Yeah, I get it. I kept saying I wasn’t a killer, and yet I just turned that sorry blade feller into a very soft, very squishy sort of lawn dart.

Look, most villains aren’t really evil. They are narcissistic, and dramatic, and they like to color over the lines and live outside of conventional morality.

They make lots of threats. To blow up the world, to paste a city, to turn an entire country into their slave army, that sort of thing is normal. Why? Because it never works out. Sometimes it happens for a little while, but when someone is holding your country hostage, he usually doesn’t really want the headache of trying to run a country as his personal fiefdom, he just wants the money. Most people aren’t really good, but they aren’t really evil either.

It takes dedication, drive, and patience to be really evil. You have to go after real evil with both hands and wide-open eyes.

Have you ever heard of a non-insane villain putting a hero in an overly complex and easily escapable death trap, and it actually works? Me neither.

But the real monsters, the real animals that grasp evil with both hands, won’t even use a death trap. Those are for show. They will cut your head off, or shoot you in the back of the neck, and dump you in a hole. They don’t monologue, they won’t keep you alive so that they can torture you every day for the rest of your life and provide you with a chance to escape. If they make a threat, it won’t be vague and ill-defined, it will be very, very personal, and something they are fully capable of doing.

By threatening my family, even if they didn’t exist, he had doffed his ‘showboat villain’ cap and showed his true self. I am not a killer, I don't enjoy it, but I will put down a rabid animal. I happily eat bacon, and those pigs have far more of my sympathy than someone like that.

I was fine with all the ammunition unloaded on me, but I sort of had to reassess the people we were facing. I knew that a lot of them would run at the first opportunity, and I was fine with that, but courageous and high-placed cartel? They had to do something horrible to get there. Murdered someone in cold blood, created a terror display piece and slaughtered entire families. The ones that stay are not people, they are animals.

I opened my arms, showing that their bullets were having no effect. Again, my overconfidence caught up with me in a big way. Well, since drawing out their worst threats and letting them attack me was my true goal, it wasn’t really overconfidence so much as surprise.

Did you know that, on its most basic level, vibrations are simply another form of kinetic energy? Sonic pulses, the energy wave from intense and well-controlled wavelengths, induce a harmonic vibration in response.

It felt kind of like a full-by vibrator. Not painful, but it shook me up pretty good and destroying the balcony under me sent me plummeting through several more.

With the armor, I was damned close to 400 lbs. Catching the edges of the balconies, which were weakened by whoever set up that harmonic scream, sent me right through them. Almost ten floors until the mass of broken railings and rubble caught me in the small of my back and I stopped falling.

It also overfilled my energy reserves but good. I was almost humming with power, which was good because it was followed by a sort of specialty cannon, with an armor-piercing tip, that was powerful enough to actually sting, denting the front of my armor. It wasn’t as heavy as Tino’s punches, but whatever it was made of was clearly meant to be armor-piercing, and if I hadn’t been wearing the armor, even with my huge absorption, it might have put a nice big hole through me.

It also increased the depth of my personal kinetic protection, which I was ironically grateful for.

In Spanish, I heard “Jesus Christ, what the hell is his armor made of? That should have blown through a tank! He’s still moving, he should have been pasted against the inside of his armor!”

A response, in a slightly deeper tone of voice, “It does not matter! Banshee, Tie him down. We will get his armor off and get some answers.”

A female voice replied, “I am trying! All my waves seem to just be getting absorbed into whatever crap this armor is made from. If he gets back up, I am getting the hell out of here!”

So I got back up.

The girl was kind of cute, blonde with a pug nose, and she took one look at me, paled, and started running like hell. She was probably not one of the ones I was too worried about, but the guy that started relentlessly trying to shoot me was. His projectiles were really powerful, way more than his guns should have been able to handle, and the rounds seemed to glow as they impacted my armor, hard enough to start knocking me backward.

Wow. After I was charged up, even Tino, a known class C, had trouble knocking me back. He was short and was dressed in a tactical jacket. I pushed through the hail of bullets coming from… were those six-shooters? He was dumping dozens of shots from each one, so it could only be a meta.

Suddenly everything started getting hazy around me, and I felt the weirdest feeling like I was drunk for a few seconds. I shook my head, and almost felt nauseous, falling to my knees for a moment with a clunk.

Hey cool, new resistance type! It wasn’t killing me, so I was quickly building resistance, but some jerk had actually managed to pull my helmet off. I felt a hot barrel pressing against the back of my head, and a voice said “Surrender, fool, or the next bullet goes through your brain.”

“Fine,” I grumbled, but you know what? Everyone was focused on me. That was the point, to distract their attention, and it looked like, right now, it was working. I smiled a little. “How do you want to do this? I stand up and you have the cute blonde strip search me? Or do you want it to get nasty?” I chuckled.

“Get on your feet. Gunrunner, stay behind him. If he makes a move other than standing and lifting his hands, blow his brains through the wall.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said, spitting on the floor. “Still woozy.” I was lying, a bit, my absorption had already caught hold of whoever was projecting some kind of inner-ear disturbance and it was barely nudging me a little, a bit like being buzzed.

“Open your armor. We need to know who we have caught, without your toys. Play your cards right, and you might even survive… We have a need for someone that can create technology like that.”

“You want me naked?” I asked, “I am not sure I am really into dudes.” One thing that was always true about the cartels, they were paranoid about anything resembling homosexuality. If you want to piss them off, imply that they enjoy being the bread in a Johnson sandwich. It had certainly worked on the guy with the underoos headware.

“Vortex, I think he is under control now. You can ease off. We want him conscious. I do not understand the technology in this helmet, he might be a pure metatechnician.”

I was seriously filled to the brim, trying hard not to lash out when the pressure stopped. “Now get to your feet.”

Sigh. No more secret identity. The Cartels regularly cut people into abstract sculptures in front of their families to prove a point. The chance they would pay attention to federal mask mandates was very, very unlikely.

Well, at least I had black face paint, and a pair of goggles with cool-looking lights around them since I figured something like this might happen. I slowly got to my feet, raising my hands in the air.

The Man in front of me was odd-looking. It took me a moment to realize that he had spines growing out of his scalp and flowing backward, like porcupine spikes. He also had them radiating from his cheeks, like whiskers, and almost had a beard of them as well. I looked at him closely. “Huh. Is that your power? Spikes?”

He scowled at me, “My spines will travel through your head at over two hundred miles an hour unless you cooperate. Who are you? Did you create your own armor? How did you know that we would be here?”

I saw a small scrap of red cloth fluttering, slowly, through the air in the middle of the atrium lobby as it descended from the 20th floor, It was looping, and drifting slightly, but it was clearly a red ribbon. The gig was up, either capes were on their way, or she was done with her looting and had destroyed the rest.

“Well me Nombre es Powerdox. That’s Power-dox, not paradox. I am here to make the point that you are no longer welcome to do business in South Florida and to fine you for violating your territorial agreement. If you wish to renegotiate that agreement, you are welcome to do so, but now I have seen all of your faces, and so has the Witch Doctor.”

The guy with the gun lowered it from where the hot barrel was resting against the back of my head, “Oh Shit.” he said.

“What is going to happen, is that you are going to give me back my helmet, and then I will leave before The Florida Sun shows up. I have made my point, and if this is the best you’ve got, you cannot do a single thing to stop me.”

A loud bang behind my head went off, and I felt one of those shots bounce off the back of my head, skittering along my scalp, and then go whanging off into the distance.

“Ow,” I said. And spun around, catching both of Gunrunner’s hands. At full power, it was easy, and I shook him until his guns dropped to the ground. “Stop that,” I said.

I turned my head to see that spikey boy had both of his hands raised up to point at my face. “As I was saying. You will give me my helmet back. I don’t need it, but a very cute girl gave it to me. And then I will leave and you can hope you never see me again. The invitation for the Quattro Cartel has been revoked.”

“Or, you can try to stop me, and then, when the Sun shows up, they will be disappointed to find nothing here but a bunch of Metahuman bodies that have been squeezed into one somewhat-small ball.” I tightened my grip until I heard Gunrunner’s wrists break. He was actually fairly tough, but right now I was on a power high, thanks to adapting to Vortex’s ability. I dropped him.

“Oh, and say thanks to Vortex for powering me up. Whatever she did got me all riled up. I don’t see her around here, but give her a kiss for me.” I looked directly at Spike. “Now. Are your spikes a little more destructive than whatever energy bullets gunrunner just tried? Would you like to try option A, or are you going to go for option B? Kjootoo told me to offer option A, although the Gay Blade out back forced my hand a little, so you might want to send someone out with a mop.”

I shrugged, “I am actually kind of hoping you pick option B.” I said, with a straight face, “You guys also took off my helmet. Might want to get checked for radiation poisoning if you live through this before important pieces start falling off.”

“Radiation?” Gunrunner squeaked.

I nodded slowly, “Why else do you think a guy who can bounce your energy bullets with his head is wearing heavy metallic armor?” I was not exactly lying, but I was having fun.

The spikey guy, clearly the leader, sighed, and motioned to a very large man holding my helmet, “Give it back. Give our apologies to Kjootoo for the misunderstanding, we do not wish to risk a repeat of what happened with Sanjira. We will be in touch.”

I took my helmet from the guy and carefully slipped it back over my head, “Man, you guys have totally ruined my fun.” I sighed dramatically, the metallic whining making even the muscled guy wince a little.

I slowly walked out of the exit. I had maybe less than a minute, so I was going to have to take the hard exit, one I didn’t look forward to. I leaped.

On the plus side, it helped burn off some of that excess power that Vortex’s attack had filled me with, and I made sure that I was on full physical resistance once it started bleeding off. I was NOT a regularly jumping-type superhero, so I seriously overshot my mark, being a mile clear of the shore before I finally splash landed.

I’d hoped that I could get away well before the capes showed up, but I had no idea if I had succeeded. Which meant I got to stay underwater for a while. I went deep, far deeper than I expected, and jumping in the water was impossible. I finally had to resort to stripping off my armor, piece by piece, until I was finally light enough to start swimming back to the surface, but by that time I was starting to choke on water.

Have I mentioned that drowning sucks? Well, it does. And it doesn’t kill me, it just sucks. I never even lose consciousness, it just hurts.

It was kind of weird, the lack of oxygen eventually starts to make me dazzled, but this was a lot more than I expected. It looked like starry globes were wherever I looked, moving and drifting, and the weird part was when I turned my head, they didn’t move with me! They weren’t oxygen deprivation hallucinations, they were real! Of crap, did they have someone like Aquantis, an underwater vigilante type that could control water?

After a few moments, my head broke the surface, and I felt the water drain away from me, even though it felt like there was a hard surface under me. I started coughing up water, trying to clear it from my lungs, and sort of vomiting it out. I wish there was some sort of absorption for drowning, but that took more of a gift for creating oxygen, rather than a talent for absorbing energy. Drowning was drowning, it just couldn’t kill me.

Soon I was hovering over the surface of the ocean, well over it… like 50 feet above it. This was definitely not going according to plan. I was in some sort of a bubble, with weird starry watery squiggles slowly rotating over its surface in a glow.

Shit. I knew that bubble!

“Hello again, Mister Webb. Funny seeing you here. I could have sworn that the last time I saw you, you promised me you’d stay out of trouble.”