She ignored the stinging sensation in her back as she was thrown through a wall, and bounced down an aisle of the superstore like a rock skipped across a lake. Instead, she did what she had been trained to do for half her life, and checked her health bar.

Health:3370/4500​

Damn. He hit like a dedicated damage class even though she knew he wasn’t one. Over a thousand points of damage meant he wasn’t playing around. The average civilian only had around a hundred health at most.

Thankfully, she wasn’t the average civilian.

Pushing herself to her feet, she rolled her shoulders and glanced around herself. The pain she was feeling told her that her arms and legs should be a mess after using them to brace herself against the impacts. Instead, they, and the specially made outfit covering them, were perfectly fine.

That was the first thing the Ultra League taught newbies. Pain was an illusion. Injury and sickness were a lie. Once you gained your first level, the only way to be maimed or fall ill was for someone to use an ability on you that specifically carried those effects.

The building was demonstration in pure chaos. There were upturned displays of product littering the interior, likely a result of fleeing civilians. A security alarm was going off - no doubt from people rushing to the emergency exits when Adrenaline had appeared - and so the high pitched wailing of the alarm served to make listening for ambush basically impossible. Not that Perception was a stat she had trained to any significant level. She had mostly just hit the bare minimum required of her, and then moved on to more useful things.

“Look we both know how this goes and believe it or not I don’t love the property damage so-!” A voice from behind her yelled over the sound of the blaring alarm overhead. Sheer reflex had her whipping around to face the target, and her fists tightening. She spared a thought for one of the several items sequestered about her person that provided the Metamagic Ability she used to target her Decay Aura, instead of indiscriminately murdering everything that got within twenty feet of her while it was active.

“Careful! I hate to take a hostage but you know how it is!” The voice added, when she paused instead of attacking.

Because it was a child talking to her. A child covered in leeches, though his expression and voice made it clear he either didn’t notice or didn’t care about them. Previous experience with Adrenaline told her that he was probably hiding somewhere in the building, using the skill that made the creatures he used to control people over and over again. No one knew exactly what his upper limit was, or how much mana he had to have to maintain them, but the common consensus from the theorycrafters on base was that he had to be some kind of specialized caster to achieve the effect.

Which meant that if she could find him, she could punch him in his squishy caster head until he released all his hostages.

“If you don’t want anything broken, you should probably surrender!” She offered in as diplomatic a tone as was possible while effectively telling someone they were fucked.

“Honestly I would have left by now but I’ve got kind of a situation so-” The child replied with a shrug.

On a hunch, she jumped towards him in the middle of his sentence, earning a yelp and a quick backpedaling step from the puppetmaster controlling his body. Instead of attacking him though - which she would never have done anyway - she triggered the ring on her right hand, hidden by her thick purple glove.

Ring Of Selection (1m: 59s)​

Immediately, the timer for the ring's cooldown appeared in the upper right corner of her vision, and the leeches covering the poor kid - which were no longer excluded from her Aura - fizzled and popped, like extremely large meaty popcorn kernels that vanished entirely from existence the minute they died.

Unfortunately, while she could easily use the abilities of her equipment to exclude ‘everything’ from her Aura effectively indefinitely - she couldn’t use it to target things she couldn’t see. It wasn’t as simple as trying to target ‘all leeches’ because even if she tried, she would still only affect the ones in her line of sight.

Ofcourse, having fought Adrenaline before - multiple times at this point - he knew that too, which was why she bent forward and discharged her Lay on Hands ability into the kid, instantly cleansing him of all status effects below her own level. As she did so, several more of the creatures fell from beneath his clothing, and disappeared.

Glancing back to where she had just come from, she was unsurprised to find several more of the infectious summoned creatures dropping onto the spot she was just standing in, having no doubt been hanging from the ceiling that entire time.

She seriously hated Adrenaline. Against any other caster or summoner type character, she was as good as gold, easily capable of taking down people several levels higher than her due to the way her abilities worked.

Against Adrenaline, her ability to cut loose was severely hampered by the fact that all of his minions were effectively innocent civilians.

“Okay I’m being totally serious here, if you just stop for a minute I will leave all these people alone.” An annoyed - now female - voice told her through the gaps in the shelving, evidently having been standing in the opposite aisle to the one she was presently in.

“So what, just let you get away with holding all these people hostage and probably robbing the place?” She spat back in annoyance, already scanning the area around her and noticing several more people hidden in nearby aisles, just waiting for her to waste her time and resources on them one at a time.

‘Oh I hate him so much.’ She cursed to herself, aggravated with the unusually savvy supervillain. Most bad guys were - for lack of a better word - idiots. They didn’t have the full breadth of understanding for the rules of the system that the Ultra League possessed, and so unlike the average hero - who wouldn’t be allowed out onto the street without meeting certain minimum knowledge and level requirements - tended to behave like jumped up thugs with superpowers.

Which they were, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was, they lacked tactical understanding of what they were doing. Once you’ve seen one idiot waste his mana throwing fireballs at a forcefield only to be apprehended when he ran out, you’ve seen them all.

That’s what made criminals like Adrenaline so dangerous. He had a sort of ruthless cunning that made the odds of him reaching a high level much more likely.

And high level villains were bad for everyone. No one wanted another Niagara.

“I mean- yes? Also you know I don’t rob places like this. If you people would let people who aren’t in your little club go into the Dungeons, I wouldn’t even have to do these stupid quests in the first place!” Adrenaline returned to her.

She didn’t even bother dignifying that particular bit of insanity with a response. It was exactly because of people like Adrenaline that they had to safeguard Dungeon access. Still it… did bother her, a little. Not withholding access to jerks like Adrenaline - that she had no problem with. But he was right in that the League and the media had made a point of greatly exaggerating his escapades. He rarely killed anyone, almost never stole anything, and typically avoided as much property damage as he could manage while still making his escape. To all accounts, he really did just show up, perform his current quest, and leave. But that definitely wasn’t the norm for most villains, and pressure to handle Adrenaline had been mounting ever since he had made it to level two.

She tried to think of a solution to her current situation. She still had several trinkets on her for targeting her abilities without hurting any civilians, but she had to use them sparingly, or risk being caught while they were all on cooldown. She had enough Mana to cast Lay on Hands several more times - but that ability required her to touch a target first, and honestly didn’t mesh well with any of her other Decay Attunement powers.

Which was exactly why she had taken it at level three, but that was neither here nor there.

There was no backup likely to arrive anytime soon, and her ‘sidekick’ was too lethal to be allowed anywhere near a hostage situation like this, so he was currently outside directing the police.

What she really needed was to find Adrenaline. Or at least, whatever it was that was keeping Adrenaline here in the first place - since he had admitted to complications arising.

It was at times like this that she really wished she had any kind of utility spells or equipment. A simple Radar spell would go a long way to helping her plan, but she had long since ceded the use of that type of gear in favour of filling all of her slots with the trinkets she used to manage her Aura.

It was then that something occurred to her. It was a well documented fact that the physical abilities of Adrenalines victims scaled with the number of leeches he left on them - so why had the one that had kicked her possessed so many more of them than the ones surrounding her now? More so, why weren’t they attacking her? If Adrenaline wanted to get away, he should be trying to knock her out or drop her to such low health that chasing him would be dangerous - and stupid. Instead, he had launched just the one attack against her, launching her through the wall and away from…

‘That guy!’ She finally realized, remembering the one seemingly unaffected employee who had called out to her when she had entered the building. She hadn’t paid much attention to him at the time - he was clearly a non-threat - but if she thought about the current situation, it was almost like Adrenaline was trying to keep her away from him.

So why?

Gritting her teeth, she decided that ultimately, she didn’t actually care. It might not lead her straight to the villain - but at least she had a direction to move in.

That thought in mind, she oriented on the hole in the wall she had come through, and triggered another one of her rings, this time including all of the random debris, merchandise, and racking between herself and her goal in her Aura’s list of allowed targets.

Then she crouched down, tensed legs powerful enough to kick over a city bus, and took off.

“Ah, fuck.” She heard Adrenaline curse behind her from several mouths at once as she raced in a straight line back the way she had come, objects disintegrating before her instead of impeding or tripping her up.

Just as she was about to reach the hole in the wall - something slammed into her from the side, sending her bouncing through several displays full of power tools.

This time she was better prepared though, and she quickly arrested the motion by digging her fingers into the linoleum floor and holding fast. She checked her health again.

Health:3070/4500​

It was less damage than the last attack - basically just a love tap - but it had a kick to it.

“Come on Break, you gotta throw me a bone here.” A… thing… positively covered in leeches complained to her in a voice she didn’t recognize. It felt odd to hear it, and it took her a couple of nanoseconds to realize that it was because her passive level scan was telling her that what was in front of her was probably the real Adrenaline - and that she had never heard his actual voice before.

It took her nearly no time at all to make a connection between trying to reach that hole in the wall, and Adrenaline taking the obvious risk of allowing her anywhere near his real body.

“Now I know what you’re thinking but seriously, don’t-'' The gruff voice tried to dissuade her, lifting an arm that quickly swelled and distended to comical proportions as the leeches burrowed into the skin all across the figure. In a matter of seconds she was staring at a man so huge that he was nearly three or four times the size of a normal human being. For obvious reasons, most of his clothes hadn’t survived the transformation, and only a hastily applied cloth wrap around his head protected his identity.

She derived several pieces of information from this. For one, Adrenaline had never displayed the ability to become so physically imposing before - which meant he had either been hiding the ability, or had recently leveled up, both options being less than appealing to her. For another, with the leeches now out of sight, there was no way she could safely use her Aura on them - and while she was sure Adrenaline could survive some exposure, she had no way of knowing for sure how much.

The last and final thing that occurred to her, was that she was going to have to get into a costly, collateral damage causing, fistfight with the villain.

And honestly? She was just fine with that. She was a Paladin after all.

She absolutely had no intention of losing in her class's specialty to a Caster.

All of this information combined together into one perfect crystalline moment for her, wherein - for the first time in over a year of fighting the jackass, she finally, finally, got to punch him in his stupid, smug, face, sending him stumbling through the a self checkout in a crash.

“You poor stupid man.” She faux simpered at him. He glanced at the hole in the wall, sighed once, and stood back up.

“Starting to believe it, yeah.” He replied, lifting his titanic fists into a boxing stance.