Chapter 70 Finding My Girlfriend

March 13, 2025. Thursday. 2:52 p.m.

The powered-armor truck folded into the curb like a sleeping beast waking for business, its servos hissing as the ramp lowered. I climbed down while the gunner and the hacker followed, each carrying rifles; while the driver stayed perched in the cab, eyes on the street. I pointed without looking back. “Basement floor, left wall. The vault’s behind it. Take your payment. Password’s 06-06-06.”

The hacker snorted, amused. “That’s not a very creative password.”

We moved like a small, awkward unit into the lobby, the elevator doors breathing open like a waiting throat. I gave them one last tool-tip before we descended. “There’s a hammer in the corner of the basement, use it to tear away the wall. Don’t make a mess; take what you want and go.”

The gunner’s patience snapped; he jabbed the muzzle of his rifle at the back of my head and swore loud enough to echo off the marble. “FUCK! ARE YOU PLAYING WITH US?!”

I let the sound roll off me and stepped into the elevator anyway. “No, I am not playing with anyone. Please, let’s get the show on the road.”

Inside, the hacker’s tone softened into a mock brotherhood. “Let’s go, brother.”

I kept my voice even as I pressed the buttons for basement and top. “You do know your bullets would be useless against me,” I said, more to fill the silence than to threaten. “The vault holds several hundred thousand in marks, stuffed into duffels. Drag as much as you can carry… Any amount you pull out is yours. Hurry; you don’t have all day.”

The hacker shrugged and checked his rig, fingers dancing over a tablet while the gunner cursed under his breath and shouldered himself into readiness as he walked inside the elevator. The elevator dropped them toward the basement.

When the elevator chimed and the doors sighed open to the top floor, I stepped out and moved through the corridor with the kind of speed that came from muscle memory and intent. My secret room occupied the dead center of the floor plan, concealed by a panel that read as plain wall to anyone who cared to look. I punched in the password for the room.

The door yielded with a locked exhale and I entered.

I didn’t even know why I was doing this. Maybe it was weakness. Maybe it was the scrap of humanity left inside me, the part that still longed for something resembling connection. I cherished Silver, her loyalty, and her fire. Onyx was a different beast, but still mine. That was why I had to find her . Even if Silver was gone, maybe some piece of her still lived in Onyx. It was a fragile hope, but it was enough to drive me forward.

I gritted my teeth and worked at my PC, eyes burning from staring at endless strings of data. SRC archives, backdoors, loopholes… I tried them all, only to be met with locked walls and rejection screens. Mom’s registration number, my old way in, had been erased from the system. Director Hall had closed the crack I had lived off of for years. Maybe he wasn’t as incompetent as I liked to believe.

Scrolling through feeds, I caught headlines screaming about the Vanguard’s operation against Pride. It was finished… Pride had been gutted, its hierarchy dismantled. I leaned back in my chair, letting out a slow breath. At least one problem was gone. No more worrying about Pride’s capes coming for my head in the dark. But the SRC, the Vanguard… They were a different beast. They would never stop looking.

My gaze froze on an article plastered across the screen. My name. My face. Nicholas Caldwell. High school dropout. Son of an unregistered cape. Son of a former SRC agent. The words bled into me, sharp as glass. Eclipse was gone. The mask had been ripped away, and what was left was pathetic in the eyes of the world. Half the details were Crow’s lies, his fingerprints all over my civilian identity, but the irony wasn’t lost on me. I was living inside his fabrications now.

I sighed and rubbed my face, hating how the truth and the lies had fused into something I couldn’t untangle. The irony tasted bitter.

A voice drifted over my shoulder, smooth, mocking, and too familiar. “Reading about yourself, Nicholas? I must say, you’ve made the headlines again. That’s some talent.”

I froze, my hands hovering above the keyboard. Crow was behind me. I turned, slowly, unsure whether to feel rage or fear.

“How?” I stared at him, feeling the room tilt into a colder, stranger geometry. “Crow? You should be dead. I killed you.” The words left my mouth like a dare.

“I know,” said Crow as he smiled. “But you should know… Someimes, the dead doesn’t stay dead…”

Impulse burned hot and stupid. I grabbed a stapler off the bench and hurled it while phasing the object; the plan was simple. Make the thing go through him and stick inside his chest. The stapler vanished through air and metal the moment it left my hand, but instead of lodging in flesh it thunked harmlessly against the far wall and stuck there like a bad joke.

“Can’t two things be true at once?” said Crow as he laughed, settling onto a crate of weapons as if he’d been invited. “I mean, I can be dead and alive at the same time, can’t I?”

I forced my feelings away, dialing my Enhancer ratings down to a clinical hum so I could think. “How are you doing this?” I asked, steady and cold.

Crow’s answer came easy, smiling through it, as he gave me a lecture. “The nature of power is simple, boy. It can go two ways… wider in variety, or deeper in potency. Survive long enough, and it changes you. I was nothing once, just a conman with barely Umbrakinetic-2. Every conflict, every gamble, pushed me further. One day I woke up with Empathy-1, then Hypnosis-1, and suddenly the game was bigger. Bigger cons. Grander schemes. Until I wasn’t just a man anymore. I was inevitable. I became… more.”

“You are not real,” I snapped. “Get out of my head.”

He only smiled, continuing on his bizarre speech. “I can’t. I’m part of you… an infection, a sickness. Eventually, there won’t be a ‘you’ anymore than there is a ‘me’ in a ‘we’, and that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?” His words slithered across the floor, and my shadow answered with a smile that wasn’t mine. Panic skittered up my spine; whatever this was, it was contagious and hungry.

I reached for the shadow like it was a thing I could pull back into a jar, thinking of Crow the way you think of a name you need to remember, and my hand closed on cold feathers.

“What’s this?”

A small crow. It was black as oil, with eyes like coals. The crow-like creature sprang free from the darkness and squealed in my palm, an animal and an idea at once. The man in front of me blinked, and then the voice that had been him unraveled; the Crow I’d been arguing with vanished as if it had never mattered.

“Kzyatah-CAW!” squealed the strange bird as it laughed. “Ha-ha-ka-ka-ha-ha-ka-ka!”

There was no hesitation. I slammed that little thing against the corner of the metal table once, twice, and again, over and over, until the soft sound of impact became rhythmic and the bird’s tiny body no longer wriggled. With each strike a dark stain spread along the table’s edge, a blackness that seeped like oil into the metal grain. I kept hitting until my hands trembled and the room felt impossibly quiet, black stains smearing my cheeks.

“What… what in the world was this?”

The little crow hissed and blackened in my palm until it melted into a smear of tar that slid across the floor and pooled into a dull, grotesque stain. I stared at that spot longer than I should have, feeling a cold, absurd kind of exhaustion.

I knew superpowers were weird, but this felt like the kind of wrong that lived in old myths and bad research papers. I remembered something I'd read once about abilities that outlived their owners, lingering like ghosts and causing incidents long after the body was gone. That thought kept my hands moving; I had work to do before anyone sensible arrived to catalogue my ruin.

I opened the flap to the hidden room adjacent to my top-floor hideout, one with no visible door, and checked the bags I’d stashed there: cash, spare masks, tools, and enough hardware to look like a war chest if anyone bothered to inventory it properly.

If the SRC and the police swept this building, which they would now that the headlines had my face plastered everywhere, they would haul the lot away and lock it in an evidence locker. I wasn’t leaving my life in someone else’s evidence chain. I sorted duffels into smaller packs, slid stacks of cards into pockets, and took stock of grenades and magazines until the chest under my ribs felt its normal, impatient weight.

I didn’t bother with porcelain anymore; my face was public commodity at this point. I dressed down in plain Kevlar under a scuffed jacket, cargo pants, a bonnet mask to blur my profile, and shoved two handguns into holsters, one compact for concealment, the other a real kicker if things got ugly. I counted pockets like prayers and filled them: cards, a small toolkit, spare mags, and a few grenades secured against impulse. T

Through the window I watched the Triplets herd duffel bags into a powered-armor truck, their bulk hunched over the loot as they fled with competent speed. I phased through the wall, dropping from the building like a shadow unmoored from its owner, then phased through the highway to bleed off momentum before I hit asphalt.

When I switched the power off, the world rejected me, shoving me back onto the sidewalk like an ill-fitting glove. I picked a direction at random and folded into the alleys I knew by habit, the city’s underside folding around me until I found the place I’d been looking for.

A cluster of thugs turned their faces my way under a flickering streetlamp.

“You Murder of Crows?” I asked.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?” spat one of them. “Buddy, I think you are looking in the wrong neighborhood. You don’t want to mess with the Murder of Crows.”

I didn’t bother with an answer. I was there for leads, not small talk. I moved like I always did, fast, economical, and mean. I punched one square in the throat, ducked a haymaker that missed me by a hair, cracked another in the eye, and stomped an ankle until the joint gave with a sharp, angry noise. The third screamed that I didn’t know who I was messing with; someone in the back swore they had Eclipse and the Crow himself backing them.

They knew nothing.

I’m angry, and I want my girlfriend back.

One of them went for a gun and fired, the muzzle flaring in the alley’s half-light, but the bullet phased clean through me and hit the brick behind where my head had been a heartbeat before. Horror spread over their faces like a sickness; the recognition slotted into place.

“You don’t understand,” I said, voice low. “Eclipse was never with the Murder of Crows.”

They blinked, unsure how to react, and that hesitation was all the invitation I needed. I moved in and punished them with my fists with efficient, uncompromising strikes that left one unconscious and the others stumbling away on broken balance and pride.

I knelt by the one who hadn’t passed out and kept a gun pressed to his temple until his breathing slowed and his eyes rolled. “Where’s the nearest Murder of Crows base?” I asked. He spat blood and pointed down a cracked lane, voice a raw whisper. I took that direction and left the alley behind, pockets heavy with what I needed and the city suddenly feeling like a map full of dangerous names I intended to visit.