It was a shame there were no teleportation spots closer to Harold’s home, the one bordering Sector 45 only being held open as a personal favour to the man since it helped Sector 44 as well. Without that need to have a Hero easily teleported to exterminate any wandering Flesh-Beasts, Nikola knew her travels to the man’s place would have been more than a day long.

Instead, she just had to spend forty minutes in the air, blazing through the sights as she channelled her power to the limits. With the help of her new motivations, she was able to reach quite high speeds. She wasn’t close to the heroes who breached the sound barrier without breaking a sweat but she was certainly able to outpace some of the more expensive cars.

Finally getting close to Harold’s home, Nikola flew through the destroyed city. The skyscrapers were unmaintained, green growth covering them all. Those screams of the damned that could be heard as she flew by them were like music to her ears. She wondered if Harold hadn’t gone through the upper floors recently. They seemed to be infested again.

Landing just inside the electric fence, she was able to look at the glass building in front of her. It was quite the cosy cottage, the curved windows all around letting it shine in the daylight. With the golden outlines, it was exactly what a manifestation of the sun should have lived in. Nikola was still unsure how that crazy old man had been able to get something so luxurious built in the middle of an apocalyptic city.

“You’re here in half the time,” Harold noted, sitting on the porch in a comfy chair. It looked to be homemade, the wooden design certainly was not made too symmetrical. “I guess you’ve made progress on your abilities?”

“Another Branded Hero gave me a few tips,” Nikola confirmed, sitting down next to the man. “Do you want to tell me just why the most famous murderer in recent history is challenging you?”

The man just sat there for a moment, staring into the broken city. Nikola didn’t hurry him, seeing in his eyes the memories flashing by. They were haunted by the past.

“I… partly told you all those days before when you first got thrown into off-duty,” Harold began, making the woman think back to that accident with the now-dead branded hero. It had been a scandal, and it still was, where bad choices had stopped Nikola from protecting everybody. Many people hated them because of it. “I know what it feels like because I’ve experienced it myself many times.”

“So you have said,” Nikola responded with a curious tone. “And this Jared. Is he from one of the many hundred mistakes you have made?”

“Yes. He was a small part of the biggest one I ever did,” Harold said, looking at his own hands as he filled them with that golden light that was his power. The physical manifestation of the sun in any way he could think of. Nikola knew it was noted down in the top hundred most powerful abilities ever. She wondered if that man still had the mind to deserve that mid-ranking. “I like to think that it was mercy-killing at that time. I stopped a lot of people from becoming mindless beasts. Every person he inflicted with those pieces of technology would have their insides purged of everything that gave them individuality. I watched nearly a hundred become nothing but pawns before I had to just stop their numbers from growing exponentially.”

“Give me some context, Harold,” Nikola cut in. “Who was ‘he?’”

The old man’s hands were shaking so Nikola held them tight.

“A man by the name of Andrew Hollow,” Harold explained with no real emotion. “He is dead now. I killed him myself when he tried to break out of prison. But… I also killed hundreds of his pawns. He was able to make pieces of technology that would replace a man’s mind in seconds and turn them into a beast he could remotely control. He had no care for life or anything close to it so he was able to self-replicate. It was a miracle that I was able to get told about it before the number of people reached the hundreds.”

“What happened during it?” Nikola asked.

“He took over most parts of a farming area,” Harold explained. “When he had one person, he simply made them walk over and infect the next one. It was only the lack of people on that farm that made the growth slow down. Yet, by the time that I came, he still had enough to momentarily overwhelm me. It took too long before I realised that the people couldn’t be returned to their former selves. They were lost. To make sure that I didn’t allow the apocalypse, I… killed every single person on that farm.”

Nikola didn’t say anything, just listening as he talked.

“They started hiding in the masses when it became clear they couldn’t kill me. They tried with some fancy tech but their distractions did nothing. When they began to act human again, begging for their lives, I nearly allowed them to just walk away. Then one stabbed me in the side and I allowed no chances. Even if I had no proof that they had been infected, the simple matter that they had been close to them was all I needed to cut their throats. If I had even allowed a single person to leave, they could have taken over an entire city in just a day.”

“Where does Jared fit into all of this?” Nikola finally asked. “Where is he in this?”

“He was the only one I didn’t kill,” Harold said with an empty voice. “He, out of the several hundred people at that farm, was the only one I allowed to live. He had been hiding in a cupboard the entire time, crying his eyes out. I just couldn’t do it when he looked at me. Even if he was infected, I allowed him to get out. He was meant to have been taken into a foster home but I never heard about him again. I guess this is what happens when I allow him to know that I killed every person he cared about.”

“That… is a terrible situation,” was everything the woman could say, looking up empty-eyed as well. She knew that there were moments when no chances could be allowed. She knew the protocols for such a scenario, she had signed off that she would do the same. Yet doing it, actually knowing it had happened before was something her mind refused to accept. “Is this why you stopped this life of Heroism?”

“Partly,” Harold answered. “I couldn’t see myself as a Hero of Justice when I had just performed a mass-killing worthy of the history books. I might have been the most prolific murderer in that decade. If this killing was ever given less than the highest restriction, I don’t think I would have been allowed to live by the public.”

That broken laugh that came from the old man haunted Nikola. How many times had he been forced to relive it as he had trained her and Seid? How had he even continued his work after that?

“Even the owners of that farm were gone,” Harold mentioned when Nikola didn’t talk. “They rebranded everything when some new owner came in. I think his name was… Ulf something.”

That name. Nikola remembered reading it only two days ago, right on the back wall of a certain reception.

“What… What name did the farm have after the rebranding?” Nikola asked her mentor for several years. Harold looked at her with a muted gaze but he answered nonetheless.

“Amity Farms,” the former Hero said with a questioning tone, his eyes widening slightly at the mildly horrified expression on Nikola’s face.

“..I have been there recently,” Nikola said, the man’s face hardening. “I have been there twice already.”

“Why?”

“Because we had an incident with a man growing mad there, attacking everybody without any form of restlessness,” Nikola explained. Harold looked sick. “I had the corpse looked through a day later and it turned out that the Parasite that had caused it was mechanical but we couldn’t figure out anything else.”

“Was there the slightest hint of anything else at that place?” her old mentor questioned, gripping her hands tightly. Even in his old days, his grip strength was enough to make pain appear in her mind. The moment she showed fear, Harold let go, stopping his emotions from running wild. “I need to know, Nikola.”

“No, I found nothing,” Tesla answered, rubbing her mildly sore hands. “But… Seid thought it was weird and he came to me the night I got back from that initial first encounter. He said he wanted to check it out himself.”

“And what did he find?”

“I don’t know,” Nikola said truthfully. “In the news, there have been a lot of disappearances at the farm. Nearly everybody with some criminal connections is gone which makes it seem like Seid has had a field trip. And I also saw him on the camera feed at the farm just yesterday so I know he was there, but he hasn’t given me any form of response.”

“Oh, damn it all!” Harold said. “Why does that boy have to get him into every single mess possible.”

“Do you think that Parasite might have been a warning about things to come?” Nikola questioned.

“No… the man who controlled them is dead and has been dead for over a decade,” Harold said, rejecting the woman’s theories. “But I know for a fact that Jared is going to recreate the field that I originally forced him to watch all those years ago. If Seid is anywhere close to that place, he is going to get himself killed trying to stop it.”

It took no amount of effort to imagine that scenario. She knew Wave from his Hero days and she knew Seid now as a Vigilante. Going into places he was meant to stay away from was all he could do.

“Then let's go!” Nikola said as she manipulated the electromagnetic waves, going into the sky in the blink of an eye. Yet she was just as quickly pulled right back down again by a certain golden rope. “What?”

“You might be faster, Tesla, but you aren’t that fast,” Harold said as he stepped into a conjured chariot with neck braces. “Hop in. I’ll show you what real speed is.”

Right. Nikola had always hated that part of her time under Harold. That man loved trying to figure out how much speed she could handle. And as they broke the sound barrier with ease, she wondered if she was going to be reaching that limit soon.