torso.
Before the man catches his breath, a back kick to the side of his head sends his entire body slamming into the brick wall, headfirst. The ominous snap and crack hang in the air for a moment, and Kane briefly feels a little bad about it, before bringing a stomp down on the man’s probably dying head, just to make it faster for him. Turning his attention to Jeralt, who is still stumbling and disoriented from Kane’s earlier assault, Kane cracks his neck with his hand idly.
“I don’t know who you guys were, are, or work for, but next time, figure out who it is you’re chasing before you fight them.” Kane says it aloud just in case someone is watching, then rushes forward and slams Jeralts temple into the corner of the nearest building unceremoniously. “Though, I do hope you’ve got some money on you.”