Raizer stood by the reinforced concrete pillar, his posture casual, watching the unfolding chaos with the detached air of a theater critic unimpressed by a low-budget play. He saw a mercenary level his tactical rifle at the girl's spine; he saw another training a sidearm on the dying woman through the SUV's shattered rear window.
Though Laura was strong, she was outmanned and defeated when she lost her wits over the certain death of her 'mother'.
One of the gunmen pointed his weapon at the 'innocent passerby'.
"How unlucky. To survive another day, you men need to kill." Raizer whispered into the cold night air. "But that act itself will kill you. How unlucky, indeed."
The atmosphere didn't just change; it died. The 'King's Aura' expanded in a silent, invisible ripple, creating a cold vacuum that sucked the oxygen from the lungs of every living soul in a fifty-yard radius. The mercenaries felt a sudden, inexplicable plummet in temperature, their breath hitching in their throats as a crushing weight—like being submerged in the dark depths of the Atlantic—settled over their shoulders.
Raizer stepped away from the pillar, walking toward the wreckage with a rhythmic, steady stride. A mercenary to his left snapped, his finger jerking in a reflexive, panicked burst of gunfire. Raizer didn't flinch. He didn't even break his pace. He simply tilted his head a fraction of an inch to the right, the movement so precise it looked pre-recorded.
- Ting! -
The high-velocity rounds whistled past his ear, sparks flying as they struck the stone wall behind him. He reached the SUV's window and looked down at the woman. Her life force was a flickering wick, drowning in the rising tide of internal trauma.
He extended a hand, palm down. An emerald-green magic circle—a masterpiece of geometric complexity and humming mana—erupted into existence over her shattered chest. A new spell was created on the spot with a mere thought.
Verdant Rebirth
The mana didn't merely heal; it conducted a symphony of biological restoration. A brilliant, translucent green energy encased the woman entirely. To the outside observer, it looked as if the damage were being forcibly undone. The jagged, bullet-torn lungs sealed themselves with a wet, squelching sound; the internal hemorrhaging reversed, the spilled blood siphoned back into the veins by the sheer authority of his magic. Her shallow, rattling gasps stabilized into a deep, restorative sleep.
"Stay there," Raizer murmured, his voice a low vibration. "You're a liability if you wake up now."
He turned back to the street. The combat had reached its climax. Laura was pinned to the asphalt by a high-voltage capture net, her small frame convulsing as the blue electricity fought against her healing factor. A mercenary, his face twisted in a sneer of triumph, stepped forward, his heavy tactical boot raised to crush the girl's skull into the pavement.
Raizer raised his right hand, his blue eyes igniting with a terrifying, luminescent intensity that outshone the city lights. He didn't need to lunge or shout. In this moment, he was the axis upon which the world turned, and the world was in a very foul mood.
Mana Missile: Rain
He snapped his fingers. Twelve orbs of condensed, violet mana materialized in the air around him. They were no larger than marbles, but they hummed with the terrifying density of stars, glowing with the dark purple hue.
With a casual flick of his wrist, the orbs vanished.
There were no cinematic explosions. No dramatic screams of agony. Just twelve simultaneous 'thips', the sound of suppressed air being forced through a needle's eye.
The missiles moved with the terrifying, cold logic of a computer algorithm. They bypassed ceramic armor plates, ignored the tactical positioning of the cars, and struck with perfection. Twelve men dropped instantly, their bodies hitting the ground with the heavy, limp thud of sandbags. Each possessed a single, finger-sized cauterized hole in the center of their forehead, leaking a faint trail of yellow matter onto the clean New York asphalt.
The street fell into a sudden, haunting silence, broken only by the ticking of cooling engines.
Laura, still tangled in the smoking remnants of the net, looked up. Her feral, blood-rimmed eyes widened as she stared at the man in the suit. He wasn't breathing hard. He hadn't even rumpled his tie. He was simply dusting a fleck of plaster off his lapel with a look of profound annoyance.
Raizer walked over to her. He stopped just out of reach, channeling a razor-thin thread of mana, snipping the electrified wires of the net as if they were made of silk.
Raizer parted his lips, his voice cold but not unkind. "I suggest you take the keys from the first sedan on the left. It looks significantly cooler than the rest of these heaps."
Laura stared at him, her claws slowly retracting with a metallic shing, her chest still heaving from the adrenaline. She looked at the SUV, seeing her mother's chest rising and falling in a steady, healthy rhythm. She looked back at Raizer, her heightened senses searching for a scent, a heartbeat—anything to categorize the being before her.
She found nothing but a void. No fear, no malice, no pride. Just an overwhelming, terrifying "Absoluteness."
"Go on. Shoo," Raizer said, waving her off as one might a stray cat.
Laura didn't need a second invitation. She scrambled into the wreckage, hauled her mother out with the staggering, superhuman strength of a mutant, and dragged her toward the black sedan Raizer had indicated. She paused for a single heartbeat at the driver's door, casting one final, lingering look at the man standing amidst the corpses of her hunters.
Raizer didn't watch them leave. He was already looking at his phone, his thumb swiping through a series of red and green charts. He stepped over the nearest fallen mercenary, his mind already drifting back to the volatility of his Stark stocks and the potential dividend yield.
"Messy," he muttered, adjusting his cufflink. "Absolutely messy."
'How's my aura, system?'
[Off the charts, host!]
Raizer allowed his lips to curl up slightly as he walked away.
.
.
.
"This is why I don't kill people."
Raizer grunted, looking at the guest standing before his door. The morning sun was hitting the hallway carpet at a sharp angle, but the man standing there didn't cast much of a shadow. He looked like a mid-level insurance adjuster, but his eyes had seen too many classified files for that to be true.
"Kill people? I would say you massacred them, Mr. Haze," Phil Coulson replied, his voice level and devoid of its usual polite warmth. He didn't wait for an invitation; he simply stood his ground, a tablet in his hand displaying high-resolution satellite imagery of the carnage from the previous night.
Raizer sighed, leaning against the doorframe. "Massacre is such a dramatic word, Agent. I prefer 'aggressive pest control.' Come in. The coffee is fresh, and I'd rather not have this conversation in front of the neighbors."
Coulson stepped inside, his eyes immediately scanning the room. He noted the reinforced walls, the pristine furniture, and the lack of any visible weaponry. He sat on the edge of a chair, placing the tablet on the coffee table. The screen showed twelve red circles over twelve bodies.
"Twelve men, Raizer," Coulson said solemnly. "Identical cause of death. Surgical energy discharge to the brain stem. No struggle, no misses, no mercy. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been trying to keep you in the 'friendly anomaly' column, but if you kill like that, you move into the 'threat' column. And we don't treat threats to a cup of coffee."
Raizer's expression didn't shift. He didn't reach for his cup; he simply looked at Coulson with eyes that seemed to hold the weight of an entire dimension. The air in the room suddenly grew heavy.
"Threat?" Raizer repeated, his voice dropping to a register that made the windows vibrate ever so slightly. "Agent Coulson, let's be intellectually honest for a moment. If I were an enemy of S.H.I.E.L.D., your organization wouldn't be 'treating' me to anything. It wouldn't exist. I could have turned the HQ into a decorative crater before you finished your morning briefing. Don't mistake my desire for a quiet life for a lack of capability."
Coulson didn't flinch, but his grip on his knees tightened. "Is that a threat, Mr. Haze?"
"It's a fact. But take it as a threat," Raizer retorted, the pressure in the room vanishing as quickly as it had appeared. He took a sip of his coffee. "Now, as for your twelve 'victims.' Did your technicians bother to check who they were? Or did they just count the holes in their heads?"
"Alkali-Transigen enforcers," Coulson admitted. "Mercenaries with a history of human rights violations."
"They were rats," Raizer snapped. "They were hunting a terrified child and a dying woman in the middle of a civilian street. They were firing high-caliber rounds with zero regard for backstops. If I hadn't stepped in, that girl would be in a cage, and that woman would be a corpse on the asphalt."
He leaned forward, his gaze piercing.
"But that's not why I killed them. I killed them because they were weak. I killed them because they raised a gun at me. I killed them because I wanted to. I don't have time for the 'Hero's Dilemma,' Agent. If they came at me, their lives became mine, entirely at the mercy of my mood."
Raizer confessed as he stood up, walking to the window.
"If S.H.I.E.L.D. is so concerned about 'bloodshed,' then perhaps you should start putting these rats down yourselves. Whoever they were, they were a menace. I ended twelve of them to save two. That's a good thing in my books."
He turned back to Coulson, his face a mask of cold calculation.
"Clean up your own house, Agent. If these people cross my commute again, there won't just be twelve bodies. I will show you the true meaning of a 'massacre'. Perhaps then you might consider this as a simple road-rage."
Coulson remained silent for a long moment. He stood up, retrieving his tablet. "I'll relay your... feedback to Director Fury. But be careful, Raizer. The world is getting smaller, and people with your 'skills' tend to attract a lot of attention."
"I dislike attention," Raizer said, walking Coulson to the door. "But I don't fear it. If the world is ready to be blind, they are welcome to stare at me."
As the door clicked shut, Raizer exhaled.
"Man, no wonder my past month was calm. The universe was just reloading," he muttered. "Shit's finally going crazy."
[Shall we destroy Alkali-Transigen, Host?] The System's text pulsed a violent, hungry crimson. [I have already begun drafting a 'Total Annihilation' protocol.]
Raizer didn't think his system had a protocol for anything other than fanboying.
He tilted his head, pondering over it, "Nah. Too much effort. I don't even know where their headquarters is, and I'm not in the mood for a cross-country scavenger hunt. It would be a pain to go hunting for them."
[...Hunt? If I may, Host... I don't think you'll need to look for them. I believe they will be knocking on our door quite soon.]
'Huh?'
Raizer's brow furrowed.
- Knock!
Raizer looked back at the door, his eyes narrowing. He wondered for a brief, hopeful second if Coulson had simply forgotten his hair oil or a stray file on the coffee table. Sadly, his senses 'saw' two people. And neither of them was a balding, middle-aged government agent in a sensible suit.
- Click!
He swung the door open, his expression shifting into a mask of bored indifference. He scanned the two intruders from top to bottom, his gaze clinical.
Standing in the hallway was the woman he had healed just hours prior, Gabriela, looking remarkably healthy considering she had been a literal porous sponge of bullet holes the night before. She wore an awkward, trembling smile that screamed 'Please don't kill us.' Beside her, clutching Gabriela's hand with a grip that could likely crush a lead pipe, was the girl.
Laura didn't smile. She didn't look awkward. She was staring at Raizer's face with an unnerving, predatory calm, her nostrils flaring as she caught his scent again. She looked like a small, feral beast trying to decide if he was a predator or a parent.
'Hmm~ System,' Raizer thought, his hand still on the doorknob. 'Do you think I will be truly evil if I just slam the door on their faces right now?'
[...]
'I mean, I saved them already. I gave them a car. I took out the bad guys, right?'
[I don't think that question even needs an answer!] The System's text danced with enthusiastic, chaotic sparks. [Since when were you under the impression that you aren't a villain, Host? Slam that door! Do it!]
Raizer looked at Gabriela, who was opening her mouth to speak, and then at Laura, whose eyes hadn't moved from his. He felt the sheer 'trouble' radiating off them like a physical heat. These weren't just people; they were a walking, breathing magnet for every secret project, government agency, and mutant extremist in the Western Hemisphere.
"Mr. Haze..." Gabriela began, her voice shaking. "We were tracking the X-men's recent-"
The X-men weren't silent only because of the Raizer's fear. They were actually attacked again. No surprise there. Hence, their current location was a bit hard to find.
Gabriela was tracking the recent movements of X-men, who were silent in the past month, and reached to Raizer's doorsteps on her own, which was their last known location before they hid. And before she could leave, Laura refused to move, hoping to see Raizer again.
"I'm out of lemon water."
But Raizer didn't care, his grip on the door tightening as he prepared to execute the 'Slam Protocol' on their face. "And I'm allergic to houseguests. Especially the ones with metal in their knuckles."
Laura tilted her head, her gaze dropping to her hand. She didn't growl, but the air around her felt sharp.
"Wait!" Gabriela stepped forward, placing a hand on the doorframe. "She... she wouldn't leave. She said you smelled like the 'Quiet.' She won't go anywhere else."
Raizer stared at the brat. 'Smelled like the Quiet? I thought I had blocked all of my traces with Absolute Control. Does the lack of presence itself show a different kind of presence?'
He sighed, considering what to do next.
'System, I really want to slam this door.'
[Then do it, you coward! Become the 'Cartoon Villain' of the week! I'll even play the dramatic exit music!]
Raizer sighed, the sound echoing through the hallway. He looked at his pristine hardwood floors, then at the dirt on Laura's boots. The King was currently losing a battle against a twelve-year-old's stare.