Blood came off way easier when it was still fresh.More than that, cotton soaked up the red stuff way better than polyester.He’d learned that little bit about laundry, mostly because it was useful and right now — relevant.
Especially as he twisted the fabric of the unconscious Yakuza’s shirt in his hand, a fistfull of white cotton being used to scrub hard at his own knuckles. The stuff was already getting sticky as it was, red catching in the little grooves of his single silver knuckleduster.He hadn’t come up with a name for it yet, not like Serpentine Steel, mostly for two reasons. For one, it wasn’t a Shen Gong Wu, so it felt a little pointless. And for two…
Well, he’d only had the thing half a week.Zain dragged the fabric across his knuckles in slow circles as red streaked white, working the metal until it caught the light coming through the skylight he’d busted on his way in. Silver shone bright on the weapon sitting on his hand like it was made for him, the kid turning his fist over and over before—“Phtooo.”
— before he spit on it and wiped it again with the guy’s sleeve.
The shirt’s owner let out a little groan, the man still face-down across a busted pallet. It only took a moment of checking to make sure the dude was still out cold, not like it would have mattered anyway. He probably wouldn’t be complaining about much for a while.
"You good, though?" Zain nudged him with a Foamposite. After a few seconds, he got nothing back but another groan. "Nah, you good. You just resting."
Zain stood up and looked around. They all just resting.
Eleven of them.
He'd counted going in and he counted again now, and that number hadn’t changed. Eleven bodies laid out across the floor of an import warehouse that hadn’t imported anything legal in who knows how long. Half of them were making noise, and none of them making anything close to words, one of the Yakuza had even managed to crawl about six feet toward the loading door before deciding that was enough movement for tonight.
Somebody near the pallets kept making a sound like a kettle, his nose busted so bad Zain wasn’t sure it’d ever heal quite right. Honestly, he wasn’t even proud of that one — not because of the pain or whatever — but because Zain hadn’t even done anything. Hell, the man had done it to himself, full-force ran at him only to trip over his own boy's leg, and straight-up eat a knee that was already coming up anyway. Free one. That's a freebie. Don't even count.
All in all, it hadn’t taken a good bit longer than three… No. Zain tilted his head to the side. More like four…
Yeah, four minutes tops. He hadn’t exactly been timing or anything but it couldn’t have been any more than that. Honestly, it was starting to get weird.
Not weird like bad, just… weird.
He rolled his shoulder as he sighed out loud in the middle of all of it, waiting for the part of it where his heart was supposed to be racing.
It wasn't. That was the thing.
Two months back, a room like this would've had him breathing through his teeth for a solid minute after even with Rage and Redneck as backup. Now he was standing here with his pulse doing regular-person business and the only real damage on him just a couple of bruises and some drywall dust on his windbreaker.
He had to be at least a little careful with how he moved because even a hard slap was enough to rock somebody like a haymaker. Throwing a straight hook felt like hitting one of those big cardboard boxes that's been sitting in the rain for a week. Just… He worked his fingers, flexing each one and popping the knuckles. Just no resistance in it.
If he even bothered using ki, it was even worse honestly.And with the meat-map…
Well, with that, people started feeling like paper-mache. His fist would go and the guy would just go and there wasn't a moment in between where he had to really put any effort in it most of the time. Hell, trying to punch through would probably just make a mess.
Which is crazy. His eyes narrowed off at nothing. It should be crazy.
Those same eyes widened again as he let his head fall back with a sigh, tracking a little bit of broken glass still falling from the shattered skylight.
Is it crazy?
He'd honestly stopped being able to tell.
I'm the truck. He clicked his tongue, tucking the knuckleduster into the pocket of his windbreaker. And they’re the deer.
Like deer, they acted like they were in headlights as soon as he started asking questions, which might have been ‘cause of the concussions. Either way, it was no different than the last six spots this week. He'd asked, they'd cried, and one of them even tried to pull the whole I don't speak English routine right up until Zain started counting down from five in Japanese. Go, yon, san, ni…He didn’t even make it down to Ichi before the guy suddenly started speaking some top-tier English, real Ivy League language, and Zain still didn’t get any new info on the Hand.
The closest he got to the Hand tonight was a guy who said the word Yami just to end up talking about some guy named Yamamoto who owed him a band.
Whatever. Still a good night of exercise.
Bandana pulled higher over his nose, Zain headed for the stairs at the back and hopped the rail on the way just for fun instead of taking the steps. As quickly as he was moving, so was his name.The news had started running stories about him, some lady on Channel 7 even spending a whole fifteen minutes yesterday talking about an underage vigilante involved in dangerous activities in that voice news people use. Then they cut to some NYPD captain talking about how the whole thing was unsubstantiated and just a whole hoax based off rumors and street stories to get attention.
A hoax. He'd watched it in Colleen's kitchen with a bowl of cereal and almost coughed up his Franken-Berries. Yeah, I’m a big ol’ hoax. Zain grinned under his bandana and kicked an old switchblade out of his way, metal skittering down the stairs. But that was the whole point, though. Hoax or not, the word was moving.
Wind hit him as soon as he cleared the roof access door, the entire city staring back at him with Manhattan sitting there lit up like it was showing off. The Queens rooftops closer to him stretched out, those water towers on stilts on the brick buildings with the tar patches, spread further and further as Zain walked to the ledge and let out a breath.
Hardest part of this month back hadn't even been the fighting.
No, that had been Colleen.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
"Three." She'd already said it like fifteen times.
Standing in the middle of her kitchen with her arms crossed, she kept saying it. “Three weeks.”
And every time she repeated the words, it somehow hit harder. "Three weeks, Zain."
Like a punch right to the top of the skull.By number six, he was already staring at his feet like he was still nine and broke his window throwing a pair of sneakers too hard.
So he'd told her.
Zain didn’t even bother with a whole fake story, not that he had one ready anyway. He’d opened his mouth and just… told her; the warehouse in Hell's Kitchen, Stick and the pushups, the mannequins with the red X's on the throat.
He didn’t mention the Hand because… well, he didn’t want to freak her out too much.
Not like that helped.
Man, her face. Sensei had gotten real quiet, which was scarier than the yelling, and then all she had to say was one word: "Groomed."
Zain had made a face of his own as he looked back at the woman. "Nah, it wasn—"
"Some creepy old man convinced you to come with him because he had something secret to share with you, said you were special, kept you isolated, told you not to talk to anyone, and put his hands all over you." She'd counted them off on her fingers. “I mean…”"Zain. That's grooming."
"Okay but like, technic-"
"Technically."
"I'm just saying, that's a word that means something else, and you saying it like that makes it sound like—" He'd already put his hands up and waved them around, trying to get around the weirdness of what Colleen was trying to put on him. "—like some whole other thing, and it wasn't that, it was just fighting and stuff. Ain't nobody touch me weird."
Those eyes had stayed on him as Sensei went quiet.
Too quiet.
Too long.
He hadn't heard the end of it. She made sure of exactly that.
Nobody groomed me, though. With a shake of his head, Zain stood on the ledge of the roof, half his shoes over the edge as he looked out at the water. Above his head, a plane blinked its way across toward LaGuardia.
It was just fighting.
She just kept looking at him all the time.But it was fighting though. Nothing weird about it. Sure, Stick was a psycho and a killer and, yeah, the old man was a creep but he wasn’t a creep. Not like that, at least.
So it's different.
He turned that over for about three steps.
...It's different, right?
Shaking his head again, Zain stepped off.
That first drop always did something stupid to his stomach, a half-second where gravity took him and his stomach jumped up with a good six stories of nothing under his Foams. Queens came up wide and orange underneath, streetlights and the BQE and somebody's bodega sign flickering four floors down.Serpentine Steel came out of his sleeve, his Shen Gong Wu ready and waiting.Links snapped forward — twenty, fourty, sixty feet rushing out through the dark in a half second and biting into a brick wall. The chain went tight and Zain didn’t waste a moment, already pulling with his shoulder as the swing took him in a long low arc that brought his stomach back to the rest of him.
He let it stretch long before he retracted, a grin on his face as those links whipped back in a snap of speed at the top of a curve that smeared the city sideways.Without wasting a second, he threw his hand out.A water tower leg was his new anchor and he tugged again. “Woooohoooooo!”He still wasn’t over it.Not the chain; Serpentine Steel had been the same since the beginning. Even after the Hand ninja cut through it with that greasy red chi, it only took a full seven days for it to fix itself completely whole; not even a seam to show it ever happened.He’d checked it about forty times to make sure, even.
But nah, it wasn’t the chain.
The swinging was what had him feeling so different. His new body didn’t just make him better at fighting. It changed his whole movement game. Grappling used to be all he could do; point A, point B, and then feet down. It was a real ugly, stop-and-go monkey bar kind of deal.Now he was catching angles, kicking off and letting the arcs do the arc as one swing led clean into the next one without ever touching down; his arms able to handle the weight of his whole body without tearing his arm off.Sure, it hurt if he did it for too long, but he wasn’t dumb enough to.
He knew it didn’t make sense for him to be this good at it, considering he was falling off fire escapes a year ago but a lot of things didn’t make sense. Hell, I met Deadpool.
The chain caught a cornice as he swung wide around a brownstone, soles skimming somebody's satellite dish.Just last week, and it had been a whole week, he’d met the Merc with a Mouth in person and he still wasn’t sure what to do with that. He’d just been sitting with it, the sight of the full red-and-black and the twin katanas and that gun that popped a Yakuza through the throat over the killer’s own sholder.A no-look shot.
Whistling.
But that was the thing that broke his head open, though, and it wasn't even the whistling.
Deadpool had been there. Deadpool existed. Deadpool was walking around Red Hook doing gun kata, rambling about Van Wilder, and looking for some poor dude named Francis.
So that only left him with one question… the hell is Spider-Man?Zain hit a fire escape with both feet, kicking off with a spin as the chain shot off toward the next roofline. For real, where’s he at? Because he'd been looking. Since day one, basically, since the second he figured out what world he'd landed in. Iron Man was all over everything. Hulk, all over the news. Captain America had a whole exhibit and the man was in every other history documentary. That was three of 'em.
So, where was the web-head? A city like this, with a guy like that, you'd know. But nah, no web-head and not even a single blurry photo or bad video.
And no X-M—
X-M…
He blinked, feet finding brick, before he pushed off again.
X... what was I even...
His swing wobbled one more time, chain going slack for half a beat as Zain landed wrong on a tar roof and skidded two feet on his heels.
...what was I saying?
He stood there for a second with his hand still on the chain, brow scrunched under his bandana, that itchy half-there feeling in the back of his skull like a word he almost had.
Something. He'd been on something.
...oh. Yeah. Deadpool.
Right. He shook his head hard and got moving again, chain out to a water tower leg. Deadpool existing was almost as crazy as the killer himself, especially since Reed Richards wasn’t even fantastic yet. Zain had even looked it up, same as he had everything else.Man was only like five or so years older than him right now, just a genius kid doing kid-genius stuff, giving talks for something called the Baxter Foundation, getting written up in science magazines and not even a little stretchy.
No Fantastic Four.No Doom.Latveria didn’t exist, either.
Well, it wasn’t on the maps anymore at least. Apparently, the communists took it over back at the end of World War II and renamed it Sokovia or something. Zain really wasn’t sure what to do with that information past a shrug, especially since the only Von Doom he’d turned up was some pretty-boy tech dude in San Francisco building AI and doing TED talks.
Wakanda was on the map, though. Barely.
If you counted sheep, dirt roads, and nothing else worth attention except for good-quality cloth or whatever. This world is so weird.
He arced over a water tower, knees tucked and chain already coiling back into his sleeve for the next throw. Wait. The city turned underneath him as Zain got hit sideways by a completely different thought. ...Am I stealing Spider-Man's whole flow?
'Cause he was out here swinging.
Off a chain, sure, not webs, but the motion. The arc, the release, going all between buildings and everything else. When the web-head finally did show up, if he ever did, people were gonna look at Spidey and think…
...that's messed up. Zain frowned into the wind as he swung out. Or not? Like, it’s not stealing if he’s not here yet. He nodded slowly as he tucked in again, arm lashing out to the right. That’s more like… I'm the blueprint. I'm inspiring him. He gon' see me and be like, "oh, word, that's how you do it."
...Unless he think I'm biting his style.
Which I can't be, 'cause he ain't here yet.
Which means he'd be biting mine.
Zain grinned so hard his bandana slipped. Ayo, Spider-Man's a whole jacker.
The chain caught a fire escape and whipped him around and down toward a flat Queens rooftop, tar paper coming up fast, and he was still halfway through that thought when his sneakers touched down.
His body dropped straight into a duck before he knew why.
A boot.It came through the air where his head had been, close enough that he got wind off it.
Zain jumped back, hands up and ready as a shape flipped clean over him — a full flip, neat and tucked as a figure dropped down in all glossy black, landing in front of him in a crouch with one hand on the roof and a laugh already coming out.
He winced, hands dropping down to his sides the second he heard it. Goddamn it, Felicia.
"Wow." Black Cat rocked back on her heels and rose up out of the crouch like she was putting on a show, which she was. "Look who learned to dodge.”"...man—"
"Color me impressed, tomcat."
Stop calling me that. Zain rolled his shoulders out as he pointed at her, hand still wrapped in the chain. "Stop sneaking up on me!"
"Mrow."
"And stop that." He pulled a face behind his bandana. “It’s… weird.”
"What’s wrong, tomcat?" She tipped her head, bangs falling over her eyes as she raised her weird headphones-goggles combo higher on her forehead. "You’ve been avoiding me. It’s gotten so boring just watching you do the same thing every night for weeks."“Avoiding? You’ve been a ghost! Second of all—” He stopped, blinking as he realized what she said. Weeks. “Okay, first of all, stalking is crazy. That's actually crazy behavior."
Her lip quirked higher on one side. "Second of all?"
"...I ain't get to second of all yet."
"Take your time." She was doing the thing with her voice where she stretched it out, that fake-older purr. “Mmm-hmm.”That purr lost itself, falling into a giggle. “You’re so funny sometimes. You know you talk to yourself when you're swinging? Like, out loud."
"I do n—"
"You said 'ayo' to a pigeon."
“That…” Zain opened his mouth wide, suddenly glad he didn’t have the kind of skin that blushed. "That pigeon was in my lane."
"You apologized to it."
Zain let out a groan low and hard all the way from his chest as he dragged both hands down his face, bandana and all. "A'ight. Bye, Felicia."
He had the chain out and the arc started before he even realized she had gasped behind him.
Half a block later, swinging past a church spire, his brain finally caught up to his mouth. …she never told me her name, did she?– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
Cat Got Your Tongue? — 100 DPLeave Felicia speechless.
ROLL: "Floating Figures Falling" (Free) [Generic Stick Fighters] {Providence}:Everyone here seems to drift lightly through the air. While this can’t keep you from falling off an edge, it can keep that fall from being fatal and allow you to recover. In addition, you have an innate talent for kicking off walls, running along collapsing pathways, and performing other strange feats that would usually be attributed to wire-fu in movies.Dojo Points: 200