Here, a city let itself be a stage. People wore logos on their chests. They fought where everyone could see it. It worked until it didn't. New Wave had tried to do it with names and faces and moral certainty and that had ended in the kind of damage people stopped naming out loud. She had read the threads. She had scrolled past the photos people were not supposed to post.
She let herself laugh once, quiet, without feeling mean about it. People did what they could with the rules they had. If the rules here said the PRT formed lines and ran foam hoses while a racist gang lifted cars with their minds, then that was the game.
The reporter kept talking. Rias lowered the volume and watched the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen. Road closures. Shelter-in-place. The PRT asking anyone within the cordon to stay inside until officers could escort them out.
She turned the TV off and stood. She was bored.
She dressed without making a production of it. Jeans. A shirt that didn't call attention from half a block. A dark jacket. She left her hair loose. She could have turned it black or brown with a glamour. She left it red and turned the intensity down to a shade that wouldn't glow in the sun. She layered a minor veil over her features. She set an anchor circle under the couch and another in the workroom. If anything touched the wards on the doors and windows, she would know.
She stepped out onto the porch and felt the air like she had never been inside for a week. The street had the same small sounds it always had. A truck down the block took an extra second to shift gears. A teenager on a bike weighed the curb by the corner and then committed. With a gesture, Rias teleported.
Downtown was cleaner from a distance. Up close, it showed its age at the seams—grit in the grout of the sidewalk squares, a smear of old oil at the lip of the curb, glass in a gutter from one window that had given up the week before. Today it showed something else. Police tape. A mobile command trailer with a PRT logo. Four blocks of traffic were redirected with orange barriers and the kind of sawhorses that looked foolish until they held a line because people believed in them.
Rias set down on a roof two buildings from the corner the reporter had named. Then she looked.
The PRT had a formation that was clearly practiced. Troopers in masks and body armor held a staggered front, clear visors down. Foam crews hunched behind thick hoses, two per nozzle, a third to manage the line. Shields formed a blunt wing to either side. Behind them, a small Protectorate presence anchored the line. Armsmaster stood at the hinge point where a line breaks and might need to be stitched. He had a halberd aimed down and an expression that didn't move. The screen on a trooper's wrist showed a map where little icons moved in a careful shuffle.
Up the street, Empire Eighty-Eight soldiers gathered. Hair shaved short. Jackets with stitched insignias. Some wore bandanas. They moved with confidence because they were in their own city and because a cape behind them had already shown off.
Rune floated above street level on a slab of something she'd pulled out of a sidewalk. The slab moved like a boat on a pond without water. She held a rusted stop sign turning without her hands. It rotated and then stopped and then screamed through space to clip the top of a foam rig. The operator ducked. The sign slammed into the trailer behind him and bent around a corner. Another piece of metal lifted free of a parking meter and joined the dance.
Hookwolf took the other side of the street. He had a human outline only in the most technical sense. He was bladed metal and mass and enough motion to keep a man from knowing where the man stopped and the knives began. He charged, took foam to the chest, shook it off with a sound like steel tearing. He hit a car that had already been hit and went through it with no regard for the fact that cars had owners and keys in their pockets somewhere else.
Othala stuck to the leeward side of a delivery truck, a hand on a young man's shoulder. She said something in his ear and pushed power through the contact. His stance changed. Crusader hovered halfway up a building face, spectral men circling him with lazy motions. Their movements made the troopers watch the wrong places.
What they were fighting about, Rias didn't know.
The PRT started an advance. Armsmaster stepped forward with the line, halberd twitching to drop a short-range net on a low flyer who thought he could break through. The net wrapped the boy in bright lines and pulled him to the asphalt. A Ward in blue sprinted out and tagged the net with a rod that locked it harder. The Ward slid back a step and then two when Rune sent a piece of newspaper box at her in a hard rectangle. A trooper took the hit instead and rolled, popping back to one knee like he had practiced it in a gym.
Rune pulled a car up from the far corner without even looking. It hung crooked. She flicked her wrist, and the car started moving to throw. The arc would take it over the cordon and into a storefront where three people huddled under a countertop without a plan. Rias raised two fingers and pressed the air. The car lost momentum and drifted sideways, kissing a streetlight and sliding down its length with a sound that could be mistaken for bad luck. The vehicle settled into a lane without a driver as if it had rolled and stopped on its own.
Hookwolf cut left to break a flank. A trooper slipped on foam and went down hard enough to see stars. Hookwolf's jagged shape changed course without losing speed. Rias didn't think. She put a panel of force where it needed to be. Hookwolf hit it full. The impact made a sound that made teeth hurt. He bounced back two steps and lost the clean line to the prone trooper. The trooper scrambled. Two teammates hauled him behind a shield before Hookwolf had his bearings.
She did nothing else. If someone outside of the two moments lived because she had lifted a hand, that would be enough. If anyone looked for what had gone wrong for them, they would shrug and call it angle or luck or the day turning on them.
She let herself enjoy the practiced efficiency of the PRT crews for a minute. They weren't heroes. They weren't sloganeering. They did their job. Foam pinned an E88 man to the street. Another man kicked and found his foot glued. He went down on a knee and stared at the mess he wasn't coming back from today. Armsmaster took a line two paces forward and two paces back with the kind of reading of a street that made Rias think of people she liked.
She felt the line of magic she had left on her house stir. The wards at the window flexed under nothing important and then settled. A leaf hitting wrong could do that. She kept one eye on it anyway and found it quiet again.
Rune pulled a bench up and sent it sideways. A Ward lifted a shield and took the hit on it and slid back three feet. Someone in the crowd yelled a word Rias didn't care to repeat. Stormtiger cut a gesture with his hand and dragged wind down the street in a way that made hair rise. Othala touched another man's shoulder and the set of his body changed. Rias cataloged the scene and then set it aside.
She had gotten what she'd come for. The absurdity was still the absurdity. She stood from the rooftop, reached for an anchor, and stepped back through the neat circle she made.
The house felt the way it always had. The front room held the plain chairs she had given it and the table that had nothing on it by design. The air moved. She unbuttoned her jacket and hung it where she always would hang it. She walked to the kitchen, filled a glass with water because she could, and drank it.
She put the glass in the sink. She let herself think of her family for five seconds. She stopped at seven. She crossed to the workroom and closed the door behind her.
Rias wondered how fun it'd be to play the role of a superhero. It certainly sounded like a good way to take her mind off things.
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• Boards ► Endbringers & S‑Class Threats
• Thread #008713 – [SPEC] Madison Beam / Chicago Ghost / Brockton Weirdness (Long Post, Bring Receipts)
Thread created by: MadisonWatcher
2010-02-03 19:42 (CST)
2010-02-03 19:42 (CST) – Username: MadisonWatcher
Okay, so I've been sitting on this since December and I finally have enough to make a thread.
We all saw the official pressers on Madison. "Thirteen hours, Simurgh driven off, quarantine in place, Scion + Triumvirate involvement, nothing to see here except the usual existential horror." Fine.
But some of us also saw the leaked phone footage before the takedowns.
In particular: Clip M-17-B, the one shot from the parking structure, angle looking across the river. There's that sequence around the 07:13:21 mark (timestamp from the file header) where Ziz is descending, debris field tight around her, then—
There's a red‑black line.
It's not foam. It's not a Dragon laser; wrong color, wrong edge. It's not Scion's usual gold. It's a thin lance from left frame to center mass, maybe a tenth of a second on screen, and for that tenth of a second there is a hole straight through the Simurgh. Full torso, wing segment to wing segment, clean void.
Then the debris field stutters, like someone hit pause on reality, then restarts. The wound starts to close under her TK. Then gold boy slams into her from below and the whole fight shifts.
Everyone just…pretending that didn't happen?
Because funny thing, I haven't seen the PRT once acknowledge that shot. Official footage cuts around it. Madison briefers talk Scion and Eidolon and "coordinated response," but nobody says "oh yeah and somebody punched a rifle‑shot through an Endbringer."
We know no current cape can do that. Not Alexandria, not Eidolon (not directly), not Legend, not any of the Triumvirate. At least, not in any of the footage I've ever binge-watched instead of sleeping.
So:
Who fired?
Why isn't anyone talking about it?
And why the hell does it line up with rumors I'm hearing about a ghost breach in the Chicago PRT building and some weird Brockton Bay anomalies?
Bring your own tinfoil. I've got plenty.
2010-02-03 19:55 (CST) – Username: VideoJunkie
Finally someone makes the thread.
I grabbed M-17-B before it got nuked and ran it through my software. Brightness bumped, frame-by-frame export, that whole sequence slowed to 1/60th.
You're not imagining it. Frame 43120 to 43126:
Frame 43120: debris orbit normal, Simurgh mid‑turn.
43121–43123: red‑black beam visible, edge razor sharp, no bloom, no spread.
43124: there is literally empty space where parts of her should be. Not "she's occluded by dust," I mean you can see the far debris ring through her.
43125–43126: void still present but already shrinking at the edges.
Same frames, gold boy is still a tiny blob lower left. Impact doesn't happen until 43140-ish.
If that's a Scion blast, then:
He changed color profiles without anyone noticing for twenty years,
He learned how to do sub‑pixel beams that line up perfectly with a shaky camera,
And he somehow shot past her first and only then closed for grapple?
Nah.
This is something else.
2010-02-03 20:02 (CST) – Username: PRT4Life
Can we not immediately jump to "SECRET S‑CLASS CAPE THE GOVERNMENT IS HIDING" every time a pixel looks weird, please?
Phone cameras are trash. Compression is trash. There was dust, steam, end-of-the-world levels of energy in the air. You're trusting six frames of artifacted video over multiple official statements and a coordinated media package?
Pretty sure if there was a new cape who could one-shot the Simurgh, we'd all know. They'd be on every talk show from here to Earth Aleph.
2010-02-03 20:07 (CST) – Username: TinFoil_MkII
Pretty sure if there was a new cape who could one-shot the Simurgh, we'd all know.
Or, hear me out, the PRT/Protectorate would maybe not broadcast "hey, we've got a magic bullet that almost works on Endbringers, everyone form an orderly line to steal it".
Also, maybe don't throw "one-shot" around. Ziz got a hole punched in her and then it healed. That's scary in both directions.
New cape or new weapon, either way:
Something hit her hard enough to make Scion flinch (freeze that frame, you can see his posture change mid-flight).
That something is not on the public roster.
A week later there's a weird "no comment" situation in Chicago.
Coincidence? Sure. We live in a world where coincidences kill cities.
2010-02-03 20:10 (CST) – Username: MadTown_Survivor
I was there.
Not inside the quarantine, obviously. Out on the second ring. Evac'd early, stuck in traffic with two thousand other people while the sky tried to come apart.
We couldn't see Ziz directly, but there was a point in the afternoon where everything just…lurched. Like a car hitting a speed bump at 80 km/h.
Wind changed direction. The sound changed. My teeth hurt all at once.
A couple seconds later the Endbringer sirens glitched—just a stutter, like the system didn't know what it was supposed to be screaming about.
If you told me something hit her hard enough to make the scream miss a step, I'd believe you.
I'd also believe the PRT shoving that so deep in a file cabinet that only five people ever see it.
2010-02-03 20:14 (CST) – Username: Numbers_Not_Names
Small correction: Endbringer sirens are built with redundancies out the ass. If they stuttered, that means something hit the infrastructure too. Power dip, comms interference, somebody messing with the grid.
Doesn't rule out mystery cape. Adds to the list, honestly.
Madison had regular capes, Triumvirate, Scion, Tinkers, military, all in one salad bowl. You're telling me some random unregistered laser‑Jesus just shows up, snipes Ziz, and then vanishes without anyone getting a codename or a call‑sign?
2010-02-03 20:19 (CST) – Username: Dragon_Did_Nothing_Wrong
Okay, but we're all dancing around the obvious options:
Dragon Tinker device.
New toy, tested under field conditions, didn't quite kill her, data classified. Red‑black could be exotic power source or weird lensing.
Eidolon power.
Guy literally gets new sets of abilities on demand. Maybe he pulled some kind of beam + teleport combo and optics made it look disconnected.
Scion variation.
We don't know the full extent of what he can do. Gold light is just what we usually see.
Why does it have to be some rando with no PR file?
2010-02-03 20:26 (CST) – Username: Mod_Note (Administrator)
Reminder:
Do not link to pirated or illegally obtained PRT/Protectorate footage.
Do not post instructions on how to bypass site filters.
You can describe what you saw, but keep it legal.
Infractions will earn you a 48h ban.
Carry on.
2010-02-03 20:31 (CST) – Username: Secondhand_Spook
Since OP opened the "tinfoil" door, I'll contribute.
Friend of mine (yeah yeah, "friend", I know) works low-level IT for PRT Chicago. Not frontline. Basement. Literally.
Two weeks after Madison, there's a Level 3 internal alarm. No public statement. No news. But:
Weight sensors ping in Sub-Basement C.
A vault door (one of the real ones, Tinker-assisted lock, multi-factor) logs as opened and then closed.
Three inventory tags in that room change position in the system.
There is no video. Not "video shows nothing," but actual corrupted segments from every camera in that corridor for a ~90 second window. Access logs show nobody badged in or out. No scheduled maintenance.
The official line inside is "software glitch" and "miscalibrated sensors," but they pulled that entire section off the grid for three days and Dragon supposedly pushed a patch to every recorder in the building.
Guess what that room was tagged as in the asset list?
HAYWIRE – RESTRICTED.
Make of that what you want.
2010-02-03 20:38 (CST) – Username: GodWhen
HAYWIRE – RESTRICTED.
So Madison has Simurgh plus Haywire history, then there's a mystery beam at Madison, then there's a ghost raid on Haywire's old toys in Chicago?
Yeah okay, that's fine. Totally normal. Definitely not someone trying to build their own interdimensional nuke or whatever.
We should maybe ask ourselves whether we want to find this person.
2010-02-03 20:41 (CST) – Username: LaughTrack
build their own interdimensional nuke
Joke's on you, the nuke is friendship.
jk the nuke is probably whatever punched a tunnel through Ziz.
2010-02-03 20:47 (CST) – Username: EmpireSux
Since we're collecting weirdness, can we talk about Brockton Bay for a hot second?
Little sister lives there. Follows all the cape gossip like it's a soap opera.
She mentioned:
Some ABB goons tried to grab a redhead near the Boardwalk a couple weeks back. Next thing you know, they're all sitting in an alley drooling for like ten minutes. When they came out of it, they ran in three different directions. Hospital records (leaked, don't ask) show ten guys in within 24h with "unexplained pelvic pain and sexual dysfunction," all ABB affiliates.
Same night, Oni Lee supposedly almost blew himself up. Witness says grenade flew out, stopped mid‑air, then went straight back at him. Big boom, no collateral.
PRT had a dustup with E88 downtown today (it's on the news, go look). Cars moved weird. Hookwolf bounced off something nobody saw. Official footage looks like he hit invisible glass.
Maybe it's three separate things. Maybe not.
2010-02-03 20:52 (CST) – Username: BrocktonBay_Local
Confirming #2 and #3, at least from rumor mill.
Everyone at Winslow's been talking about how "Oni Lee glitched" and there's a betting pool on whether he lost fingers or just pride. PRT won't say squat, which usually means "embarrassing for someone."
As for the E88 fight, there's a still going around (blurred faces, relax mods) where a car is mid-flight and then suddenly just…drops. No cape under it. Rune's on the far side of the street.
Armsmaster's post‑op presser used a lot of words that mean nothing, but one reporter swears he heard the phrase "unattributed force events." That's the kind of thing you write in a file when you don't want to admit you've got a ninja on your board.
2010-02-03 20:57 (CST) – Username: Numbers_Not_Names
If it's the same actor:
Madison: precision beam that erases matter.
Chicago: ghosting past physical + electronic + Tinker security, moving heavy cases.
Brockton: subtle TK, mindfuck curse, grenade return, invisible walls.
That's at least a high-tier Blaster/Striker/Mover/Thinker bundle, possibly Shaker, maybe Stranger if they're dodging cameras.
You don't get that kind of grab bag without a lot of drawbacks or some serious weird.
2010-02-03 21:03 (CST) – Username: Hero_Hiring_Manager
From a purely pragmatic standpoint: If there is a cape out there who can:
Put holes in an Endbringer,
Walk into a PRT sub‑basement and borrow Haywire's legacy,
Troll two gangs in one mid‑sized shithole without being seen,
then literally every organization with a brain is going to want a piece.
Protectorate: "Please sign here, you get your own base and six lawyers."
Villains: "We'll let you pick which continent to own if you don't kill us."
2010-02-03 21:09 (CST) – Username: Endbringer_Stan
Everyone's talking recruitment like this is a sports draft.
You realize if this theoretical cape decides they hate us, we're all screwed, right?
We've spent twenty years building playbooks around "Endbringers are unstoppable, Scion is cheat mode, everyone else plays cleanup." Drop in someone who violates that assumption, and all your models fall apart.
Maybe they're a hero. Maybe not. They might just be…doing their own thing.
That scares me more than Ziz does.
2010-02-03 21:15 (CST) – Username: VideoJunkie
Naming discussion time because this is PHO and we are trash.
What do we call them for now?
"Z‑Piercer"?
"Redline"?
"Crimson Lance"? (too edgy?)
"Ghostshot"? (covers Madison + Chicago)
"Nerfbat"? (for Hookwolf lmao)
2010-02-03 21:18 (CST) – Username: TinFoil_MkII
Nerfbat
No.
My vote: "Nullshot."
Because whatever that beam was, it didn't burn Ziz, it deleted part of her. And if they can do that to her, they can do it to anything.
2010-02-03 21:22 (CST) – Username: MadTown_Survivor
"Nullshot" sounds like something we chant at three in the morning if it means she doesn't come back.
But, uh, maybe don't meme them into an S‑Class boogeyman before we know they exist? We've got enough things to be afraid of without inventing a new one.
2010-02-03 21:27 (CST) – Username: PRT4Life
Everyone take a breath.
From what we actually know:
Madison: anomalous beam maybe exists on one piece of shaky footage.
Chicago: anonymous IT guy says "spooky vault day" with no log evidence we can see.
Brockton: rumors from a city that treats cape gossip as a civic sport.
You're connecting three data points with a crayon and calling it a conspiracy board.
Is it possible there's one cape behind all of it? Sure. Is it more likely we've got a mix of normal weird, Dragon upgrades, and bad camera angles? Also sure.
Let's not accidentally start a panic that makes some Master or Stranger's job easier.
2010-02-03 21:31 (CST) – Username: Secondhand_Spook
anonymous IT guy
If it makes you feel better, the IT guy's file exists. I checked. He's very boring. Married, two kids, posts about football on local boards.
He also forwarded me a snippet of a Dragon error code from the Chicago incident. I can't paste it here without probably getting this thread wiped, but I looked it up: same family of codes that pop when Dragon hits precog interference or "data integrity compromised by unknown external factor."
So either mystery cape is a psychic hacker, or Dragon had a migraine that day.
2010-02-03 21:38 (CST) – Username: Budget_Contessa
Hot take: we're not dealing with a Blaster at all. We're dealing with a super‑Stranger.
Someone whose main power is "does not exist unless they want you to notice," and all the flashy stuff is just bonus.
That would explain:
No ID on Madison sensors.
No Chicago footage.
No Brockton eyewitnesses describing anything more specific than "car looked like it hit air."
If they don't want a codename, we might never get one. We'll just have "that one time the Simurgh flinched and nobody could explain why."
2010-02-03 21:44 (CST) – Username: BrocktonBay_Local
Super‑Stranger or not, they've got a theme: red.
ABB story? Redhead. Madison beam? Red‑black. Hookwolf bounce? One of the troopers on scene posted (anonymously) that for half a second his HUD flashed a red distortion where the impact happened.
If this person ever does put on a costume, I'm calling it now: big dramatic cape, red motif, twelve thousand PHO avatars overnight.
2010-02-03 21:50 (CST) – Username: Hero_Hiring_Manager
they've got a theme: red
Protectorate marketing team reading this thread like: 👀
In all seriousness, if you're out there, Mystery Cape:
Join someone.
Heroes preferably, but I'll take "villain with rules" over "ghost with Endbringer beam" any day.
You don't owe us your name, but this world is not friendly to loners.
2010-02-03 21:55 (CST) – Username: Endbringer_Stan
Also, if you can hear us, please don't be another Siberian. I don't think we can handle "invincible murder cat" and "invisible Endbringer sniper" on opposite sides.
Thanks in advance.
2010-02-03 22:01 (CST) – Username: GodWhen
I'm going to say the quiet part out loud:
If I were the Government (allegedly, hypothetically, etc.), and I had a cape or weapon that could hurt an Endbringer like that, I would:
Not tell anyone.
Test it under field conditions once.
Then do everything in my power to keep both it and the user off the board until I had a plan.
Madison might have been the test.
Chicago might have been someone trying to get a copy.
Brockton might just be them getting bored.
We are all NPCs in someone else's endgame, folks.
2010-02-03 22:06 (CST) – Username: Mod_Note (Administrator)
Last warning: Take deep conspiracy talk to Conspiracy Theories & Closed Cases. This board is for Endbringers and S‑Class threats, not for arguing whether your cousin's dentist is Number Man.
Further:
Do not openly advocate kidnapping or coercing hypothetical capes "for the greater good." That's a hard line.
Do not attempt to dox Madison survivors, PRT staff, or anyone else named in this thread.
Keep it hypothetical, keep it civil, or I start handing out bans like candy.
2010-02-03 22:11 (CST) – Username: MadisonWatcher
Fair enough, mod.
To pull this back to the actual topic:
Whatever happened in Madison, something changed the tone of the fight. Even the sanitized footage shows it if you squint. Before the red‑black, Ziz is all smooth motion and perfect timing. After, there's a beat where she's a half‑step off.
Scion takes advantage. Eidolon cleans up. We get a "victory" and a quarantine city instead of a crater.
If that's just luck and good teamwork, great. I'll take it.
If it's not, if there's a person out there who can nudge an Endbringer off her script, I hope someone with sense and a spine finds them before the wrong people do.
Until then, I'm saving that clip in three places and backing it up on a drive that's not connected to anything. Just in case the internet forgets.
2010-02-03 22:17 (CST) – Username: LaughTrack
backing it up on a drive that's not connected to anything
Plot twist: that's what triggers the Simurgh. She's like "who let this idiot preserve my L?"
2010-02-03 22:21 (CST) – Username: TinFoil_MkII
jokes aside, I kind of like that we don't have an answer yet.
There's something comforting about the idea that in a world where monsters fall from the sky on a schedule, there might also be unknown good things we haven't mapped.
Scion, Triumvirate, the big names—they're known quantities. We've costed them. We've written articles and wiki pages.
Whoever fired that shot doesn't have a page.
Not yet.
2010-02-03 22:25 (CST) – Username: Mod_Note (Administrator)
Thread will remain open for now, but:
No more posting of "my uncle in the Protectorate says…" style hearsay without at least some corroboration.
No links to hard leaks.
No advocacy of illegal action against any cape, known or hypothetical.
Further violations and I lock this.
Carry on, speculate responsibly, and maybe someday we'll get an official "Nullshot" entry on the wiki and can all argue about who called it first.
2010-02-03 22:27 (CST) – Username: BrocktonBay_Local
Calling it now: when we do get a name, it won't be anything we've suggested.
Because the universe has a sense of humor and it's terrible.
Rias blinked and yawned and stood up. It was honestly refreshing how quickly the humans were able to notice her tracks or the absence thereof.
The new Ward looked smaller than he should have.
He stood on the little television screen in Rias's front room, in front of a PRT backdrop, helmet tucked under one arm. Brown hair, pale skin, all angles and nervous shifts. His armor was red and gold with a glossy finish that tried a little too hard. A red visor sat above his forehead, pushed up for the camera. The footage had that too-bright quality local news loved, like someone had turned the saturation up to hide how tired everyone really was.
"—Brockton Bay's newest Ward, Kid Win," the reporter said. "A technology‑based hero whose inventions include a personal hoverboard and modular energy weaponry. Kid Win joins the existing Wards team as the youngest Tinker on record in the city—"
The camera cut to a B‑roll clip: the kid on a red hovering board, doing a short, controlled sweep over a training yard. Foam targets along a wall sprouted blackened circles as his gun flickered in rapid shots. He wobbled once, recovered fast, glanced toward the camera as if checking whether anyone had noticed.
Rias watched from the couch, one knee up, elbow on it, chin in her hand. Her hair fell in a red curtain over her shoulder, loose and unstyled. The light from the screen painted faint blue shadows along her cheekbones.
He couldn't be much older than Issei had been when she first met him. That thought came without permission and sat beside her.
"Sources inside the Protectorate say—"
She picked up the remote and clicked the television off.
Silence dropped back into the room with a soft tick from the cooling screen. The house felt more itself at once: old wood, clean paint, the hum from the refrigerator, a car going past outside on Willow Lane at the usual slow neighborhood speed.
Rias let herself sit there for another heartbeat. Two. Then she straightened.
Enough.
She stood and crossed to the bedroom.
Her current clothes—soft sleep shirt, lounge pants—weren't going to do. She wanted something that could move with her. Something that might trick her brain into thinking motion was a choice and not another way to run from a feeling.
She lifted her hand and snapped her fingers.
She pictured fitted black leggings that would sit smooth against skin and not chafe. A longline sports bra with proper support. A red tank, darker than her hair, that fell to mid‑hip and breathed. A lightweight jacket in slate gray that could tie around her waist if she overheated. Socks that didn't slip. Shoes that could handle concrete and uneven sidewalks, soles with just enough give.
The magic answered. Everything appeared on the dresser, folded in neat stacks, exactly as she'd imagined it down to the small reflective strip on the heel of each shoe.
She pulled the clothes on. Everything fit as if she'd been measured. The shoes hugged her feet. The tank moved when she tested a twist, but not too much. She tied her hair back with a band she made the same way, a quick snap that turned nothing into elastic and cloth.
Rias stepped to the small mirror by the door and looked at herself.
A tall young woman in running clothes looked back. Red hair, tied high. Blue‑green eyes. Pale skin that took to this world's weak winter light easily.
Her fingers rose automatically to trace the line of her cheek, the shape of her nose. Habit suggested a glamour: shift the lines, dull the color of her hair, soften the eye color, add a forgettable cast to her mouth. Nothing big. Nothing that would stand out.
She stopped halfway.
She let her hand fall.
"Enough hiding," she said quietly, to the empty hallway. "I am who I am."
She locked the front door out of respect for Alice's gentle paranoia, checked the small rune on the frame with a touch of thought, and stepped out onto the porch.
Morning sat bright and thin over the street. The winter sun in Brockton Bay didn't have much heat, but it did its best.
The Hebert house sat to her right, quiet. Curtains half‑drawn. A wind chime on the back porch moved once at the edge of her senses and then fell still. She thought of Alice's warning about lights on late and shadows behind curtains and didn't look too long.
Rias drew a breath, rolled her shoulders, and started running.
She took it easy at first. Her feet found a rhythm on the sidewalk: right, left, right, left. Knees soft. Shoulders relaxed. The neighborhood slipped by in small, even pieces. Mailboxes with peeling numbers. Lawns clipped too short for the season. A plastic tricycle lying on its side near a front step.
People glanced up when she passed.
Attention rolled over her like the first touch of warm water. A man in his forties, taking trash to the curb, paused with the bag halfway into the bin. Two teenage boys on bikes slowed without meaning to, conversation stalling as their eyes tracked her. A woman walking a terrier frowned at the dog when it tried to pull toward Rias for attention and then, after a double‑take, offered a quick, reflexive smile instead.
Rias had grown up with people staring. At school, at formal gatherings, at the odd off‑campus trip where she forgot to damp things down and a whole street seemed to decide at once that this was the most interesting stranger they'd seen all week. She'd learned to tune it out and not think too hard about how much of it was her and how much was was simply the genetic lottery of Gremory hair and features.
Here, the attention felt…different. Just human eyes following someone who looked slightly out of place and very put together. A boy's startled appreciation. A woman's quick assessment. A jogger running the other way offering a nod of respect on pure autopilot when their feet fell into the same cadence for a moment.
She let it warm her, just a little.
She increased her pace when her body settled into the motion. Muscles loosened. Breath came easy, deeper and steady. Devil physiology didn't care about lactic acid the same way humans did; fatigue was a choice she rarely had to make. Her heart worked, but it didn't strain. The run felt good in the simple way of doing one thing and only that.
She cut out of the neighborhood, down a longer street that led toward the busier parts of town. Traffic picked up. She timed her crossings without thinking, slipping between cars without making them brake. Her awareness moved out from her body, tracking where people were looking, where they weren't. She let the small field of "don't bump into me" drift closer to her skin; drivers didn't suddenly swerve toward or away, they just…naturally chose paths that didn't intersect hers.
The city passed under her feet.
She ran through better blocks and worse ones: little family restaurants with hand‑painted signs, chain drugstores, a stretch of warehouses that smelled faintly of oil and something sharp, a park she'd already mapped from her walks. Kids played on a playground that had seen better paint, bundled in jackets and beanies. A pair of teenage girls on a bench turned their heads together, eyes following as she went by, their conversation hitching in mid‑word.
She let herself enjoy that too.
Three hours slid past in pieces. She didn't track time closely; she tracked the way the sunlight shifted, the way her body warmed and then plateaued, the way the city's noise rose and fell according to invisible schedules. Trucks on one street, buses on another. School letting out somewhere too far to see, close enough for the wave of voices to brush her range.
By the time she came up on the Boardwalk, the air off the bay had picked up, bringing salt and the smell of damp wood and fried food.
She slowed without needing to think about it, dropping from a run to a jog to a walk in a few lengths of board. Sweat cooled on her neck where a few stray strands of hair had escaped the tie. Her breathing deepened once, twice, then leveled. Her legs felt pleasantly used—not tired, but satisfied.
The Boardwalk looked almost cheerful. Shops had their shutters up. Tourists moved in flocks of two and four, thicker near the food stalls, thinner near the souvenir places selling t‑shirts and keychains and cheap plastic Rig models. Someone had drawn chalk hearts and badly shaped stars near the railing, already scuffed by shoes.
Rias walked along the planks toward one of the mid‑sized restaurants that faced the water. It had big windows and a mounted television over the bar inside, angled just enough that she could see it from the sidewalk if she picked the right spot.
She leaned on the railing opposite, rested her forearms on the cool wood, and watched.
A news anchor with perfect hair and a grave expression sat next to a graphic labeled AFRICA – CAPE CONFLICTS.
The footage wasn't clean. It never was when they talked about that side of the world. Grainy shots from a distance, zoomed too far. Buildings with walls torn open. Smoke rising from what had once been a marketplace. A jeep overturned at the edge of a dirt road, its wheels still slowly turning.
Names scrolled past. Not one she recognized personally, but the pattern was familiar: warlords with capes at their backs or on their backs, alliances that lasted months before breaking, ceasefires measured in hours. The anchor's mouth tightened as they cut to another clip, this one shot from the air—a helicopter, maybe, or a drone.
Below, something burned.
At first it looked like a moving patch of wildfire. Flame rolled outward in a thick, roiling wave, constantly replenishing itself, chewing through scrub and low buildings alike. Smoke boiled up in black columns. The camera shook as whoever held it hit turbulence. At the center of the inferno, for half a heartbeat, a shape resolved: a man's outline, made of fire and breaking apart into embers, only to reassemble a moment later under the blast of his own explosion.
ASH BEAST, the caption identified.
The ticker at the bottom did its steady crawl. Casualty estimates. Displacement numbers. Some international commission's politely worded condemnation of warlords who were just going to ignore them. Warnings about people trying to redirect Ash Beast toward their enemies and instead losing three towns and a chunk of their own forces when the monster refused to cooperate.
Rias watched the endless explosion roll across a stretch of land that could have been anywhere: dry earth, scrub, the skeletons of houses. The shockwave kicked up lines of dust and ash that gave the beast his name, the way the field around him converted matter to energy and back again on a constant, uncontrolled cycle.
A parahuman that walked and the world burned around him.
This world really did not know how to do subtle.
Africa was far. Planes and politics made it farther. But the idea of a whole continent reshaped by capes and their wars tugged at something in her.
On her Earth, devils and angels and fallen had carved up the world with treaties. Human conflicts had been layered over those lines, sometimes used as tools, sometimes left alone. Wars came, wars went, but there were systems for containing the worst of it when you cared to.
Here, men with powers styled themselves warlords and answered to no one but their own hunger until something bigger came along to eat them.
Rias tilted her head, eyes following the path of Ash Beast's advance as the camera zoomed out to show a map with a red dot moving slowly across borders. She read the names of the countries, filed them away.
"Interesting," she murmured.
She made a quiet note in the back of her mind, the place she kept long‑term ideas: Africa. Sooner or later. Not tomorrow, not this month, maybe not this year. But someday.
She pushed off the railing and walked away from the Boardwalk.
If motion helped, she would keep moving.
—
Brockton Bay's pretty picture ended quickly when you stepped off the waterfront and walked inland along the wrong streets.
Paint peeled. Windows boarded over. Shopfronts turned into fronts for nothing at all. Trash collected in corners. The same city that put up neat PRT barriers and friendly posters about volunteering had whole districts it seemed to forget on purpose.
Rias walked there with her hands in her pockets and her attention stretched wide.
Homelessness looked similar in most places: people bundled in layers that didn't match, sitting on stoops, under overhangs, in the lee of dumpsters. Cardboard signs. Plastic bags with everything they owned. Smells of unwashed bodies and street food someone had eaten three days ago. Here, it had extra additions—gang tags on walls, E88 and ABB marks arguing in spray paint over who neglected whom.
A man sat on the sidewalk near a convenience store, back against the wall, blanket over his knees. His beard was gray, his eyes the vague color of someone who had forgotten how to focus them.
Rias stopped in front of him.
He blinked up at her, slow.
"Spare some change?" he asked automatically, voice rough.
She considered the question.
"Food," she said. "Would you like food?"
The man blinked again, brain catching up.
"Yeah," he managed. "Yeah, I…yeah. Anything."
"Stay," she said, as if he had anywhere to go. She walked past him into the convenience store.
The inside was fluorescent and smelled like stale coffee and sugar. The clerk looked up, then relaxed when he saw nothing about her screamed immediate trouble.
Rias walked the aisles, picked up a basket, and began filling it: pre‑packed sandwiches that had the least offensive ingredient lists, bottles of water, granola bars dense enough to be actual calories rather than flavored air, a few sealed packs of fruit cups. She added a couple packets of cheap socks on an impulse. Cold feet made everything worse.
She paid in cash. The clerk barely looked at the bills; he had the bored efficiency of someone who'd been on shift too long. She stepped back outside and knelt in front of the man.
He watched her with something like caution now. Beautiful people didn't usually stop and kneel in front of him. That tended to be a prelude to a trick, in his experience.
She set the bag down, opened it, and took things out so he could see there was no catch.
"Food," she said. "Water. Eat the sandwiches first; the bars keep."
His hands shook when he reached for the first packet.
"You an angel?" he asked, half‑joking, half not.
Rias smiled, small.
"Not even close," she said. "Just someone with a little extra."
She stood before he could thank her, because this wasn't about hearing gratitude. The ache under her ribs hadn't changed. If anything, it felt sharper for a moment.
She walked on.
She did it again a street over, for a young woman with a baby bundled in an oversized hoodie, eyes darting. Again near a cluster of men sharing a bottle in a paper bag. She made sure to buy at different shops so no single clerk saw her repeatedly empty a section and might decide to feel clever about calling someone about it.
Devil Magic could have conjured the food out of the air the way she'd made her clothes. She chose not to. It felt wrong to disrupt the small ecosystem here more than she already did by existing. If she could convert money into food in a system that at least recognized food as food, she'd do that. The cash would keep the store open another week. The food would get eaten. It was clean math.
By the time she reached the end of the block, several people were eating. None of them looked transformed. No one suddenly remembered their childhood dreams and stood up to go get a degree. No one burst into song. A couple of them eyed each other's share with wary suspicion because when you were used to not having enough, abundance looked like a trick.
The ache stayed.
"Of course it does," she said under her breath, turning her collar up against a gust of bay wind that had made it this far. "You can't bribe your own heart."
She kept moving.
—
The rest of the afternoon became a list.
If feeding people quietly didn't fix the hollow spot inside her, maybe activity would. Maybe if she kept stacking experiences on top of each other, the weight would press something into place.
She found a bowling alley that had seen better decades. The sign buzzed. Half the neon letters didn't work, so the place called itself OWL N G. Inside, old carpet disguised sins in aggressive patterns. A handful of lanes were occupied; parents with kids, a group of teenagers, a man in his thirties doing something complicated with spin and footwork.
Rias rented shoes because that's what you did. The clerk eyed her leggings and tank top, then eyed her face, then looked away hastily and pushed the shoes over with a muttered, "Size?"
"Seven," she said. The shoes were clean enough.
She bowled alone on a lane near the end. The ball felt heavy at first, then obedient. She didn't cheat. No telekinetic nudges, no microscopic adjustments to friction. She let human physics do what it did.
Her first throw went neatly into the gutter.
She watched it roll all the way to the back, listened to the dull clunk as it hit. The failure felt almost refreshing. She tried again, adjusted her stance, watched the ball curve in and knock down seven pins. The sound was good: solid, decisive. The little animation on the screen above her tried to make it more exciting than it was.
She finished a game. Then another. She improved. Not dramatically, not in the way devils with infinite time and patience could improve at anything, but enough that by the end she was reliably breaking one‑fifty.
"Nice arm," the man on the next lane said once, responsibly not hitting on someone who had clearly just outscored him twice.
"Thank you," she said.
She left. The ache stayed.
A movie theater next. The big one with six screens and sticky floors. She bought a ticket to something with explosions and a title she forgot before the previews ended. She sat in the dark, surrounded by strangers chewing loudly, and let the sound system rattle her ribcage.
The actors ran, shouted, kissed. The city on screen nearly fell and then didn't. The hero made a speech about choosing to fight for home.
Home, Rias thought, and stared at the flicker of light on the theater ceiling until the line under her ribs pulled tight.
She stayed through the credits because the seat was comfortable and the dark hid her expression. Then she got up and left with everyone else, discarded cup in hand, another line crossed off the list.
Later, she found herself in a community center on the edge of a different neighborhood, drawn by a hand‑lettered sign out front: CHESS NIGHT – ALL AGES WELCOME.
The room smelled like coffee and old wood. Folding tables stood in rows. Most had boards on them. Most boards had pieces in motion. Older men leaned over their games with the intensity of people for whom this was the highlight of the week. A couple of teenagers sat at one table, phones out between moves.
Rias slid into an empty chair opposite an older woman with sharp eyes and a cardigan that had seen better days.
"May I?" she asked, indicating the board.
"Sit," the woman said. "White or black?"
"Black," Rias said.
They played three games. The woman won the first because Rias let herself underestimate how quickly a human mind could spot patterns. Rias won the second, this time actually paying attention. The third took longer. They traded pieces like favors. The woman finally resigned three moves before checkmate, saw it coming, and huffed.
"You're too young to be that patient," she said.
"I had a very strict teacher," Rias said, thinking of Sona's notebooks and quiet, relentless focus. "She would be offended if I lost all my habits."
"Good," the woman said, then narrowed her eyes. "You should come back next week."
"We'll see," Rias said.
She left before anyone could ask her name or life story. Outside, the sky had gone the particular washed‑out blue that meant evening was thinking about arriving. The air cooled. Streetlights started to click on, one by one.
She walked home.
—
Willow Lane looked almost picturesque in twilight. Porch lights flicked on in sequence as if someone had choreographed it. A kid a few houses down argued with a parent about coming inside for dinner. Somewhere, someone's television leaked laugh track audio through open blinds. A dog in the distance barked in a steady, conversational rhythm.
Rias's feet knew the way now without needing guidance. She turned the last corner and saw her small pale green rental house waiting, porch light switch still stubbornly upside down because Bill had loved it that way and Alice wouldn't bully it.
The Hebert house sat next door, slightly closer to the street, its own porch light off. The hedges had been trimmed. The siding looked clean but tired. A plastic chair on the porch slumped like it had opinions about all of this and no one to share them with.
The front door opened as she came into range.
A girl stepped out, piloting a bulging trash bag with both hands. She wore jeans, a hoodie two sizes too big, and an expression that tried to be blank and mostly just looked tired. Black hair fell in a frizzy curtain around her face, half obscuring thick glasses. She paused when she saw Rias, weight shifting on one foot.
They were close enough now that Rias could see the way the girl's fingers tightened on the trash bag's plastic as if bracing for something.
Rias slowed and then, deliberately, stopped by the hedge that marked the invisible property line. She could have nodded and gone inside. She didn't.
"Hello," she said, voice easy. "We're neighbors, and I've been rude about not introducing myself."
The girl blinked, eyes focusing from behind the lenses.
"I'm Rias," Rias went on when the silence stretched. She smiled, small but genuine, and held out her hand across the boundary.
There was a tiny hesitation. Then the girl shifted the trash bag to one hand and reached out with the other.
Her grip was cautious, a little too light, like she was afraid of squeezing wrong. Her palm was cool. Her hand disappeared into Rias's easily.
"Taylor," she said. Her voice came out a little hoarse, like she hadn't used it much that day. "Taylor Hebert."
"Nice to meet you, Taylor," Rias said. "I moved in next door a little while ago. I meant to say hello sooner, but…"
She lifted a shoulder. "Life."
"Yeah," Taylor said softly. She glanced at the trash bag, at the curb, at anything but Rias's face for a moment, then forced her gaze back up out of what looked like sheer stubbornness. "Um. Welcome to the neighborhood, I guess."
"Thank you," Rias said. "I like it. Your neighbor up the street makes excellent tea and has very strong opinions about light switches."
That pulled the faintest flicker of a smile from Taylor.
"Mrs. Donnelly," she said. "Yeah. She, um. She used to babysit me when I was little. She thinks everyone under thirty is a child."
"She isn't wrong," Rias said.
Taylor huffed a sound that might have been a laugh if it had more practice. The tension in her shoulders eased one degree.
The front door behind her opened a second time.
"Taylor? You need a hand with—oh." The man who stepped out stopped on the threshold.
He was in his forties, maybe, with hair going thin at the temples and a beard that hadn't quite decided whether it wanted to be stubble or a real beard. His work shirt—Dockworkers Association logo on the chest—hung a little loose on him in a way that said it had fit differently a year ago. Tired lines sat around his eyes and mouth, the kind that didn't come from age alone.
He took in the scene in a quick, almost guilty glance: his daughter on the walkway with a stranger whose hair did not occur naturally in this world, whose posture said comfortable and whose clothes said she could have chosen to live somewhere much nicer than Willow Lane.
Reflexive politeness won over hesitation.
"Evening," he said. He stepped forward, took the trash bag from Taylor without looking at it, and gave Rias a nod. "I'm Danny. Danny Hebert. I, uh—looks like you've met my daughter."
"Yes," Rias said. "She was welcoming me to the neighborhood. I'm Rias. I live next door."
She gestured toward the pale green house. "Alice introduced me to the street. She mentioned you, actually. In a good way."
Danny's mouth twitched, fighting its way toward what had once been an easy smile.
"That sounds like Alice," he said. "I think she's determined to single‑handedly keep this block from falling apart through the power of tea and gossip."
"It seems to be working," Rias said.
He huffed a breath that might have been a laugh on a better day. His eyes flicked over her once more, taking in the running clothes, the lack of visible gang colors, the direct eye contact. Something like resolve set in his shoulders.
"It's good to meet you, Rias," he said. "We don't get many new faces on this street."
"Rent was reasonable," she said lightly. "I couldn't resist."
"Yeah," he said. His gaze went briefly distant, somewhere in the middle distance where memories lived, then came back. "Listen, if you're not busy, we—"
He trailed off for a second, as if hearing his own voice and the invite in it at the same time and wondering who, exactly, had decided to be that person today. Then he pushed through.
"We're just sitting down to dinner," Danny said. "Nothing fancy. Spaghetti and whatever sauce I didn't burn. But if you'd like to join us, I figure it's about time we did the neighborly thing properly."
He offered the words with an awkward earnestness.
Rias looked at him, at Taylor, at the open door behind them with the warm rectangle of light spilling onto the porch.
Dinner at the Heberts' table was simple and warm.
The kitchen was small, the light a little too yellow, the table scarred where plates had banged and knives had slipped over the years. Danny's spaghetti came out of a box and the sauce from a jar he'd tried to improve with garlic and too much pepper. It still tasted better than hotel food. Better than the sandwich she'd forgotten halfway through two days ago.
Taylor sat across from her, hunched a little, hair falling like a curtain. She twirled pasta around her fork with the kind of careful focus that said she'd rather be invisible. Every time Danny asked her a question—how was school, did you finish that English assignment, had she seen the new poster they'd put up at the bus stop—her shoulders twitched, but she answered. Quiet, short, honest. She laughed once, surprised, when Alice came up in one of Danny's stories and he did a passable impression of their neighbor scolding a raccoon.
Rias let the domestic noise soak into her. Forks on plates. Glasses clinking. The little huffs of shared amusement. The patchy silence afterward that felt less like absence and more like people who used to have one more chair at the table and were still learning how to live with the empty space.
She had grown up at tables three times this size, with silverware that had never seen a dishwasher and chandeliers overhead. With her brother making bad jokes and her mother pretending not to smile and her father raising an eyebrow when she tried to sneak a forkful of dessert first.
This was nothing like that. It still felt like family.
When the plates were mostly pushed back and Taylor had offered, almost tripping over her own tongue, to do the dishes, Danny insisted she at least let their guest escape the cleanup.
"You don't have to go just yet," he said as he carried plates to the sink. "But if you've got things to do…"
"I do," Rias said, and for once it was true without qualification. "Thank you for dinner, Mr. Hebert. Taylor."
"Danny," he corrected, a little awkward but firm.
"Danny," she echoed.
Taylor wiped her hands on a dish towel and half-lifted it in something that wanted to be a wave. "Um. Good night."
"Good night," Rias said.
She stepped back out into the cool air with the faint scent of tomatoes and dish soap clinging to her. The Hebert porch light swung behind her as the door shut, leaving a narrow wedge of warmth on the steps before it cut off.
Her own house waited next door.
She unlocked the door, stepped inside, and let it shut softly behind her. The quiet of the pale green house met her like an old habit—clean, still, ready to be whatever she made of it.
She toed her shoes off in the entry and left them neatly aligned. The front room had the chairs she'd conjured, the little table, the untouched rug. The workroom door stood open, the lamp off.
She stood in the middle of the front room for a moment, hands loose at her sides, and listened to the echo of Hebert voices in her head fade.
The ache under her ribs shifted again. It didn't lessen. It just…changed shape.
"Superhero," she said to the empty room.
The word sounded ridiculous and entirely plausible at the same time.
She flicked the front room light on and went to the workroom.
—
The work table was clear. The Haywire cases sat stacked neatly in one corner, closed and dormant. Her laptop waited at the far end, lid down. A simple pencil and a pad of paper lay in the center because Alice had once dropped them off with an apologetic, "In case you need to write angry letters to the city about trash pickup. I find it helps to use real paper first."
Rias pulled the chair out and sat. The wood creaked a little under her, a familiar sound now.
She drew the pad closer.
"Costume," she murmured.
The first lines came easy: a quick silhouette, long legs, the hint of a cape. She sketched without magic. Pencil on paper, graphite leaving pale gray trails.
Cape was the obvious choice. She'd grown up with formal gowns that might as well have been capes. Her brother's aura made literal cloaks of power when he wanted it to. The word hero brought capes along like trailing fabric.
She shaded the cape, then stopped. Capes dragged. Capes caught wind and bullets and careless hands. Capes were dramatic, but she'd spent enough time watching this world's capes to know half of them weren't thinking about practicalities.
"No cape," she said aloud.
She crossed a line through it.
What else? She could lean into what she was. Crimson hair, horns, the sweep of bat wings, the flare of the Power of Destruction in her palm. Go full devil so there was no mistaking her for anything else.
That would be honest. It would also be stupid.
If someone ever worked out that the same red-haired woman who had punched a hole through the Simurgh's torso and robbed a PRT vault also lived in a small house on Willow Lane next to a grieving widower and his daughter, they would come. If they connected that woman to an entire different metaphysical system this world didn't have names for, they might decide to poke at it.
She didn't want Brockton Bay to become collateral in a different kind of war.
"Separate," she told herself. "Sentai Crimson is not Rias Gremory."
The name rolled out of nowhere and stuck to the inside of her skull. She frowned at it.
"Too much," she muttered. "Too on the nose. Too…me."
She tapped the pencil against the pad, let the tip dent little moons into the margin. The motion pulled up a different set of images, unbidden: her brother hunched forward on a couch, elbows on knees, crown of red hair lit by the glow of a television screen.
Sirzechs liked to pretend he was regal, all composed smiles and distant calm. In private, with family, he was as ridiculous as any big brother. He'd dragged her and Grayfia onto that couch more times than she could count when she was younger, insisting they watch "just one more" episode of whatever colorful ridiculous Super Sentai season had grabbed his attention that year.
Rias had watched more men in primary-colored spandex shouting roll calls and attacking rubber-suited monsters than any self-respecting devil princess should have admitted to.
She hadn't liked all of them. Some had been too loud. Some too earnest. But she remembered the way Sirzechs' face lit up when the Red of the year did something dramatic and stupid and brave. Remembered the warmth of his arm around her shoulders when she'd fallen asleep halfway through some special and he hadn't moved until the credits were done.
The ache under her ribs shifted again, sharper now, edged with nostalgia.
"Fine," she said softly. "You win."
She flipped the paper to a clean page and started again.
This time, the lines were bolder. Full-body suit, snug but not painted on. Strong boots. White gloves with cuffs. Bold diagonals across the chest. A helmet with a smooth visor and a simple crest. Not any particular Sentai team—the shows blurred together in her memory—but the feeling of them. Clean, bright, a little theatrical.
She added a belt, stylized buckle in the shape of a crimson wing. She toyed with shoulder pads and discarded them. Too much. She added a narrow white band around the upper arm. She made the main color a deep, rich red that wasn't quite Gremory crimson but close enough that her heart knew it.
She drew the helmet last. Mouthplate smooth, no lips. Visor black and opaque with a slight curve where the eyes would go. A simple V-shaped crest above, like a stylized bird or flame.
She looked at the sketch for a long moment.
"Sentai Crimson," she said again, testing it.
This time it fit.
She set the pencil down and snapped her fingers.
Devil magic moved, delighted to have something so straightforward to do. It took the image in her mind and the lines on the page and turned them into intentions in the air. Power flowed through her, easy as breath.
White briefs and undersuit first, a base layer that appeared folded on the bed in the next room. Then the main suit—a one-piece of red that clung without pinching, faint sheen catching the light, seams placed where they'd never chafe. She specified the fabric with the lazy precision of someone who had had armorers and seamstresses her whole life and could bully reality directly now: four-way stretch, breathable, insulating when needed, resistant to small arms fire because this was still Brockton Bay and she didn't wanna have to consciously repair it every single time someone shot her.
Gloves and boots followed, white with narrow black cuffs and a small silver ridge along the knuckles and insteps. The belt came next, white strap, silver buckle with the tiny wing emblem raised in relief. The lines of it made her think of her own family crest without actually being it.
The helmet took more work.
She held the image steady: sleek, rounded, jawline hugging, visor black from the outside but translucent from within. Airflow channels she'd never see. Padding that conformed to her, not the other way around. Micro‑magic worked into the inner shell to keep her voice clear, to give her ears the world exactly as loud as she wanted it.
The helmet appeared on the table with a soft, solid sound.
Rias stood and went to it.
Up close, it looked…right. The red matched the suit in her mind. The black visor swallowed the lamplight. The small crest at the forehead caught it and threw it back. If she squinted, she could imagine it on a ridiculous hero screaming a roll call on Sirzechs' old screen.
She smiled despite herself.
She carried the pieces into the bedroom and changed.
The undersuit slid on like water. The main suit followed, sealing seamlessly at the back with a line that vanished once closed. She pulled the zipper up, felt the fabric settle. It hugged her in all the right places and gave in the others. Her curves were there—she had never been able to pretend otherwise—but the suit held them with a clean, confident line rather than flaunting them.
Boots, snug around her calves, soles firm and springy. Gloves, fingers fitting perfectly, no excess at the tips. Belt around her waist, buckle centered.
She picked up the helmet last.
For a second she hesitated, helmet cradled in both hands. The last time she'd covered her face had been when she'd worn a tiara and veil as part of a ceremony she didn't want to remember too closely. This wasn't that.
"Just a costume," she told herself. "Just a mask. Not a cage."
She pulled the helmet on.
The world went dark for half a heartbeat as the padding settled around her skull, cupping it. Then the visor cleared from the inside out. Her own reflection in the bedroom window stared back at her, distorted by the angle: red suit, white gloves, helmeted head tilted.
She turned, twisting to see herself from different angles. The suit moved with her. No tugging, no sagging. It felt like wearing a skin she'd put on on purpose.
"Sentai Crimson," she said inside the helmet.
The inner magic picked her voice up and tossed it back at her with a slight metallic edge. She tweaked the setting with a thought until it sounded like herself, only…more. Clearer, slightly lower, a little theatrical.
She posed once, because Sirzechs would have made her if he could see her now.
"That's too much," she told the empty room, laughing quietly at herself. The laugh echoed in the helmet and came back warmer than she expected.
She dismissed the laugh and looked at the clock on the nightstand.
9:47 p.m.
She rolled her shoulders, testing the range of motion. The suit didn't bind.
"Ten o'clock cape nonsense," she said. "Why not."
She stepped back into the front room, boots thudding softly on the wood floor. She locked the door out of habit, even though anyone interested enough could walk through it if they tried hard enough. The magic on the frame hummed in recognition. She reached back and let her wings unfold.
They slid through reality as easily as they ever did, unfurling from a place under her shoulder blades that technically didn't exist. Dark, bat‑like, membranes catching the lamplight. The sight of them in the reflection of the window made the suit look less like a costume and more like a statement.
"Part of the look," she said. "We'll call it theming."
She opened the window with a touch, eased it up until the night's cool breath slipped into the room. Willow Lane lay outside, streetlamps painting soft circles on the asphalt. Most houses were dark. A few had blue flickers behind curtains where televisions did their work.
Rias stepped up onto the windowsill, crouched there for a heartbeat, then pushed off.
Wings caught the air in a smooth, practiced sweep. The ground fell away. The pale green house, the blue‑shuttered one, the Heberts' place—all shrank as she rose, sliding above the rooftops. The helmet made the wind sound different, muffled and close, but the motion was the same. She climbed until the line of the bay was a darker band against the sky, the Rig's lights distant pricks.
She leveled out.
Sentai Crimson flew over Brockton Bay.