2103:11:02:00:51:36

  “How about you don’t,” a deep voice interrupted my mentor’s words.

  Crowsong and I turned around to face our stalker, my mentor withdrawing her sword while I prepared to shift into one form or another.

  Our surprise guest was a tall, thin man with the lower half of his face obscured by a black-and-red, flame-patterned bandana. The bare upper half of his face revealed burning red-and-yellow eyes shining an unholy light and wild, salt-and-pepper hair drawn backwards as if he’d just left a wind tunnel.

  For the rest, he wore loose leather pants and a leather jacket, both black except for the gleaming silver of his metal zippers, buttons and belt clasp, and the moving, many-colored flames at the end of both his pant and arm sleeves. In one hand, he held a what looked to be… a glass bottle?

  It was Blazin, the leader of Motorgang, itself the oldest gang in Charm and the city’s second oldest masked organization in general. They were not quite older than the Treaty itself, but predated the masquerade’s global dominance and the Guardians becoming the Unified State’s principle masked enforcers. Only the New Seattle Sentinels – a vigilante team – was older, having been here since Charm’s founding.

  He was well out of our league.

  “Here I thought I’d give my junior a little test, you know? Get him into the right mindset of what it means to be Motorgang.” He lifted the glass bottle to under his bandana and lifted his head up, the villain casually taking huge swigs from the bottle in front of two vigilantes.

  Neither Crowsong or I moved.

  The villain paced lightly back and forth on the roof off the train. “But what do I find instead? Another good lesson for the boy. Maybe one about overconfidence? One about gloating? About using his brain and staying high up for once? Pah, I’ll figure something out.” He waved away the idle thoughts with his free hand, then froze in his steps and turned to us once again. “But that can only happen if he’s allowed to learn it.” Even from behind his mask, I felt the intensity of his gaze. “You wouldn’t want a young child not to learn anything, would you? Berefting a teacher of his student – why, that’s very un-hero-like if you ask me.”

  Crowsong remained silent, no doubt struggling between her desire to lash out at the gang that killed her mentor, and the knowledge that it would do little but risk our lives.

  I took the word. “I thought adults were not supposed to intervene?”

  “True, true. Which is why I haven’t struck,” he replied. “But I can’t just let you leave with him now can I? The little dragon has so much potential, such a bright and burning future ahead of him. All he needs is proper guidance, and I’m nothing if not a provider.” He tilted his head. “Will you attempt to stop me?

  Crowsong snapped out of her stupor. “We prevented your junior from killing two minors, a hero and a villain. Do you really think we’ll just let you take him? Did you even know what he was doing?”

  Blazin tilted his head to Drake in consideration. “I could care less about the Jannacht – rats scurrying in my city get what they deserve,” he said casually. “But an Acolyte? Hmm… But I cannot simply give up on a member of Motorgang…”

  He trailed off in thought for a second, before snapping his fingers and looking up at us again. “How about a consolation prize. We all hate the Syndicate moving in – disrupts this lovely balance thing Charm’s got going on. So, how about a deal? A little truce and a little trust between us, hm? You don’t attack us, and we’ll allow you free rein in our part of town. And together, we can burn these weeds from our garden return to normalcy. Burn the scum and clean the streets. Burn them back into the dust from which they came.” He said, voice dangerously gleeful at the thought. “Deal?”

  I looked at my mentor. She was still unresponsive and I had no idea what was going through her mind. Did she want to accept? She already tolerated working with Nth-Sight despite her personal dislike of him, but working with a villain was another thing altogether. Especially the one responsible for her mentor’s death.

  On the other hand, wasn’t this the ‘big picture heroics’ she’d taught me about? The one the news and everyone else mentioned whenever they talked about truces and the Treaty? The Jannacht were worse for the city, that was something everyone agreed on. Was that enough of a reason for this truce?

  But even so – if she even was really considering to agree to the deal – I couldn’t bring it in me to accept. There were things about being a vigilante that didn’t sit well with me, but which I could square away as a necessity. This was not one of them. There were provisions in the Treaty for a truce against an existential threat or Treaty-breaking foe, but no matter how bad Jannacht might be for the city, the Syndicate was neither.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Accepting Blazin’s offer was a bridge too far. One I wouldn’t allow my mentor to cross.

  My Heroic Impulse, so often silent nowadays, agreed with me.

  “No,” I said, taking the initiative. Both Blazin and Crowsong turned to me.

  “No?” he asked. “You spurn my offer, reject my goodwill?” His voice was soft, but a sharpness that spoke of violence lied underneath.

  “It doesn’t matter which group,” I said. “A villain is a villain no matter what place they call home. You, them, Magistry, Dusk bandits – it doesn’t matter, you’re all poison to the people living here,” I said.

  Silence reigned.

  “And what’re you going to do about it, little Jester?” Blazin said, gesturing towards me with his bottle. “You plan to rid this city of villains? You? Ha!” The previously hidden edge in his voice was now open and visible to all. “Better heroes, more powerful heroes have tried and failed. You’ll just wind up another corpse on the pile.”

  “Not the city,” I responded. “The world.”

  Silence reigned again.

  But then, Blazin began to shake. “The world?” He giggled. “You, little mimic, are planning to rid the world of villains?” Laughter escaped his lips.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He laughed out loud, unrestrained and unashamed. He doubled over in his joy, arms clutching his sides as if in pain, dropping his bottle in the process. It shattered, its liquid contents lighting on fire the moment it did. It smelled like… gasoline?

  “Yes,” he said, voice deepening. I felt a breeze begin to pick up as his laughter continued. “Yes!” Joyful laughter edged towards madness. “That’s the kind of fire I like to see in my heroes!”

  His laughter turned louder and deeper as his form began to shimmer. The wind blew harder and harder, air turned shrieking as it converged around Blazin. The flames on the end of his sleeves leaked into reality, while the flammable liquid of the bottle dripped down the side of the train, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. Thick, black smoke began to rise up from the now rapidly growing fire, obscuring much of the light the flame would otherwise give.

  The escalation took seconds. The laughter blended with the roaring flames as an inferno sprang into being, a wave of fire blasting in a half-crescent away from the villain and threatening to encircle us. A wave of heat – though not fire – followed and flew towards us, with Crowsong and I taking a step back, ready to react.

  The metal of the trains besides our own groaned as the temperature increased exponentially, their metal starting to sizzle and bubble, melting under Blazin’s power. The groans turned to outright destruction as the trains began to collapse, melting slowly into metal puddles where there’d once been tracks.

  And still the fire spread further and further. Apparently, Charm’s shielding didn’t descend for trains as the fire continued to leap from one to another, guided under Blazin’s shifter-alter powers. Soon enough, all we could see was fire and rivers of metal flowing underneath.

  All except behind us. We were sweating under the intense heat, but otherwise unharmed.

  “Leave Drake, take the Acolyte and go,” the roaring flames spoke, Blazin’s voice unrecognizable. “Until next time, crow and clown.” The flames laughed and flared higher and higher, brightening the night.

  We lingered for a second longer until Crowsong took me by the sleeve. We descended from the train, picked up Bizz-Buzz and walked away from the Unified Rail’s depot, the sound of mad laughter and roaring flames haunting our steps.

  X

  As the conflagration still burned behind us – though allegedly no longer guided under Blazin – we finished recounting our story to Looming Thread, the Guardian hero that responded to our call. Medical personal lifted the now-conscious Bizz-Buzz into an ambulance, while workers of both Charm’s law enforcement and those of the Guardians secured the area.

  An overabundance of feelings coursed through me. I was more tired than I’d ever been, almost to the point that I wished I could sleep – almost. I was tired to the point it wrapped back in on itself, making me feel jittery and wanting to pace around to keep the energy flowing.

  Above all else, though, I was elated. We’d saved lives, actual lives today, and I had a hand in it directly. And if Nth-Sight hadn’t lied, our actions here had saved many down the line. It left me buzzing in pleasure, my mind shaking with it.

  “Good work,” Looming Thread told us. She was a tall woman, taller than Blazin, who’d looked tall for a man, and slim like him as well as well. She was wearing a fully white body suit with the Guardian’s golden aegis embroidered in its center, an equally white cape on her back split in eight parts, appearing like spider legs from her back. Her mask, like Bizz-Buzz, covered the top half of her face, and curved in the shape of a moth’s wings. Though her eyes were covered by some form of glass, parts of it were mechanical and moved with smoothly with her facial expressions. That, or her power helped in manipulating them somehow.

  “Too bad they got away, but we can’t win them all. At least no one got hurt so far as we can tell right now,” she sighed, turning to look at the bright light illuminating the sky up above. “What could’ve possessed Blazin to send the trainyard up in flames? He has just as much reason to keep it up and running as anyone – more, even.” She shook her head in a what-can-you-do kind of way. “Whatever. I suppose only villains can truly understand the minds of other villains.”

  She turned back to us. “Anyway, thanks for rescuing my sidekick. Little idiot should’ve called it in before rushing off to investigate.”

  We all turned to Bizz-Buzz, who waved us goodbye before the ambulance doors closed. Only I waved back. Looming Thread snorted, though at who I couldn’t tell. She turned back to us.

  “Now, get out of here before I have to capture you scoundrels,” she said, shaking her fist at us with a smile.

  “Take us in?” I questioned. “Why?”

  The shaking fist and the smile froze. “…Because you’re vigilantes? You break the law going after villains, we shake our fist and do nothing about it as long as you don’t get too wild – you know, the whole routine?”

  I blinked, not understanding what was going on. “What do you mean?” I asked, dread building in my stomach as cold sweat broke out – not that there wasn’t already cold sweat everywhere. “Being a vigilante isn’t illegal.”

  Looming Thread turned to Crowsong, who was rubbing her temples.

  “I told you that before, remember? About Guardians trying to bring me in sometimes?” she asked. “It’s still their policy, even though the enforcement is a bit meh.”

  I recalled what she meant, but, “I thought that was just about you.”

  Crowsong shook her head and groaned in dismay. “No, you- ugh! I can’t believe this!” she said.

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” Looming Thread said, and walked away.

  Crowsong turned to face me fully and grabbed me by the shoulders, staring me right in the eyes. “All violent use of powers, unless in self-defense, is illegal under Unified State law. That’s why we’re called vigilantes by the Guardians and independents instead of just another kind of hero. Vigilante is a legal term, one long predating the masquerade for someone taking the law in their own hands.”

  She released me and groaned again. “What did you think you were doing when we beat up henchies and criminals? Not even law enforcement can just go out and start beating people. Well, legally anyway...” She whispered the last part.

  I opened my mouth to rebuttal, but found I had no argument.

  “Oh God,” I said. “I’m a criminal.”

  Crowsong sighed in exasperation, “No, you’re- ugh, whatever,” before taking me by the hand and leading us out of here.