I got about ten feet from the car with Kevin in tow - all the while chatting amiably with me like we weren’t doing something incredibly stupid - when I realized I had a problem.

“I don’t have a mask!” I hissed to myself in annoyance, wanting to smack myself in the face for my own poor forethought.

I’d just gotten through a tense situation with my identity barely concealed. The last thing I needed was to show up in some random person's shaky cellphone footage of whatever was going on while visibly using powers.

Which was one of those insane things I had never understood about people. Pyromantis is attacking a gas station? Better run towards the fire so you can take a sick video for social media! It was insane. It was insane, and I could actively see other people moving towards the same spot we were, their cars parked half on the sidewalk while traffic was stopped.

“Bro, I got you,” Kevin said easily in response to my exclamation, jogging back to his car and popping open the trunk. He came back a few seconds later with two ski masks, and had an extendable baton in one hand that he quickly flicked open and then shut again before stuffing it in his pocket.

“Uh,” I began taking the mask but hesitating to put it on, even as Kev yanked his over his head.

Suddenly he looked a lot more sketchy, which was kind of saying a lot given my nickname for him on a normal day.

“Don’t freak out,” he cautioned me, holding an open palm out towards me then miming pulling a mask on.

“No, I- I’m starting to feel like I’m being baited into something here, man. You gotta explain this, right now,” I insisted, not budging.

Look I can ignore a lot of what Kevin does at work because to me, he’s always been a harmless stoner. More than that, he’s always been pretty nice to me even if a bit annoying at times. But this? Random wads of cash in little baggies? Gear in his trunk like he was planning to break into a place at some point?

Kevin was starting to look a lot less nebulously sketchy, and a lot more genuinely criminal.

The man in question sent me a dazed look for something, then glanced around us at all the parked vehicles and people idley trying to see what was going on in the distance, and turned back to me.

“Bro, don’t laugh,” he said cautiously.

“I’m really not,” I muttered apprehensively back at him.

There was no penalty for failing a quest right? I’d been temporarily blinded by the belief that this would be quick and easy experience, at least compared to my other quest which was to work sixty hours this week, but that was starting to change.

I mean, how many stories do you read where the well intentioned idiot helps the wrong person and ends up in hot water with the law? I think half of the edgy metahuman fanfiction I read started with that exact premise.

“I wanna be a hero! The kind without powers!” He blurted out at me.

I stared dumbfounded at him for that.

Not because such heroes didn’t exist - I could think of a few who seemed to primarily just be really skilled normal people with a bunch of gadgets - but because Kevn was the one saying it to me.

“You…” I paused, tentatively scanning around to make sure no one was looking, then slid the ski mask over my own face before starting over.

“You keep masks and weapons in the trunk of your car… because you want to be a hero.” I asked incredulously.

“Nick,” Kevin said, his voice and bearing taking on an uncomfortably serious tone that was jarring to hear from a guy whos eyes were so bloodshot he kind of looked like he was about to violently attack me.

“There are guys who can throw trucks across the city. There are dudes who are so smart they can solve problems like the collatz conjecture, or build shit in defiance of the square cube law. I’m not going to fucking university for some shit an asshole with superpowers can solve in an afternoon and I’m not gonna fuck around with mediocrity,”

I stared at him.

That was the most complete series of words I’d ever heard from Kevin, and I was starting to feel like something was seriously off.

“…we work in retail,” I pointed out to him.

“Cool shit costs money,” he dismissed me, deciding to walk past me with the obvious intention that I’d just follow him - which I did, but felt very uncomfortable about.

It was like Kev had sobered up and become an entirely different person. He stood differently. He spoke differently. He moved differently, with this confident strut that was completely at odds with his usual dazed stumble.

Thinking about it, why had I allowed myself to get in a car with him?

“The baggy of money?” I pressed, not entirely sure I believed thIs particular explanation.

It still felt way more likely to me that Kevin was just a run of the mill criminal.

“Bro, I sell weed. Now can we do this or what?” He stated bluntly.

“Just checking things out, no fighting,” I insisted.

“Sure, man. Totally.” He said to me with a nod. Then he turned and started to jog off to the plume of smoke visible just over the top of the nearest buildings.

I watched him go for a second, then groaned and jogged after him.

Ultimately, it was probably a stupid idea, but the idea of getting that sweet, sweet, experience tipped the scales just enough that I was willing to put up with… whatever that was… long enough to see if I was an idiot for believing him or not.

So I loped after him, my enhanced physique making quick work of the distance between us. I slowed as I drew even with Kevin, who seemed kind of annoyed at me now for some reason, and we made it to our destination shortly. It wasn’t really that far away. If it was, we wouldn’t have had to follow standard traffic rules and pull off the road entirely until hero support arrived.

It was a chaotic mess.

There were people running both away from and toward the mess - like us - although most of the people running towards things stopped at what must have seemed like a sane distance from the threat.

Which was stupid, because in my personal opinion, there is no ‘safe’ distance from what I can only describe as golems made out of dirty fabric. They looked like… like the bad guy from the nightmare before christmas movies. Oogie Boogie! That was his name! Vague approximations of the human form, with empty holes in their faces the size of tennis balls where eyes would be on a normal person. Their hands ended in twisted lengths of thinner fabric the dangled and trailed behind them as they moved. Even just on my approach, I could see one of them - they were each easily seven feet tall - bringing one of those whiplike arms down on the hood of a car - creating an appreciably large dent in the thing.

And there were five of these things, all just kind of milling around the front of some nondescript office building, randomly breaking stuff and making to attack anyone that got too close to them. If there was any saving grace at all, it was that these things were painfully slow. Many of the people still trying to escape the office building were slipping past them before the monsters could even fully turn towards them.

“Wow look at that, rag monsters. Welp, nothing we can do, guess we should-” I said, trying to keep my voice calm - and failing - as Kevin and I pulled to a stop just slightly away from the loose crowd of onlookers with their phones out.

“Let’s get closer,” Kevin interrupted me, shouldering his way past the crowd and disappearing from sight.

‘Sorry Darwin, our species is doomed.’ I thought somewhat manically, trying very hard not to have a panic attack.

Instead I opened my stats.

>>>Stats<<<

Skills

Inventory

Quests

Strength

🔼 10 🔽

Dexterity

🔼 24 🔽

Vitality

🔼 12 🔽

Intelligence

🔼 12 🔽

Wisdom

🔼 12 🔽

Luck

🔼 10 🔽

Health: 300/300

Ki: 12/12

Name: Nicholas Cole

Class: Monk

Attunement: Summoning

Status Effects: None

I wanted to reset my stats.

I wanted to reset my stats so bad.

It’s not a weird thought to have. Most modern video games let you do it for a price or with a special item. I didn’t regret saving Kevin from getting pasted by masonry, but I did regret that my Dexterity was now my single highest stat. It made me faster, sort of, but only by so much. I wasn’t going to be catching bullets or anything. And more importantly, moving fast wouldn’t help me if I made a mistake and got hit by one of those things.

‘Dodge tanking is such a stupid fucking concept,’ I screamed internally as I chased after Kevin, bullrushing through the random gawkers who were swiftly closing ranks after his passing.

I quickly flicked to my quests tab, where, sure enough, my only two available quests were sitting.

Quest: The Stoner & The Super

Description: Escort Kevin to and from the scene of the crime. Do not let Kevin get injured.

Reward: 200 Experience. 638 Dollars. ???

Bonus Objective: Stop the Criminal

Progress: None

Quest: Minimum Wage Metahuman I

Description: Work for sixty or more hours this week.

Reward: ???

Progress: 9 Hours, 8 Minutes, 12 Seconds

Yeah that… tracked.

If I was reading this right, the quest would be over when Kevin left, and there wasn’t much I could do about that besides protect him.

…I did privately resolve to just hit him over the head and run if things got especially bad though.

As though in direct spite of that thought, when I finally emerged on the other side of the crowd, it was to see Kevin dead sprinting towards the nearest monster. It had actually managed to reach one of the people fleeing the building and had them - a middle aged guy who was absolutely screaming his head off - wrapped in its limb and was waving them overhead like a child with a toy. The empty aperture in its face that would have been its mouth had it been human was even stretched into a gleeful un-smile as it waved him haphazardly about.

“Fuuuuuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” I screamed haphazardly as I kicked myself into gear and started to sprint after him.

As previously demonstrated, I was caught up to, and then past Kevin in the space of about a half second. I hadn’t done a whole lot of testing with the Dexterity stat, but I was really feeling it now. It wasn’t just that I was faster, or rather, I didn’t feel like I was supernaturally faster than I should be able to move. I was just exponentially better at articulating my movements. I hadn’t noticed before because I hadn’t been trying to push myself, but now that I was running to what was probably my death, I could. Every footfall felt perfectly placed, my body moved like it had an instinctive knowledge of air resistance and how to foil it, my eyes were scanning the ground ahead of me as I moved in search of obstacles on practically autopilot.

It was a strangely invasive feeling. Like something else was nudging my initial movements towards the correct direction.

But not invasive enough that I was going to be ungrateful for the boost as I reached the cloth monster which turned a ponderously slow gaze on me as I approached.

Now, a good, proper superhero, with training, an understanding of optics, and just generally any kind of firm grasp of heroics as a concept would have saved the guy the monster was holding first and foremost.

I had a decent grasp of what a hero would do, but in my head, I wasn’t a hero. I was just some dickhead who was being dragged into a situation I shouldn’t be in because a different dickhead wanted to be a hero.

So when I finally bridged the gap between myself and my target, I let my body do whatever the hell it wanted with my newfound knowledge of martial arts - and did perhaps one of the most obscenely impractical things I could have at that moment.

I did a Webster Axe Kick.

Now, I only knew what that was because of said stolen knowledge, but for those of you who don’t have an ill gotten encyclopedic knowledge of kicking and punching stuff, a Webster Axe Kick is when you do a front flip, and use the forward momentum of the flip, to kick someone, ideally, directly on the top of their stupid squishy skull.

It was a good move, in that if it connected you were fucked, but it was a bad move, in that it was really easy to see coming, really easy to dodge, and left you really vulnerable in it’s execution.

More to the point, I wasn’t tall enough to actually hit this thing's head this way.

So what ended up happening was that my heel buried itself in the thing's body somewhere near where a human collar bone would be, which caused it to drop to its knees under the force of my blow.

“Get the guy!” Kev bellowed at me as he charged up next to me, having finally caught up after I had stopped to - and I can’t stress this enough - do a front flip at my opponent. He clocked the thing on its head with his baton, then circled around behind it before it could respond to his presence.

‘Okay, maybe a little oversight on what the hell I’m doing in a fight,’ I mentally noted, before shaking the idea off.

‘Wait, no, fuck fighting! I don’t want to fight!’ I switched to.

I couldn’t tell if it was one of my other stats, or just that Dexterity was somehow really unbalanced, because I felt like I had a lot of time for these sorts of mental asides when I should ostensibly be fighting for my life.

It was a thought I set aside for the moment in lieu of doing what Kevin had asked me to do, expending a point of Ki to create a stone soldier who began to appear with his stone saber coming down on the arm of the monster before its whole body had even finished spawning into existence.

The ragged limb didn’t cut cleanly off the thing - which made sense considering the stone sabers were closer to clubs than real sword - but it clearly hurt the thing, because it abruptly dropped it’s hostage and reared that same limb back to slam down on me with a whip crack speed that was completely at odds with the speed it had been moving at before this.

‘Was it just fucking around before?’ I wondered, feeling oddly calm now that I was actually fighting.

It wasn’t that I had no fear, it was just that things didn’t feel… real. It was like, here I was, in the middle of an evening street, fighting a rag monster with my bare hands. Who does that? Not me. I spent my evenings playing modded video games. My greatest trial in life was remembering to buy groceries.

I had no right to be where I was currently standing.

But I was standing here anyway, and now that I was here I felt… I dunno. The way one does when doing something unpleasant. I was doing it, I hated it, but it was going to get done.

It was an attitude that had served me all my life, and would probably be very helpful for compartmentalizing the trauma I would certainly remember to start feeling once the fighting was over and done with.

Forewarned, and with the full knowledge of how my abilities worked - I think anyway - I responded to the attack the only way I could think to.

I conjured a new Terracotta Soldier directly in the air overhead, between me and the approaching attack. It blocked. I blocked. And when the limb cleaved through my minion like butter but landed on my crossed forearms with barely more than a stinging sensation - I knew I was on to something.

‘Block fucking stacks! It fucking stacks! Oh my god if I could get three soldiers at once I could be one hundred percent immune to damage! I can do this! I can fucking win!’ I realized, and at that moment, a surge of euphoric thrill ran down my spine.

I loved this kind of stupid interaction in video games. It was like playing one of those old MUD’s and realizing that the computer couldn’t tell the difference between ‘limbs’ and ‘hands’, so it had no problem at all letting a millipede equip a gun for each limb. It was dumb, it made no sense, and it was probably a bug (heh) in the system - but it was abusable.

I rode that high through another exchange with the creature, rushing towards it with a textbook boxing jab then a straight to recover the two points of Ki I had just spent, then backed up in preparation of it’s next attack. Kevin tried to help - he was behind it and it wasn’t very smart so it hardly paid attention to his weaker blows to its back - but it kept its attention on me.

Which was good, because Kevin’s safety was kind of the only reason I was here.

“Behi-!” I heard Kevin call out to me, almost too late to notice. I was so focused on the fight in front of me that I’d gotten tunnel vision. I was waiting for that split second moment of attack where I could guarantee both myself and my soldiers could block together, like a perfect dodge in a video game, but I had forgotten a very important, critical aspect of the situation.

I was fighting one monster right now, but there were actually five of them.

My eyes widened as my supercharged brain and reflexes registered what Kevin was trying to tell me, and I lunged to the right just in time to take the blow that had been coming from behind me on my left arm instead of my head.

It hurt. It hurt so bad I was positive my arm was broken.

But somehow, it wasn’t. When I came out of my roll, it was with an overly complex kip up that made use of my enhanced strength in ways I know no martial art was designed for that moved me another three feet backwards and allowed me to come around with a block already at the ready.

Before me were all five of the monsters, each of them moving towards me with a newfound malicious intelligence that it felt like hadn’t been present before.

And then there was Kevin, on the opposite side of the mob from me, watching me square up with the dumb things.

And just like that, my manic, obsessive, love of video game bullshit was trumped by the reminder that - yeah, I was probably going to die.

I shared a look with Kevin that I hoped he read as ‘please fucking run away so I can leave’ and he nodded at me like he understood perfectly.

I was about to breathe a sigh of relief and then follow my own advice - darting a gaze around to look for escape routes that wouldn’t leave these things chasing me through a mob of gawkers - but then Kevin did the exact opposite of what I had wanted him to do.

He reached under his baggy sweater for something - which, by the way, showed off that he somehow had washboard abs despite eating two double cheeseburgers for lunch every day I’d known him - and came away with a can of spray on deodorant that had evidently been hanging from a harness he had hidden underneath it.

The hell?

I didn’t really have time to think all that hard on that, because in the brief moment of distraction it had caused me the monsters had closed in, and I found myself desperately ducking, rolling, blocking, and conjuring minions to take hits for me from the creatures.

It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t have taken them all on at once, I eventually realized. It was that they had way more reach on me than I did on them. They could attack me from relative safety, and the only way I could retaliate while being suppressed by the constant barrage of attacks was to conjure a stone soldier near them. The problem was, I needed to use those soldiers to defend myself, and I had a limited number of uses of them before I would need to get into melee again to recharge my Ki.

Something had to give eventually.

And something did.

It just wasn’t what I expected to give.

It was just as I was considering a suicidal rush to get back into my optimal range that it happened.

A gout of fire consumed one of the creatures, which quickly began to flail desperately around itself, slamming its two limbs into its compatriots on either side of itself. Seeing my opportunity, I lunged forward amidst the confusion, launching myself into a drop kick on the monster closest to the edge of the group, which knocked both it and myself over.

I however had been expecting that, and so caught myself on my hands before my back even touched the ground, and pushed, throwing myself up and over the downed monster. A conjured soldier followed behind me, materializing in the air atop the thing, and in unison we landed on its head and stomach respectively.

Defeated Raggamuffin

0 Experience Rewarded

A window popped up in front of me, but I swiftly dismissed it, instead regaining my bearings and whirling on the next nearest monster while quickly checking on Kevin.

He had a match and a can of body spray out and was using it as a flamethrower. A really, really, shitty flamethrower.

But it was working.

Whether it be because of their cloth like nature, or maybe just because they were that stupid, the… Raggamuffins…

‘Nope, not calling them that. They’re Bag Monsters now,’ I thought to myself.

Anyway. The Bag Monsters just refused to get near the open flame, even though the one that was currently on fire was taking way longer to die than I was entirely happy with.

After that, we cleaned the mess up pretty quickly. If I had to put it into words I would almost say that they were more or less permanently stunned by Kevin’s display of frat party prowess, which made sweeping them up with extreme violence a cinch. They didn’t even really fight back after that, and much like the first one, they all threw stupid notifications at me awarding me zero experience for defeating them.

Still, when all was said and done, I was both extremely tired, in a lot of pain, and was very conscious of the crowd of people just kind of staring at the spectacle like we were at a wrestling match.

“Fast as fuck boi. God damn dude, where’d you learn that shit?” Kevin asked me, jogging over to high five me which I begrudgingly granted him.

“Powers. Can we go now?” I asked desperately. Kev paused to examine me, top to bottom, then looked back at the building we had been fighting in front of, completely ignoring the crowd that was now cheering at us like we were street performers.

It was the worst. I wanted to curl up into a ball and die. Somehow people paying attention to me was ten thousand times worse than having to fight for my life.

“How gassed out are you?” He asked me, and I grouchily check my health before answering.

“...on a scale from one to three hundred, I’m at one hundred and fifty seven,” I said darkly. Nearly half my life lost from what amounted to chip damage. Even if I could prevent most damage by being very acrobatic and cheating with my Block skill, I still couldn’t prevent all of it.

“Fifty two percent? Healing factor?” Kev pressed.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I mumbled, glancing once more at the crowd. Kevin seemed to finally take my hint, because he nodded decisively at me.

“Take a breath, but we gotta go in there,” He said, pointing at the building.

“Why?” I asked incredulously.

“Bro,” He said, looking around us at the ruined cars, damaged windows on the buildings, and at least one smoldering pile of rags that had once been alive.

“Where’s the Metahuman?” He finished.

I blinked.

He was right.

I really, really hated to admit it, but he was right. We’d fought obvious minions. Similar to myself or Adrenaline in the grand scheme of things. Minion Masters were a pretty common flavour of Metahuman.

I still didn’t see why we had to be the ones to find the guy - or girl - though.

“Who cares?” I tried tentatively. Kevin gave me a flat look, then rolled his eyes, and turned back towards the building, beginning to jog towards it.

I groaned again.

‘The bonus objective better be fucking amazing,’ I griped to myself.

Ah, who was I kidding.

Bonus objectives always suck.

God damn it.