207 Coomer Street
207 Coomer Street
I took the long way back.
I parked the bike several blocks away from the safehouse, far enough that even overlapping CCTV cones wouldn’t stitch together a usable trail. The helmet and tracksuit went first, discarded into separate trash receptacles after a quick phase to shred anything identifiable. I lifted a change of clothes from an NPC’s apartment, careful to stay outside their line of sight, then slipped into the rhythm of the street and let myself be seen.
I walked like an NPC walked. Same pace, same pauses, and same vacant patience at intersections.
By the time I traced my way back to the safehouse, I blended in well enough that even I almost believed it.
Inside, everything was exactly as we’d left it.
I checked my bugs first, fingers light and methodical, peeling back ceramic edges and vents. None of them had been moved. My earpiece hadn’t picked up so much as a whisper while I was gone, and after a full sweep of the rooms, I couldn’t find any sign of intrusion. No displaced dust, no altered airflow, no new smells.
I exhaled slowly.
Either we’d been lucky, or Perry was better than paranoid. I’m fairly certain there was more to this safehouse and Perry, but I couldn’t really tell anymore.
The air rippled behind me.
Perry appeared mid-step, dressed in civilian clothes that didn’t draw the eye, a heavy bag slung over his shoulder. He dropped it to the floor with a muted thud and looked at me.
“How’d your end go?” he asked.
I didn’t bother dressing it up. “I failed to recover the cancer cure. Candyland capes were already on site.”
He frowned, more calculation than disappointment. “Unfortunate.”
“You didn’t mention the NPCs wouldn’t perceive us while on the pills,” I said instead, keeping my voice level. “I couldn’t even interact with Dr. Emmerson. Candyland probably relied on there telepath. That’s how they found the cure and got a leg up on me.”
As far as Perry knew, I was just an intangibility-class cape. No mind-reading, no possession, and no tricks beyond slipping through walls.
His eyes flicked to me for a fraction of a second longer than usual, then he nodded.
“That explains it,” he said.
He vanished and reappeared, hauling in another bag of cash, then another. I watched him work, my thoughts spiraling despite myself.
A spy in the group wasn’t impossible. Vibe came to mind immediately, not as a willing traitor, but something stranger. When I’d possessed her, the memories had been consistent, aligned, as if a secondary personality could surface and submerge without friction. A sleeper without knowing she was asleep.
A hybrid power too, Acoustokinesis layered with Empathy, though she only ever showed one side. Hybrid abilities were rare, volatile, and frighteningly adaptable. Hopefully, her group would be able to solve her issue, without killing her. It would be a shame to lose such a cape.
Perry stopped moving.
The bag he’d dragged in this time was different, heavier in the wrong way. My eyes narrowed as I stepped closer.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He unzipped it halfway.
Inside was a very dead body.
I stared at it, then looked back up at him. “I thought players dissolved into pixels.”
“Not during robberies or car chases,” Perry said. “Game logic treats those differently, apparently.”
He zipped it back up. “Since NPCs can’t perceive us on the pills, we had to trick a player into partying with us to activate the robbery quest.”
“That actually worked?” I asked.
He snorted softly. “Players here have reduced intelligence. Makes them easier to guide, and easier to break. Gameboy’s influence doesn’t help. Low-level ones will follow anyone who sounds confident.”
He met my eyes. “Help me deal with the body.”
He vanished again.
I crouched, pulled the zipper closed, and phased the corpse straight down, pushing it as deep into the ground as I could manage without causing a surface collapse. The resistance faded, and then it was gone, buried beyond casual retrieval.
Perry reappeared a moment later, holding a case of chemicals.
He paused when he saw the empty floor.
“…Where is it?” he asked.
“Already handled,” I replied. “Phased it deep. No trace.”
He stared at the spot for a second, then slowly closed the case.
“Efficient,” he said. “I like that.”
Perry gave a short nod.
“Good work,” he said.
“Where are the other two?” I asked.
“Trying to lose players and NPCs,” he replied without hesitation.
I leaned back against the counter. “The Candyland capes I saw were all women. Their leader was a blonde. She could flatten herself into two dimensions and snap back like nothing happened.”
Perry’s expression tightened just a little. “That’d be Two-D. One of Candyland’s executives.”
I watched his reaction closely. “How are Qilin and Snap supposed to shake half a city?”
“There’s a plan,” Perry said.
He vanished and reappeared an instant later with a battered radio in his hand. He turned the dial, static crackling before an NPC announcer’s voice bled through.
“—unprecedented violence today as a monstrous player rampaged through multiple districts of Urbanite, leaving both NPCs and players destroyed in their wake—”
Perry turned the volume down.
“Qilin’s strong enough to bulldoze through mundane threats,” he said. “Snap knows the city well enough to guide him. Between the two of them, they’ll draw attention, break pursuit, and slip out.”
I exhaled slowly. “You’re heading back out there.”
“Yes.”
“Want help?”
He looked at me then, really looked, his eyes sharp but guarded.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Perry said. “You don’t know the plan, and it has too many moving parts. Not something you pick up on the first go.”
There it was. Not condescension, not quite mistrust either, but distance. He was keeping me just far enough away to be safe, for him at least. The faint edge of disgust he wore didn’t feel genuine. It felt practiced, a mask layered over caution.
Perry was good at this. Better than most.
“Watch the cash,” he added.
Then he was gone.
The room felt quieter without him, even with the radio murmuring chaos in the background. I picked it up, listening as the broadcast spiraled into panic and sensationalism, then set it aside and wandered over to the arcade machine.
Pixels flickered to life as I fed it a credit.
Spaceships. Enemies. Simple rules.
I wrapped one hand around the joystick and played.
The arcade machine chimed as another wave of enemies disintegrated on the screen, its tinny victory sound clashing with the radio’s escalating hysteria. I kept one ear tuned to the broadcast, fingers moving on muscle memory alone.
The broadcaster’s voice cut in briefly through the static, warning of Kingdom sightings. I stilled for half a second, and then resumed playing. Of course they would show up now. Candyland, Urbanite, Foresthome, and now the Kingdom, all converging like vultures drawn to the same corpse. Lockworld never did anything by coincidence.
The broadcaster’s tone sharpened, excitement bleeding through fear as he described Qilin. A hulking brute, scales crawling over his skin, lightning writhing around him like a living thing. The emotional resonance was too raw, too unfiltered. Player, not NPC, I realized. He was terrified and thrilled in equal measure.
Then the mood shifted.
“—homewreckers on the field! The Kingdom’s here! Folks, you heard that right, they’re rolling in on a literal tank—”
My hand paused mid-input.
A tank
The announcer was almost laughing now, drunk on spectacle. He rattled off names with reverence and dread alike. Maestro. Knightess. Golem. The Fool.
They were executives from the Kingdom.
I straightened slowly, eyes drifting from the arcade screen to the wall. I’d already crossed paths with an executive today. Two-D alone had been dangerous enough, considering her powers. Four from the Kingdom was not escalation. It was overkill.
We had Qilin. We had Perry. Both were executive-level in their own right. Snap, though? Snap was good, versatile, and clever, but this was a different tier entirely. And the Kingdom excelled at synergy, their powers stacking, compounding, and transforming skirmishes into disasters.
What the hell were they even here for?
The radio crackled again as the broadcaster’s voice rose into something close to delirium. Golem slamming into Qilin, the street folding under the impact. A three-way battle erupting, Candyland remnants scattering, Urbanite players dying in droves. Coomer Street reduced to utter chaos.
I stepped away from the arcade machine.
By the time the machine registered my absence, I was already moving.
I changed clothes in a blur, muscle memory taking over, hands steady despite the churn in my gut. I slipped out through blind spots, retrieved the bike where I’d left it, pulled the helm down over my face, and kicked the engine alive.
Coomer Street.
I ignored traffic laws entirely, cutting corners, threading impossible gaps, trusting reflexes honed by worse places than this parody city. I remembered the route clearly. I’d passed that street earlier on my way to the hospital. The name had stuck, ridiculous enough to be memorable.
Engines blared. Horns screamed. I didn’t slow.
As I drew closer, I felt them.
Qilin’s presence was a storm, dense and furious, emotions flaring hot and wild. Frustration. Anger. A grinding determination that refused to yield. Snap was there too, lower, sharper, pressed into cover, his awareness spread thin across sound and space.
The bike tore down the last stretch of road. I swerved, hit the edge of the skyway, and launched.
For a brief moment, the world fell away.
Below me, Coomer Street unfolded in ruin. Cracked asphalt. Shattered storefronts. A tank lodged sideways through a collapsed intersection. At the center of it all, Qilin and Golem were locked together in a contest of raw force.
Golem was a mountain given limbs, stone plates grinding against one another as he leaned forward, muscles of rock bulging. Qilin met him head-on, scales fully surfaced now, lightning snapping from his arms into the air, feet dug deep into pulverized concrete.
I angled the bike midair, sighting down the mass of stone that barely passed for a human shape.
“Sorry,” I muttered, more habit than remorse. “But please die.”
Then I kicked the bike downward, aiming straight for Golem.
I barely had time to register the newcomers before the battlefield shifted again.
Three figures stood apart from the chaos. Kingdom executives. The real kind.
One of them was a woman clad head to toe in dark armor, her helm absent, as if she didn’t feel the need to hide her face. Her skin was pitch black, the same matte tone as her armor, and her blonde hair flowed behind her in slow, wavering motions, like flames caught in a windless room. Even standing still, she radiated pressure. Knightess.
To her left stood a man with a carefully groomed mustache and theatrical attire, coat tails swaying as he rested a baton against his palm. He looked more like a performer than a killer, but the confidence in his posture was unmistakable. Maestro.
The last one leaned casually on a cane, tuxedo immaculate despite the destruction around him. A fedora shadowed his eyes, and the smile he wore was all mockery and anticipation. The Fool.
Maestro laughed, the sound carrying far too well over the din of battle.
“No wreckers, please,” he said lightly, as if this were a stage and not a warzone.
He flicked his baton toward me.
The air screamed.
Notes burst into existence mid-swing, not sound but shape, dense and luminous, vibrating with invisible force. They tore through the space between us like shrapnel, each one carrying layered vectors of motion. I recognized the technique and power immediately. Telekinesis, refined to such an extreme degree that it mimicked other power expressions without actually branching into them.
Pure primary. No dilution.
I phased forward instinctively, trying to let the attack pass through me, but the moment the notes intersected my form, everything went wrong. They didn’t collide so much as resonate. The vibration rippled through me on a molecular level, disrupting cohesion, interfering with my control. The air itself buckled, pressure waves slamming into me from multiple angles.
I lost trajectory.
The ground came up fast. I hit hard, rolled, my powers stuttering as I tore a shallow trench through shattered pavement. Pain flared, sharp and grounding, and before I could fully recover, something else moved.
Knightess was suddenly there.
She crossed the distance in a blink, armor flaring with heat as if she were a compressed mass of charcoal given form. I remembered the rumors from Foresthome’s archives, the scattered accounts whispered with equal parts awe and dread. A mutate whose density bordered on the absurd, strength born from compression rather than size.
She swung.
Her sword burned white-hot, a blazing arc cutting straight through my position. I let it pass through me, trusting intangibility to do its work, but even then the heat lingered, crawling across my senses like an afterimage.
I needed space and time. I had neither.
I stepped into her, tapping her shoulder as I re-solidified just long enough to act to intangibly phase her downward. I drove force downward, attempting to bury her into the ground before she could fully react.
The earth exploded.
She vanished beneath the surface, stone and asphalt folding over her like water.
For half a second, I thought I’d bought myself breathing room.
Then someone laughed beside my ear.
“Headshot.”
I ducked on instinct as the Fool’s cane swept through the space where my skull had been a heartbeat earlier. The strike whistled past, precise and practiced. He was fast, faster than he looked, and worse, unpredictable.
I twisted away, trying to reassess, trying to track all three at once, when something grabbed my ankle.
A dark hand burst from the ground, fingers locking tight around my foot.
Knightess.
She hauled herself up from below, armor scraping against stone as she anchored me in place. I tried to phase. Nothing happened. My power slid off reality like oil on glass, refusing to engage.
That was new. That was bad.
The Fool didn’t waste the opening.
He stepped in, cane rising in a smooth overhead arc, and brought it down on my head. Stars exploded across my vision as pain bloomed, warm and wet, the taste of iron flooding my mouth.
“Told you so,” he said calmly.
I staggered, the world tilting, my thoughts scattering as the realization settled in with brutal clarity.
These weren’t Urbanite players.
These were predators and real capes who knew how to fight.