“Good shit, Jerome!”, said Dante, giving me a thumbs up. “Considering you don’t have a brain anymore, I wasn’t too sure if you’d be smart enough to catch my very subtle hints. But you did.”

“You didn’t give me any hints,” I hissed, walking towards the hole in the wall I made after punching the imposter. “All you did was show me how easily you're influenced by compliments on your aesthetic.”

“Oh yeah?”, he chuckled, sounding offended. “And what was your big plan, Jerome the dickless? You must’ve already known she was an imposter with the way you punched her, but how?”

I stopped walking. “I didn’t, and I wasn’t sure at first either. That’s why I decided to bank it all on a gut decision, and, as I predicted, it worked”

“You punched who actually could’ve been your daughter off of a gut decision? What if she was just acting weird because of someone’s ability?”

I held my hand up and put my other hand on my chest. “May lightning strike me down if the person I just hit was my da-”

Lightning struck the ground a little too close to the house we were in, prompting me to drop both my hands.

“She’s awfully quiet in that other room…”, muttered Dante, glancing at the hole. “If that is her, you better hope she ain't dead in there. For your sake and for mine.”

“Shut up… But yeah, let's just make sure.”

From what I could see, the walls were thin which meant I had sent her pretty far into the other room. However, when I got closer to the entrance, I didn’t see a girl or anyone else flattened on the ground. I was about to take another step forward when Dante grabbed my shoulder and whispered, “They’re crouching down next to the entrance, holding something. Let me go in first and you stay back.”

I presumed he had used his Energy Sense to spot her, so I decided to take his plan seriously and wait at the spot he pointed at. Dante activated his forcefield and walked through the hole.

At that moment, the scream of a woman, with a voice drastically different from my daughter, rang out. “Take this, you surfer!” A decently sized electrical blast zapped Dante’s bubble, but it didn’t break or move an inch. The blast came from a metal pole, and the person holding it had… green skin.

Without hesitation, I pierced through the wall with my fist and grabbed the skull of whoever was using the taser device. The girl yelped in pain as I yanked her through, creating another hole in the wall. She landed and the shock of getting caught so easily must’ve been great as she immediately ran for the door. Before she could though, Dante trapped her in a forcefield, causing her face to slam against it and her body to fall.

“Aaaah, my face,” she groaned, covering her face. “My actual, only face. Even though I can have multiple faces, it still hurts regardless.”

I walked to her forcefield and slapped it, jolting her up. “You don't tell me every detail of your little plan, and your face won't be the only thing in pain.” What weirded me out about her was her clearly human appearance, yet her skin had an unnatural green hue, as though she were some zombie variant.

Although, what was even weirder to me was the way she quickly surrendered the moment she saw me, getting on her hands and knees.

“I’m sooo sorry! Please, please, please don’t terminate me!”, she begged, body shaking. “I’ll literally tell you everything I know about me. My abilities, who I work for, my favorite food, all my lab notes on the radions I’ve gathered, my cup size, the times of the day that I pe-”

“Woah, woah, woah,” I exclaimed, gesturing for her to stop. “Lady, I don’t need to know all of that. I just wanna know what your plan was when you turned into my daughter.”

“And while you’re at it…”, said Dante, approaching us with a status board in his hand. “Tell us who you were talking to on here. I would check myself, but its got a lock only URs can open.”

”How does that stop you from getting inside?”, I asked, suspicious of what he said.

“Well, being banished indefinitely does that to you.” He opened a hole in his forcefield and punched the woman’s bubble, causing her to jump back in fear. “C’mon you green bitch! You think we’re playing, huh? How about I shrink that forcefield and crush your body into a bloody mess?”

Upon hearing this, she shrieked, flailing her arms in an exaggerated fashion. “Ok, ok! I-I-I-”

“Spit it out!”, screamed Dante.

“I was talking to the Eviscarator, the Eradicator, the Greatest of All Time…” She got up and clasped her hands, as though she was praying to some higher being. I could practically see the diamonds in her eyes. “Daemon Williams.”

The scowl on Dante’s scarred side seemed to scowl even more. “You have my dad’s number? A nobody like you? Yeah, right.”

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If I recalled correctly, Daemon was the really muscular guy sitting at that table in the room I was teleported to. He had a real stern look to him—reminded me of my father. With how much that granny talked to me, I almost thought that she was their leader, but Daemon seemed to be calling the shots. It didn’t matter who the leader was though ‘cause all of them were gonna lose to me in the end.

She snickered, her smile looking more confident. “What a foolish man you are, Dante. If you had only waited a few more seconds for me to finish my sentence, you would have learned that it wasn’t Daemon I was talking to. It was… his secretary!”

“We already knew you weren’t talking to him,” Dante sighed. “Just tell us what you two were yapping about, or is wasting our time your way of showing us you wanna die?”

“M-M-My apologies!”, she said, straightening up her posture. “We were discussing how to restrain and/or incapacitate the life form known as ‘Jerome’, which I now know is the talking Type Two in front of me. I probably would've had a better prepared plan if I wasn't randomly teleported out of nowhere to the surface… and a few pictures like the ones I have of the specimen ‘Sunshine’.”

“You weirdos have pictures of my kid?”, I asked. “When did you guys even have the time to do that?”

“A UR with the ability to make others perceive him as invisible took some and sent it to our status boards last month.” She frowned, the light in her eyes dimming. “Unfortunately, the specimen was, and I say this with much regret, was terminated last month. After all the work I did on him too…”

“Oh, that was me,” I said casually, raising my hand. “His name was Johnny, right?”

“What!? So you were the one who destroyed hours upon hours of creating and modifying… you little surfer.” She emphasized on the “er” part as if it would make the insult hurt more. “Do you even understand how difficult it is to create a molecular ability compared to a nuclear or radio-”

“Don’t care,” I interrupted. “Do you have anyone else working with you near here? Do you even know where Sunshine is?”

“Noooo,” she said with an annoyed look, tugging on her short, white hair. “And to clarify, that’s a no to both questions—just in case you’re too small-minded to understand th-”

“Alright, you’re done.” I readied a fist. “Dante, turn this thing off.”

“What, what, what!?”, she cried, plummeting to her knees. “You said you would spare my life!”

“We literally never said that,” said Dante.

“But you allowed me to talk which means we built some form of connection, right? Isn’t that enough for someone like me to be redeemed?”

“Not really…”, I said.

“Ok, wait,” she replied, aiming her palms at me. “You want to t-t-terminate me because you’re positive that I’ll go back to Underground City A and tell them about this, right? Well, what if I proposed that I… don’t do that?”

“So you want to stay with us?”, asked Dante, just as suspicious of her proposal as me. “No can do. A little too risky for my tastes.”

“You already destroyed my De-Zombifier.” She looked around, seemingly admiring Dante’s forcefield. “Plus, you have me trapped in this very claustrophobia inducing bubble that makes me terribly uncomfortable… but I can’t do anything meaningful while I’m in here.”

I debated the idea for a bit, thinking back to the invisible guy I fought. His Radius ability definitely would’ve been useful to us. If only we had restrained him and made sure he wouldn’t be a threat, he would’ve been a good asset during that Jason fight. If this woman could turn into anyone, then that would’ve been a nice power to have on our side.

I dropped my fist. “Alright, I take back what I said before, Dante. She can be used for our–my benefit.”

“Yes, that’s correct.” Her lips crept up into another awkward smile. “I am someone people can benefit from.”

“Well, if we’re both gonna take down Jason, then ‘our’ wouldn’t exactly be the wrong word.”

“Wait… Did you just say J-J-J-Jason!?” Beads of sweat began to cover her face while her yellow eyes widened. “Delete every word I just said from your mindscape because I am not going anywhere where that anomaly is present. In fact, just kill me.”

“Calm down. It’s not like you’d be in the frontlines or anything,” I assured her.

“Excuse my language, but I don’t fricking care. I am not-”

A small section of her forcefield opened up. “Shut up and unlock it,” Dante cut off, pointing the status board at her. There was a fingerprint symbol in the middle of the screen.

Hesitantly, the green woman pressed her thumb against the symbol, and the SB was unlocked. The screen showed a blinking red dot on top of a mountain that was moving quickly, as though whoever the dot belonged to was being chased.

“As I predicted, your kid still has a tracker in her.”

“Seriously?”, I asked, bending down to look. “Where the hell is that place?”

“Topside Mountains,” he replied. “Probably a few miles from here.”

“So the third Radius Ability user is either with Jesus or Sunshine…To be safe, let’s head over to Sunshine’s location. Then, we’ll worry about where the horse man is.”

****************

The air up in the rocky mountains was thin, pressing against Sunshine’s lungs as her breath came in shallow, ragged gasps. Dizziness tried its hardest to send her down tumbling, but she pushed on. It felt like miniature knives grouped up and slashed her insides with every step she took, though her legs kept moving. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t lose. Not to enemies as pathetic as these two.

There was no way she was gonna look weak now of all times. Or else all that training with Jesus wouldn't have mattered anymore.

However, winning would be hard… Especially when a swarm of cockroaches had once again appeared in front of her, intent on ripping her limb from limb.

Fine. I’ll just go through then

Sunshine’s grip on her metal bat tightened. It was time for a disgusting massacre.