Brainpunch - CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Order (Patreon)

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A kill order can only be issued by a majority vote in the leadership of both the local SRU and Guardian units (min. 5 votes). They must then be approved by the president of the SRU (currently Vincent Hyde) and the core Guardian Esper group. This process generally takes anywhere from 5 days to 3 months. A kill order is the highest priority marker the American government can place on any individual super. Guardian, SRU, and contractor teams will be deployed to carry out any extant kill orders, and a reward will be placed to incentivize normals and non-government supers (hero, vigilante, and villain) to execute it as well.

Only 24% of kill orders are approved. Of those 24%, 91% are of villains who have never participated in a Cataclysm.

There are a limited number of exceptions to this approval process, known infamously intra-department as “Escalation Protocol.” These include:

1. Killing a Guardian outside the line of duty

2. Killing in excess of 1,000 people within a 72 hour timespan

3. Assassination of a governor or the President of the United States

- “Primer to the SRU,” an intra-department guide for new recruits at the Superhuman Response Unit

#

It was frightening how fast one phone call could change everything.

Just yesterday, the atmosphere had been warm. Even with the looming threat of Killjoy’s suicide supers, Vivian had felt like she was among friends.

One call had stretched the air taut with tension so thick Vivian could cut it with a knife. Nobody was talking, but everyone was communicating. Getting the details from the higher-ups, no doubt.

“Is it our squad only?” Shockwave asked, breaking the ongoing silence.

“Most of Echelon is currently managing the quarantine zone,” Amazon replied. “Of the teams that are available, we are the ones who will cause the least collateral damage.”

“It’s not just our squad,” Lycoris said. She hunched over the table, fingers flying over her keyboard so fast that Vivian wondered if she had another Mover power. “One of the Indy Guardians is joining us.”

“We’re not getting a full team?” Vivian asked. “Are the Guardians not sending a squad?”

“Guardian teams are never the first sent to carry out an execution,” Amazon said bitterly. “I’m surprised we even got Jackal.”

“He volunteered,” Lycoris said. “Tsunami and I have been fighting to get through the red tape ASAP.”

“What does Jackal do?” Vivian asked.

“C-rank Esper, D-rank Brawler-Marksman,” Shockwave rattled off immediately. “He can track a person’s trail of movement for up to twelve hours after his target leaves an area. As gets closer to a designated target, his aim gets better and he’s stronger.”

“You’re well-informed,” Vivian said, closing the wiki tab she’d half-finished a search in. “Jeez.”

“Anyone in this program should be,” Shockwave replied. His lightning patterned mask obscured the entirety of his face, but she got the impression he was judging her.

“Jackal is already on-site,” Lycoris said. “He’s tracking where Jekyll went from Lighthouse’s apartment.”

“Then we leave now,” Amazon said.

“Ugh,” Barbarian said. “Haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“You can have it on the car,” Lycoris said, patting him on the back. “Come on! Let’s go make some good TV.”

EHC’s choice of transport was every bit as extravagant as the rest of their branding was. Vivian hadn’t even known vans could look that expensive, but this one managed without even using tacky gold plating.

“Do you take the President around in that thing?” she asked.

Lycoris chuckled. “If he visits, yep!”

“You don’t drive your own car?”

“This one has armor,” Shockwave said. “Our cars don’t. Also, we don’t pay out of pocket for this one.”

That was a fair enough point.

There was enough space on the inside of the van for eight, which gave them more than enough room.

“No driver?” Vivian asked. There were three seats up front, and there wasn’t anything that looked like a steering wheel.

“AI,” Amazon said. “The Synth who installed the self-driving program claims it’s unhackable.”

The van started moving the moment all five of them were in. It was almost the smoothest ride Vivian had ever had, except she’d been in Lycoris’ insanely decked-out sports car yesterday.

“It’s all for the cameras,” Zach grumbled. No, he was Barbarian now. It was hard to think of him that way because his costume wasn’t face-obscuring and, unlike Amazon, he didn’t change his mannerisms much once he was suited up.

“Everything is for the cameras, Barb,” Lycoris said cheerfully. “That’s how heroing works!”

The Shifter just groaned.

“Jackal has relocated to just outside the quarantine zone,” Amazon said. “Seward Park. He’s waiting for us there”

“Jackal and Jekyll,” Vivian noted. “That’s going to get confusing pretty fast.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to distinguish when we engage,” Adam said. “But it’s a fair point. We’ll address it if it comes up.”

“Look for the bigger one,” Lycoris suggested. “He’s probably the bad guy.”

Vivian snorted. “Alright. I’ll keep that in mind.”

It was hard not to remember the Greek-god-like visage of the villainous Shifter from the fight footage. She found it incredibly eerie that they’d literally just been commenting on yesterday had gone and murdered a hero during the night.

Vivian was a murderer too, strictly speaking, but she was pretty sure there was a difference between being overzealous in defending oneself against an enemy and tracking a hero down and killing him in cold blood.

Sure, they had watched footage of a lot of villains before she’d turned in for the night, but Jekyll had been the first one. Vivian didn’t believe in supernatural signs, but if she did, she would have been very on edge right now.

“ETA is fifteen minutes,” Amazon said. “Ten if we break traffic laws.”

“So, eight?” Lycoris asked.

“Barring unfortunate circumstance, yes.”

Zach—Barbarian—pumped a fist half-heartedly. “I love breaking the law.”

As it turned out, “breaking the law” was a bit of an understatement. The van must have had sirens equipped somewhere, because it started blaring them the moment they got into traffic. It dodged and weaved through gaps that were definitely way too small for a van to get through. Vivian saw the speed limit at one point, then saw the speed on the digital speedometer.

Going a hundred miles an hour on a forty mph speed limit was a touch faster than she was comfortable with going, but the car didn’t look like it was hitting anything, so she tried to relax.

“So, uh, how’s heroing with Echelon?” Vivian eventually worked up the courage to ask. They weren’t talking much otherwise, and she genuinely did want to know. It was a bit of an awkward ask when they were on their way to go find and kill a villain, but her best window of opportunity to ask had passed already, and she’d been having too much fun to remember. “When there’s not a crisis like this, I mean.”

Shockwave, Lycoris, and Barbarian all started to answer at the same time.

“You go first,” Lycoris and Shockwave said.

“Jinx,” Lycoris added.

“It’s fine,” Barbarian said. “I get paid. I get benefits.”

That was apparently all he was able to muster, because he didn’t elaborate on either of those points.

“I think I’ve said this, but I like this job because I get to get closer to making a change, and also I get to meet all the interesting people,” Lycoris said. “That includes you!”

“It’s an opportunity for rapid advancement,” Shockwave said. “There’s always going to be something going on, whether that’s in Chicago or elsewhere, and doing well on those jobs means high potential for you to move up in the ranks. That means more pay, better benefits, more prestige.”

“More danger, too,” Amazon chimed in. “To me, ranking matters less than the chance to make a difference. The company knows how to work with heroes better than the Guardians do. Less interference from the SRU helps a lot.”

“I’d like more vials,” Shockwave said, shrugging. “I want to make a difference, too, but to be frank, I need to be an S-rank to affect the world the same way the Dyad or the Guardian core teams do.”

“Aren’t additional vials super rare?” Vivian asked, frowning.

“Oh, she’s new new,” Barbarian said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve seen how Guardian teams get more powerful over time, right?” Lycoris asked.

“Kind of.” The most powerful Guardian team she’d known of had also been the one that had died in Cataclysm 101. Sunrise had said something about getting more powerful before, hadn’t he? She would have to check with him.

“They gain power faster than us corporates do,” she said. “Know why?”

Vivian shook her head.

“They attend every Cataclysm.”

And on that cheerful note, the van screeched to a halt.

“Hold on,” Vivian started. “You’re saying that—”

The door slid open.

“Jackal!” Lycoris cried. “It’s been too long! This new girl is Mantis Shrimp, or just Mantis for short. She’s a D-rank Kinetic, according to the wiki, but she’s got a close-range trick that should be ranked higher. You’ve met everyone else?”

“I have,” Jackal replied. He had a faint Southern twang to his voice, which was odd. Wasn’t he from Indiana? “Pleasure to work with y’all again. Nice to meet you too, Just Mantis For Short.”

Barbarian groaned at the joke. “Can you just get in?”

Jackal was average height for a man, which meant that he was just about an inch taller than her. She’d seen photos of him in the news and on Reddit before, but she was surprised that he wasn’t taller.

Vivian had been forcibly shaken out of her hero worship phase years ago thanks in large part to Sunrise, but she still kept up with the news about them often enough. Jackal’s gear was the same as it had been in the last article she’d read about him. Local hero solves 14 missing persons cases in one day or something like had been the headline.

His voice shouted “Southerner,” but his outfit looked more like what she’d expect out of a non-super Navy SEAL. Jackal wore a bulky camo vest and pants—the only identiifying marks that pinned him as a superhero was his full-face mask, which featured two glowing red lights where his eyes were, and the insignia of a snarling dog on his chest.

Oh, wait, that wasn’t a dog, was it? His superhero name was Jackal, after all.

Vivian had only spent forty-five minutes with the branding team at EHC, and she already felt qualified to judge the Guardians on their lack of it. Echelon had done better than his costume for her, who’d been working for them for all of one day.

The Esper slid in where the driver would normally sit, putting him next to Amazon and nobody else. Barbarian and Shockwave had chosen the second row. Lycoris had gone to sit with Amazon at first, but had come back to join her when Ayaka realized that Vivian was sitting alone.

“Corporate cars are always so interesting,” Jackal said in a tone that made it clear exactly how interesting he found this one. He sounded older in person than Vivian had thought he would. Almost like Dad, if Dad had been born in Charlottesville instead of Shanghai.

“If you need help—” Shockwave began.

“I can manage just fine, son,” Jackal said. “I appreciate the offer.”

He rattled off a list of addresses and commands in a matter of moments, and the van started moving. Evidently, the breakneck swerving speed they’d been at before was too fast for him to keep up because he spoke another command about half a minute in, and the car slowed to a much more sane twenty above the speed limit.

Vivian was still eighty percent sure that they were going to die in a head-on collision, but it was less bad than it had been before.

“Sorry about the noise,” Jackal said. “I like talking my commands better than typing them. I have a bad case of old man hands.”

“Aren’t you, like, thirty-five?” Barbarian asked, adjusting his seat back far enough that Vivian had to tuck her legs in.

“Forty, but I appreciate the underestimate,” Jackal said.

“You don’t look a day over thirty-nine,” Lycoris said brightly. That got a laugh out of him.

“Charming as ever, Lycoris. Computer, backtrack three and right seven towards Washington Square, please.”

Vivian was sure that the computer could take regular commands just as well as whatever compressed version of the English language Jackal was using, but the van listened to him just fine. It U-turned with remarkable grace, given the Chicago traffic, and they continued trucking on.

She was startled to see just how many others were outside today—pedestrians and cars both. Given the situation, she had thought they would be a little more cautious.

Maybe it was because the mayor’s curfew only affected the night, and the quarantine zone hadn’t spilled over yet.

Or maybe people from Chicago just had less fear than those from San Francisco. Vivian wasn’t qualified to tell the difference.

They made small talk as Jackal continued redirecting the van. It got slower and slower with time, which Vivian hoped meant that they were closing in on whatever tracks the Guardian had found.

“Who died?” Jackal asked eventually. The conversation Shockwave and Lycoris had been having—talking about marketability on non-traditional platforms or something—died out instantly. “Local, or one of the imports? I wasn’t briefed.”

Vivian’s chest grew tight. She hadn’t even considered that possibility. Both Sunrise and Lachlan were in Chicago now, weren’t they? If it had been one of them, she didn’t know what she’d do.

“Local,” Amazon said. “Gaslight. He was a C. Ruler and Hider. Two months on the job. He took a heavy hit, but he is—was—a quick healer, so he returned home after the events of the day.”

“Christ,” Jackal said, his voice tight with anger. He crossed himself. “May his soul rest in peace.”

The pressure in Vivian’s chest didn’t go away. It never left her alone as fast as it came for her, so that wasn’t a surprise. It abated enough to let her breathe normally, which was about as much as she could ask for right now.

“Jackal had a nephew in the Indy Guardians,” Lycoris whispered to Vivian. “Keyword had. I think that’s why he decided to join us.”

For someone with such a happy-go-lucky attitude, Lycoris really had her finger on the pulse of people.

Or maybe Vivian was just spectacularly bad at keeping up with things. That was entirely possible. She still hadn’t fully processed what Lycoris had said about vials earlier, and nobody else had even been surprised.

After sufficient time had passed and conversations started up again, Lycoris decided that it was maybe okay for her to ask about it again.

She was a bit smarter about it this time, though. Rather than interrupt the truly illuminating conversation that Za-damn it, that Barbarian and Shockwave were having about the merits of gas cars (“they’re sexy,” according to Barbarian) and electric ones (“I can charge them myself, and they’re quite,” from Shockwave), she just whispered her question to Lycoris.

“Right, vials,” Lycoris said, a touch quieter than normal but not at the same barely audible volume Vivian had chosen. “There’s plenty of ways to get them, but the second-easiest route is to get them after a Cataclysm. Depending on how much work you put in and how long you spend fighting it, there’s a chance you get a vial when you survive a Cataclysm. That’s how Shockwave got to B-rank.”

“What’s the easiest?”

“Stealing, of course!” Lycoris beamed. “Or legal looting, in our case. I got mine from a raid a year ago. It’s part of why I rebranded, actually.”

Vivian frowned. “Shouldn’t people just take their new vials immediately? Oh, wait, I know this one. There’s a risk of complications, isn’t there?”

She remembered discussing the potential of increasing her own power with Lachlan before. Second vials had come up, and he’d had statistics on hand.

Why didn’t he tell me about the Cataclysms? Vivian wondered. Was it because he couldn’t tell her, wouldn’t tell her, or had he just not known?

She could worry about that when she talked to him next. One problem at a time.

“There are,” Lycoris acknowledged. “That’s not all, though. There are a few issues with vials you get from Cataclysms. One: they aren’t always going to suit your power. Two: if you’re not perfectly compatible with it, it can take months for the vial to sync to your body. Three: they have a very high chance of making a normal explode if you feed them one, so even if you don’t want the vial, it’s hard to pawn off on other people.”

Vivian’s frown deepened. “Killjoy fed Whiteout a vial, I’m sure of it. Was that a preserved Titan vial, do you think?”

“It could be.” Lycoris shrugged. “Killjoy doesn’t seem like the type of guy to worry about making a normal explode.”

That was a fair point.

“I think we’re getting close,” Jackal said loudly, interrupting every ongoing conversation. “But we’re at the edge of the lockdown now, so we’re gonna have to go on foot from here. Are y’all okay with that?”

Nobody dissented, though Vivian could admit she wasn’t terribly excited to see how well she fared walking around with a bullet wound still healing in her gut.

“I’m probably not going to be able to run,” she said. “Injury.”

“That should be fine,” Jackal said. “We’ll adapt.”

The van’s doors clicked open, and they filed out of it. Before they left it entirely, Barbarian grabbed a very familiar duffel bag from the back.

“You brought the gear here?” Shockwave asked. The disapproval dripped from his tone.

“Don’t get your balls in a twist, big man,” Barbarian said, slouching against the van as he ruffled through his duffel. “Mantis, you still have a bag on you?”

“I do,” Vivian said.

It was small, but she needed something to holder her assorted powders and pistol. She hadn’t felt comfortable holstering the gun on one of her legs. When Ayaka had suggested that, Vivian had gained a very vivid mental image of reaching for her weapon and accidentally shooting her toes off.

“Then you can add this to it,” Barbarian said, handing her a fist-sized bag packed full of steel ball bearings and… a metal rod the size of her forearm with circular grooves carved around one end of it.

There was something tied to the grooves, she realized. Were those nails?

What the fuck is this, she wanted to ask. Vivian looked for a more eloquent way to phrase it.

“What the fuck is this,” she said.

Okay, that worked.

“You can use it as a weapon,” Barbarian suggested. “You can accelerate the nails really fast, and then you’ll be able to hit things real hard with it.”

I can already do that, she almost said. Her power was better suited to taking someone down at close range than it was at powering a McGyvered together weapon.

Why was that her first thought, and not the fact that Barbarian had suggested that she create a lethal weapon? What was wrong with her?

“I’ll consider it,” she said carefully.

“Don’t use it if it doesn’t work for you,” Shockwave said. “Barbarian’s early-phase stuff almost never works.”

“Hey!” the hero in question protested.

“Are we ready to go?” Jackal asked.

“We are,” Amazon said. “Lead the way.”

#

Vivian had been to Chicago before, but only by technicality. She was usually asleep on the bus to and from O’Hare, which was the airport she flew into when she was coming from home to school. As such, she’d never seen the rest of the city.

She’d heard a lot about it, though, and given the circumstances of Killjoy’s temporary supers and the extant kill order, she had kind of expected this part of town to look shittier.

It just looked like a city. The apartment complex that Jackal had lead them to could have come straight out of her campus housing. She bet it was a lot cheaper, too. Sure, the other cards parked in the lot weren’t as nice, and the sidewalks definitely looked dirtier, but she had expected to be actively skeeved out.

This was just a neighborhood, albeit one with very few pedestrians. She did spot someone a couple streets down that looked like they were recording the heroes.

“He may be in this apartment,” Jackal said, tapping away at his phone keyboard. “One moment, y’all. I’m going to inform my superiors about what’s happening.”

Shouldn’t we tell him about the information leak? Vivian wondered. That had been an ongoing issue, and though they had found one traitor in the Guardians, there was no guarantee that they had found all of them.

But nobody else was speaking up, and they had mentioned that it was possible that Jackal (or one of the Indianapolis Guardians, at least) was a bad guy. Maybe they were testing him? Vivian couldn’t be sure, but if none of the other heroes were going to say anything about it, she wasn’t, either.

Come to think of it, how had Killjoy gained influence so fast? He’d left Lafayette only about a month ago, hadn’t he?

She could ask that question when they weren’t about to break and enter into an apartment complex.

Amazon had started slashing her wrists again. Vivian looked away.

“And done,” Jackal said, putting his phone away. “The trail is strong, here.”

He reached into one of the many pockets in his vest, withdrawing a… was that a stress ball?

Clearly, it wasn’t just a stress ball, because he squeezed it, brought it up to his eyes to examine, grunted, and put it away.

“Definitely close,” the hero said.

Huh. That was neat. Vivian wasn’t sure if she’d seen it right, but she guessed that he was testing his strength to see how much of a boost his power was giving him—therefore telling him how close he was to his target.

That was equal parts clever and sad. Clever, because Vivian would’ve taken a while to think of it. Sad, because why wouldn’t your power just tell you that?

Or maybe he just wanted to flex his wrist muscles. That was possible too.

Vivian’s phone vibrated, ringing silently. Her helmet displayed the caller ID.

Lachlan.

Everyone else must have been contacted simultaneously, because Vivian saw Amazon, Shockwave, and Lycoris raise a hand to their ears. Barbarian fished a comically bricky phone out of a pocket, and Jackal’s had a ringtone. Hey There Delilah, apparently.

Vivian accepted at around the same time everyone else did.

“This is Lachlan, SRU and Guardian intelligence liaison,” the A-rank Esper said over the phone. “You’re the executioner squad, right?”

Intelligence liaison. He was counting on Vivian to not blow his cover as a super, then? What was the play here?

“This is Echelon plus Jackal from the Indianapolis Guardians and Mantis Shrimp,” Shockwave replied immediately. “How did you get this number?”

“Great. Like I said, I work with intelligence. I have an Esper on your case to eliminate our possibility for error.” Vivian struggled not to laugh at that. Was he talking about himself? “Normally, this message would go through a few layers of obfuscation, but time is of the essence.”

“Out with it,” Jackal said. “You’re not wrong. People are starting to watch.”

“Jekyll is on the third floor, apartment 312,” Lachlan said. “He’s not alone. There may be normals, but all our intelligence can tell you is that Raven is there, too. Lachlan out.”

A moment later, a text scrolled across the bottom of Vivian’s helmet. Then another.

Lachlan: director williams gave me the greenlight to direct call

Lachlan: commands not happy and my power is out of juice so thats it for me for now

Lachlan: good hunting vivian

Lachlan: *mantis

Lachlan: we’ll catch up after

Despite herself, Vivian cracked a grin. It was nice to have people you could count on. It was nice to have people her age that actually cared about her.

Vivian: get some rest

Vivian: keep on texting me like this and I’ll get the wrong idea

Lachlan: tf u mean

“You heard the man,” Amazon said. “302. Jackal, does that line up with your power?”

“I figure so,” the hero replied. “Let’s get moving.”

They walked inside. It was eleven in the morning, so the apartment complex was fully open. They didn’t even need a keycard to get in, though there was a security guard armed with a wicked-looking baton after a second set of automatic doors.

“Guardians and Echelon Hero Corporation,” Amazon said, raising a badge. Her costume was tight enough on her skin that Vivian had to wonder where she stored that thing. “Please step aside.”

The security guard licked his lips nervously, then stepped back, staring at the assortment of heroes.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Jackal said, and they continued past the guard.

“We take the stairs,” Amazon said, kicking open the door to a dark, narrow stairwell.

“The last time we took the elevator, the bad guys cut the power and jumped down the stairs,” Lycoris whispered to Vivian. “It was super embarrassing.”

“Dark as hell,” Barbarian said as they filed into the stairs two by two—Amazon and Jackal, Barbarian and Shockwave, and then Vivian and Lycoris. “Lights?”

It smelled faintly of piss, even through the helmet. Vivian wrinkled her nose.

Shockwave raised a hand, and a ball of lightning sparked to life in his hands, providing just enough illumination to see by. The actual lights seemed to have died some time ago.

Vivian had to climb the stairs gingerly, careful not to tear her stitches out. She felt like she was moving slower than she could before she’d started her training routine. Damn, this gunshot wound was annoying.

“Raven is a C-rank Ruler,” Amazon said, not even breathing hard as she took the steps three at a time. Unfair. “She can move shadows, and she can see perfectly fine in the dark. If you breathe in too much of her power, you’ll slow down and eventually suffocate. She incapacitated two heroes and killed four normals yesterday.”

“She also doesn’t have a kill order,” Shockwave added. “Capture is highly preferred.”

“Traitors deserve what’s coming for them,” Jackal snarled. “Brutus got his due. Raven will get hers.”

Vivian raised an eye at that. Of all the heroes in this cramped, odorous staircase, she hadn’t expected the middle-aged Southern one to bring up Roman history.

Not the time, she thought.

They reached the second floor in no time at all.

Then the third. Amazon opened the door to the floor as quietly as she could, but it creaked loud enough to make everyone wince.

This apartment complex wasn’t very large, so there were only two apartments on this floor. 300 and 302.

Both looked occupied.

Are we really doing this? Vivian asked herself, heart pounding loud enough she could hear it.

Yes, they were, she told herself.

She needed to get over herself. Now was not the time to panic. They were carrying out orders. That was all.

“Are we going in loud or soft?” Shockwave asked, passing the ball of lightning from one hand to another.

“Quiet,” Amazon said. She tilted her head towards the door. “They’re busy.”

That was true. Even when Vivian got her heart under control, she could still hear a WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP that she quickly determined was from an overly bassy speaker inside 302.

“They’re not great neighbors, are they,” she murmured. “I can unlock it.”

“Ooh, let me get this on camera,” Lycoris said, stepping back.

Vivian pointed at the lock, then fiddled around with her telekinesis. It was a less precise art than she made it seem. Her lockpicking experience mostly involved looking up a bunch of YouTube videos and then guesstimating where the pins in the locks were supposed to be.

If that didn’t work, she would blindly grope around the inside, hoping to manually unlock the door from the inside instead of picking it.

Thankfully, this lock was cheap and simple, and it clicked open quickly enough.

Jackal led the way, walking in with a—when did he get a pistol? He must have drawn it from a belt or something. How had Vivian not noticed that he had one?

Amazon followed, her blood still drying on her arms. Then went Barbarian, then Shockwave.

Lycoris held up a knife. “Got one anchor for this, and another back in the van. Let’s do this!”

She stepped in, and Vivian followed.

The apartment was a mess. It was immediately obvious that whatever went on here wasn’t entirely aboveboard, from the bundles of cash strewn about a corner of the room to the discarded jumpsuit lying on a couch.

Vivian made a face. It looked like her part of the dorm did when a particularly bad depressive episode hit her, if her dorm had a tornado pass through it. The scent of stale beer, cigarette smoke, and body fluids combined with the pounding beat of EDM that was turned up way too loud to create a combination attack on her senses.

She didn’t have much time to bask in the den of hedonism, because the others were creeping forward already.

Six heroes in a single apartment was a comical amount now that they were here. Vivian hoped she wasn’t going to get in anybody’s way. She stuck close to the walls, watching the desk

Despite the messiness, this place didn’t seem very lived-in. There weren’t many clothes strewn about, nor were there any personal artifacts on the furniture. Maybe that was why it was so small when Jekyll clearly had the money for a better place.

Why here, though? Why not somewhere closer to the heart of the Gravekeepers’ power? Was this a safe house of some kind?

The answer came just as Raven did.

Vivian was the furthest back of the six heroes, but she caught a glimpse into the bedroom. Unnatural, oily darkness shrouded the windows, preventing light from coming in from the outside, but the bedroom’s door was ajar, and enough of the dim, hazy light from the rest of the apartment streamed in that Vivian could glimpse a woman that could only be Raven wearing a purple-and-black costume.

For a certain value of “wearing.” Vivian was pretty sure that costumes were supposed to cover those parts of your body.

Through the pounding bass of the music, she could just barely hear soft moans and the slap of flesh against flesh. Raven’s head was tilted upwards, so she didn’t see them arrive. The music masked the heroes’ sound.

Then, when Jackal swung the door wide open, Raven’s head lowered. The ecstatic bliss on her face morphed into surprise.

Vivian didn’t see what the Esper-Marksman did, but she heard it just fine.

Jackal fired his pistol eleven times.

The gun clicked empty.

Raven’s body collapsed.

Vivian’s ears were ringing so badly that she couldn’t hear what happened next, but she saw it just fine.

The darkness popped like a soap bubble, and a very naked, very tall, and very angry Greek god of a man punched Jackal’s face in.