Chapter 7 : THE HOOD BEGINS
The second individual at 1400 Crescent was a dead end.
I walked the block twice the following morning — once on my way to the warehouse shift, once on the way back — and found nothing. 1400 Crescent was a four-story residential building with a barber shop on the ground floor and fire escapes on both sides. No broken windows. No scorch marks. No green arrows embedded in the brickwork. Whatever the responding officer had seen on that rooftop had vanished with the night, leaving behind a police report that would probably be filed as unrelated and forgotten by noon.
I didn't forget it. I added it to the butcher paper behind the closet door — 1400 Crescent, second individual, rooftop, night of Hunt takedown — and drew a question mark next to it. One data point wasn't a pattern. Two would be.
The scanner became my addiction.
Three nights running, I sat on the apartment floor with the prepaid phone's earbuds in, the police frequency crackling through the tinny speaker while I stretched out the muscles Marcus had spent the morning destroying. The Hood was prolific. Adam Hunt on night one. A second target — Martin Somers, shipping mogul, ties to the Chinese Triad — on night three. The scanner traffic painted the picture in fragments: suspect in green hood... arrows... multiple casualties among security... suspect fled on foot...
The timeline was holding. Somers was a Season 1 target, one of the names on Robert Queen's list, and Oliver was hitting them in the order I remembered from the show. Not exact — the spacing between targets felt slightly compressed — but close enough to plan around. The meta-knowledge was working. The comfort of that certainty sat warm behind my ribs like a second heartbeat.
That comfort made me stupid.
---
The idea was simple: establish a surveillance perch overlooking one of Oliver's likely future target buildings. Martin Somers ran operations out of a warehouse complex on the waterfront, and the episode I remembered had Oliver confronting him twice — once at the docks, once at a secondary location. If I could position myself above the secondary site before Oliver got there, I could observe his tactics, log his capabilities, and build a profile that would help me when the time came to make contact.
The rooftop route was three buildings long. I'd mapped it from the ground — fire escape to roof one, twelve-foot jump to roof two, eight-foot gap to roof three, which overlooked the target warehouse. I'd watched parkour videos on the phone's browser, which was like learning surgery from a flip book. But the buildings were close, the gaps were manageable, and my body had two weeks of daily gym work behind it. Not much, but more than the man who'd collapsed into this apartment on day one.
"AGI six. The gap between building two and three is wider than it looked."
I should have listened to the math.
Building one to building two went clean. The running start covered the twelve feet with room to spare, my boots hitting tar paper on the other side, momentum carrying me forward. The Stealth skill whispered — land on the balls of your feet, roll the impact through the ankles — and I almost felt competent.
Building two to building three killed me.
The gap was ten feet. I'd estimated eight from below, but looking down at street level three stories below, the extra two feet stretched into a canyon. I took the running start anyway because stopping felt like losing, and the takeoff was decent, and for a fraction of a second I was airborne over a Glades alleyway with the wind in my face and the city spread out below me in a grid of amber streetlights and dark windows.
My right foot caught the edge of building three. The left didn't make it. My fingers scraped brick — rough, tearing, the calluses from the gym shredding on mortar — and for two seconds I hung there, half on the roof and half in empty air, legs windmilling over nothing.
Then the fingers gave.
The fall took forever. Three stories of forever, the alley walls scrolling upward, the sky shrinking to a rectangle, the ground arriving with a specificity that the brain catalogued in the final millisecond — concrete, dumpster lid, the edge of a fire escape railing.
Impact. Not pain — impact. The pain came a quarter-second later when my body processed what had happened to it, and by then the processing was academic because the damage was already total. My back. My skull. Something inside the chest cavity that crunched in a way chests are not supposed to crunch.
The city from above had been beautiful. For exactly two seconds, sailing through open air, Starling City had looked like a map made of light.
Then it looked like a ceiling. Then it looked like nothing.
[DEATH RECORDED. CAUSE: FALL — BLUNT FORCE TRAUMA, MULTIPLE SYSTEMS FAILURE. RESPAWNING AT BONFIRE ZERO.]
---
The apartment floor. Again.
Different from the first time. The stabbing had been sharp and fast — white-hot pain, then void, then linoleum. The fall was slower. The fall had given me time to think, and the thoughts were worse than the landing. Two full seconds of absolute certainty that gravity was going to win, and the only question was how much of the body would be functional when it did.
None. The answer was none.
I lay on the linoleum and stared at the water stain on the ceiling — the same kidney-shaped stain I'd catalogued the morning I woke up in this body, back when the biggest problem was figuring out where I was. The stain hadn't changed. Nothing in this apartment had changed. I was the one who kept changing, adding deaths to a tally my body erased but my brain refused to forget.
The vomiting was dry this time. Nothing in the stomach — I'd skipped dinner to go climbing, another item on the growing list of decisions that were going to kill me if I didn't start prioritizing survival over ambition.
[DEATH ECHO #2 — STORED. DURATION: 60 SECONDS.]
I reviewed it. The Echo played behind my closed eyes — the run, the jump, the catch, the fall. The city from above, luminous and indifferent. The alley wall accelerating past. Then the angle shifted and I could see what I'd missed: the edge of building three was crumbling. Not structurally compromised — just old brick worn smooth by decades of weather, offering no grip to fingers that needed grip to survive.
Two deaths. Two lessons. The first taught me that my intelligence was ahead of my physical capability. The second hammered it home with a three-story exclamation point.
I pulled up the stat screen. The numbers stared back at me, unchanged, impassive.
AGI: 6. That was the killer. Six in Agility meant a body that moved like furniture — functional for walking, adequate for jogging, catastrophic for anything requiring speed, coordination, or the ability to clear a ten-foot gap without dying.
I had 20 CP. Five CP would push AGI from 6 to 7. The investment felt automatic — the System equivalent of buying insurance after the accident.
[CP INVESTED: AGI 6 → 7. COST: 5 CP. REMAINING: 15 CP.]
The change was subtle. Not a bolt of lightning, not a surge of power — more like someone had adjusted the calibration on the body's internal gyroscope by a single degree. When I stood up from the floor, the balance was fractionally better. When I walked to the bathroom, the feet landed with more precision, each step deliberate where before it had been approximate.
Seven wasn't enough for rooftops. Seven was enough to stop tripping on uneven pavement. The gap between where I was and where I needed to be stretched out like the distance between building two and building three — visible, measurable, and fatal to underestimate.
I changed into fresh clothes, re-activated the Bonfire with the charged phone in my pocket and cash in the wallet — because preparation for death was becoming as routine as preparation for work — and sat on the bed with the map.
No more rooftops. Not until the numbers said I could.
The police scanner crackled on the phone. Somewhere in Starling City, the Hood was putting arrows in people who deserved them, and I was sitting in a Narrows apartment with a gym membership and fifteen CP and two deaths that had taught me exactly how fragile the body carrying me really was.
Fifteen CP. Two deaths. And a city full of people counting on a plan I hadn't built yet.
I picked up the pen and started redrawing my surveillance routes — ground level only.
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