210 Reality Warper
210 Reality Warper
It was a ridiculous scene.
That was the only word for it, watching the internal rot of Urbanite play out so nakedly in front of me. Whatever hierarchy Gameboy had built, it wasn’t loyalty holding it together. It was fear, humiliation, and a leash disguised as indulgence.
Gameboy turned on Selena without warning.
He struck her across the face with the back of his hand.
“Ungrateful,” he spat. “Do you have any idea how much I’ve given you?”
Another slap followed, sharp and casual, as if he were disciplining property rather than a person.
“What would a bitch like you know about running a community?” he went on, voice rising. “After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me? Turning your back on me? Ruining my game?”
Selena’s cheek flushed red almost immediately. She didn’t flinch the second time. Or the third. The trembling stopped, replaced by a hollow stillness. Her eyes unfocused, glassy, as she absorbed the blows and the words alike.
It was a sorry sight.
And it pissed me off more than I expected.
Something about the casual cruelty, the way he framed himself as the wounded party while breaking someone down in front of him, dug up memories I’d rather have left buried. I felt my jaw tighten before I even realized I was clenching it.
“Gameboy,” I said sharply. “I’m still here.”
He paused mid-motion, straightened, clapped his hands together once, and smiled as if he’d just remembered an amusing detail.
“Ah,” he said brightly. “Right. You.”
The ease with which he dismissed the violence he’d just inflicted made my skin crawl.
I tightened my grip on Rachel’s ankle. “If you care so little for your subordinates,” I said evenly, “I assume you won’t mind if I let this one sink the rest of the way.”
I glanced down at Rachel. “All I have to do is let go.”
Gameboy leaned back, rubbing his chin as he hummed to himself, exaggerated and theatrical.
“Hmmm.”
For a moment, I thought he might object.
Instead, he snapped his fingers.
“Well,” he said lightly, “do as you please. Let her die. I can always make another.”
Selena’s eyes went wide.
She lurched forward, hands shaking, trying to scream, only to produce nothing. No mouth. No voice. She gestured frantically toward me, then toward Rachel, desperation pouring out of every movement.
“Please,” probably begged Selena.
Gameboy winced and stuck a finger in his ear.
“So loud,” he complained, despite the silence.
He snapped his fingers again.
Selena collapsed where she stood, her body folding in on itself as she dropped into unconsciousness, the fight draining out of her instantly.
I stared at her, and then back at him. All it took was a single snap and another life was reduced to a switch. I’d seen powerful capes before. Monsters. Gods-in-their-own-minds. But this casual, petulant omnipotence was something else entirely.
Gameboy snorted.
“I don’t give a damn what you do with your hostage,” he said lazily. “Kill her. Maim her. Desecrate her. Whatever twisted impulse you have, she’s useless to me anyway.”
I frowned, noticing he was lying through my psychic senses.
Only then did something click.
Earlier, I’d assumed the finger snapping was affectation and a theatrical tic. Now, standing across from him, I realized it was almost certainly the trigger. Every snap, a command. Every command, reality bending to suit him.
I tightened my grip and hauled Rachel upward.
The body came free of the concrete.
And immediately, I knew something was wrong.
This wasn’t Rachel.
I was holding a man, middle-aged, with a thinning, M-shaped bald pattern, panic written across his face. He was wearing Rachel’s clothes, ill-fitting and absurd on him. His eyes darted around wildly as he stammered, asking what was happening, saying he’d only joined some quest, that he’d been somewhere else just moments ago.
Gameboy snapped his fingers.
With a soft displacement of air, a naked silver-haired woman appeared in his arms, unconscious, cradled like a prop in some grotesque show.
“Tada,” he said cheerfully.
Rachel.
Selena lay nearby, still unmoving, exactly where she’d collapsed.
“I can replace them,” Gameboy went on, almost conversationally, “but it’s a pain. Costs resources. So I can’t just let you kill them.”
He shifted Rachel in his grip, and then drove his knee into her back.
There was a sickening crack.
Rachel woke screaming.
She slipped from his arms, collapsing onto the floor as her body reverted to its smaller form, silver hair spilling across the concrete. The little girl cried out incoherently, repeating the same word over and over, hands clawing uselessly at the ground.
“It hurt.”
Of course it did.
Gameboy watched with idle interest, as if gauging the effect of a move in some private simulation.
There was no ambiguity left. Whatever humanity he’d once had was long gone, stripped away and replaced by something gleefully, unforgivably broken.
Then he turned his attention back to me, and to the man I still held by the ankle.”Hey, Doug! Do me a favor, will you? Jerk on his face off, and I will give you a million points!”
Three sharp snaps of his fingers followed in quick succession.
Doug’s fear tipped into compulsion as he unzipped. “Oh, that’s easy!”
I didn’t wait to see how far it would go. I’m disgusted to my bone. I phased him straight down through the floor, deep enough that the building swallowed him whole. The screams cut off almost instantly.
When I looked back up, the space in front of me was empty.
Gameboy was gone.
So were Rachel and Selena.
I didn’t relax for a second.
My psychic senses stayed stretched taut around me, a constant pressure against the back of my skull. The moment something brushed that perimeter, I reacted without thinking. I spun, grabbing for the presence behind me.
My hand closed around a throat of something plastic.
It was a mannequin.
“How?”
For half a heartbeat, my mind snagged on the impossibility of how it had gotten there and how it had fooled my psychic senses, and then I saw the vest strapped to its torso. Red numbers glowed through a cracked display.
Three seconds ticked down rather slowly.
I phased it straight down through the floor and broke into a sprint, bursting out into the street just as the explosion went off behind me. The blast punched the air flat, shattering windows and throwing debris like shrapnel. Heat rolled over my back, but I didn’t slow.
A car screeched toward me from the side street.
Gameboy was behind the wheel, laughing openly, one hand slapping the dashboard as if this were all a joke he couldn’t get enough of.
“You ruined my game!” he shouted, voice carrying even over the engine. “So I gotta punish you for it!”
I timed it perfectly, phasing forward, landing on the hood, fingers snapping for his throat.
And touched nothing but an NPC.
A civilian woman stared ahead, eyes empty, face slack, no emotion to read, and no mind to grip. The realization hit a fraction of a second before the car slammed into the building behind me. The explosion that followed was far too violent for a simple crash.
I walked out of the fire and smoke untouched, glass crunching under my boots as flames licked up the side of the ruined structure. The street opened up around me, eerily clear. I paused, scanning instinctively, thinking of Perry, Qilin, and Snap.
Gameboy’s voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Waiting for backup?” he asked lightly. “You can stop. They’re not coming.”
I let him think that.
The last thing I wanted was my team blundering into this, stumbling onto me standing toe to toe with the boss of Urbanite. Some fights were better kept private.
I straightened, hands loose at my sides.
“Your power,” I said, projecting my voice into the open space, “looks like conditional reality warping. Triggered by snapping your fingers. Limited scope, but flexible.”
He chuckled.
“You’re pretty calm for someone fighting a reality warper,” Gameboy said. “That’s the pinnacle, you know.”
I snorted. “It’s a weak power early on. Practically useless. Back in my world, not a single reality warper ever made a meaningful difference.”
That much was true. I’d seen the archives. I’d seen how those stories ended.
“Powers always have a cost,” I continued. “Proportional to what they can do. The stronger they look, the worse the trade-off.”
Gameboy was silent for a moment. Then he laughed again, sharper this time.
“Or,” he said, “they got killed the moment they were found. Or they hid. If you could warp reality, wouldn’t you rather disappear? Build your own little paradise somewhere quiet?”
I tilted my head.
“Then how did you get caught?” I asked. “If your power’s that good.”
The air seemed to tense. When he answered, the playfulness was gone.
“That,” Gameboy said, voice tight with something ugly underneath, “is your fault.”
I frowned. “Mine?”
Another pause.
“I’d rather not elaborate,” he snapped.
Pain bloomed across my body in a dozen precise points, sharp and intimate, as familiar tarot cards embedded themselves into my flesh as if they had always belonged there. I staggered, breath tearing out of my lungs, and looked up just in time to see Gameboy standing a few steps away, hands casually at his sides.
“Just returning your things,” he said lightly, as if he’d handed back a borrowed pen instead of perforating my body.
Another snap followed, and the distance between us collapsed. He was suddenly right in front of me, close enough that I could see the faint glitching along the edges of his face, like a bad render refusing to settle. I had to admit it, if only to myself, he was strong and obscenely so. Strong enough that the other faction leaders were almost certainly his equals, if not worse.
“Cue the music,” Gameboy said with a grin.
He snapped again, and sound poured into the street from nowhere, heavy bass and distorted strings rolling through the air as if the city itself had been fitted with speakers. “A boss needs boss music,” he added, clearly pleased with himself.
The invisible force hit me from the left before I could adjust, smashing into my ribs and hurling me across the asphalt. I bounced once, hard, the breath knocked clean out of me, and scraped to a stop in a shower of sparks. My intangibility hadn’t even had time to engage.
“That,” he said, snapping his fingers again, “is for hurting my women.”
I was yanked backward mid-rise, my spine slamming into the hood of a parked car hard enough to crater the metal. Glass shattered around me, and the alarm began to scream uselessly into the night.
“And that,” Gameboy continued, irritation creeping into his voice, “is for shooing away Candyland’s capes. Do you have any idea how much effort it took to lure them here with the cancer cure?”
He paced as he spoke, snapping once more, sending me skidding across the street like discarded trash. “I had them right where I wanted them,” he went on. “Tricked into trying to save a traitor, tangled up in my game, perfectly placed. I have the script prepared, but you just have to ruin it!”
I pushed myself up slowly, heat rolling off my skin as he snapped yet again. This time I was launched straight into the side of a propane truck, the impact setting off an explosion that swallowed the street in fire and thunder. The blast tore upward, incandescent and violent, but I rose from the flames moments later, smoke curling off my clothes, injuries already knitting themselves closed.
I fixed my eyes on him, breathing deep and steady, grounding myself. I didn’t want to kill him, not really. But as I weighed the probabilities, as I felt the rhythm of his power and the cost hidden beneath it, I knew I could if I chose to.
I planted one foot forward, shoulders squaring, focus narrowing.
Before either of us could move, the air shifted.
A woman appeared between us without warning, dressed in a neat business suit and pencil skirt, glasses perched precisely on her nose. At her side stood a drooling man bound in a straitjacket, his eyes unfocused and his posture slack, as if he were only half present.
Gameboy turned, scowling. “System Administrator,” he said flatly. “What are you doing here? I’m busy, in case you didn’t notice.”
She adjusted her glasses, her expression calm but unyielding. “You are to cease further action against this individual immediately,” she said. “If you continue, you will regret it.”
Gameboy laughed, a short, derisive sound, and spread his arms. “Regret it?” he echoed. “I’m facing a weakling. What exactly am I supposed to be afraid of?”
I sank into the ground, flattening myself into it, folding distance the way others folded paper. For a brief span, ‘here’ and ‘there’ overlapped, and I rode that seam just enough to reach the speed I needed.
I emerged directly in front of him, one hand already reaching out.
Time locked.
Chronokinesis clamped down like a vise, freezing Gameboy mid-motion, his sneer suspended half-formed. The music stuttered, warping into a dragged-out echo. I didn’t hesitate. Possession was already rising to the surface of my mind, sharp and eager. I had no intention of stealing his reality warping, since its cost reeked of rot and long-term decay, but I could kill him inside his own body just fine.
My fingers were inches from his arm and then he was gone.
The street snapped back into motion as if nothing had happened. The System Administrator vanished with him, as did the drooling man in the straitjacket. My Chronokinesis lost its anchor and collapsed inward, leaving behind only the echo of resistance, like trying to grab smoke.
Gameboy’s voice carried from somewhere unseen, high with adrenaline. “Jesus Christ! You scared the bejesus out of me!”
I straightened slowly, recalibrating. The failed kill attempt didn’t frustrate me as much as the clarity that followed it. My approach hadn’t been flawed. The new elements merely hindered it.
The man in the straitjacket was a teleporter. Looking further, I judged the control belonged to the woman who had the teleporter under her thrall.
“Interesting,” I muttered.
A quiet voice, tight with restraint, followed. “You would have died just now,” the System Administrator told Gameboy. “That was not an exaggeration.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gameboy muttered. “Noted.”
I reached up and began pulling the tarot cards free from my body one by one. They slid out slick with blood before sealing over as my Biokinesis repaired the damage. I caught them midair, telekinesis steady, and charged them with Electrokinesis until they hummed faintly, edges glowing.
“I’m just starting,” I said into the empty street.
Gameboy clicked his tongue, irritation bleeding through his bravado. “What a pain. I don’t even get to punish you properly.”
The music cut off with a final snap.
“This isn’t the last time you’ll see me,” he continued, his voice receding, stretched thin by distance and whatever medium he was speaking through now. “Next time, I’ll have a nice surprise waiting. Something to put you back in your place.”
Then there was nothing as the three of them disappeared in front of me.