Interlude: The Trials of Overlord
New York. The city where dreams were made, the city where dreams could be broken. If you could make it here, you could make it anywhere. Or that was what they said, anyway. The expression seemed mostly true for those who were in the game between villains and heroes, the constant back and forth that affected the entire world. New York was one of those places where there were always plenty of others willing to start a team, either of villains or heroes. There were always plenty of things to get into for a newcomer to the scene, too. Heists and jobs stopping heists, important figures that were wanted by both sides of the law, valuable targets that could make plenty of money on ransoms or in rewards for their rescues. Starting off in New York wasn’t hard. Surviving for long was another story.
For someone that was just arriving here, it could seem oh so cold, however. It wasn’t like it was cheap staying here. It was the opposite, and while there was always work in New York for someone with powers, there wasn’t always
good work. While it was easy to jump in, climbing the ranks was something that was much harder. After all, how many other cities had this many others trying to do the same thing? How many people could reach the same dreams before it became too crowded at the top and some were pushed back down to the bottom? That was what the woman in the mask was contemplating as she stood in the rain in Nassau County, staring up at the Guardians Building that could be seen through the fog because of its bright lighting. She’d come here a few days, just looking at it and waiting near the gates to Angel’s Village. But they wouldn’t let her in.
Even though she had come from more than a continent away to get here. This was maybe the third or fourth time she had come here and just stared at the building from a distance and waited near the gates, as if she was waiting and hoping she would see someone, but she hated the place because of it. The Guardians claimed to protect the downtrodden. But when someone who had nothing, like her, came all the way over here, they wouldn’t even let her in the area. She could have broken in, yes. But she didn’t know how much help that would be. Angel’s Village was an entire town, really. Finding someone there wasn’t necessarily easy when she would have to sneak around to do it.
Mentally, she was standing on a knife’s edge. She had endured many things. But traveling thousands of miles to see someone and being turned away at the gate? That was somehow worse than most of the other stuff. At least back then she had been hopeful. Now, it was becoming increasingly apparent that just having that hope wouldn’t be enough for her, and that even as she reached what she thought would bet the last step before finding some happiness for herself, more was required. She didn’t know how much longer she would be able to keep going. But she knew she had to try. “We’ll see each other again eventually,” she stated to herself, staring up into the fog once again. “Even these oceans… Won’t be enough to keep us apart.”
It was hard for her to pinpoint one spot where her fall had actually started. Things had been bad for awhile and there weren’t many people that had suffered as much over such a long time span while still surviving. Which event was the one that had started it all? Being taken away from her parents? The tortures that she had endured during her adolescent years? Fighting not just with the enemies, but with the people that she had considered her own friends, ones that she would definitely give her life for if the situation demanded it? Maybe that was when she had really fallen. Through everything that had happened, there had been others around her. At some point, she had even been considered the glue that held them all together. Until she wasn’t, anymore. And things went further downhill for her from there.
There was one specific night which she could blame her fall on, too. Maybe blame was too harsh of a word. More accurately, there was one specific night that she could track it all back to. If the cracks had begun to show earlier than that, that one night in Guangzhou was the point where they opened up into a split. A divide between her and just about everyone else, a point of no return which she was still recovering from to this day. The day when a friendship had fallen and she had made an enemy out of someone she had looked out for in the past. She could remember it vividly, even if she didn’t want to. Somehow, even after things had changed this much and after her opinions on certain people changed, it hurt her that things had turned out this way. It wasn’t how she had wanted it to happen even at the time, but once things had started setting themselves into motion, she couldn’t bring herself to back down. Perhaps that was one of her flaws, and one that had bit her. The inability to realize when she should have just backed down and taken the loss before things went further than they needed to.
It had been on a rooftop, overlooking the city, during one of the rare times when they didn’t have to worry about completing some objective and they were just relaxing while they were waiting to return to base. Two of them, however, weren’t relaxing. She remembered standing there, not far from the ledge, wind blowing her hair across her face as she stared at the beastlike woman standing about three to four feet in front of her, one foot propped up on the edge as if she had no fear of falling, even in the wind. That was so like her. To have no fear, even when one slip could mean death. Not that falling would be the worst way to go for someone that was regularly shot at. It would be a much quicker and easier death than the battlefield was.
“Look, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but if you have a problem, I’m standing right here,” said the bestial woman. Sure, she was only an arm’s length away, and she could be pushed off the roof, potentially. But she wasn’t weak, even if it did look like she was in a dangerous position. She stood at 6’6”, didn’t have a huge figure to match but she definitely weighed enough to throw her opponent around, and her strength wasn’t that of a regular person. She’d smash a regular person in normal hand to hand combat, the other girl had witnessed it first hand and she knew that if they were in a fight, she wouldn’t receive mercy just because they were friends. Or because they had used to be friends. No, she would be up against a brawler who would do anything that she needed to do to win, the scars on her face acting as a reflection of that. She’d sacrifice her body to take down an enemy, there was no way she was going to go easy just because of the past. “So if you want to settle things, let’s do it. Otherwise, you should quit acting like a teenager and shut the fuck up about it around the rest of the team.”
She reached up and brushed the hair out of her face. If something was going to go down, she was going to make sure that she could see properly. If she did start the fight here, she would be the almost certain winner, but that wasn’t what she was trying to do. Starting a fight here would have consequences. Especially when it was against the leader of their group. She could secure the kill, yes, or even beat down her opponent non lethally, but how much help would that be to her when it simply landed her in trouble? And her opponent knew that, not breaking her stare as she waited for a reply. Smug bitch. She knew she would lose in any straight fight and yet she knew that she was also untouchable. Maybe that was the only reason she was willing to stand so close to the ledge while tempting someone almost as tenacious as her to fight her.
There was a choice to be made. She could take what some would call the high road and she could walk away right here. She could surrender, not fight for what she cared about, and accept the truth that was in front of her. Or she could fight back against it, maybe not with her fists and with her powers but with her words and through more subtle actions. She could say that she wasn’t going to surrender. Even if it ripped apart the very fabric of what this team had been built on for years, splitting up the two people that had acted as the glue for their respective corners, and two people that had looked out for each other in the past, no matter what they thought of each other in the moment. Could they depend on that loyalty from each other going forward? Probably not. Not if the path of resistance, of selfishness, was taken.
“Is this how you’re going to treat one of your best friends?” she asked, fighting as hard as she could to keep her voice level and not show any sign of weakness or hesitation. Any weakness, and she would be devoured by the beast standing across from her. Not in the literal sense, but in the sense of the argument. Above everything, she had to show she wasn’t caving. “Think of all the times I’ve been around. I’ve saved your life, you know. I’ve never been afraid to suffer pain because of you. I’ve always been willing to take it if it meant helping you, and that’s only talking about the things we’ve experienced on the battlefield, you know good and well that I’ve also advocated for you all the damn time outside of it. Who was always there to cover for you and explain what you actually meant when you ended up letting your temper get the better of you and you pissed off one of your friends? It was me. I was the one that made the peace, but it’s not like you’ve ever spent much time thanking me for that. Not that I even asked you to in the first place. Who was the one to keep you in line when you were ready to snap and do something that would get yourself killed? It was me that talked you down from those things, multiple times. You’re still hanging in there because of help that I gave, and the only thing that I ask for in return is-”
“That I back off from this?” the other girl asked, taking a step forward and grabbing her opponent’s collar, pulling her ever so closer without stepping down from that ledge, even as the wind picked up and whipped against the faces of both of them. It was hard to tell if the feeling of butterflies was from the tension of the conversation, from the fact that they were both a few feet away from their deaths, or both. “Yeah, figures you would ask that of me. I’m not the one that started this, you know. So maybe instead of lashing out at the entire team for it, and me specifically, you should talk to the person that did start it-”
“You think I mean to lash out at the entire team? Because I’m sorry if that’s how it comes across, that’s
not what I’m trying to do. I want nothing but the best for this team and you know that. You know that I love each and every one here, even you despite you testing that bond in the past few weeks and months, but when you keep pushing me and you’re working on taking the one thing that makes me happy despite being stuck with the same shitty job that all of us are stuck with, with even less prospects of getting out than you yourself have, and you keep pushing me about it and rubbing it in my face… It’s hard to not let any of the frustration come out. I would say it’s impossible.”
“You’re a tough one, you know. I’m sure you can handle this. I’m sure you can handle seeing it, if you put your mind to it. Or if you really want to do something about it, you should do something about it. But whatever you do, I’m telling you to stop letting it out around the team. Around
my team. You have such a problem with me these days… Either stop me or shut the fuck up about it-” started the beastlike girl, before she was thrown to the side and onto the inner part of the rooftop, as the other girl flicked her there without putting in any effort at all. There would be consequences to any fight, but for now, those consequences didn’t matter. If she was going to throw away the friendship that had been forged between them over the past years, and act so coldly towards her so-called friend, all bets were off. There would indeed be a fight.
“You wanted me to do something about it, eh? Be careful what you fucking wish for. You can’t tell me that I didn’t fucking try, that I didn’t give it my best fucking shot to not bring my temper into this and to talk to you calmly and rationally. I thought that maybe you valued being friends and valued holding this team together as much as I did, after all, you’re the leader and I would have thought that you’d care more about team chemistry. That maybe you would sacrifice something for it because that’s what a leader does. But if you want to be like this, I can be like this too, and you already know that you have no way to beat me when I
do feel like being this way,” said the girl who was turning away from the edge of the rooftop, walking towards her target and the others that were now watching in a slow and methodical way, holding both of her arms out as blades were created out of the thin air and hovered around them, following her movements closely. Her blue eyes flashed intimidatingly, almost like there was a fire burning within them, and as she walked, more blades were formed in the air behind her and around her, following her in a pattern that resembled the kind of fancy tail that might follow a bird, each one of them ready to move and destroy her target on her command.
The girl on the ground had miscalculated. Pushed too far. Bit off more than she could chew and she didn’t even move, not because she physically couldn’t, but because she was shocked. Sure, she had baited the enemy into an attack, but she didn’t think the actual attack would come. No, she imagined that she would convince her enemy to back down that way because of the consequences of attacking her, but once those consequences were no longer cared about… She lost her most valuable shield, and without it, she was nothing more than a mere brawler. Maybe she was a larger brawler than most and she had exceptional strength, yes, but she was still just a brawler, and even with her weapons, she was no match for the person in front of her that could bend reality itself and simply pull weapons out of thin air. Even if she did have her own weapons with her right now, she knew that the enemy would just keep coming, and coming, even if she fired and hit her mark-
Perhaps the bestial girl wasn’t going to die today. Her enemy wasn’t that far from her, as more blades appeared in the air around her and pointed towards the downed target on the ground, but there was someone in front of her who had jumped up from the group that had been watching and stood in front of the target. Maybe the one person that could end this, the person that had been the source of the split and the only person that could keep it from becoming deadly. Her eyes were wide and there were tears welling in them, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. She didn’t want anyone to die. Not because of her, even indirectly. So if she was the source of this fight, she would die to make sure that it didn’t take anyone else’s life, if necessary. She hoped that cooler heads would win out and that it wouldn’t come to that, but even she couldn’t be sure, as the figure with the blades continued walking into the path of her downed opponent.
“Look, I know things aren’t going good with her and I know you deserve better and… And… I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry, you don’t deserve this to happen to you and you’ve never deserved any of the things that have happened to you but I’m asking you not to take it out on her because of something that she’s not really responsible for. If you want to go after someone because of my choice… Go after me and not her. I’m right here, it’s not like I can do anything to stop you, and I know that I hurt you. So kill me, if it will save her life,” the girl in the middle said, her arms still spread as if she was waiting for the inevitable attack from the blades to come. But even after seconds passed, there was nothing but silence. Nothing but a cold stare as the blades remained still and didn’t move out of their position in the air.
Nobody said a word for what seemed like a minute, but in reality it was a much shorter time. “You know I can’t do anything against you,” said the girl with the blades, pausing as she stared into the eyes of the person in front of her. “Even after… Even after getting hurt. I just have a question for you. One that you don’t have to answer but I’ve been thinking about this for weeks… For months… And it’s been tearing me up inside, damn it...Why her?
WHY HER? What has she ever done compared to everything we’ve done? I still remember when we used to be joined at the hip and I still remember that fucked up mission in Brazil where you helped pull me back together and I remember the talks about how if we somehow escaped all of this we would do it together and… You went with her? I just want to know why. Why wasn’t I good enough? Did I do something to hurt you? Is it because-”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… Please just don’t take this out on her,” the girl in the middle begged, and how could the one with the blades say no to her? She was indeed the reason why all of this had started in the first place and she out of everyone… She was the one who carried the most weight in her words. “I’m so fucking sorry, it’s not that you weren’t good enough or that you don’t deserve better it’s that… I just thought… That you didn’t need it as much and I’m sorry-”
“Enough! Just stop! You’re only making it worse,” growled the one controlling the blades, and she swung her arm downwards to cause all of them to shoot downwards into the concrete rooftop, penetrating the surface and sticking there. It was intimidating, yes, but it was a better outcome than the alternative, which was that the blades went into an actual person. She turned and looked at the girl in the middle one more time, staring her down with an intensity in her eyes that she had never quite had before, losing all semblance of her normal calm. “She needed it more, huh… Heh. After everything we’ve been through. You really are heartless, K211.”
The new employee at Ivanov’s Coffee was an interesting one. When the application had said that the employee’s main experience in the past was being a veteran of a number of foreign conflicts, it seemed like this person would be a physically imposing, maybe bearded or tattooed, man who would most likely be in his thirties or maybe even his forties. The person that actually showed up, however, looked much different from the stereotype. She had indeed been a mercenary, but she wasn’t anything like what the image would suggest. She was just a girl. One that looked college aged, but still a girl, and one with a decent looking face and dyed hair that was not what one would expect from someone with a military background.
She perplexed her shiftmate, Drago Marovic, because of that. The fact of the matter was that she definitely knew her stuff. Based on a few talks with her and just seeing the way that she carried herself, the application hadn’t been exaggerated. She knew things that someone wouldn’t have known without seeing combat, and she carried herself as if she was still on a battlefield. It was a bit subtle, but it was still possible to notice if you paid enough attention to her when she didn’t know you were looking. Her eyes would dart around to every customer frequently as if she was a soldier in the Middle East checking out each civilian to see if they were a potential hostile insurgent.
When talking to her, she used some of the same slang that the actual soldiers that Marovic had talked to used. They could have a discussion about something related to warfare and she knew more technical details that Marovic knew. Things like the small details about certain weapons, strategies which were clearly beyond that of which a normal person would know about, and even details about specific locales. She claimed to have been to a number of different ones, from peaceful locations where she worked against metahuman and regular criminals, such as in India and Brazil, to flashpoints around the world such as Syria, Yemen, and West Bank. According to her, the latter was where the more consistent money came in as a mercenary while the former paid less unless it was for a specific job such as capturing a metahuman who was very wanted by the authorities. She said she had personally been to infamous cities such as Idlib, Aden, and Baghdad, and she could describe them in way more detail than someone that had just read about them on the internet, mentioning obscure details and factions within those places that weren’t known to most of the public.
Furthermore, she had accompanied Marovic to the boxing club down the street a few times and she clearly knew what she was doing with that, too. She said that she had never competed on the amateur or professional level and that she was just using the skills she had learned as a mercenary, but she was quite good and she had beat a few of the more experienced members of the gym. And that was without knowing the specifics of the sport of boxing and just relying on her general athleticism and sense for how a fight was going, which turned out to be pretty damn good. Marovic had the feeling that if he took her down to a shooting range at some point, she would excel in that too and say something about how she had learned the skills as a mercenary.
In not that long of a time working at the shop, she had quickly become one of the boys. Not just in the sense that everyone liked her but in the sense that she had stereotypically male interests and she shared them with the rest of the staff. When it wasn’t her shift, she was frequently in the back with the others watching football or chatting about the latest fights that happened on the weekends down the street at the gym. She didn’t just do it because she thought it would make her more friends, but because she genuinely liked things like this and showed an almost childlike happiness when she was able to experience them. She didn’t even have any real connection to this place. It was run by some Russians, Serbs, Greeks, and others from far away lands. And yet she cheered as she watched
their teams on TV, made her home in a place where
their flags decorated the walls, and she even learned to cook
their menu as she started working more at this place and took on a bigger role than just making coffee and keeping the place clean.
Marovic couldn’t help but stare at her as she sat in the back room with the others just after her shift had ended, chatting about some story from her past and chuckling about it, seeming so peaceful. It was a bit of a contrast from the subject matter of the story, since she was talking about getting shot at in some third world country. Why had she adopted this place as her own, out of everywhere that she could have gone? She was clearly talented. She had also apparently received some kind of special training, giving her a lot of skills outside of just mercenary work. She claimed that at some point they had made her learn how to fly planes, and that she could find work doing it if she felt like it. But according to her, she wasn’t that interested in it.
“Oppa!” she called out to Marovic, using a Korean term. It was kind of funny, how she could switch between multiple languages with ease. Just another thing that she was seemingly a prodigy with. She’d spoken Korean, Arabic, some Chinese, and French to them. She said she’d start learning either Russian or Serbian, just so she could talk to them in their own language, and she didn’t consider it a big deal. Said that it was pretty easy when you had been doing it long enough that picking up more words became a reflex. But when they asked her where her actual homeland was and what language she had spoken originally, she said she didn’t know. It was a strange answer. How many people didn’t know where their homeland was? But it had only been mentioned briefly, so it was never brought up again since then. It still didn’t keep Marovic from thinking about it. She was indeed one strange girl. “How long are you going to stand there instead of coming to listen to my story?”
Maybe she was some kind of drifter and she was looking for a family to finally settle down with. She had talked about plenty of things in her stories and some of them involved other people but she had never talked about an actual family. The reasons why for that, Marovic wasn’t sure. Maybe she wasn’t good with her actual family for whatever reason and maybe she was still getting over moving from the life of a mercenary to a life that was… Different from that. There were a number of possible reasons for why she had clung to this group, but she was here now, and it seemed like she would be staying for awhile. Marovic just wondered if, as time passed, they would find out more about her. There had never been someone around here, after all, that was so close and yet so mysterious at the same time.
Hired muscle was one of the things that you could obtain on the black market in New York City, and it wasn’t really that hard. For the right price, you could send some pretty powerful people against your enemies, and there was even a submarket of the main one which specialized in dealing with heroes in specific. There were quite a lot of heroes in the city and many of them had built up enemies over the years. While the top ones could be considered almost impossible targets, there were others who were easier to get at and were less experienced and more vulnerable to getting taken down by bounty hunters who specialized in fighting with heroes and other powered individuals. And for that growing black market, one of the meeting places in Brooklyn was at Ivanov’s Coffee.
The place looked normal enough, sure, but plenty of the customers had hidden goals and plenty of meetings took place that, while they looked normal to the public, were more sinister in nature in reality. Deals about taking down certain heroes, capturing them for ransom, and other things of the sort. Sometimes, certain individuals would hang around the place to offer their services to others who would come there to shop and see who was available. After all, you got what you paid for, and that applied to this business too. If you paid more and went with someone with a solid reputation, there was a much higher chance that you would get a good outcome rather than finding you had spent your money to deal with a hero only to find they had escaped without harm. Some even gave a money back promise in case they failed, even though that added more risk on their own end because it meant they had to keep doing well if they wanted to make anything.
After getting the job at Ivanov’s and quickly becoming one of the favored employees there for her hard work and dedication regardless of her position, it didn’t take long for the new foreigner to get let in on the secret of the place, especially when she showed plenty of combat skill herself and always seemed down for a fight, showing up at the boxing gym somewhat often and putting in work in both traditional boxing and kickboxing against some of the best fighters there. Her fighting skills weren’t limited to that either, and well, she would make a good hero killer if that's what she wanted to do. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the gunplay skills, either. This new employee was a complete package, and not giving her the offer to work with the others around here and chase more lucrative profits would be a mistake. A mistake that Ivanov’s didn’t make.
She had quickly been signed up for the team of hero killers that operated out of the building during the night, many of them working there or being regulars during the day time. With their identities masked, not many would suspect these ordinary people of taking on superpowered individuals in one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and even beyond that as they traveled up and down the east coast to find work elsewhere. But that was one of their strengths. They wouldn’t have heroes coming by to investigate the coffee shop which seemed normal by all accounts, and they had fallback identities unlike some of the other more wanted people in the city, making it a safer job for them altogether. It wasn’t like they were going to go hungry if the circumstances changed and forced them to lay low.
She fit in well with the group. Learned their customs quickly, kept her identity secret just like they had told her to, did her job without bringing attention back to the shop. But what was she after? What was she after when there was no one else but her, and she was alone with her thoughts and her feelings? That was something that the others just hadn’t figured out yet. This code, it was harder than the typical one to break.
Another day, another raid successful. The crew would be coming back with some well earned money, but for now, they stood and looked out over the city as they lingered on one of the rooftops that was on their escape path. The newcomer, specifically, couldn’t help but look off into the distance, almost like she was gazing to a specific direction and looking for something, some sight off in the distance that she was hoping to see. It made Marovic stop and linger, standing next to her and looking out to see what she was searching for.
But she didn’t say anything to clarify and Marovic didn’t ask. Not directly, anyway, as she turned and started following after the others again, hopping from roof to roof in an area that was tightly packed together enough to make it a viable strategy to avoid the roads. As they ran, Marovic stayed behind the newcomer, asking questions between the times when they would jump and try not to miscalculate, which could prove deadly. “What are you even looking for? Money? Power? Some kind of other vice?”
She didn’t reply for a bit until they were on the next rooftop, and then she stopped Marovic, putting a hand on his shoulder and turning him away from the others. She pulled her mask off, showing a rather serious expression on her face before she sighed, almost as if she was conceding to revealing her intentions here. “You really want to know, eh? I guess you deserve to know. I came here…”
There was one more pause. A bit of awkward silence. And then, she spoke.
“I came here to find someone. Everything else until then, that’s just temporary. But if I do find them and that doesn’t work out? Well… I don’t know what I’d do. I think I’d lose myself.”