Girl's Pov:
She had not made it twenty meters into the alley before a hand closed around her arm.
"AHHH! LET ME GO!!!"
The grip relocated to her neck.
"Well," said the first one, with a voice that made her feel like something small being examined by something large.
"Look what we found..... Hello, beautiful. Why are you walking so fast? Do you not want to keep my friend and me company?"
"My friend is right," said the second, from her other side.
"Why do you not keep us company? Maybe you would even like it."
Something cold and metal appeared near her face. "No, no, no. Stay still, little girl. I would not like to do this with a corpse. It is not as much fun when they do not scream."
She began to sob.
"Relax," said the first, with a smile in his voice. "My friend and I will show you a great time..... You will see."
She ran every option she had.
Scream and the knife moves.
Hit one and the other neutralizes her.
Nothing worked. She ran the options again and arrived at the same results.
'If that had not happened I would not be in this situation,' she thought. 'Someone. Please. Help me.'
Twip.
All three of them turned toward the sound.
A figure came out of the shadows fast, covering the distance between itself and the two men in a way that should not have been possible, and kicked them both in the face in the same motion.
They separated.
They fell.
The second one was back on his feet before the first had finished landing, and he had something in his hand that was not a knife.
"HEY! YOU! IDIOT! DO NOT MOVE!!!" The gun was pointed at the figure, which had not moved. She could not see it clearly because it was standing in the part of the alley where the light did not reach. "I WILL SHOOT!"
"Good evening, gentlemen." The voice was modulated, altered, carrying a quality that she could not immediately identify except that it made the hair on her arms stand up.
"I see you were planning to commit one of the more serious offenses against this lady. I will give you one opportunity to choose correctly."
A pause.
"Option A: leave the girl and go on your way.
Option B: experience the worst moment of your criminal lives."
"Listen to me, you idiot," the second one said, keeping the gun up. "You do not come in here and...."
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The second man went down with a broken nose and several teeth missing, and the figure did not stop there, because stopping there apparently was not the plan. It continued in a way that made her look away because what was happening to the man's arm and leg was not something she was prepared to watch.
The first man was sweating visibly. She could see it from where she was standing.
The figure stood up slowly. Its hands were dark. It took the gun from the second man, who was no longer in a condition to care about the gun, and put it somewhere on its person. The light caught it properly for the first time.
She opened her eyes wide.
So did the first man.
"It seems Option A was never genuinely under consideration," the figure said, looking at the first man. "Tell me, friend. Will you let her go, or will I have to apply the same methods to you?"
"YOU BASTARD!!!" The first man shoved her to the side, hard, and lunged.
"Only if I was going to get a dollar for every time I heard that from now on..." the figure said imagining the prospects.
What followed was not a fight in any conventional sense.
The first man threw punches and the figure redirected them, not blocking exactly but deflecting, touching each incoming strike with just enough contact to send it somewhere harmless and then moving on.
The last punch came in and the figure stepped inside it and pressed two fingertips into the man's stomach in a precise location.
The first man folded.
"Wait," he gasped, crawling backward. "Wait. You are not going to do to me what you did to him, are you?"
He pointed at the second man, who was an arrangement of limbs on the alley floor that suggested several things had gone wrong in their structural relationship to each other.
"Yes," the figure said. "I am."
"WAIT! I have information! Valuable information! If you do not hit me I will tell you everything!"
A pause.
"If the information is valuable, it will save you," the figure said. "If it is not, you know what will happen. Speak."
The first man spoke. He spoke about a criminal he knew of, someone who had been hiding from the police for a long time, someone connected to a case that had been on the morning news recently.
He gave the name and the location and kept going until the figure held up one hand.
"If this is false," the figure said, "I will come for you again."
Then it reached out and broke the man's arm, which produced a sound that she was going to hear for a while, and knocked him unconscious with a single punch before he finished screaming.
The figure turned toward her.
"Up you go," it said, extending a hand. "It is not good for a lady to be on the ground."
She took the hand. It pulled her upright with no apparent effort.
"I suggest you avoid this particular route in future," the figure said. "Especially at night. What is your name?"
"M.... my name is Kara," she said.
"Miss Kara. I hope the rest of your night is uninterrupted."
It turned to go. She found a question before she could stop it.
"What is your name?"
The figure paused.
"Spider-Man," it said. "With a hyphen. But in this particular guise, you can call me Noir."
"Haha," she said, and felt the smile come before she had decided to smile. "Thanks."
She left the alley quickly.