When in doubt, make a list.
That’s exactly what I was doing, writing in reverse
order the names of those I planned to destroy. I even
included a nice little box beside each name, so I could
check it off as I went. In my line of business, it paid to
stay organized. And my business was the
assassination of super heroes.

EPISODE 1 – PSA

I slid through the crowd and made my way towards
the podium. As I neared I uncrumpled the piece of
paper that’d been wadded up in my jacket pocket.
That’s right, paper. I was going old school –
untraceable, didn’t leave behind any digital footprint or
noise, and when I needed to get rid of it a simple
lighter would do the trick. I scanned down the list,
squinting to make out the names through the dirt and
blood stains. Twelve down, Carsus Belrind. Better
known as The Blender to the masses. There was no
check mark next to the name. But I was about to fix
that.

I tucked the paper away and glanced back up to the
podium. The crowd roared as Carsus strode across the
stage and stopped next to the other Very Important
People that smiled for the drones and auto-cams. I
didn’t make a point of hiding my face – the cameras
were embedded everywhere and there was no way to
tell where. The only way to keep them from picking my
face out of the crowd was to smash and rebuild it after
every job. It was my least favorite part of the job, but
just like my old man used to say, pain builds character.
The silver skyscrapers that towered above us changed
to show what was happening up on that stage. The
video feeds zoomed in on The Blender’s smiling face
as he shook the hands of the other Very Important
People. Even at one hundred times fidelity, you
couldn’t even see a hint of scars from the operation.
But they were there. You see, The Blender paid a small
fortune for brain augments to become a TK – a
telekinetic, that is – and he specialized in the twisting
and tearing of the insides his enemies, starting with
the intestines and working his way out. Hence the
name “The Blender”.

The Blender spun towards the audience. “I’d like to
thank every one of you for coming out today, for today
is a very important day.” His voice echoed through the
streets, booming from the audio plates implanted on
the scrappers’ facades. “The reason why is because
today, well, it’s the day that we kill Levi Cole.”
I froze. The crowd parted around me. I looked up to
see my face plastered all over the scrapper walls. The
big announcement, and that was me was me up there,
right in the middle of scratching my nose. How
Flattering.
I dropped my hand to my side and let my gun slide
down into my grip – a .80 automatic black Seiver. I
jaunted up to the stage, the crowd running from me
screaming like I was carrying that plague. And here I
was, standing in the thick of it all, my only purpose to
cure them.

As I neared, I boosted my step and pushed off the
ground, jumping high above the stage. I raised the
gun and started tearing holes into the synthetic wood
platform. Splinters exploded up around the Blender,
but none made it closer than a foot. He lifted his left
hand for dramatic effect, and I stopped midair. He
made a clutching gesture with his other hand, and I
felt a ripping in my gut.

I admired the creativity of his technique; you could tell
that he took pride in his job. That was the one thing
you could always count on with these types – they
would play the part they assumed. If it was me, I
would have twisted off my hands first thing.
Unfortunately for him, he was stuck in his method.
My beam blade zipped out of my sleeve and into my
free hand. I worked the controls, and the flat white
beam shot out of the handle and straight towards the
Blender’s throat. My hand twisted at the wrist, and the
beam singed the Blender’s right ear before going off in
the distance behind him. The skin on my twisted wrist
ripped open and blood spurted in thick gushes from
the tears, but it wasn’t enough to put my hand out of
commission. I worked the controls again, and the
beam jutted a hard angle to the right and then
another, and now it was coming in hard on the back of
his neck.

Once engineers figured out how to create an actual
beam weapon that would stop after a certain distance,
it was child’s play to get them to go in any shape or
direction that you desired. Mine was specialized in
changing direction while maintaining its flat blade
shape, which the Blender found out too late. The
telekinetic’s hold on me released and I dropped, hitting
the ground in sequence with his bouncing head.
I doubled over and puked up bits of my torn up
digestive system. The entire block of buildings were
flashing red, with white text inset in yellow scrolling
banners, streaming warning messages to the good
citizens of New City, telling them to lock the doors, hide
under a table, and wait for the situation to end. The
lamp post closest to me repeated in a polite voice
“Unauthorized weapon used in the vicinity. Use of a
beam weapon constitutes as a class S felony. Disarm
and lay prostrate immediately.”
Sure, beam weapons were highly dangerous, which
equated to them being highly illegal. If you couldn’t
tell, that didn’t bother my consciences in the least. The
lamp post exploded from an .80 round of my Seiver,
and I straightened my posture and wiped the blood off
my chin.

I waited for a few more seconds, looking around the
crowd for another mark. For a second I thought this
day was going to be one big disappointment. One
lousy TK to check off my list? That’s it? After all, this
was supposed to be a set up to kill one of the Most
Wanted assassins alive.

They didn’t let me down. I had to suppress a smile as
I spotted the two men walking in the opposite direction
of all the panicking citizens. The one on the right –
what was his name? My memory settled on Bulk –
was dressed in a sleeveless bright blue body suit to
show off the bulging muscles of his arms. His entire
body was in a state of perpetual flex, with cuts that
were normally impossible. But with enough cash,
nothing was impossible. Muscle tissue augments were
on the cheaper side of superpowers, so he must have
been new money or just a little lower in the food chain,
or maybe he got screwed in the market at some point.
Sure, he wasn’t a big name, but I didn’t discriminate,
and would take pleasure in marking his name off the
list along with the rest.

It was easy to recognize the man on the left as
Daedalus from the ridiculous helmet he wore.
Feathered metal wings extended a meter on either side
of the helmet, making me wonder how he even kept his
head upright. Deadalus was fitted with a light
exoskeleton armor, with thin superinium-nano rods
running down his spine and wrapping around his arms
and legs to give him extra strength. He wasn’t going
to waste any time, and light sparked out of the
microboosters attached to his back and calves and he
launched at me. Bulk followed close behind, all one
thousand muscles pulsating to keep pace.
My wrist wasn’t feeling up to taking them both on at
the same time, so I holstered my beam blade and
dropped a screen grenade in front of them. In an
explosion of smoke, a solid wall shot up between us. It
would only give me a few extra seconds, but that was
enough for me to sprint to the nearest building and
duck into the alley. I keyed a sequence into my palm
which activated the cloaking device I installed in that
alley earlier. In this line of business, it was always best
to plan for the worst.

The cloaking device was lowbrow; it worked by creating
a hologram of the area around me, dampened any
sounds I made, and regulated the air temperature so
the high techs couldn’t pick up my heat signature.
None of those fancy nanomaterials, though I could get
them if I needed them.

I sat and reloaded my Seiver, waiting for my time to
strike. Deadalus’s shadow passed over me as he flew
above, unaware of my location, and Bulk was just now
breaking through the temporary barrier created by the
nade. Bulk stomped along the side walk, and he was
now within feet of my location. I rolled out, gun ready,
and aimed it at the back of his muscled up skull. He
must have heard me, because he ducked and spun at
the last second as a stream of bullets left a crater in
the wall behind him. The best maneuver to take when
being shot at was towards your attacker, and that was
exactly what Bulk was doing. I pulled my gun down to
track his movement. Before I could shoot I heard the
loud crack of ribs breaking as Bulk drove his shoulder
into my chest. The next second, I was up in the air,
my Seiver flying in the opposite direction, and then I
was crashing through glass into the fifth floor of a sky
scrapper.

I tucked myself into a ball as I slammed through
cubicle wall after cubicle wall, and finally smashed into
a desk that was heavy enough to stop my momentum.
I looked up to the bulging eyes of a salary man, and
gave him a nice and bright bloody smile. Before I
could turn back to the window, he was already
screaming and running with the rest of the people
trying to jam themselves into the elevators. At that
rate they’d kill themselves before I’d even get a
chance.

Bulk was a lot faster than I expected, and I would have
to finish this quickly if I wanted to take care of
Daedalus as well. I rolled a couple of nerve nades, set
to a one meter radius, towards the new opening in the
wall, timing it just right so that when Bulk landed softly
at the ledge he was greeted with an unpleasant blast
of neurotoxins. His muscles, all one million of them,
twitched uncontrollably as he tried to rush forward and
take me out. A normal man would have been out as
soon as the toxins hit his system, but that wasn’t the
case. I brought myself into my fighting stance. As
Bulk charged, I could see the neurotoxins taking hold
of his body as his hands flapped and arms started to
wobble. By the time he made it to me, I was able to
easily slip around his attack and give him a kick into
one of his faltering ankles. Bulk whirled his arms
around in a desperate attempt to regain his balance,
but I gave him another kick, a round house connecting
my foot to his neck. With that, he toppled over, taking
the nearest cubicle farm with him. I tore through the
office and kicked off with all my strength at the lip of
the opening just as the two frag nades I left behind
exploded. The heat seared the back of my head and I
caught a piece of shrapnel in my left thigh, but my
trajectory was correct.

I caught Daedalus midflight, and dug my fingers into
his gear as we tumbled across the sky. The city turned
in every direction around us, and we came inches to
smearing across another building when the stability
sensors corrected his positioning and we shot straight
up. Sky scrapper floors blurred by as we continued
higher. He was probably smiling under that mask of
his, planning on knocking me loose and letting me
contemplate my actions as I fell hundreds of stories to
certain death. Thing was, that wasn’t part of my plan.
EMP nades would have come in handy in situations
like this, but only older equipment was susceptible to
that anymore. I had the next best thing, though, and I
attached it to his back as we neared the top of the
closest sky scrapper. I brought my feet up and
launched myself off of Daedalus. As I floated back
towards the roof of the sky scrapper, I keyed in a
sequence on my palm that activated the destabilizer I
had planted on him. He started gyrating head over
heels as he flailed his arms and legs, trying in vain to
regain control. For me, it was only a thirty meter drop
to the roof of the sky scrapper, but I caught on my bad
leg and felt my ankle snap under the immense
pressure. It was still better than the landing Daedalus
was going to experience.

I hobbled to the edge of the roof in time to see Daedlus
bounce off the pavement below. I inventoried my
wounds: Four cracked ribs, internal bleeding, a broken
wrist and twisted ankle, along with several other minor
lacerations. Not bad, all things considered. I took out
my wadded piece of paper, ready to put a check by
three names. It was a good day to be a super hero
hunter.

As I was scratching the first mark, the paper nearly
slipped out of my fingers as it flapped in the wind from
an approaching helicopter. I hadn’t even heard it until
it was on top of me, meaning it was a newer model
reserved for those with deep pockets. I shoved the list
back into my pocket, and my body shook at the sight
of the hovercopter. Not in fear – my body shook in
anticipation. Standing on the side of the hovercopter
was a tall man that had to duck just to keep from
getting a new hair cut from the copter blades. It was
Rune, and he was at the top of my list, both literally
and figuratively. I stared past his face mask and
looked directly into the glare of his cold grey eyes.
Rune brought his hands together in a light clap. “Well
done, Levi. You’re making quite the name for
yourself.”

“I’m not out to make a name. I’m out to mark them
off,” I said, keeping my face hard and emotionless.
Rune scoffed. “Do you really have to say things like
that? You should take this more seriously.” He saw
me reaching up my sleeve for my beam blade, and held
out his hand and waved it back and forth. “Patience,
now. It wouldn’t be a fair fight if you’re all banged up
like that.”

Fair fight? Against Rune? It was my turn to scoff. I
wasn’t so full of myself I’d deny that even in my best
condition, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. But that wouldn’t
stop me from trying.

I whipped the beam out, and worked the controls so
the glowing white blade forked and twisted into
several smaller beams. The tips of the beams were
inches from Runes face when they shattered. I
reinstantiated the beam, but the helicopter veered up
and out of reach of my weapon. Rune brought his
hand up in a two finger salute, and his smirk etched
permanently into my skull as he drew farther and
farther away.

I sheathed my blade as I walked the roof to the
stairwell. I would be patient, and I would eventually
cross Rune’s name off my list. I took solace in the fact
that I still had plenty of other names to work my way
through. I cracked a smile as I brought the stained
and torn list back out and uncrumpled it.

This is definitely different from conventional storytelling.
Following.