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Kade didn't bother with the ladder. He jumped.
Ten meters straight down. For a man with ordinary human physiology — no super-soldier serum, no radioactive spider bite, no mystical martial arts — that kind of drop meant two shattered legs.
But halfway down, he thrust both hands against the concrete wall. The Sensory Gauntlets bit into the surface like claws, gouging deep furrows and throwing sparks in their wake. The friction bled off his momentum in a screaming shower of light, and he landed on the sewer floor hard but intact.
The smell hit him like a wall. Rotten, wet, organic — the specific flavor of Hell's Kitchen's underground plumbing baking in summer heat. Kade had operated in worse environments in his previous life. He'd survive.
Stealth wasn't an option. Ripping a manhole cover off its hinges had announced his arrival to anyone within a hundred meters. Better to move fast and hit hard than creep around pretending he hadn't made enough noise to wake the dead.
The Tactical Optics shifted — the world turned a washed-out green as night vision activated.
The sewer was abandoned. No standing water, no slime — just dry concrete and old dust. Disused for years, maybe longer. Kade scanned the ground and found footprints almost immediately. Fresh. Recent. In a place no one had any legitimate reason to visit.
He followed them at a jog.
The tunnel system was simpler than he'd expected — wide passages, few branches. Two turns and he was there.
A room. Twenty square meters, maybe — an alcove branching off the main tunnel, dry and surprisingly clean by sewer standards. Someone lived here.
A computer sat on a makeshift desk — cobbled together from scavenged parts, none of them younger than a decade. A sofa that had once been beige and was now a uniform black. A thin blanket that wouldn't keep a cat warm. On the desk: food wrappers from discount supermarket cookies — the kind marked down because they'd already expired.
Under the desk: a portable generator, wired to the computer and a single bare lightbulb. Self-sufficient. Miserable.
Kade stopped at the entrance and switched to X-ray.
Behind the sofa — curled up small enough to be invisible in the dark — was a thin figure clutching a cracked baseball bat.
Incredibly thin. The kind of thin that came from not eating enough, for long enough. They'd wedged themselves into the gap between the sofa and the wall, waiting for Kade to walk past so they could swing for his head.
Kade had come down here ready to beat a thief senseless. But looking at this — the expired food, the generator powering a junk computer, the blanket that was more hole than fabric — the anger drained out of him.
He stayed in the doorway.
"I know you're behind the sofa," he said. "And I can see the baseball bat. Here's the deal: give me back what you took from my apartment, and I walk away. No police. No trouble. But if that bat comes anywhere near my head, the deal's off. Sound fair?"
The figure behind the sofa went rigid. The hands holding the bat were trembling.
"I have a gun," Kade added. "I'm not going to use it. So if you're smart, hand over my property and we're done."
Slowly, the figure stood up.
A girl. Young — hard to tell exactly how old under the grime and the tangled hair, but not much past her teens. Dark T-shirt chosen because it didn't show dirt. Thin enough that the word "malnourished" wasn't strong enough.
A kid. Living alone in a sewer under Hell's Kitchen, surviving on stolen scraps and expired food.
"You can see me?" She sounded more surprised by that than by the armed man who'd just dropped into her home. "It's pitch black in here."
"Expensive glasses," Kade said.
She laughed — a short, involuntary sound that surprised them both. Then the tension snapped back into place.
"Like I said — I just want my stuff back. You don't need to be scared."
The girl watched him for a long moment, measuring the distance between them. Then she backed away slowly until she was far enough to feel safe, set the baseball bat down, and dragged a small box out from a corner.
She kicked it across the floor to Kade's feet. "Everything I took is in there."
She immediately picked up the bat again and retreated to her corner.
Kade flicked his wrist. The Sensory Gauntlet deployed its blade with a sharp snick — and the girl flinched hard enough to nearly drop the bat.
He wasn't threatening her. He'd lost a teammate to a booby-trapped case during a drug raid in his previous life — a spring-loaded mechanism that had cost the man an eye. Kade didn't think this girl was dangerous, but he hadn't survived two lifetimes by being careless.
He used the blade to flip the box open from arm's length.
Inside: loose change, a ring of keys, and what looked like salvaged computer components. Nothing blue. Nothing glowing. No Energy Activator.
Kade frowned.
"This isn't what I'm looking for. I'm talking about a blue stone — sapphire, about the size of a fist. Stolen from a basement apartment at 17th and 42nd, Hell's Kitchen. Today. Recently."
"A blue sapphire?" The girl's confusion looked genuine. "I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't left here all day."
"Right. And these coins are from your savings account?"
"Those are... from men who hide cash under their mattresses. I'm just punishing dishonesty." She crossed her arms defiantly. "I have principles."
Kade almost laughed. Principles. A sewer-dwelling teenage thief who exclusively targeted husbands hiding money from their wives. He spared a moment of sympathy for every henpecked man in Hell's Kitchen.
He wasn't an investigator — he couldn't tell if she was lying by her face alone. But the Tactical Optics had already X-rayed the entire room. Every corner, every surface, the walls, the floor, the space behind the generator. The Activator wasn't here. The room was too small to hide anything from a full-spectrum scan.
So either she was telling the truth, or she'd already moved it somewhere he couldn't detect.
Where the hell was his Activator?
"Look," the girl said, lowering the bat slightly. "If you believe me... I can help you find it."
For every 500 Powerstones a bonus chapter.