A Hitman's Guide To Becoming A Hero

The infiltration began in earnest. Shadow took the lead.

She had both her hands on the grass forty meters from the fence, her eyes closed tightly in concentration. The shadows spread across the ground, moving up the building. It had crawled into the control unit, and that was where they’d turned off the energy.

"She’s showing off," Hexi said happily, and started walking toward the gate. "She’s showing off, boss. Look at her. Lying down."

"Eleven minutes, Hexi."

"I know, I know."

The prison had two thousand cameras, but thanks to Shadow, they had all gone blank. The floodlights on the perimeter were dead. The lights inside the guard house were dead. What replaced them was absolute darkness, shadows crawling through the entire building. This dark had weight. It filled the guard house like water filling a jar, and the two officers inside it had been standing perfectly still for ninety seconds, staring around in confusion.

"Control, we’ve got a full outage on the north perimeter," one of them said into a radio that gave him nothing. "Control."

As he spoke, away from his eyes, his shadow stretched long across the floor.

Shadow stepped out of it.

She caught the back of his collar, and the dagger in her hands moved fast.

Swissh!

"C-co... nt," the man’s words turned into a struggling gurgle as the blood pooled in his throat.

"Your shadow hates you," Shadow muttered. "So many secrets... Shhh."

"What?! Who are you?!" The second officer jolted in fear. He had time to turn his head perhaps ten degrees before she was behind him instead, coming up out of the dark pooled under his own boots.

Before he could tell what was happening, the dagger drove through his back, digging its way out through his stomach.

When she was finished, she yawned, stepped back into the floor, and came out again beside the inner door.

"Two," she said to nobody.

The first real resistance came in the ground floor lobby, and it was not resistance at all, as all fourteen people were frightened, not expecting what had come for them.

They had been trained for riots. They had been trained for a block breach, for a hostage line, for six different ways an inmate might get above ground. All of that training assumed the problem was inside, and the officers were outside it.

Nobody had ever thought that the issue would be coming right through their front door. After all, no impure ever thought of coming to the facility. The facility was where impures were taken. It was the end of the road, the bottom of the well, the place monsters vanished into and never came out of. The idea that one might walk up the front steps of its own free will had never once made it into a single drill.

"CONTACT, CONTACT, MAIN..."

The officer shouting it was standing under a dead ceiling panel, the shadow beneath his feet pooled and wobbled strangely.

"What the fuck?!" The man quickly noticed, retreating from his own shadow.

The shadow stood up, facing him.

"Why are you running from your own shadow?" Before the man could react to the voice behind him, he felt the dagger slice through his throat.

Red blood sprayed out like a tap, and the last thing he saw was the little girl standing next to his shadow form.

Meanwhile, in the main lobby, it was a mess. Several officers rushed out upon hearing the emergency alarms blaring all through the building.

"What the heck is going on here?!" One of the chief officers roared as he looked at the others with a stern, scrutinizing gaze.

"Sir, we have no idea, it just happened all of a sudden."

"I think we have invaders!" one of the officers yelled.

"Then find the invaders! And contact the Hero Association!" the chief officer ordered.

"No need. I’m here with you."

Hexi’s voice came drifting across the lobby, light and pleasant, and what followed it was a wave of miasma that spread through the room like ink through water.

In an instant, all the eyes of the officers went hollow.

"Sir? Sir, what are your... sir, why is he..."

The chief officer never finished the question, because the officer beside him had already raised his sidearm and put three rounds through his chest.

After that, the lobby came apart in nine seconds.

Hexi stood off to the side with his hands clasped behind his back, rocking gently on his heels, giggling as he worked. Every officer his miasma touched turned smoothly on the ones it hadn’t, and the ones it hadn’t stood frozen in disbelief for the half-second it took to die. Gunfire crossed the room in every direction. Men who had trained together for years emptied their weapons into one another with the blank, patient faces of puppets, and Hexi conducted all of it with small, fond little motions of his fingers, the way a child moves toy soldiers.

"Don’t run, don’t run," he crooned to a man crawling for the stairwell. "You’ll miss the best part. You’re all going to be so useful."

More officers poured in from the east corridor, drawn by the alarms, and walked straight into the killing floor. Hexi caught them one by one as they came, his miasma reaching out to greet each new arrival, folding them into the massacre before they understood what they were looking at. He never lifted a hand to strike a single blow himself. He didn’t need to. He simply stood at the edge of it all, laughing softly, and let them do the work.

In a few seconds, the first two floors were clear.

The gunfire died down into a wet, dripping silence, broken only by the drone of alarms nobody was left to answer and the last few groans of men bleeding out on the polished floor.

And into that silence, through the shattered front doors and across the ruined lobby, walked Zayx and the Master.

They came unhurried, composed, stepping over bodies and around spreading pools of red without breaking stride. Zayx’s face was set and blank, his eyes sweeping the room once for any threat and finding none worth the name. The Master moved at his own pace behind him, hands folded, taking in the carnage with the mild, detached interest of a man arriving at a construction site to inspect the day’s progress.

Shadow melted up out of the floor beside them, wiping her dagger clean. Hexi bounced over to join them, beaming, already reaching for a fresh strand of his own hair.

The Master stopped at the center of the lobby and looked, for a moment, at the stairwell that led down. Down past the archives, past the armories, past the humming lattice, down to the wheel and the window and the small girl held under the line.

His expression did not change.

"Let’s get the girl," he said quietly, "and put an end to this pandemic."