In the Midst of Callousness 2 (Patreon)

In the Midst of Callousness
Chapter 2

-VB-

“You sure they’ll let us off if we just barge in on their meeting?”

“Relax, Crimson~!” Jack drawled at the currently smaller than average man. The man looked nothing out of the ordinary, but then again, that was before he began to drink blood. Once he did that, he was one of the physically strongest member of the Slaughterhouse Nine. “Besides, it’ll be a Truce!” he added sarcastically. “The boys and girls of this quaint little city wants to talk with each other. What harm would there be in -?”

BOOM!

He stopped talking and looked up.

They saw an explosion some distance away.

“Huh. I thought the capes here respected the Truce to not kill each other when we’re around,” Winter hummed from underneath her ever present blue winter coat. “Oi, Jack, can I go over there and kill them?”

“Now, now, we shouldn’t spoil the fun,” he replied and urged her to stay. “Besides, we don’t even know if it was a cape.” Something told him that capes involved in the explosion, but couldn’t tell him more than that. He just called it his instinct.

Wheeeee….

“Huh?”

WWHHHEEE-!

Jack looked up.

Oh shit.

“Dodge!” he shouted and jumped out of the way.

The others, who saw where he was jumping away from and a few who saw what he saw, all jumped away.

Except Crawler.

Crawler grunted as he took whatever was falling to his forehead.

And promptly crashed into the ground.

The fallen object was a person, and they stood up slowly.

Jack’s eyes widened as he recognized who this person was. Dressed more like a civilian than a cape, the Bastard stood on top of Ned.

“... Oh, you fuckers were right here,” the Bastard drawled irritably. “I fought the Nazis for no reason.”

“Well, well, well. It’s an honor to meet you, Bastard!” Jack grinned as he started to peer into the inner working-.

Jack stared in incomprehension.

His own nominee, the Bastard, was a blank. Jack didn’t see how the cape ticked or why. His never-revealed talent told him nothing. Nothingness replaced what should have been feelings, ideas, and distant images.

Worse, that moment of nothingness passed and his power began to tell him nonsensical things.

The soul of the misplaced child returns your stare.

The misplaced child is not happy.

Crimson grinned. “Oi, Jack, ain’t he your candidate?” he asked. “Go and do your impressive talking shit, man. You know, the thing that the last kiddie cape we killed said was ‘perversion of talk-no-jutsu,’ whatever that meant.”

Jack shook out of his reverie and allowed him to grin.

Okay, no, he forced himself to grin, because while others might not recognize it, the situation suddenly didn’t seem as great as it could be.

For one, this was the Bastard, the man with seemingly infinite variety of tinkertech weapons. The Bastard didn’t get his name just for his dismissive and aggressive behavior but more because of what people always said after he left a scene.

“Where did that Bastard pull out that tinkertech from?!”

Jack saw the weird looking warhammer in the Bastard’s hand and -.

“Sit,” the Bastard hissed abruptly, and everyone, including Crawler, crashed into the ground.

Jack groaned as he felt the sudden increase in his weight. ‘S-So this is his infamous gravity attack…!’

Only the likes of the Protectorate - Hero, Legend, Alexandria, and Eidolon - fought freely within the Batard’s “Gravity Well.”

“S-Shit-!”

The Bastard very slowly made his way down from Crawler’s back, who hasn’t said anything since getting struck by the cape. What the hell was going on with hi-?

And then Jack noticed that there was an opening on top of Crawler’s back.

His eyes widened.

‘The Bastard saw us as he came down… and did something to Crawler as he landed?’

It was ridiculous. How did anyone who wasn’t Alexandria think to do something mid-flight while falling?

The Bastard raised his hammer up.

“I’m going to enjoy using a hammer to behead you, Jack!”

There was a scrap.

The two capes turned and saw Winter standing up. Somehow. The very air seemed to freeze around her.

“Fuck… You…!” the sadistic woman hissed before firing.

The bullet bounced off of the Bastard’s personal shield.

“... Damn, I underestimated you,” he muttered as he turned to Winter. “Did you just fucking suck the energy out of a gravity field?”

For a moment, even Jack was dumbfounded by what his ally had allegedly had done.

“How did you even do that? Gravity isn’t raw energy like light so-?”

Winter grunted as she fired again, and once again, her bullet bounced off.

‘Yes, lure him away from me!’

Winter could stop the Bastard. If he approached her, then she could freeze him to death!

“But there must be a limit to both capacity and speed,” the Bastard continued to mutter.

And then he pulled a very science-fiction looking grenade.

“How quickly can you suck the heat out of plasma?” he asked as he pressed a button on the grenade, set it down, and began to walk away.

Jack pushed against the ground with all his might as Winter collapsed, obviously having reached her limit, while other members of the Slaughterhouse Nine tried to crawl away.

The grenade whirled and whirled faster and faster-.

And then it dinged.

Fire erupted out and rushed to meet h-.