Chapter 7
How had it come to this?
The superhero nonsense I'd inherited from Herman had clearly done something to my brain — though I couldn't entirely blame the kid, since I'd been the one who let myself get swept up in it. I'd actually started believing in myself. Started seriously entertaining the idea of becoming something more than Herman Herby.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, wincing as the movement sent a fresh pulse of pain through my left arm — broken, and covered in burns. The mug in my good hand nearly slipped. The smell of cheap coffee filled my nose, and even blended with the stench of smoke and scorched things, it was infinitely better than what I'd been breathing for the last half hour.
Someone clapped me on the shoulder. I flinched and nodded vaguely at words that reached me through the noise without fully registering.
Calming down wasn't happening. Even just concentrating was barely happening. I kept having to gather the water seeping off me and direct it toward the nearest storm drain.
My eyes stung. My body wouldn't stop shaking. My heart hammered in a rhythm still disrupted by the electrical charge it had taken. My left foot tapped nervously against the asphalt, and I was doing everything I could to block out the smell of burning that kept forcing its way back in, and the shouts of the firefighters working to save what they could of the house blazing behind me.
Somewhere nearby, Connie was crying.
Behind the police tape, a crowd of neighborhood residents had already gathered, working their way through everything they thought they knew about Grandma's old friend.
I sat on the curb. A pair of officers stood over me, patient and methodical, writing carefully in a notebook. Two lean, unhurried cops in no particular rush to let me go — waiting, it seemed, for someone from the professional super response team to arrive.
I wasn't thinking about any of that. My eyes kept sliding toward the road — toward the spot where the ambulance had pulled away only a few minutes ago, carrying Amanda and Grandma to the nearest hospital. Grandma was all right, more or less. Her heart had given her some trouble, nothing more. But my one and only friend was in terrible shape.
And it was my fault.
---
*One hour earlier.*
"I'll raise twenty-five cents." Grandma tossed her coin onto the growing pile in the center of the table and beamed, her brand-new dentures catching the light. With practiced ease she uncorked a fresh bottle of whiskey, poured for everyone, and returned her full attention to the game. "Your move, kids."
"Pass." It was a strange situation, now that I thought about it. Herman had never touched alcohol — not once, not in any form — and I'd never stopped to ask myself why a grown man living with an alcoholic grandmother had somehow reached adulthood completely dry. The answer, I suspected, was simple: she'd never offered, so he'd never thought to try. Tonight, though, was different.
After returning the stolen money — some to Connie, the rest to the police — Amanda and I had been absorbed into the small celebration that Grandma's friend had put together by way of thanks. A quiet little gathering at her place, which was where we'd ended up spending the evening.
Poker, alcohol, and good food. Some people might have called it modest. I thought it was perfect — and from the looks of it, so did Grandma and Amanda — so no one was complaining. Just a genuinely good evening with people I was glad to be around.
"Hmm." Amanda's brow furrowed and she held her cards closer to her chest, which accomplished nothing except announcing to the table that something was up. I hadn't expected this, but Amanda was a catastrophically bad card player. Everything she thought was visible on her face in real time. She could have taped her hand to her forehead and it wouldn't have been more obvious. "I'm in!"
Grandma and Connie exchanged a quick glance — which was more or less all the confirmation anyone needed. Two sharp old women had read the naive California girl in the first five minutes and were now in the quiet, efficient process of cleaning her out.
"Then let's see them." Amanda laid her cards down first, radiating the energy of someone who had just won something important. Two fives, two nines. She folded her hands on the table and surveyed the losers with magnanimous calm. "Looks like the pot's mine."
"Oh, sweetheart." Grandma took a sip from her glass and set her cards down face-first before addressing Amanda directly. "Look at my face. What do you see?"
"That you're old?" Amanda clearly sensed where this was going and was trying to land at least one parting shot on the way down.
"Hmm." An ambiguous sound. Grandma ignored the laughter from Connie beside her and took another sip before continuing. "Lucky for you, I like you. No, dear, that's not what I meant. Does my face look like the face of someone who's losing?"
"…No," Amanda admitted, deflating slightly and poking at her cards with one finger.
"Exactly." Grandma placed her full house on the table — three of a kind and a pair — raised her glass to Connie in a small salute, and swept the coins toward herself with a practiced, unhurried motion. "Grow up a little before you sit down with me."
She said it warmly, and gave Amanda's cheek an affectionate pinch. Amanda didn't take offense — she pouted, but only as a performance. She'd been losing steadily all evening, having dropped nearly fifty dollars in a game where the bets were measured in cents. Instructive, truly.
I didn't flip my own cards. I just smiled quietly and slid them back into the deck while no one was paying attention. A straight flush. The women were enjoying themselves, teasing each other without much interest in pulling me into the conversation — and honestly, I didn't want to be pulled in. I wanted to sit with my thoughts for a while.
The events in South Central had knocked me sideways again — the way things in this new life kept doing, just when I started finding my footing. I was still scared. My body still ached in places that reminded me every time I moved. The memory of being beaten by strangers in a dark alley still made my hands start shaking and my mouth fill with water — but underneath all of that was something else.
I had *loved* the feeling of winning.
Yes, all we'd done was return stolen money. Yes, the same teenagers would probably go straight back to stealing. But that moment when we handed it back to Connie. When we passed the bag to the police officers and saw something like respect cross their faces.
It had been extraordinary. Exhilarating. Addictive, almost — the kind of feeling I was already afraid I'd chase. If heroes lived on that kind of emotional current all the time, it wasn't hard to understand why there were so many of them, and why the number kept growing.
"All right, let's take a little break." Connie pushed her chair back and stood, pulling me out of my thoughts. "I think it's time to bring out the hot food."
"You're merciless, you know that?" Grandma grumbled into her whiskey, though her eyes were still smiling. "I'm not at the age for this much eating anymore…"
"Don't give me that," Connie said, patting Grandma's shoulder as she passed. She winked at me and Amanda, then disappeared toward the kitchen — barely two steps from the living room where we'd spent most of the evening. "I saw the way you were looking at my new security guard…"
"Oh lord—"
"Lovely young man." Grandma laughed at my embarrassment and played her eyebrows at Amanda, who was listening with great interest. "You'd like him, dear — very sharp, very handsome. Not my dumpling, of course, but still. Shame he doesn't have two pennies to rub together."
"Clearly none of you are wasting any time," Amanda said, sliding her glass forward for a refill. She was about to follow up with something — almost certainly crude, designed to embarrass me for the entertainment of two very willing old women — when the doorbell rang. "Hm? Are we expecting someone else?"
"Let me check." I was on my feet and out of the room before the words were fully out of my mouth, grateful for the exit. Behind me, I heard the conversation pick back up, and I let it fade.
"Hopefully it's not another woman of a certain age with unconventional tastes," I muttered as I jogged down the hall, then slowed to a normal pace and took a second to put myself in order. "Whatever happened to the isekai harem? I was promised beautiful women. That's practically a contractual obligation."
Nearly a year had passed since I'd woken up in Herman Herby's body. My progress had been real, objectively — but I still sometimes caught myself comparing myself to the protagonists of the transmigration stories that seemed to be twice as popular in this world as they'd been in the last one.
"Right, yes, the harem is very me," I muttered, reaching for the door handle and pulling it slowly open. "Wake up every morning in a full seizure, soaking wet, foam coming out of every opening… very—"
They didn't even let me say hello.
The impact to my chest was so fast and so hard that the only thing I managed to do was clamp my mouth shut to keep from biting through my tongue.
A blinding white flash. The world lurched. I was moving backward through the corridor, airborne, and then I hit the wall. The creak and groan of my own bones reached me even through the shouting and the crash. My left arm exploded with pain as I slid down to the floor and collapsed onto my side.
Burning meat. That was the smell hitting my nose now. The entire left side of my body had gone somewhere between numb and paralyzed, and my heart was battering itself against my ribs like it was trying to escape.
Screaming from somewhere behind me. Loud, edging toward panic, accompanied by the familiar bass rumble of Amanda's voice — which meant she'd had time to react and transform.
Plaster rained down on me from the ceiling. The hallway light fixture tore free and hit the floor, scattering broken glass, some of which stayed in me.
Squinting against it, I tried to get up. The house shook again — hard — and knocked me right back down.
The smell of ozone cut through everything else now, even the char smell rising off my arm. The crack and roar of lightning drowned out Amanda's sounds entirely.
I crawled toward the living room on one arm, trying to get some sense of what was happening. I hadn't made it halfway when something struck my face. Soft, almost gentle — especially compared to the boots the gang members had put into me.
"Well, well, well. What do we have here? A baby super?" My vision was still swimming, the afterimage of the flash still burning. "Hey. You alive, little punk?"
A slap across the cheek drove the glass fragments deeper. I nearly blacked out. A weak sound came out of my mouth. Blood filled it, and now my nose had something to say too — copper and iron, sharp and close.
"Hey, hey — not yet." The danger signal flooding my brain was doing nothing useful. "Let's wake you up a little."
He ran electricity through me. A small charge, working through the fluid covering my body, driving itself directly into my heart and skull. The burst of brilliant pain snapped me back to consciousness just long enough to see who was standing over me.
A young bald man, grinning with genuine delight, visibly enjoying my convulsions. Green costume with a pattern of gold lightning bolts running through it. A black mask cut diagonally across his face in an X.
"Better? No?!" He leaned down, breathing a nauseating cocktail of alcohol, ozone, and something like pine resin directly into my face, then grabbed my leg — and with a cheerful laugh, threw me through the wall.
The exterior wall of Connie's house gave way without much argument. I tumbled out onto the front lawn — or what used to be a front lawn. I caught glimpses of it while I was rolling, catching flashes of consciousness and losing them: scorched earth, craters, heaps of twisted debris that had once been a car and a porch.
And off to the side, Amanda. Already in her human form. Her legs were bent at angles they had no business being at, and there was a thin line of blood running from the corner of her mouth. Unconscious. But even in that state she kept flinching with each breath, her hands folded over her stomach where her shirt had ridden up and the skin underneath showed the unmistakable char pattern of a lightning strike.
Grandma and Connie were nowhere I could see.
Panic started moving through me like a tide — but then I saw him.
The smiling man walking out of the burning house.
He came through the fire and the collapsing roof like it was a stage entrance he'd been planning, arms spread wide, eyes on mine. Unhurried. Theatrical. He wore the expression of someone who has already won and is currently savoring the fact.
Rage and fear fused into something ugly and hot inside my skull. On pure instinct, I threw my good arm up and launched a torrent of water — blood-tinted from the cuts covering me — directly at him.
It hit him, ran across his skin, and died immediately as the current moved through it and arrived back in my exhausted body.
"God, what is wrong with you?" He tilted his head toward the sky as if asking it the question. Waited a few seconds. No answer came. He walked toward me, crouched, and grabbed a fistful of my hair at the back of my head. "I couldn't even believe it when I heard some idiot had robbed me in broad daylight. *Robbed* me. And handed the money to the cops. I mean, at least you can breathe unassisted — clearly nature didn't give you anything else to work with."
Another charge through my body. Weak, by this point. Almost gentle, compared to everything else.
"When those little punks told me how you took the money off them, I thought maybe the city had a new super coming up through the minor leagues. That's the story they were selling to explain how they lost it." He spoke pleasantly, punctuating his monologue with small, casual bolts of electricity, as if he were tapping a table to make a point. "But what do I actually find? A washed-up little turncoat nobody remembers, and her useless boy toy, who thinks it's a good idea to throw *water* at the *Master of Lightning.*" He said it like it offended him on a philosophical level. "I am the living embodiment of a force of nature, you tiny idiot. And you hit me with *water.* Are you serious?"
"Who are you?" My voice didn't sound like mine. It sounded like it was coming out of someone else's throat.
"Does it matter?" He let go of my hair and my head dropped back onto the torn-up earth. He straightened, and for a moment just stood there. "Honestly, I almost feel bad about the time this cost me. Even those little thieves gave me more of a workout than the two of you combined."
He smiled — the bloodthirsty kind — and let lightning branch slowly across his arm, watching it move the way someone might watch a fire. The smile got wider when he noticed my expression. The fear on my face seemed to delight him more than anything else had.
"Scared? Good. You should be." He spread both arms wide and closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again he let his power come loose — a cascade of golden lightning erupting across his entire body, wreathing him like the aura of some movie villain mid-transformation. "Remember this feeling. And stay out of other people's business."
I had to close my eyes against the light. His voice still reached me through the crackling roar — and then, all at once, everything stopped. The lightning was gone. Its owner was gone with it, leaving nothing behind but the lingering bite of ozone in the air.
A thunderclap split the sky overhead.
I forced my head up and caught a glimpse of it: a bright smear of red and blue against the darkness, breaking the sound barrier as it tore across the city and vanished southward.
I couldn't hold on anymore.
I let go, and fell back onto the broken earth, pain finding every part of me at once, the sound of approaching sirens filtering through the roar of my own heartbeat, growing slowly louder, and then fading again.
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