The wall of eighty-inch televisions, a perfectly synchronized monolith of commercial desire, bathed the flagship electronics store in the righteous glow of managed violence. On every screen, the city's premier demigod, Zane Apex, was putting on a clinic.
He hung in the air like a figure of living light, a miniature sun against the overcast sky, hovering above a traffic-snarled intersection downtown. Below him, atop a city bus, stood the source of the chaos: the villain Gridlock, a gaunt man in a trench coat interwoven with a pulsating nervous system of fiber optics. He had his arms outstretched, basking in the symphony of stolen control he had orchestrated across six square blocks of the city.
The news commentator's voice was a slick, adrenaline-fueled purr piped through the store's premium sound system. "For those just tuning in, the A-Tier technopath Gridlock has seized control of the downtown core, demanding a ransom from the city. But it looks like his reign is about to be cut short by the People's Champion himself, Zane Apex!".
A small, holographic overlay appeared at the bottom of the screen, a feature as common to hero fights as instant replays were to sports.
> COMBATANT: ZANE APEX
> AFFILIATION: ECLIPSE WATCH (LICENSED HERO)
> TIER: S
> ECE OUTPUT (CURRENT): 7,840
> CLASSIFICATION: PHOTOKINETIC/ENERGY MANIPULATION (TYPE-IV)
>
The numbers were a language everyone understood. An ECE (Exo-causal Energy) output over 5,000 was S-Tier territory, the domain of global powerhouses. Zane's resting pulse was a city-level threat.
On-screen, Gridlock gestured, and a wave of hijacked self-driving cars, their electric engines screaming, careened towards a crowd of civilians trapped behind the police barricade.
Zane descended, a perfect meteor of golden light. He didn't crudely stop the cars. That was Tier-2 work. Instead, he swept his arm in a majestic arc, creating a brilliant, concave shield of hard light that shimmered like a soap bubble made of dawn. The cars slammed into it, their momentum absorbed in a dazzling, silent, and utterly harmless display of golden ripples. With the immediate danger averted, Zane spared a half-second to wink at a hovering news drone, the gesture captured in glorious 8K resolution. The crowd roared, their relief and adoration a palpable wave.
Zane's movements were grand, theatrical. He fired precise, thread-thin solar beams that didn't destroy anything but merely severed Gridlock's unseen connection to the city's power conduits. He landed on the bus so gently his feet barely made a sound, a stark contrast to the chaos he commanded. A single, non-lethal chop to the back of Gridlock's neck, executed with the clean economy of a master, and the technopath crumpled. The pulsing fiber optics on his coat went dark. The cacophony of the city—the blaring horns, the screeching alarms—died instantly. The fight was over in under two minutes. It was clean, visually spectacular, and perfectly marketable. Zane stood over the defeated villain, raising a hand to the cheering crowd and the circling cameras, a heroic, camera-friendly pose that would dominate the evening news cycle. The news anchor praised his "flawless execution and public engagement".
Three miles away and ten hours later, the only light came from a single, buzzing fluorescent fixture thirty feet down a concrete service corridor. The air in the industrial warehouse, thick with the lingering smell of ozone and floor cleaner, was a dead thing, disturbed only by the rhythmic slosh and scrape of a mop.
Dax Raoh pushed the worn industrial mop, his face a mask of impassive focus. His janitorial coveralls were clean but worn, a uniform of anonymity he wore more comfortably than his own skin. His movements were a study in absolute efficiency—no wasted energy, no superfluous motion. He wasn't just mopping a floor; he was executing a task with a discipline that bordered on the profound. His world was this corridor. His reality was the grime on the floor. His focus was absolute.
A high-pitched electrical whine began to slice through the quiet, emanating from the fixture down the hall. Sparks sputtered from a rusted conduit box connected to its base. The heavy metal housing, loosened by years of unseen vibrations from the factory floor above, rattled in its moorings. It gave one final, metallic groan and dropped.
It fell, a sixty-pound hunk of metal and glass, plummeting towards the concrete floor.
Dax didn't look up. His rhythm didn't change. His eyes remained fixed on the arc of his mop. With his free hand, held loosely at his side, he made a subtle, two-fingered twitch, a gesture so small it was less than a thought.
In the dimly lit corridor, a faint, almost imperceptible shimmer of deep blue energy, like heat haze in a frozen alley, surrounded the falling fixture. Its frantic descent halted instantly, stopping it a mere two inches from the floor. It hung there, silent and motionless. Then, the two mounting screws, which had rattled loose, began to twist silently back into their sockets in the ceiling above. The cracked and sparking conduit box sealed itself, the metal flowing like wax to close the fissure. The whining ceased. The flickering stopped. The fixture was secure.
By the time the mop passed under the now-stable light, the event was over. Dax continued his steady pace down the corridor, turning at the end without a second glance. There were no cameras here. No cheering crowds. There was no ECE scanner to register the event, but if there had been, it would have shattered. The sheer density of the power required to so delicately and precisely manipulate matter on a molecular level was something the Tier system had no language for.
His internal monologue was a low, cold hum beneath the surface of his focus. They put on a light show to stop a man playing with toys, he thought, the memory of Zane's smiling face on a cheap breakroom TV a bitter aftertaste. It's a performance. A flashy, inefficient circus act to keep the masses calm.
He finished his pass, his work complete.
They cheer for a man who plays with firecrackers, oblivious to the volcano he's standing on.
When the real monsters come, there won't be any cameras left to watch the show.