“Hey, you! Stop right there. Number… where the hell’s your damn number?” Conrad Blake slapped his metal bat into his open hand as he marched toward Billy. If anyone had picked the wrong job, it was Blake, the brute. Everything about him screamed that he belonged in a blood-splattered MMA cage, smashing skulls or burning off his excess testosterone in some dirty, no-rules street fight. As long as he could make his victims suffer, he was fine. And he took that out on the production workers every day, poor guys like Billy.

  Blake wasn’t just a supervisor. He was the kind of man comics loved to simplify into thugs: big, loud, cruel, and proud of it. If Billy had ever drawn him on a page, he would’ve exaggerated the shoulders, shadowed the eyes, maybe added a scar to make the point clearer. But real life didn’t bother with visual shorthand. Real villains wore company badges and carried stun guns approved by HR.

  Billy turned his back on the supervisor and started to run.

  Big mistake.

  Suddenly, he felt two small metal darts pierce his back. They were attached to long wires, over sixteen feet long, connected to the stun gun Blake casually held in one hand as he pulled the trigger.

  Electric shocks ripped through Billy’s muscles, sending him crashing stiffly to the ground like a toppled bowling pin.

  For a split second, Billy thought of Spider-Man again. Of all the times Peter Parker got slammed into brick walls, electrocuted by villains with names like Electro or Shocker, only to get back up because someone needed saving. The difference was simple and brutal: Spider-Man always knew why he was getting back up.

  Billy didn’t.

  Blake kept his finger on the trigger. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if smoke had started rising from Billy’s body.

  “What the hell did you and those other sewer rats do?” Blake growled through his beard cover, finally releasing the trigger.

  “Was just breaking up the fight, Mr. Blake,” Billy said, lying on his stomach, his head turned to the side as drool dripped onto the floor.

  “Spare me the crap. Who do you think you are? Acting like Batman in Gotham. You’re nobody. We’ve already ID’d you, you little rat. You think you could fool us?”

  “You—what?”

  Blake squeezed the trigger again, sending another thousand volts surging through Billy’s body. He screamed in agony. He hadn’t known you could actually hear electricity shooting through your own body. But you could.

  This was how it always went in the real world. No dramatic reveal, and no secret identity speech. Batman broke bones, but he never begged. Billy begged internally, promising the universe he’d never try to do the right thing again if it would just stop hurting.

  “I was just making sure everyone got back to work,” Billy groaned. “Don’t need a damn medal, but stop torturing me already.”

  To his surprise, Blake planted a boot on his back, yanked out the metal darts and let Billy roll over.

  “How do you even know who I am?”

  “Facial recognition cameras. Got them from the Chinese.”

  Billy, still lying on the ground, massaged his temples in slow circles with his thumb and forefinger.

  Cameras. Always cameras. If this were a comic, this would’ve been the panel zooming out, revealing the true enemy: not Blake, but the unseen system watching from above. No mask could hide you from that. No cape could outrun an algorithm.

  “Listen, I can explain, I… I wasn’t sure if I’d oiled the conveyor belt after my shift. That’s why I came back to check.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “And?”

  “I didn’t forget.”

  Blake looked down at him, leaning casually on his iron baseball bat.

  “Can I go now? I… I swear I’ll never break up another fight. I’m never playing superhero in this fucking factory again.”

  The supervisor pursed his lips and nodded. “Alright. Get lost.”

  Billy hesitated. “Seriously?”

  Then he saw it—the cruel smirk forming on Blake’s lips.

  Of course. What now?

  It felt like a bad omen, even though Billy didn’t believe in that kind of thing. That was more Vivian’s superstitious nonsense.

  “Get lost, and don’t bother coming back,” Blake said. “You’re fired.”

  “What?”

  The last word echoed in Billy’s head like it was in slow motion: F-I-R-E-D.

  In comics, getting fired was often the catalyst. The push. The injustice that made the hero snap, don the mask, and draw a line. Billy felt no such clarity, just a hollow ringing, like someone had slammed a door inside his skull.

  Conrad Blake grinned, baring his teeth like he was waiting for someone to snap a picture of his moment of pure joy.

  “But you… you can’t just fire me like that,” Billy stammered, half defensive, half desperate. Completely desperate, really.

  Blake waved an official letter from Thandros Corporation in his face, then practically laid it on his chest like a delicate gift. “Merry Christmas to you and your wife,” he said.

  In front of the entrance, a huge, decorated Christmas tree gleamed, though the season felt anything but Christmas-like. It was dark, and at a balmy 59 degrees, the weather was too mild, even for climate change, which had hit the world completely unexpectedly. There had been no time to react. Not at all. At least, that’s how the drunk, drugged, or simply brain-dead and greedy politicians acted.

  Billy stared at the tree longer than necessary. In another life, in another genre, this would’ve been symbolism so obvious it bordered on parody. A glowing beacon of hope standing in front of a factory that chewed people up and spat them out. If this were a comic panel, the caption would’ve read something like The world pretended everything was fine. Snowless winters, collapsing systems, smiling leaders on screens promising stability while quietly selling it off piece by piece.

  Superheroes always showed up when politicians failed. That was the fantasy, at least. When institutions crumbled, men and women in masks stepped in. But no one was stepping in now. No capes on the horizon. Just a Christmas tree plugged into a generator.

  Billy glanced at his watch and came to the conclusion that Vivian was going to kill him.

  Or had she already?

  Had she been slowly, silently killing him throughout all these years of marriage?

  He’d once read a Batman issue where Bruce Wayne described his civilian life as a necessary disguise. The mask wasn’t the cowl, it was the suit, the polite smiles, the social obligations. Billy had laughed at that back then. Now it felt uncomfortably familiar. Marriage as a costume. Routine as a cage. No dramatic trauma, no gunshots in an alley, just erosion. A thousand tiny compromises wearing you down until there was nothing heroic left to defend.

  Yeah. His years with Vivian had been disturbingly similar to the grueling hours in the factory. In both cases, it felt like a slow, painful suicide. Maybe he should have seen his firing as a sign, a chance to turn things around. A signal from fate to leave his wife as well and cut out the two main ingredients of his misery. But seeing the good in bad situations wasn’t Billy’s strength. Instead, he shook his head at how his life had turned out, then climbed into the baby-blue electric car—Vivian’s choice, though Billy had paid for it with his savings.

  He slid into the passenger seat, slammed the door shut, and opened the glove compartment. A stack of superhero comics spilled out. There were even a few old Top Cow comics from the nineties, no longer exactly in pristine condition. Especially not the Tomb Raider issue #33B, which practically fell into his lap, several of its pages oddly stuck together.

  Coincidentally, always the splash panels featuring Lara Croft in a bikini.

  Yeah. Sex with Vivian hadn’t happened in a long time.

  Billy Jones let the Tomb Raider comic with the 3D cover drop onto the floorboard and picked up another instead. Kick-Ass. The superhero without superpowers.

  He had already read it back in high school. Like Dave Lizewski, Billy Jones was a massive comic fan, and back then, instead of studying for his finals, he had asked himself the same question. Why didn’t anyone dare to become a superhero? Someone like Batman. No magic powers, just combat skills, fighting the injustice of the world.

  Much like Dave Lizewski, he had once gone out one evening to hunt criminals himself. Armed with pepper spray, a folding knife, and a stab proof vest. He had been seventeen at the time. Thankfully, he had survived the night with nothing more than a bloody nose, a black eye, and an empty wallet.

  Today, Billy Jones knew better. Superheroes belonged to fantasy. The world was a shithole you needed to escape from as fast as possible, either by rocket or by death.

  Or… by running from reality and surrendering to the beautiful world of fantasy.

  He let Kick-Ass slip from his fingers and picked up the Tomb Raider comic again instead. He held it in one hand. Looked at Lara Croft. Cast a cautious glance outside, the windows already fogged up from the inside anyway.

  Then he quickly unzipped his fly.

  Doom Knight Dungeon.