Chapter 112 The Bargain

I held the two women’s arms tight enough to remind them of the teeth beneath my palms. One thought and I’d phase them into each other into a clean and lethal collision. It’s a neat trick, really.

The brunette I knew. Leverage. I’d seen her unmasked before. The other woman with brown hair and ordinary face… she wasn’t anonymous to my empathy, but I couldn’t remember who. There was a cape under that plain skin; the thread of power was faint but there. That meant trouble if she tried anything.

I stared at the CCTV feed and nodded once, slow, the way you tell a machine to keep time. Bunny picked it up. The seconds stretched; the camera blinked, a mechanical nod of its own, and then the show was on.

Timing was everything. By now, Bunny should be informing Wolfe of my demands: no media, no reinforcements, or the two women died. No negotiation. No delay. If he had any love for his subordinates, he would obey.

The vault doors sighed and rolled open. The guards and the bank manager scurried toward the entrance as if their lives depended on it, because they did. I watched them go, the distance shortening between me and the two capes in my hands that would be my only witnesses.

“You don’t have to do this,” the brown-haired woman said, voice small but steady. “The SRC is willing to talk to you, and I hope you listen to whatever they have to offer.”

Leverage’s tone cut through hers like a knife. “Probably reduced years in prison time, but way better than getting killed for it.”

“Thank you, ladies, for your suggestions, but no,” I said, because I’m polite like that. “Now, no more talking, or I'll kill you.

I kept my grip on the two women’s arms, feeling the small muscle tremors beneath. Wolfe stepped into the vault and looked at me like a man looking over a contract he hadn’t quite read. He spoke first.

“I am here, Eclipse, what do you want?” he asked.

“Did you come here alone as I instructed?” I demanded.

It wouldn’t hurt to be overly careful. After what I’d seen of the world and its monsters, I learned the hard way that trust was a precious commodity measured by amounts of paranoia. My time with the Ten had also taught me to sleep with one eye cracked open. The SRC had pushed me into alliances I never wanted; now I was about to go nuclear, and I needed to know exactly who I was bargaining with.

“Yes… I’ve come alone as instructed…” Wolfe said.

There was nothing in his mental tone that tripped my empathy. Old files taught me tricks with omission, careful phrasing, and mixing truth with lies as methods to deceive lie detection. People trained to sound honest could skate past my instincts. I didn’t blink.

“Say that you’ve come alone,” I pressed.

“I came alone, took the cab, and went straight here,” he said.

Still clean. But chances were he was lying, just by the nature of an SRC Agent. I tightened my jaw.

“Say that you’ve come alone. I won’t ask a second time, or they lose it. You know my background, John… What you probably don’t know is that someone had trained me for over five years in closed doors, both in my powers and the SRC’s methods. So please, tell me the truth.”

He paused long enough for a heartbeat to settle, and then he honestly revealed. “I didn’t come alone.”

“Good. That’s a start. Who? Enumerate their names.” My voice left no room for performance.

“Wormhole, Guesswork, Nullblade, Healtouch, and Hover,” he said.

“Is that your entire task force?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Lies.” I accused flatly, watching for the micro-tells my empathy could still catch. His face hardened, but his mind stayed scrubbed, like someone polishing a deck of cards.

“Tigress, and… Leverage.”

I turned my head slightly to look at the brunette in my hand. Her fingers shook. But it was the other woman, the brown-haired one, who snagged my attention. Pale. Eyes raw. The Empathic line I’d recognized earlier snapped into place. She's Tigress. Lucky, I thought. Two named SRC capes in one room, fresh from the headlines and probably green as new money. My luck, for once, wasn’t entirely terrible.

Wolfe held his hands out, palms open, his voice steady but taut. “Everything is going to be fine… Just calm down, and don’t do anything drastic…”

His words worked, at least on his agents. I felt the tension in their bodies ease just a fraction, their heartbeats slowing. They didn’t know I could feel that, but it helped me gauge just how close they were to snapping. It probably also helped that they believed I didn’t know their names.

I glanced down, eyes flicking across the small rectangle pinned to the brown-haired woman’s chest. Amelia Morose.

Huh.

I suddenly felt bad for her. Tigress, the tracker, wasn’t just a codename now to me… She was a person, and one whose life I could end with a thought. Maybe I’d pretend I hadn’t seen the tag. It wouldn’t hurt to be civil, especially since I needed something from them.

Wolfe broke the silence first. “What do you want, Nick? Money? Knowledge? You must want something, right?”

I kept my expression calm, almost detached. “I want a new life.”

He let out a dry, humorless chuckle. “You know that’s impossible.”

“You offered me privileges before,” I reminded him, voice sharp.

“I suggested the possibility of it,” Wolfe said, his tone rising. “But you’d need to put in the work… take the assignments, do the dirty jobs, and earn your way up. But it’s too late for that now. You just robbed a bank! And I know you joined the Ten, Nick. I’ve got evidence to prove it, footage of you riding along the Dullahan of all people!”

I let the accusation hang between us, quiet and heavy. I could’ve gone straight into business, told him exactly what I wanted from the SRC, but something in me shifted instead. There were things I needed to say and questions that had been eating away at me for years.

So I changed gears.

“Why didn’t you kill me back then, John?” I asked.

That shut him up.

His face froze, and behind that practiced calm of his, I could feel the smallest crack in his control.

“Because you are a victim of the system,” Wolfe began, voice even like someone reading a verdict. “Kids like you became like this for a reason, and it isn’t your fault. The environment shaped you... The city-states designed to create superheroes, and that inevitably makes villains like you, necessary for their creation to ensure a steady amount of pulls.”

That was new.

“What are you talking about, Wolfe!?” Leverage snapped, heat in her voice.

Wolfe didn’t flinch. He kept talking as if he’d rehearsed this speech in long, lonely rooms. “The disparity between rich and poor, the discrimination against superpowered individuals, the never-ending cycle of hatred, the perpetual existence of superpowered crime... They were all engineered to create more capes. It’s a futile act of protection against threats outside the Council of City-States. You have to understand: none of this is entirely your fault. Surrender now, and we can still turn it around. Even someone who’s killed as much as you has a shot at a pardon.”

Amelia, Tigress, was shaking with barely contained fury. “What the hell, John!? You’ve got to be lying, right?”

I felt it before she spoke: the empathic threads tightening around her, searching for confirmation. She was 'pulling' at Wolfe's revelation. Now, she was developing empathic powers and began to probe at his emotional seams. That’s how she knew he wasn’t lying...or at least, how she tried to know. It made sense; with two empaths in the room, a 'pull' could tease out the power of Empathy from her. When someone reached like that, they sometimes borrowed derivations, a sliver of the other’s tonal shape. It was sloppy science, but that was just how it worked.

The Pull was a phenomenon that triggered when someone with latent potential faced extreme stress. It was the spark that awakened powers, a sudden alignment between instinct and survival. Most capes remembered their first Pull as a moment of panic from a gun pointed at them, a fall from a rooftop, or a desperate wish not to die, and then, suddenly, their power answered. For some, it happened only once. For others, especially those already exposed to powerful capes, it could happen again, evolving or mutating their abilities under the right pressure.

I closed my fingers a fraction, feeling the small muscle tremors in the two women I held. My voice stayed low, calm, but it cut through the tension like a blade. “I don’t want a pardon,” I said. “I want the privilege. The immunity.”

Wolfe’s eyes narrowed. “I can’t do it—”

“I will give you the Ten,” I cut in, my voice hard as stone. “I have access to their base, their movements, and their inner structure. I could do more than just let your army march in there, Wolfe. I could end them from the inside.”

That shut him up. For once, John Wolfe looked genuinely stunned. His lips parted, a retort caught somewhere in the back of his throat.

“No way you’re serious about this,” spat Leverage. “You can’t trust him! This is Eclipse, the Monster of Markend, for god’s sake!”

I smirked, bitter and humorless. “Of course, he’ll agree. After all, it was the SRC who originally made the Ten.”

Disbelief was written all over Leverage’s face. “Please, don’t do this, John,” she said, almost pleading. “This is not why I joined the superhero program… It’s everything we stand against.”

“You forget something, Leverage,” Amelia said quietly, her tone measured but heavy. “This is the SRC. And I think John’s already decided.”

Wolfe didn’t deny it. He turned his back on us and muttered, “Let me call my superiors.”

He took a few steps toward the corner, pulling out a slim communicator from his coat pocket. The device flickered with a faint blue light as he spoke in hushed tones. I couldn’t make out every word, but I caught fragments… “Asset potential… Ten’s infrastructure… immunity off the table… yes, yes, I understand.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose halfway through the call, muttering something under his breath, a prayer, a curse, or both. When he finally turned back, his expression had hardened into something uncomfortably professional.

“I can’t give you immunity,” Wolfe said, voice low but steady. “But I can give you privilege. From now on, you work for the SRC.”

So that was it.

I knew the Ten were born from the SRC because Mother told me, and that intel was part of her plan to take down Ning Light. They began as an SRC black-ops unit called Project Tenfold, a strike team built to erase enemies from the dark; officially disbanded, they had in truth gone rogue under Ning’s influence. Mother wanted me to use that history as leverage, to force the SRC into cooperation by exposing their own hand in creating the Ten, while making sure the deal protected my life and my goals.

The pitch was simple: I had the proof they needed to justify a purge of Ning, and in return, they would give me privileges without selling my freedom.

I tilted my head, watching him carefully. “You never answered my question, Wolfe.”

He frowned. “Which one?”

“Why didn’t you kill me back then?”

Wolfe stared at me for a long moment, and something flickered in his eyes, something that wasn’t duty or strategy. Just… recognition.

Finally, he said, “Because you remind me too much of him.”

I blinked. “Who?”

His voice dropped to a near whisper. “The Mourner.”