“Did she really just…? Dust damn…” Black’s eyes flickered red as he peered through his binoculars watching a sickly-looking man come careening towards his third-floor hideout. Did she know I was watching them?

Black liked to watch fights, and, unlike Scarlet, he liked hanging out in the Suburbs, so he took the time to relax and watch his second-in-command fight. Not to say he didn’t take the dangers of the Suburb seriously, but he was seriously dangerous himself.

Thoughts whirled rapidly in his head as he addressed the fight he just watched and quantified the threat inbound. He had watched this man survive one of Scarlet’s special gutbusters with hardly more than slight discomfort. He brought Scarlet to her knees without even moving. And Bec just punted him directly at me. Lovely.

Black activated his active camo just as the man shattered the window and rolled gently into the room like he weighed nothing more than a feather.

Normally, you’d expect to see some signs of damage after getting booted about 2 city blocks. Knowing this, Black did not care one bit to fight with this guy, so he just started to inch his way towards the newly opened window. The man sluggishly pulled himself up to his feet, laughing.

“What a marvelous girl! Somehow she’s weak… yet strong.” He flexed his back and bent his fingers. “How deliciously, paradoxically, superb. I would like a taste of that.” He smacked his cracked and bleeding lips.

Excuuuuse me? Black halted halfway out of the window. No one was having a taste of his sister. He reached for a weapon and paused. Could he hurt this man at all? Something about his Word had rendered him relatively unharmed by all the conventional attacks he faced. He pulled himself out of the window and decided to watch him more carefully. How he moved next would decide Black’s attack. The guy just headed for the stairs. He even took a break to catch his breath as he wandered the halls looking for the exit.

Damn, damn, damn. Black thought he’d be able to discover this guy’s Word from his movement. Shaking his head, Black decided to get to work. With a lightning-fast rappel, he’d made it to the second floor long before the ambling ghost of a man. Traps, traps, traps. Black was no slouch in a fight, but he made a robust career of dismantling people without ever meeting face-to-face. He had a ton of tricks and treats in his bags, and anything he didn’t bring he could print on the fly with his printer. A little disk extended from his sleeve, whirring to life and producing all the components for his onslaught.

Bullets, blades, bombs, bear traps, Black had long gathered the reputation of being a walking one-man arsenal, and he wielded them like Santa. Whizzing from room to room with the practiced grace of a man who singlehandedly turned trapsmanship into a higher educational degree option in the city, Black danced from chokepoint to chokepoint sprinkling goodies from his pouches. Black had turned the building ahead of the shambling man into a grindhouse in the time it took for the man to find the stairs.

The slow man wouldn’t even know what hit him. Standing outside, Black looked at the building with pride as though he built the whole thing himself. Finishing off a little backup plan, he fled into the neighboring building to watch the whole thing unfurl.

Black snorted as the man lazily walked through his laser cutter traps on the second floor. Black nearly choked on his laugh as the man ambled painlessly through the lethal laser cutters with only black lines being drawn into the man’s already blackened garb. He didn’t even seem to notice! The man wandered into the stairwell and triggered the next trap.

Shape-memory alloy razor wire launched from the room he just left, wrapping itself in a pull knot configuration around the man’s throat. The man pulled his hands up instinctively grasp at it. The second phase of the attack engaged with a bang as a chuck of the ceiling fell in the stairwell. The wire launcher shifted into a compound pulley that used the chunk of ceiling as a counterweight, cutting deep and yanking him back and up into the ceiling.

The wire tightened as the weight of a ton of concrete pulled, causing the sounds of high-tension metal wire to echo through the building. The man bobbed lightly as he dangled like a piñata, suffering only minor lacerations.

A slingshot orb, trained algorithmically to target faces and other more sensitive parts, rolled in from a dark corner and lobbed a flaming wad of napalm into the dangling man face, disappointingly fizzling on impact and turning to dust. Another orb bot rolled out and tried to shoot dart electrodes at the man’s balls. “Stop that!” is what the man would say if there wasn’t a ton of rock weighing on his windpipe.

It took him a little bit to dissolve the special laminated razor wire wrapped around his throat. It was designed to be particularly difficult for those who disintegrate things on touch. Black grit his teeth as he watched from the neighboring building through a wall display. His mood soured fast as he watched the man slowly work his way through a trap that was designed to pull people’s heads off.

With a light ptink sound, the high-tension wire snapped, and the man landed on the ground, immediately exploding. The mini mines camouflaged at the man’s feet shredded the entire second floor with high velocity shrapnel. As the smoke cleared, Black saw the man, clothes in tatters, standing there with a confused and slightly cut up face. His mouth moved. Black could read his lips. “Am I being attacked right now?”

Black punched the wall next to the display. “Damn it. This guy is a fucking tank.” Black tracked the guy as he hopped down the damaged stairs into the first floor. Black pushed a mental button trigger a series of bombs. He couldn’t see the man anymore from his vantage point, but he liked to imagine the look of bewilderment as—The structure groaned loud enough for even Black to hear at a distance. He smiled. The taller than average Suburban building collapsed in on itself like a master demolitionist with the man in the epicenter. “And the coup de grace!” Black gestured and was a little disappointed to remember that concentrated lye bombs seeping into the crack of the rubble wouldn’t look too impressive.

Black whipped out his infrared googles and tuned in to see the… Black frowned. He could see the man wiggling inside the rubble. He was slowly making headway through the rubble and emitting insane amounts of heat as he did it. With a smash, a chunk of rubble near the top exploded into dust, and a smoking man pulled himself free. He was utterly naked, and his gaunt frame was revealed to be a misnomer. The man was somehow muscular and scrawny at the same time with ribs poking past hard abs. Waves of heat were emanating from his body as he kicked rubble into dust in frustration. Did the alk bombs not even register?! He should be a puddle of meat! Black felt a meter he recently installed go wild. This guy was radioactive! That was very nearly three different ways this man was hot. Black sighed and gathered his thing. Last plan.

“Hello there, good sir!” He popped out of his nest and dropped down. Immediately something was wrong, as his legs buckled as soon as the man turned to him. “Dust damn, that thing you’re doing is strong. Ugh.”

The pale man didn’t even need to ask who this jackass was. It was clear from the moment he laid eyes on him that this asshole was the one making it a right pain to go and track down that delectable masked girl in gray. He started to walk towards him. He was a little winded, but he was enraged to the point that it wasn’t even registering. He was going to positively dust this red-eyed moron.

Black’s breath ran ragged. He felt like his life was being slowly bled from his body. He watched feebly as the man took one too many steps. The ground under the man’s feet artifacted and flickered. The paper-thin display gave way immediately under the nude man, and he plummeted into a pitfall.

Black crawled over to the hole and emptied a pouch into it. Black weakly crawled away as a series of explosions echoed from the open manhole he had disguised. The hole started to smoke, and a wad of foam started to flow from it. The fluid mixture hardened as it hit the air forming a rock-hard filler to the hole. He crawled away watching the security foam rocket out of the hole.

Black was hoping his strength would return to him when he bumped into something. He looked up and saw a gun pointing at his face. He sighed and dropped his head. “Fucking scavengers.”