… Elias Mercer
"I should've expected something like this to happen…"
If there's one thing Brockton Bay teaches you, it's that rock bottom is never the end. There's always a basement, and sometimes that basement comes with special effects just to make sure you understand exactly how fucked you are.
After my power showed up —or my "awakening," like the PHO nerds love to call it— I started noticing this thing in the corner of my vision.
[Celestial Roulette: 1x Free Roll Available]
I stared at that glowing notification the same way you stare at a cockroach sitting on your pillow.
Like… you know you've gotta do something, but you also know that one wrong move can turn the whole situation into something way worse…!
But to keep going… no music started playing; no deity showed up to explain the rules; no tutorial popped up offering me fifty bonus crystals.
Just that screen floating in front of me, like a government notification telling you your data got leaked but everything is totally under control.
I ran a hand over my face, trying to organize my thoughts… but it didn't do shit.
"…Let's spin this shit."
There just wasn't any other option!
The roulette wheel appeared, spinning with names moving too fast to read, flashing letters over and over. Some I managed to catch, but others were still way too fast for me.
[Deadpool Healing Factor]… [Rasengan]… [SCP-500]… [Shikai: Senbonzakura]… [Talent Sharing: Combat]… [Byakugan]…
For some reason, each one looked more absurd than the last.
I crossed my arms, following the spin, trying not to overthink it. "If I get something useless…" I muttered, half on autopilot, "I swear I'll throw myself into an alley and wait for the first Nazi to run me over with a van."
I reconsidered that for half a second.
'Actually… that sounds more like Merchant territory.'
And then, like a plot twist written by a drunk shonen writer—
The wheel slowed down and stopped.
[Boogie Woogie — Rare Power]
I blinked twice, but that didn't help. A window popped up right after, with all the formality of a virtual assistant.
⟶ [Boogie Woogie] — Rare Power
You have the ability to instantly swap the position of anything (including yourself) within your line of sight, as long as you clap your hands.
I stayed quiet for a few seconds. "…My power is a music genre?"
Of course it wasn't, but it didn't really help that it was named like one.
I ran my tongue over my teeth, thinking.
"Alright… so I'm a Mover," I said quietly. "If PHO isn't completely wrong."
Which… miraculously… they weren't... sometimes.
I closed the holographic window with a thought and felt my hands itch with this urge to try it out that was practically physical.
I raised my hands and—
Clap.
The sound echoed in the stuffy room. A moment later, the chair was where I had been, and I was where the chair had been.
My brain took a second longer than the rest of me to catch up, trying to line up what my eyes were seeing with what actually made sense.
'…Huh.'
Swapping things with a clap.
Simple, direct, and ridiculously useful depending on how I used it… but one question kept hammering in my head.
'How the hell is this supposed to help me kick a Nazi's face in?'
Because if it's not useful against the Empire Eighty-Eight assholes, then it doesn't matter if it came from the Celestial Roulette, some weird tech, or straight out of a fake angel's ass.
…
At the bottom of my backpack, between beat-up books and food crumbs, I found what I needed.
An old black hoodie with no design, the hood wide enough to cover half my face. A disposable mask, the kind that's perfect if you need to pass near the Merchants and don't want to catch some new disease.
I finished it off with a dirty pair of jeans and some leather gloves I'd stolen from one of the abandoned locker rooms months ago.
It wasn't elegant, and even less stylish, but it worked.
I stood in front of the cracked bathroom mirror. I could only see my eyes, sliced up by the lines of broken glass.
"Perfect."
I pulled the hood over my head and slipped out the back window, like I always did when I didn't want to run into my junkie neighbor or the drunk guy from apartment 202.
The streets looked rotten as always. Trash piled up in torn bags, the alleys reeked like piss, streetlights flickered like they had epilepsy, and the air carried that sticky, heavy feeling that never really goes away.
This is Brockton Bay, the official capital of "not my problem."
A few addicts shuffled around the corners, switching between half-conscious and half-dead. Cars with smashed windows sat there permanently, and you could tell where the Merchants had been just by the number of needles on the ground and the ridiculous graffiti like "feel the freedom".
…Always ironically painted on condemned buildings.
But the worst part wasn't the addicts; wasn't the homeless; wasn't the crazies yelling at streetlights.
It was seeing Nazis walking around like it was normal, arms covered in tattoos and heads shaved clean.
They always moved in packs too, three or four of them strutting around with arrogance written all over their faces.
The Protectorate turned a blind eye to them, and the police somehow managed to be even worse.
'But I'm not the police.'
I kept walking until I found a smaller group with just two of them. They were walking along the side of a building in the industrial zone, closer to Downtown.
A perfect place for a disappearance to go unnoticed.
I leaned against one of the alley dumpsters and watched my targets. One was bulky, with a crooked nose and an iron cross tattoo on his neck... probably taken more punches than he'd thrown. The other was skinny, but loud.
I waited for the right moment, which came when they passed near a pile of trash and a rusted metal bar that must've been part of a gate, lying loose beside it.
"…I'm telling you, man, that new guy from the south is a joke," the skinny one said, spitting on the ground. "Chatting it up with some mixed chick… can you believe that shit?!"
Ah… for some reason, I wasn't exactly impressed with the conversation topic.
"If I get my hands on that piece of shit, I'll make him swallow his own—"
Clap.
I vanished from the dumpster's shadow and appeared where the rusted bar had been.
"What the fu—?!" the skinny one turned, alarmed.
My foot met his knee with a satisfying sound.
He screamed. "AAAARGH, MY KNEE, YOU SON OF A—"
Clap.
With Boogie Woogie, he disappeared from in front of me and reappeared… falling straight toward the dumpster.
"Holy shit, what—?!"
The metal lid finished the sentence, smashing into his face and dropping him to the ground like a sack of racist potatoes.
The big one came right after, fists clenched and eyes wide.
"You're so fucked, you—"
"Shhh… racism isn't a personality trait, champ," I said, lowering my voice on purpose, going for that generic second-rate villain tone.
He growled, and for a moment I wondered if he was Hookwolf.
"You're gonna die, faggot!"
I rolled my eyes at that insult. "Wow, classy language. Didn't your mom teach you any manners?"
Then again… he was a Nazi. I couldn't exactly expect manners from him.
He came at me with a sloppy cross, and I clapped.
The rock I'd been standing on was now in his place and… he tripped with all the grace of a drunk boar, stumbling into me.
"FUCK—!"
He hit the ground hard, and I took the chance to grab one of the metal bars nearby before he could get back up.
"You sure you wanna keep going, bonehead?"
He spat on the ground, already trying to stand.
"You're a dead man, you piece of shit. Empire's gonna find you… gonna—"
One clean hit to the base of his skull, and he shut up.
The skinny one was still groaning near the dumpster, his face buried in a ripped trash bag.
I stepped a little closer and said, "Maybe take a shower before spreading hate, dumbass."
Another clap, and I wasn't there anymore.
'Getting out is easy with this power… guess that's the perk of being a Mover.'
Of course, I left both of them there. One of them would live to tell the story, and the other… who knows? Maybe he'd get lucky.
But what if they talked? What the hell would they even say?
"Some guy in a hoodie clapped and fucked us up."
Yeah, I'd love to see someone believe that shit.
'No… they'll probably believe it,' I thought. 'This is Brockton Bay… there's no shortage of crazy and weird shit in this place.'
Still… fuck it, I guess.
...
The streets went quiet again… or as close to quiet as this place ever gets. The kind of silence where sewage runs under the concrete, where people pick up their pace the second they spot a hooded figure on the sidewalk…
The silence of people pretending nothing happened, like they didn't hear the screams.
Brockton Bay taught almost everyone to unlearn how to react.
I cut through the alleys with my hands in my hoodie pockets and my head down, like any other idiot trying not to be noticed.
I kept walking until I went deeper into Empire Eighty-Eight territory, which was exactly the kind of area that reeked of twisted pride, unresolved testosterone, and institutionalized neo-nazism.
They'd taken over whole blocks, sprayed symbols on walls like they were planting flags of conquest, and beat their chests talking about "tradition" and "purity"… all while selling meth to dumb teenagers and beating the shit out of anyone with the "wrong" skin tone or ethnicity.
And they still thought they were right.
But instead of doing anything, the whole city danced around that tumor… all in the name of a fake peace that worked for no one.
I passed a graffiti-covered wall with a badly drawn Nordic rune. Some idiot probably thought watching Vikings and lifting weights gave him a connection to ancient gods.
Right next to it, another idiot had written "WHITE WHAR" in big block letters.
I let out a muffled laugh. 'Genocidal and illiterate… what a combo.'
My problem with them wasn't just ideological… it was physical, like an itch that couldn't be scratched.
The idea that these people walked free, talked freely, and wielded fear like it made them some kind of moral authority in an already rotten city… made me want to break something.
'These assholes lost a war almost a century ago and still think they've got something to teach the world…'
And now they walked around in packs through streets that weren't theirs, and nobody said a thing.
But I wasn't "nobody" anymore.
A few more blocks in, and the noise found me before I found it. Voices laughing loud, mixed with the smell of cigarettes, sweat, and ignorance.
I stopped at the mouth of an alley, staying in the shadows and watching.
Five of them this time. Two leaned against a car painted white and red, another sat on the hood scrolling through his phone. The other two were laughing at something, shoving each other like high schoolers with emotional issues.
None of them were capes, obviously. Just street trash with a garbage ideology.
They had bats, two pistols, and a switchblade hanging out of one guy's pocket like it was some kind of trophy.
My hands itched to move.
'Showtime, you pieces of shit.'
Clap.
I stepped out of the shadows and appeared in the middle of the street, swapping places with a manhole cover. I landed with my knees slightly bent, about two meters from the first idiot.
The one with the switchblade saw me first.
"What the fuck is—"
"CAPE!"
Clap.
He dropped like a sack of flour, his head cracking against the concrete when I swapped him with the falling manhole cover.
"WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?!" the one on the hood yelled, already pulling a gun.
Usually, fights between Capes avoided guns… but most gang grunts used them, as long as they weren't fighting a Cape.
Apparently… nobody wanted to be the one who escalated things.
But that probably gets hard to stick to when panic kicks in.
Clap.
I swapped places with the parked car ahead… burning more of that invisible energy I could only assume was my stamina.
A shot went through where I'd just been. Now I was behind him.
"Nice aim…" I said, stepping closer, "but your reaction time sucks."
A knee to the ribs made him choke, and I helped him faceplant into the asphalt, knocking the gun loose.
I grabbed it and fired a single shot into the air, loud enough to alert anyone nearby.
The two who'd been laughing froze. The one with the bat backed off, and the other ran.
"Yo, man, what the hell is going on?!"
"That little shit's teleporting!"
"Another fucking Oni Lee?!"
I smiled behind the disposable mask and put on a rough, fake voice again.
"You think he's the worst thing in Brockton? That's adorable~"
The one with the bat tried to move in, but froze when he saw the gun pointed at him.
Looks like he still had some survival instinct left.
"You gonna try… or you gonna run, you nazi pig?" I asked… but without waiting for an answer, I brought my hands together.
Clap.
Me and the guy with the bat swapped places, and I fired, hitting the one who was running in the shoulder.
He hit the ground screaming while the others scattered in different directions. I took the chance to pistol-whip the one trying to get back up.
Two left running. One was limping, and the other… yeah, he had some decent legs on him.
'Maybe they learned their lesson…?' I watched for a second and considered going after them, but decided not to.
One last clap, and I reappeared in the alley, feeling the exhaustion settling into my body from using Boogie Woogie.
'Time to head home…'
After all… I've still got school tomorrow.