Jamison Barnes stepped out of the armored limousine into the light drizzle of rain, thick hands pulling at his black tie, which was starkly outlined against his white dress shirt and black suit. Having fixed his tie, he swept his black hair back and focused, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.

He was a heavyset man of average height. Based on the thick jaw, deeply sunken brown eyes, and handsome overall appearance, you'd guess he was a movie star or perhaps a director. Maybe the CEO of some up-and-coming business. Glancing around constantly in a perpetual attempt to discern any and all threats, Jamison breathed deeply, settling his frayed nerves.

This deal was not a small one, and while it was supposed to have been private, the news had somehow leaked, and now everyone under the ground knew that he was going to be cooperating with none other than the infamous Alex Effex.

Alex was a lanky man with flexible, always-moving fingers and a skeletal grin. He was well-known for being a thief and a cutthroat, and he'd spent a lot of time and effort building that image. Alex was quite confident in his pickpocketing abilities and was brazen in his public movements. Not quite enough that it caught the attention of any major powers or even the police, but more than enough for the media to pay attention. They'd blamed more than a few crimes on him, and he made no move to disperse those rumors. He'd be willing to do anything to make his reputation as big and as scary as possible.

Jamison wasn't that kind of man at all. He preferred a quiet deal, a behind-the-barn shooting if necessary here and there. His Henchmen were as tough as they came, often built like an apartment building - stocky and solid, but not very much in the decoration department, to put it lightly. They had a well-earned reputation of getting the job done without any excess finesse or complications. While Jamison himself possessed spine-snapping strength of his own, he preferred not to use his strength more often than not - messes, ironically enough, were entirely too messy for him.

His personal retinue pulled up close behind, exiting their matte-black SUVs in similar suits and ties. Toting suspicious briefcases and tinted sunglasses, they were hardly subtly in their general thug-like appearance. Well, they were thugs, after all.

He took a good look at the unassuming warehouse in front of him, knowing the interior was likely lined with stolen decadence, and sighed. This was a bad idea. Who knew what sort of higher powers were keeping an eye on this meeting?

It wasn't really optional anymore. It was a matter of personal honor on his part that any deal struck would be followed through, and while he hadn't technically written any signatures, he doubted that he was going to walk away empty-handed. Regardless, he had a bad feeling that someone was going to crash the party, and his gut was right more often than it was wrong.

Turning to his Henchman, he instructed them in his stunningly smooth voice, "Guard the lobby. Anyone comes in, gun 'em down. But use the silencers, all right?"

They nodded, opening their briefcases and removing the Imp P18s inside. Custom pistols - semiautomatic, a magazine of twenty-four, and armor-piercing rounds complimented a sleek silver appearance and professionally effective silencers. Not easy to come by unless you either had connections or money, and Jamison had both in spades.

He tried to relax, attempting to convince himself that this was just another meeting. What could go wrong?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

'Wrong' went by the name of Kappa, approximately twenty thousand feet above, in the cargo bay of a massive dual-bladed helicopter. Everything about him screamed 'wrong', from the thin limbs and eye-catching height to his tired gray eyes and the bags under them. Flicking an errant lock of tousled brown hair out of his eyes, he sighed, fixing his attention once more on the militant man in front of him. He tried to focus on his words, but he was just too tired...

"KAPPA! Wake up, already!"

He snapped back into wakefulness, dragged out of his perpetual sleepiness. Blinking the sleep out of his eyes, he squinted at him. "What is it?"

Colonel Major Anderson was a name that fit the man in front of him perfectly, down to the buzz cut and shining array of medals proudly displayed across his left breast. Ice-blue eyes intensely staring at Kappa, Anderson told him irritably, "Why are you always so carking tired? If you can't work past that you'll never make it!"

Kappa nodded, dozing slightly. He wasn't entirely sure what it was about him that made him so tired, only that it was always ready to steal his consciousness away. He could barely even remember where he was most days.

Anderson leaned down, making an attempt to grab the handle of the nine-foot stainless steel briefcase near Kappa's feet with a sigh. "Kappa, you've got to take better-" He was intercepted by a steel grip on his wrist. Startled, he looked up at Kappa's steel-gray eyes. There was no sleepiness in them at the moment.

Quietly, clearly, enunciating his words carefully, Kappa said, "Don't touch my sword."

Anderson swallowed, backing off. He outranked the younger man in every sense of the word. He'd run more successful operations than any colonel major before him. He'd stared down terrorists in the eye and accepted their fanatical madness without a blink.

As for the lanky person in front of him?

He knew which battles he wanted to fight.

Standing, Kappa picked up the briefcase, sending one more glare at Anderson before opening it. A wide smile crossed his face, though he wasn't aware of it. One-handed, he reached inside and removed the sword inside.

Eight feet in length, the glittering blade featured a simple leatherbound two-handed handle and a basic bronze hilt. It measured a full fourteen inches in breadth and an inch thick. It was otherwise featureless but obviously powerful. Even if it was dull (and it was anything but), its sheer weight would be a formidable factor in any fight.

Kappa lovingly ran a finger across the flat back edge of it, placing it side-down on his lap. Most of his colleagues had thought him extremely strange for giving it a name, but Second Half was an accurate name for it. He would have slept with the blade if he'd been allowed to, but his superiors had flatly refused. They'd partially relented and let him keep it in its briefcase in the bed with him.

Anderson sighed, stepping backward. Kappa had a freakish obsession with that sword, but the technicians had told Anderson that unexpected attachments to objects or pets was a fully expected side effect of what they'd put Kappa through. Either way, it was weird and Anderson didn't like it.

As he pushed a large red button, a massive door slid down, a thick window of glass the only way for him to see Kappa. While he watched, Kappa slung a bandolier of several grenades and flashbangs on. Hooking a strap through a loop on the hilt of his sword and a hole bored through the back of the blade, he easily pulled it onto his back. It was too long for him to walk without the edge scraping on the ground, which meant he had to hunch in order to walk normally.

Kappa pressed a switch near him, and the back end of the chopper slowly opened, air screaming at the edges and howling into the cargo bay. Wincing from the noise, he approached the tip of the door and gazed down at the city far below, namely, at the warehouse he was supposed to be invading.

Anderson attempted to shout over the roaring wind. "Remember! Get in, get out, and make sure you come back safe! We literally can't afford another loss!"

Kappa glanced back at him and shrugged. "I'll do my job. You do yours." With the snide remark, he gently hopped out of the helicopter.

Behind him, Anderson sighed again, putting a hand to his lower back. That guy took years from his lifespan just by talking.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The air whistling past his ears, Kappa squinted at the rapidly approaching roof of the warehouse. He hadn't been given a time limit on the mission, which was new. On most of his tests, which usually involved a deserted island and a frankly ridiculous number of armed guards, he was only given so much time to work his way through and to his target within. Really, the only reason he could think of for them not giving him a handicap was that this was actually a real mission and not a training exercise.

The bullets were probably still real, in that case.

Flipping forward, Kappa oriented himself feet down, arms akimbo as he carefully adjusted to the ever-changing air currents. The rain was annoying, but wouldn't affect his performance at all since he would likely be primarily fighting inside.

Speaking of fighting, he pulled Second Half from his back and aimed downwards. Bracing his feet for the impact, he closed his eyes and tensed.

The brick ceiling imploded inwards as he crashed through it, Second Half punching through the concrete floor. Kappa's feet slammed into the ground, and his knees snapped. Grunting, he spent a small amount of his precious reserves to immediately fix them. He couldn't be impaired this early in the mission.

Looking around, he appraised the situation with a single glance. There were four targets armed with pistols, which had a laughably low rate of fire when compared against the fully automatic assault rifles he was used to. The targets looked remarkably hefty, however. He was probably going to have to use lethal force, which he usually tried to avoid. It got Second Half dirty.

The targets were swift to get their senses back and aimed. Kappa's eyes narrowed as he predicted the path of their guns, carefully and rapidly assessing the angle of their pistols, the grip they were using, and the intentness of their eyes. You could learn a lot about where a man was aiming by his eyes, although you'd have to rely on the barrel to be certain.

Luckily, Kappa had more than enough experience when it came to predicting bullet paths. He leaned backward sharply, angling his body oddly and raising Second Half.

They all fired simultaneously. One bullet went under his knee. One went just above his torso, nearly nicking a grenade, and one missed entirely. The final bullet impacted Second Half's side and pinged off, spinning crazily.

Not that Kappa was paying attention to the bullets anymore. The moment they'd failed to hit him, his priorities had changed. Pushing off the ground with one foot, Kappa launched himself in a clean backflip, ending it with a bone-crushing kick to the head of the man behind him. Spinning Second Half's side across his forearm, he deflected another bullet away and launched forward.

Bringing his sword up with a powerful grunt, Kappa sliced through the concrete, the man's gun, and the man himself. The air itself hissed as Second Half whipped upwards, and he halted its movement with a muscle-tearing wrench. Throwing himself to his knees, he avoided two more shots and swung Second Half towards his opponents, back edge first.

It impacted the third target's skull, and his neck tilted with a snap. The fourth man recovered his senses, aimed, and fired.

Keeping a careful eye on the bullet's predicted path, Kappa deliberately allowed it to hit him. It sliced through the back of his neck, carving a trench through it. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he fixed it immediately. Despite the pain, the bullet had served its purpose. With that out of the way, he folded Second Half under his arm and unleashed a straight kick into the man's chest. With a sickening crack, the man was hurled away, globules of blood flying out of his mouth.

Kappa paused for a moment, appreciating the sudden silence and sheathing Second Half across his back. Popping his neck, he rubbed his eyes. To the room, he complained, "Why can't I just sleep in peace for once?"

The fight might have been over, but he had a feeling that alarms had been raised by his incursion, and he had no intention of allowing his enemies to come to him. If he was going to fight, he was going to take the fight to them.

Granting only a passing glance to the fancy (and now dusty) paintings leaning in carefully placed positions against wooden crates, Kappa searched around for a moment. Rapping his knuckles against crates and various other, less obvious containers, he moved around the room until he heard a hollow clang.

Standing back, he grinned at the refrigerator in front of him. Fridges were supposed to be hollow and metallic, but the opportunity was too good to miss. "Well," he said to no one in particular. "that's one place to hide a hideout. I guess that's why they call them hideouts."

A slice from Second Half neatly separated the top and the bottom of the fridge from each other, and he leaned over it. Looking down into the dark passage before him, a metal ladder his only access, he whistled quietly. A skill that had taken him weeks to pick up from his handlers. "Here we go."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Kappa was incredibly bored.

Walking through the spacious white tunnels beneath the warehouse was boring. Knocking out the odd guard was only slightly less boring. Hiding their bodies was extremely dull, not to mention tedious. What he wanted was either action or a good place to sleep, and he had a feeling that there weren't any decent beds down here, leaving him with the initial option.

Fighting was what he was made for, quite literally. He couldn't remember all that much from his years in a laboratory, kept in a twenty by twenty room with a bed and a toilet. What he could recall was the fighting tests, the electrotherapy, the experimental mutation process, and the resulting agony that shortly ensued, the crippling loneliness...

He snapped out of it with a shake of his head. He wasn't here for self-reflection or meditation, he was here to stop bad guys from making a potentially very bad deal.

Turning a corner, he entered a massive space, faint lights visible on the ceiling a hundred feet up. Walking into the gigantic storage space (who puts a warehouse under another warehouse?), he warily removed Second Half from his back.

All things considered, he should have heard the blow coming well before it actually hit him. Despite the fact that he should have, he didn't.

Either way, a metal fist larger than that fake fridge hit him in the side, sending him cartwheeling across the cement floor. Ideally, he would have hit the distant wall and recovered, or perhaps slid to a stop while righting himself and coming to a cool, composed fighting stance.

Instead, he slammed into a metal supporting pillar, and his spine snapped.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"As you can see, my mechs can take out even a human, even a highly mutated one, in one hit! Certainly, you'd like to acquire one or two of these?" Alex leaned out of the cockpit of the forty-foot mech, throwing the glass hatch upwards with a grin that split his face.

Jamison observed the gigantic mech with an appraising eye. It was a genuinely powerful machine, hunched forward on its powerful front limbs like a gorilla. It was an appropriate comparison, all things considered - from the camera room's vantage point, Jamison had watched in increasing shock as this single human and his absurdly disproportionately huge sword had torn through his men with all the trained practice of an actor in a movie. It had almost seemed preplanned - choreographed even! - barring that moment where he was injured in the neck, but even then the weird human had regenerated it faster than any mutant Jamison had ever seen.

Regardless of the power the human had displayed, the gorilla mech had killed the opponent in one hit. It was a terrifying display of power, and Jamison had a feeling that he was going to need one of those if he wanted to take out some of the more powerful heroes. Sure, the concept of superpowers was a relatively understated one - as opposed to the supernatural weather-changing powers shown in the Iron Age comics, the abilities that mutated humans possessed were more... ordinary, for lack of a better word.

Of course, it wasn't normal in any sense of the word for people to turn their bodies into clay, or drip lava from their wrists, or have a sense of smell that could pick up specific scents from miles away, but it was far from the weightless flight or faster-than-light sprinting seen in fiction.

Jamison approached Alex thoughtfully. "Well, I've got to give it to you, that's an impressive machine. And you're sure this thing can be piloted by anyone?"

Alex leaned on the controls casually, a conniving grin spreading across his face. "Well, not anyone. It takes quite a bit of training to operate one, although I'd be happy to supply my own men for hire."

Jamison's forehead creased. That wasn't going to work. If Alex's goons were the only ones who could use the mechs, then he was practically going to be running a skeleton crew. If the mechs were as effective as he'd seen just now, his own Henchmen were essentially going to be unneeded. In other words...

He tucked a hand into his dress shirt, eyes narrowing. "What are you playing at, Effex?"

Alex tilted forward with a split grin. "All I'm offering is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase some top-of-the-line mechs, along with their pilots. Of course, if you're not interested, I'm sure that the Fool's Parade would be more than happy to acquire one or two..." He trailed the sentence off, allowing it to remain unfinished.

Jamison nervously placed a hand on the custom handgun in his shirt, swearing internally. Of course, Alex had rigged the deal. The Fool's Parade was the Henchmen's biggest rival, full of mutants, and he literally couldn't afford to let them get those mechs.

It was a moment before he realized his teeth were grinding together. It was an unfortunate habit, one built up from his dad. That old man had a mutation that let him eat just about anything - namely, gigantic metal teeth. He'd picked it up at some point and didn't really know how to get rid of it.

Back to the point. "What are you planning?"

Alex smirked. "Well, I'm well aware of your deep pockets and wanted to give you first pick. Are you in or not?"

Jamison sighed. In the end, there was only one way this could go. He shrugged, trying to make it look noncommital. "Fine, you win. I'll take the-" He was distracted by movement in the corner of his peripheral vision, and glanced over. "What the..."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It took a considerable amount of Kappa's reserves to fix his spine, and he stood up with a groan, using Second Half as a temporary crutch. "That hurt." He mumbled the words to himself irritably. There was only so much that he had in reserve before he'd end up unable to mend himself, and he really didn't want that to happen, for obvious reasons.

"I'm sorry, but shouldn't you be dead?" Alex sounded annoyed, and Kappa chuckled to himself. He should have died more than a few times during the ridiculous training regimen he'd been put through. A broken spine, despite the incredible agony and temporary paralysis, was an easy fix compared to partial disintegration. Sure, it used up almost half of his overall reserves, but now that he was aware of the danger, he was reasonably sure he could counteract against it.

Kappa wanted to go to sleep.

Inevitably, the experiments run on him to produce the near-unstoppable juggernaut of strength, speed, and reflexes that he'd become put too much of a drain on him. It was impossible for him to go a full day without at least a good power nap, but he could deal with that afterward. Right now, he was suitably focused for a good fight, and this machine definitely qualified.

Rolling the joints in his neck, Kappa readied his Second Half, lowering his center of gravity and extending the blade. Settling into a better position, he muttered quietly, "All right, let's get this over with."

Alex began manipulating the controls with an unexpectedly intense expression of frustration. The mech lunged forward in a screaming mass of metal, one gigantic fist thrusting forward. Sidestepping, Kappa braced Second Half against it, and the fist grated across the side, sparks flying.

Yanking Second Half back into a better position, he stabbed it into the steel arm and held on tightly. As Alex attempted to retract the arm, he ended up yanking Kappa towards him. Carefully orienting himself midair and tearing his sword out of the arm, Kappa rotated and brought Second Half in a crushing downward slice.

Eyes widening, Alex slammed a button and was promptly ejected backward. The majority of the cockpit was launched away, and just in time. The enormous sword sheared through the metal and left an enormous gash in the center of the machine, and a variety of important-looking circuits sparked. Red lights began strobing the interior of the mech, and it slowly keeled forwards, collapsing on top of its own limbs.

It was several quiet moments before Kappa extricated himself from the wreckage, shoving a limb off with some effort. Looking around, he sighed in annoyance. Neither Jamison nor Alex was visible. He suspected Jamison had made a run for it the moment Kappa had stood back up, and who knew how many secret exits and contingencies Alex had.

"Kappa? Did you succeed? Is everything alright?"

Kappa winced as the scratchy voice of Colonel Major Anderson spoke into his ear. He waggled a finger in his ear and felt a tiny metal cylinder, faint threads piercing into the sides of his ear. Well, time to accelerate the plan a bit.

Placing his thumb and index finger on the sides of the cylinder, he gritted his teeth and began pulling. "Sorry about this, Anderson," he grumbled, "but I'm not going to be your hero." Ignoring the Colonel's furious shouting, he yanked the earpiece out and crushed it between his fingers. Hefting Second Half on his shoulder, he began making his way to the surface, deciding he'd get a nap just as soon as he escaped the search radius.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Anderson placed his fingers on the bridge of his nose with a sigh. Every time. Every carking time they sent one of the experiments out, this happened.

The technician waiting next to him looked at him expectantly. "Sir, you know how this works."

Anderson nodded irritably. "I know, I know. I'm just annoyed, is all. I was really hoping this guy would be the one, you know what I mean?" He received a shrug from the technician.

He grabbed a glass-covered switch from the nearby table grumpily. After the chopper had landed in a discreet location some distance away, he'd been listening to the whole thing. He'd made out the bone-chilling snap, and the disconcerting silence that followed, and had assumed that was it, but he could only stay quiet for so long.

Sliding the glass aside, he pressed the button.

In the warehouse Kappa had invaded, a small metal device exploded, having been shot out of Kappa's neck by what had looked like a stray bullet. According to the technician's devices, Kappa was officially terminated. Unfortunate, but necessary. They couldn't afford to leave any loose ends hanging around.

He'd been the tenth artificial hero.

He'd been the first success.