Wretched Joy 5 (Patreon)

Wretched Joy
Chapter 5

-VB-

The PRT got angry at me. Why wouldn’t they be? I showed the entire world their dirty laundry instead of letting them taking care of it themselves, but I have been getting antsy about Coil. Sure, I helped them initially by providing that criminal-pointing compass, but like all things involved in bureaucracy, they proved too slow for my continued existence.

They did a decent job, but slow action often left holes for the likes of Coil and his agents to escape unharmed, so I pulled the trigger instead. Faced with the public backlash and the fortunate timing where Thomas Calvert had been inside a meeting while I went after his base, he got caught rather handily.

He knew what would happen if I caught him, so he burned the timeline he was using for his villain identity. The most PRT will do was jail time. I would kill him.

See? Better choices all around. PRT got their corruption locked down and ass-kicked, Coil got to live, and I got to live without Coil hanging over my shoulder!

Of course, I was now someone known to ignore the Unwritten Rules, and it no longer applied to me as well.

I was fine with that. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t died before.

I hummed happily to myself as I dropped another day’s worth of charges into my first steel ring, which I now christened “Ring of Teleportation.” With its eighteen charges, I could now teleport at the blink of an eye to any location within a mile as long as I either had line of sight or a clear image of the destination.

I wagered that if I was on par with Oni Lee in terms of Mover rating.

Rolling my shoulders, I looked out of the top floor window of this particular abandoned four story commercial building in the northern Docks. This place was my “in-city” hideout that I set up.

Being so close to the equally abandoned Trainyards and without sources of revenue, most of the businesses in the area had either closed or left. From what I knew, most of the buildings were also abandoned by their former owners, making them city property but said city had no intention of pouring money into a bottomless hole.

But if a private investor wanted to buy it, then I’m sure the city would sell it for cheap.

The problem was two fold.

One, I was legally dead. Showing up with a dead man’s documentation was probably not a good idea.

Two, I didn’t have money, at least not in the quantity I needed to purchase a five story building, abandoned or not. Squatter rights here in New Hampshire also required that I stay here for twenty years with visible occupation, which wasn’t going to work for a “villain” like me.

“Time for me to start planning to steal from the Nazis again,” I hummed happily at the thought of smashing Nazi skulls in the near future.

However, it would have to wait. I knew that my gear was decent but not great. I would need to be much more powerful to take on the entire Empire by myself.

I briefly glanced at my phone and noted that it was April 20, 2010, a little less than one year away from the start of canon… that I already ruined.

Whatever.

I’ll just wait a few more days for a few more charges each day and pump it all into offense and defense now instead of utility.

-VB-

“Joe” had become a topic of contention for his lieutenants and low-level thugs.

So far, he’s done three things: kill Cricket, beat up Dauntless, and reveal the snake Coil. It led to his own Empire undergoing a purge to find the snake’s moles, and he managed to find a few, some who were willing and some who were completely unaware of their actions.

Kaiser executed both types regardless of their excuse. Traitors and incompetents died when they exposed the Empire’s weakness to its enemies.

That’s what Clarissa told herself when she saw one of her friends from Immaculata, Jenny, die to Victor’s bullet.

The only good thing to have come out of this fiasco was that Joe seemed to understand that he painted a huge target on his back for both the Empire and the PRT, and he laid low. The grunts grumbled, but there was nothing to be done, and Clarissa did not particularly have any desire to go up against a Brute who killed Cricket.

It was May now, and things were starting to settle down again.

Hell, Kaiser even let her start ferrying their grunts to drop off points. She loved doing that because she got to soar over the skyline of the city and be free from it all.

She raised her purpose made steel platform from the backyard of a safehouse wh-.

She choked out a cut-off scream as something struck her back. She felt something crack and snap, and tumbled down from her platform. The platform crashed back into the ground along with her, and she screamed in pain.

Grunts inside the house quickly came out with pistols, shotguns, shivs, and bats -.

She heard more cracks but from her but from where the grunts were at.

She heard them scream before they all cut off after several more smashes.

Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Creak.

She looked up with watery eyes and stared up in horror at who was crouching right in front of her and between herself and her platform.

“Good evening, Rune.”

“J-J-Joe…” she muttered in horror as her body shook. Her eyes drifted over to the backyard door of the safehouse and saw bodies of her grunts with their heads smashed in. “N-No, please, n-no-!”

“You’re a Nazi,” he chided her like a teacher would a small child. “You don’t give mercy to others, so why should I? For the record you’ll be taking to hell with you, I do not accuse or blame you for your thoughts, only your actions. And my, my, my. How heavy your actions have been…”

He stood back up and tapped her temple with the tip of his bat and then raised it up and around.

She tried to crawl away as she sobbed.

WHOOS-!

She didn’t want to di-!

CRACK.