Unheroic Life of a Certain Cape-Chapter 91 Survival & Violence

Chapter 9
1 Survival & Violence
I woke up uneasy, every nerve on edge. Sleep wasn’t something I normally did; my powers made sure of that. If I ever went under, it was never natural. It was either Silver and Onyx pulling me into some dream, or my body shutting down from a concussion. And concussions were rare.
A rasp scraped through the dark. “Finally awake?”
Light stabbed my eyes. A flashlight beam cut across my face, forcing me to squint. The man behind it smelled of smoke, sour liquor, and cheap disinfectant. His scruffy beard looked like it had been groomed with broken glass, and his lab coat had stains I didn’t dare identify.
I shifted, realizing I was on a real bed, not a dingy mattress or a broken couch. Too comfortable for my taste. My hand twitched toward my side, half-expecting a weapon that wasn’t there. Maybe a crowbar or anything.
“Where am I?” My voice came out rough, alien in my own throat.
“My place,” he said, almost casual, like that explained everything. The flashlight dipped, showing the pockmarked face of a man I recognized.
“Flak,” I muttered.
He nodded, satisfied, like I’d just passed a test. “Good to see the brain’s still working. You were twitching when I found you. Looked like someone almost got you, huh!?”
Of course, it was him. The weird chemist with more vices than customers. The guy I bought my chemical paintballs from, back when I needed something flashy to make up for the fact I wasn’t invincible. I’ve been… experimenting with all sorts of weapons.
I exhaled slowly. My body still ached, my nerves firing off random static. “So what’s the bill this time, Flak?”
His grin was all teeth, no warmth. “We’ll get to that.”
The room was small, a single space pretending to be a home. A sink in one corner, a mountain of takeout boxes in another, walls stained yellow with nicotine. No doors besides the one behind him, no windows big enough to escape through. My skin itched.
I didn’t trust Flak. Never did. Our dealings had been shallow from me tossing cash, him handing over bottles or syringes. Morphine, painkillers, and stimulants if I needed them. The man lived in chemicals like a fish in water, and his Research ratings made him dangerous. Medicine, biology, all of it. The type who needed test subjects. The type who wouldn’t ask for volunteers.
That thought snapped my restraint. I surged forward, my hand clamping around his throat before he could blink. The flashlight clattered to the ground, throwing shadows against the wall as I squeezed.
“What did you do to me while I was out?” My voice was low, shaking with more fury than I intended.
Flak gagged, but his grin twitched even with my fingers digging into his skin. “Wouldn’t… dare,” he croaked. “Not unless I had a death wish. Your partner… would kill me.”
Partner?
The word sank in strangely. My grip loosened a fraction as confusion overtook me. I worked alone. Always had. Silver and Onyx weren’t the kind of company you could explain. Not to people like him.
“What partner?” I demanded.
His bloodshot eyes twinkled with a mix of fear and mischief. “The one who… brought you here.”
I held his gaze, silent, forcing myself to breathe steadily. My pulse wanted to tear through my ribs. Slowly, I let go of his throat, my hand shaking. He rubbed at his neck, still smiling that rat’s smile.
“How did I get here?” I asked, still staring daggers at Flak.
Before he could answer, migraine hit me… ugh… Silver slipped from my shadow like smoke, her Onyx counterpart materializing just a breath later. My gut tightened as fragments of memory pieced together from the bike ramming into a man, the grind of its wheel splitting bone, and the blur before I passed out.
“Did you do it?” I muttered. My voice cracked, uncertain whether I wanted the answer.
Silver shook her head, her hair catching the dim light. “We didn’t.”
Flak’s eyes darted from me to the empty air I was addressing, his brow furrowing in something between fear and disbelief. From his perspective, I was talking to walls. Muttering to ghosts. Fair enough.
He cleared his throat as he provided. “My price. Tens of thousands of marks. You’re not walking out of here for free.”
I stared, silent.
“Medicine worked,” he continued, his voice rising defensively. “Stitched you up myself. Kept you breathing. You’d be a corpse without me. So pay. And then get the hell out of my place.”
“That I will do, but first, where’s my bike?”
“Outside,” said Flak. “Use your eyes, damn you…”
The ruins stretched wide, a graveyard of what once was a town. Windows were shattered, walls pockmarked with bullet holes, and the streets buzzed with bottom-feeders too stubborn to die and too weak to climb. I leaned by the window, the stink of mold and smoke clinging to me, staring at what little this place had become.
Silverside growled outside, its engine revving sharply and impatiently, scattering the rats who lingered too close. The low lives poked and prodded, daring each other to touch what didn’t belong to them. “I am going to kill them-”
Flak leaned out from behind me, his rasp cutting through the noise. “Fuck off before you end up fertilizer!” His voice had the bite of someone used to being obeyed. They scattered, muttering curses they weren’t brave enough to finish.
Onyx drifted close, a smirk curling on her lips. “Maybe Silverside’s a girl. She sure sounds like she missed you. Do you hear that revving? That’s her moaning for you…”
Silver huffed, folding her arms. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a bike, not—” Her eyes flicked toward the machine outside, shivering at its guttural growl. “—not whatever nonsense you’re suggesting.”
I ignored them both, pulling on my clothes. The shirt and jacket were still stained, blood stiff in the fabric. It felt like armor more than cloth now.
Silverside’s lights blinked as I stepped into the open. I reached into my bike’s compartment, counting the marks left in my roll. Almost out. Enough to pay the chemist, not enough to last long. I handed the wad over, the paper worn soft by too many exchanges.
Flak’s fingers danced over the bills, counting fast. “You’re clear. Get out before you bring more heat down here.”
I nodded, no words left to spare. His enforcers stood behind him like statues: a hulking brute with spikes jutting from his skin, a man black as pitch with three eyes that never blinked. They weren’t here for me, but they didn’t need to be. Flak might’ve been low-tier, but he wasn’t that low-tier.
I swung onto Silverside. I didn’t look back as the town shrank into dust and smoke behind me.
The wind whipped through my hair, stinging my scalp. No helmet. I’d left it back in Redford, careless like always. The bike hummed beneath me, its engine a steady animal growl.
My fingers tightened on the handlebars as I leaned forward, eyes flicking over the gauges. The dashboard flickered, light bleeding in and out like a dying heart. “Silverside,” I muttered under my breath, “what the hell happened to you?”
The GPS screen flickered again, letters stuttering before settling into a new line of text:
“NOT SILVERSIDE.”
The words blinked at me, sterile and certain.
I jerked the brakes, tires screaming against the cracked asphalt as the bike skidded sideways. Dust billowed up around us, choking my lungs. I stared at the screen, throat tight.
“BUNNYBLADE.”
My stomach dropped. Bunnyblade. George. Before he died, if he’d even died at all. My mind raced. I’d read about bizarre power evolutions, secondary awakenings, mutations so complicated they warped reality around the cape. But this? Someone pulling into a machine?
“George…” My voice was almost a whisper. The screen didn’t answer.
The engine idled low, like a heartbeat waiting for me to catch up. The open road stretched ahead, sunburned and empty, but now it felt like the world had just tilted under me.
I put a hand over the flickering screen. “If you’re in there…” I swallowed hard. “If you’re really in there… answer me… What happened to you?”
“A LOT”
The screen flickered again, and new words crawled across it in a jagged font:
“LONG TIME NO SEE, NICK.”
My knuckles whitened around the grips. “It hasn’t been that long, George.”
The engine coughed, almost like a laugh. The screen blinked again:
“PLEASE, CALL ME BUNNYBLADE… I AM DONE WITH THAT LIFE…”
I exhaled through my teeth, the wind cutting against my face as I leaned forward. “You’re telling me you’re not George anymore? You’re telling me you’re… this?”
The words appeared slowly this time, like someone thinking through static:
“GEORGE DIED WHEN I PULLED. I BECAME THIS.”
I honestly didn’t know what to make of Bunnyblade. According to him, when he pulled, he wasn’t just changed. Instead, he was reborn. His body gone, his mind turned into something like pure data, free to latch onto anything with a network and a heartbeat of electricity. A bike, of all things. Superpowers were truly strange and insane.
His voice came in short bursts of text across the dashboard, jagged letters flashing with each vibration of the engine as he grew more and more eloquent.
“I was like a newborn when I found this machine. No voice. No memory. Just instinct.”
From the corner of my eye, Onyx manifested beside me in the wind’s reflection on the mirror, her arms crossed, glaring at the screen. “Seriously? We’re doing this now? You and the bike?”
Silver’s softer voice rose like a sigh behind me. “Onyx, stop. Let them talk. Nick needs this.”
I flicked a glance at Bunnyblade’s glowing text, then back at the road. “Can you… see them?”
“See who?”
“Never mind.” I felt a strange tug in my chest, a little embarrassed.
Silver’s whisper drifted against my ear, even though she wasn’t really there. “We’ll always be here for you, Nick.”
Onyx muttered, her tone grudging but still warm. “Yeah. We’ll give you and Bunnyblade time to catch up. But don’t think we’re leaving.”
Dust and grit clung to me like a second skin as the days bled into one another. I lay low, trading the comfort of real towns for the murk of lawless ones, always watching my back. The SRC had nearly boxed me in once already; I couldn’t let them zero down on me again.
So I kept to places with no proper name or order, places ruled by cape tyrants who didn’t mind a visitor now and then as long as he paid his way. It was less than comfortable compared to lawful towns, but at least there was a roof and a bed, even if the sheets smelled like someone else’s sweat. I didn’t need sleep, not really, but just lying there, letting my muscles sink into the mattress, gave me a moment to breathe. It also helped me keep on the job, as there were plenty of jobs in lawless settlements to find.
A week of this drifted by. Riding from one rotten corner to the next, dealing with town tyrants whose moods changed like storms. There weren’t many lawless towns left, but I knew them well from six months on the road.
They all had the same rot beneath the paint with pushy whores prowling for marks, dealers hawking poison with a smile, and scammers waiting for a gullible fool to stumble by. I wasn’t that fool. I passed them with a wide stride and a dead stare.
Wearing my empathic camouflage for the entire duration had been a bit tiring, but eventually I found a clean helmet I could wear to cover my face when visiting a town. I couldn’t be too careful, considering the kind of world we lived.
The town stank of burnt oil and fried meat, the kind of place where the pavement never stopped sweating. Neon flickered on and off like a dying pulse, throwing jagged shadows across the cramped market. I threaded through the stalls, eyes scanning for anything useful from speakers, heavy ordnance, or even a busted radio. Anything to bolt onto the bike so I could drown out the silence or catch a whiff of SRC chatter before they dropped a hammer on me and tie my Eclipse identity to Courier.
That was when it came, sharp and ugly: a catcall from the mouth of some rail-thin bastard leaning against a stack of stolen crates. His grin was all rot and yellow teeth.
“Hey, pretty boy,” he drawled, voice dripping like oil. “That leather jacket’s real cute. You got a price tag on you, or do I gotta guess?”
I kept walking. Eyes forward, mind on the shelves of junk tech ahead. My powers flared just enough to skim his emotions. It was cheap bravado, the sour tang of someone looking to prove something. Not a real threat.
“Do you kiss your mama with that mouth?” I spat, mouth a hard line.
They laughed. They were asking for it.
I moved like a blade. Hands ached with the old rhythm: phase a foot through the pavement, snag an ankle, pull the ground out from under a man, and watch him collapse with his pride beating the concrete. I took one of them by the collar, felt the cheap leather of his jacket, and intangibly shoved my hand on his chest until the air left his lungs as I ripped his heart out. He gurgled and slid out before he could figure out what hit him.
Bunnyblade answered the noise with machine-gun bark, a staccato thunder that chewed up the air and sent crates splintering. It was a recent addition. The bike’s muzzle flashed, chaos in clean bursts. People ducked and screamed; the market folded in on itself like a book slammed shut.
I didn’t waste finesse. If my fingers found flesh, I phased it, leaving them either dead or maimed. I reveled in the violence. I smashed one against the curb hard enough to make him see stars; another tried to crawl, and I phased his hand through the dirt so the limb didn’t work right anymore. They bled out of sight of my eyes, not bothered by the fact that I was practically beating and killing them for the thrill of it.
“Thank you,” I told the nearest face that dared to glare back, voice flat. “Because I am going to decompress with your skull.” It wasn’t a promise of gore so much as an admission of how ugly I’d let myself get. I smashed a fist into bone and felt it answer, a short, clean relief that fizzed through me and left me hollow.
When it was over, the market smelled of burnt rubber and spilled beer. Bodies were on the ground, some unconscious, some coughing, some crying. Bunnyblade idled, muzzle cooling, as he smoothly moved by my side. I stood there with blood on my knuckles and the world ticking slowly around me. The thrill was immediate and shallow; the aftertaste was deeper and worse.
Onyx whooped somewhere inside my head, clapping at the violence like a child. “Yes! That’s my boy, smash them, Nick! Show them what happens when they mess with you!”
Silver’s voice quivered with something close to shame. “Nick… that was—too far. We didn’t have to do that. You’re bleeding on your hands.”
I flexed my fingers and tried not to listen to either of them.