Unheroic Life of a Certain Cape-Chapter 87 Invitation

Chapter 8
7 Invitation
The café hummed with chatter and clinking cups, but all of it was background noise against the purple suit sitting across from me. His monocle gleamed when he smiled, and his voice carried a smooth, deliberate cadence.
“Call me the Assessor. Nice to meet you, Mr. Caldwell. Or do you prefer Eclipse? Or perhaps…” his lips curled, “…the Monster of Markend?”
I leaned back in my chair, helm resting at my side. “Just Nick is fine with me, the Assessor.” I emphasized the ‘the’ because why not?
Onyx folded her arms beside me, struggling to suppress her grin. “Pffft… the Ass-essor.”
Silver shook her head, her tone prim. “That’s not how Nick pronounced it, Onyx. But I must admit, keeping the ‘the’ was masterclass trolling. Keep it going, Nick.”
The Assessor’s composure cracked for just an instant, the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “You sure are amused… but ‘Assessor’ is just fine.”
I gave him a thin smile. “No need, the Assessor. I respect you too much to exclude the ‘the.’ I’d hate to be rude. What can I say? We all need our determiners to instill confidence, isn’t that right? As for me, I’m perfectly fine with just Nick. Or maybe…” I tilted my head, “you’d like a nickname?”
Onyx bent forward, whisper-laughing in my ear, “Like Ass-essor… pffft… gosh…”
The Assessor tapped his spoon against his cup, tone cooling. “As amusing as your language games are, we should talk business.”
He sipped his coffee. My empathy flowed across him like smoke, searching for cracks. Nothing obvious. There were no seams, and no fragile threads I could tug. Just that faint pulse of superiority, the kind all telepaths carried like perfume.
The waitress slid a plate onto the table, a neat slice of layered cake. The Assessor’s eyes lit up. “Oh, lovely. Talking business while eating desserts is just my type of thing. The sugar really gets me pumping. How about you, Nick? Coffee? Pastry?”
“A glass of water,” I said. “Lots of ice.”
The waitress smiled as she remarked. “A glass of water, is it? Just a sec…”
Without a beat of pause, the Assessor scooped up a forkful of cake and let the sweetness linger on his tongue before speaking again. His monocle gleamed as he fixed his gaze on me.
“Work for me, Nick.”
“I don’t work for anyone,” I said flatly, meeting his gaze across the table. “I only work for myself—”
The Assessor laughed, sharp and knowing. “Ha! You say that now, but I am certain I can make your tune change.”
Silver’s voice cut sharply. “This is a waste of time. Just kill him.”
“Two things I don’t like,” I said quietly. “Being threatened. And people wasting my time. Tell me... are you wasting mine?”
The waitress arrived then, her hands a little too quick as she set the glass down. “Here’s your water, sir.” She fled just as fast, seemingly sensing the oddity between me and the Assessor.
I glanced at the ice water, paying it no heed. “If you’ve got something to say, do it in ten words.”
The Assessor’s lips curved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. He lifted his fork and gestured with the bite of cake as he provided. “Join the Ten. The money’s great. You won’t regret it.”
Onyx clapped once. “Close! Man, I wished he slipped up, so you’d get to say a cool line and then phase him into the ground.”
The Ten. The Nth Contract. Mercenaries in name, monsters in truth. They never turned down a job, no matter how suicidal, and no matter how dirty. Their roster was always shifting, their presence erratic, and a shadow flaring up across continents. To governments, they were a headache. To heroes, a nightmare. To me, an annoyance I didn’t need.
If this had been before Crow, before I learned what real manipulation felt like, maybe I would have accepted. Back then, I was hungry for power and reckless in my ambition. But I knew better now. No mind controller was to be trusted, no matter how smooth their pitch.
At the center of the Ten was Mrs. Mind. A psychic more dangerous than Royal ever pretended to be. She had once extended the same invitation, back in Deadend. I turned her down then, and it had saved me. Later, I pulled her file from the SRC archives. What I read there didn’t just warn me… it confirmed what I already suspected. The Ten weren’t merely mercenaries. They were butchers for hire, cutting the world apart one contract at a time.
My voice was calm, steady, and certain.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Oh, you are going to think about it. Here!”
My body wanted to obey. The chair felt glued to my thighs. The café spun politely and slowly around that single command.
Royal had torn me apart once. Crow had gutted me twice. Assessor’s compulsion was strong, clean enough to polish a man. Still, compared to Royal or Crow, he reeked of amateur. I tasted arrogance, not mastery. That gave me breath.
Onyx laughed. “Oh, this idiot’s done for…”
Silver muttered, darker. “Make it hurt.”
I ripped the hold out of the air with the only tools that had kept me alive: empathy braided with intangibility. I sank threads into him like cold steel into soft meat… no blunt force, just a silent, surgical pull. I fed his leash back on itself and watched the knot unfasten.
Then I smiled, and what followed was cruelty
I grabbed the glass of water in front of me and splashed it on his chest. I phased the liquid and the cubes, made them intangible for the briefest cut of a second, then let them through. The Assessor choked, coughing and gasping as the phantom cold rattled his insides and the unexpected shock seized him. He yelped, a high sound that was filled with pain.
“I can’t breathe,” he said as he began to choke on blood from his perforated organs. “Ugh… What’s h-happening?”
The Assessor coughed and clawed at his throat, the sound ugly and human.
I didn’t stop. I smashed the empty glass onto his face so hard his tophat hopped off his head and landed on the floor. Blood trickled from cut skin as he gagged painfully. But I wasn’t done yet. I grabbed a fist of his hair and slammed his face into the table once, twice, three times. He went still, silent. Then I made the table swallow his skull and pulled. I watched as the red arc splattered everywhere as I pushed him back on his seat with a slovenly thump.
When the violence was finally over, I blinked awake in my seat.
Assessor remained alive, but he had seen and read my mind. He saw every frame and felt every impact. He screamed inside as if his body shared it. Sweat washed his face. His bladder gave. He peed himself on the café tile. I did none of the violence, except imagining them into probable existence. I didn’t stand. I didn’t spill a drop of my water. I remained seated, calm as ruin. Assessor was opposite me, eyes wide, face a mask split into horror and disbelief, piss darkening the floor at his shoes.
The violence had been a projection, an empathic cruelty dialed exactly to terrify. It was more effective than any threat I could eloquently conjure. He was alive, and tremors ran through him like someone who’d nearly died.
“Did you get all of that?” I asked, voice low and joking with venom. "Because I can run it through you a second time if you want to?"
He couldn’t answer. Only trembling and the small, animal whine of a man who’d been convinced he’d been killed. The Ten’s pedigree of horror felt suddenly fragile. A good telepath could make a man kill himself in ten words; a better one could make him believe he had been dismembered without laying a finger on him.
I stood. My chair scraped. He flinched like a struck animal.
“Leave me alone, and I will leave you alone,” I said. The sentence was a promise and a threat folded into a single calm. “Tell the same to your colleagues, because trust me, you don’t want me as your enemy.”
I pushed a small bill across the table, payment for the glass of water. I picked up the glass to pin the bill underneath for effect. Assessor stared at the glass as if it might bite. He didn’t follow when I turned and walked out. He stayed there, sweating and small, the echo of my imagined violence still ringing in his head.
“Maybe we can try again?” a childish voice asked.
I turned. A little girl stood on the sidewalk, plaid skirt, pigtails, and the kind of picture-book innocence the city put on postcards. Her face was a face for playgrounds, but her eyes were as old as graveyards. There was an old hag wrapped inside that child’s skin, and it made my teeth ache to look at her.
Behind her, a man in a black vest and fedora leaned against a lamppost. Narrow eyes, the kind you didn’t see much in the Council… Ning Light, I remembered. It was such an odd name after all. He was Mrs. Mind’s second. He nodded once in my direction. “Yo. It’s been some time, Eclipse.”
Mrs. Mind smiled brightly. “You’ve grown stronger since we last met. I apologize for our colleague, Assessor… he’s new and hungry for recognition within the group. He doesn’t speak for us all. Will you give us a second chance? Ambition can be a beautiful thing. I’m surprised you’ve let yours cool.”
The street smelled of oil and old coffee. My palms found the Silverside’s grips by habit before my brain answered. I felt Onyx prickle behind my teeth, eager; Silver pressed a hand across my gut, taut with warning. I ignored them both.
“I don’t want a quarrel with your group,” I said flatly, swinging a leg over the bike. “That’s the only reason Assessor still breathes.”
I thought of the SRC like a slow-gnawing rust on my hide from their radars, files, and protocols. I’d done a good job staying invisible. I didn’t plan to show myself now by committing violence here in front of a group that was very much aware of my identity.
Mrs. Mind’s smile widened, not at what I said but at a private joke only she understood.
I kicked the Silverside into life and eased forward. The city opened like a mouth, and I rode into it, sun reflecting off black chrome.
Her voice slid into my head then, not spoken, not noisy, but a silk thread winding through my skull. “If you change your mind, she said,” bright and patronizing as candy, “there’s always a number you can call.: The string of digits pulsed in my mind with deliberate rhythm: 10-10-10-10-10. Her tone warmed like a tea left too long.
“Until then, Monster.”