For an underground passage, the hallway was much longer than I expected. We walked in silence for nearly a minute, and there was still no end in sight.


    “Where are we going?” I asked.


    “The Ashburn Police Precinct. There’s some paperwork you have to do before they’ll let you go out and fight criminals.”


    “You know… I always imagined this superhero stuff to be more like what you do. Like, I figured I’d be sitting in a car, listening to a police scanner, and then I’d spring into action when the police need help.”


    Deadeye chuckled before saying, “No, it doesn’t work that way. The police are enough to deal with normal crime. Our job is to stop crimes committed by Enhanced Humans, and that job is enough to keep us all working overtime. One percent of all people are Enhanced Humans, meaning there are twenty thousand of us in this city.”


    “Twenty thousand…”


    “Yeah, eighteen thousand of them are Level 1s, but I’m all the evidence you need to know that Level 1s can be dangerous. Here, take this.”


    As we walked, we passed by a subtle niche in the concrete wall of the passageway. I wouldn’t have noticed it if Deadeye hadn’t pointed it out. The niche held about a dozen small white plastic half-masks that covered the nose and eyes. I was reminded of the boxes of surgical masks that every house and business had in the early 2020s. Deadeye reached into the niche and held the mask out for me to take.


    I put the mask on over my eyes, and I was surprised to find that it was more comfortable than I expected. The inside of the mask was lined with a soft cloth that felt nice on my skin. It wasn’t a cheap Halloween mask meant to be worn once for a few hours. This was a well-made mask that was meant to be worn as a uniform for eight hours a day every day.


    Deadeye reached into a bag on his hip and pulled out an identical mask and put it on. It looked more like an opera mask than a superhero mask, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of mask was used in a local showing of the Phantom of the Opera.


    We kept walking. To break the silence, I said, “Hey, uh, did Hana tell you about Ganymede?”


    “When we’re out of the apartment, stick to codenames. Yes, I heard. These things happen. I’m not about to lose sleep over the death of a guy who tried to kill me three times.”


    There was no love lost there, apparently. Deadeye didn’t really strike me as the “orphan” type. Even if he had gone through New Hope Orphanage, he must have been fifteen years older than Ganymede and Sparrow. They wouldn’t have been there at the same time.


    “I see,” I said quietly. “Why do Heroes wear masks? I mean, the cops don’t wear them.”


    “Basically, we don’t want to be attacked in our sleep. Unlike normal criminals, Villains have a tendency to form grudges against particular Heroes,” Deadeye said.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    We finally reached the end of the passageway and reached a staircase heading upward. At the end of the staircase, there was a door that led out to the basement level of a parking garage. Faint rays of light filtered into this floor of the garage from the upper floors. When I looked back at the door, I saw that the words “EMPLOYEES ONLY” were written on it in large letters.


    At first glance, the parking garage seemed abandoned. There were only a few vehicles that I could see, and all three of them were covered with tarps. We approached one of the tarp-covered vehicles, and Deadeye pulled off the covering, revealing a large armored car underneath. The car was painted pure black, except for the crude drawing of a gun’s crosshairs spray-painted on the side.


    The passenger door opened, and Jason Jacobi stepped out. He was wearing a superhero costume made of tight black spandex, a golden belt on his waist, a long black cape hanging from his shoulders, and a golden lightning bolt on his chest. Covering his face was an ornate golden mask that started at his eyes before curling upward toward his forehead.


    In terms of color palette, Thunderbolt’s outfit looked very similar to Deadeye’s, though that was where the similarities ended. Every aspect of Deadeye’s outfit served a purpose, whereas Thunderbolt’s outfit more closely fitted my idea of a superhero costume. It made sense, I thought. Deadeye’s relatively weak power forced him to rely more on weapons while Thunderbolt could alway fall back on his power.


    “Get in,” Deadeye said gruffly, and I quickly got into one of the large vehicle’s many back seats.


    Wordlessly, Deadeye got into the driver’s seat while Thunderbolt got into the passenger’s seat and began driving. As we drove through that parking garage, I had to stop myself from laughing. The masks and weapons made me feel like we were about to go rob a bank rather than stop crime.


    The large armored vehicle drove in a wide spiral, slowly moving upward. We passed by the exit on the ground floor and kept moving without stopping.


    “Uh, where are we going?” I asked.


    “We have a few minutes to kill before the precinct allows visitors,” Deadeye said.


    “We’re gonna get some training in,” Thunderbolt said, raising his arms into a boxing stance to punctuate his statement.


    Deadeye’s van stopped at the third floor of the parking garage. We dismounted, and I noticed that this entire floor of the garage had been turned into a gym of some kind. Several punching bags hung from the ceiling, and a wide selection of weights were laid out on the ground.


    “Today, we’ll focus on you, Macro-Kinetic,” Deadeye said, looking at me. “Since yesterday, have you thought of a way to defend yourself more effectively?”


    Was that really possible? Honestly, I had very little understanding of my own power. I had been using my power entirely through my hands, and I didn’t even know if that was necessary. Certainly, there was a better way for me to defend myself than holding my hand out and catching any incoming attacks with telekinesis.


    “Give me a second,” I said, thinking.


    What could I do to stop somebody like Deadeye from killing me? I would have to encapsulate myself entirely in my psychic barrier. Theoretically, I could clench my hand and hold myself in the center, but then Deadeye could just attack me from above.


    I remembered the Mandeville Limit and the sensation I felt when I pushed against Electrozilla. My telekinesis remained in place even as it was destroyed by that limit. If I squeezed my telekinetic hand around my body, that should protect my body from all directions.


    “I think I have something for this.”


    I clenched my teeth, widened my stance, and prepared to cover myself in a telekinetic barrier. Either I was about to gain a useful new skill, or I was about to squish myself like a bug.