Maybe, just maybe, I should have changed my name. Metis seemed like a hollow joke, Hubris would be so much more fitting.

I had gone to ground in a small town close to New Brunsburg, renting a room in a youth hostel under the name of Diana Hunt, while working on the report about the shady dealings of the Greene-family, trying to make it as objective as possible, knowing that anything but objectivity would be condemned.

No, I needed to make the report speak for itself.

That took me five days, five days in which the media had a field-day with the horrible villains that plagued the streets of our great country. Metis was more or less directly lumped in with real criminals, like the Powered that had been part of the Omegas and the former Anti-Gang task force was tasked with tracking down the dangerous, powered villains that remained, namely Metis.

In response, I anonymously released the report into the open web and within hours it was picked up by the mainstream media. But not as factual, but as a piece of slanderous propaganda by a bad-faith actor trying to undermine public trust. It was quickly attributed by the Greene-Family to me and they claimed that it was done as a personal attack against one of the great Heroes of the League. Battlemaster came out and publicly unmasked himself, telling everyone that he, Clark Greene was a Powered of the League and that this report was a direct attack on his relatives in retribution against him.

Needless to say, Metis became public enemy number one.

The warehouse I had procured under the TitanTech company became under scrutiny in a crackdown against Cantonia-registered business and when they were unable to find out more, they raided it, finding absolutely nothing, but it made the stakes quite clear. The gloves were off. They tried profiling Metis, attempting to catch her out of armour and in her real identity, trampling on civil liberties in the process but the media was whipping the public into a mindless frenzy, creating a serious witch hunt.

But not only was I actively hunted, no, even my previous actions were twisted and used against me. The rescue-efforts at the tunnel? They cited the amount of money paid out, calling me a monster for profiteering of a tragedy.

The images of me, stopping Kira Mathis from injuring her daughter after I had rescued her in the forest was taken out of context and used to malign me further. The video of the two of them thanking me, somehow vanished from every streaming platform and re-uploading it got filtered out, claiming copyright.

The media was actively painting me as a greedy criminal at best and a brutal monster, delighting in the suffering of others at the worst.

I had no doubt that those in the know, mainly Voltic and the Shaodwbroker knew better than to trust the media but at the same time, trying to make their opinion public would quickly see them burned at the stake of public outrage, right next to Metis.

So, I did the only thing that made sense, I went into hiding, letting the firestorm die out, no matter how long it would take.

During that enforced time of hiding, I had quite a few plans I wanted to achieve. One of them, was to the north, on Accord Island. Time for the winter-testing session was approaching quickly, and I planned to win a place at the Guild University for myself.