Gotham's South Side - Abandoned Hero Team Headquarters - 2:47 AM
The building had once housed the Southside Defenders, one of Gotham's last small hero teams, five heroes working out of a converted office building with minimal funding but maximum determination.
They'd made the mistake of investigating Crane's Wings, a mysterious new villain group still unknown to most, building a case they'd planned to present to the other heroes in Gotham.
Everyone else was busy.
So Suguro and Ivy had come personally to remove the problem.
The attack had started with Ivy's plants, modified vines that burst through the warehouse's floor and walls simultaneously, creating chaos and separating the hero team before they could coordinate defense. Then Suguro had deployed gas, his hands producing the familiar black mist that marked his fear toxin in its natural form.
But the team leader, a hero called Windshear with air manipulation abilities, had immediately created concentrated air currents that pushed the toxin away, keeping his team protected while they mounted their response.
The battle had escalated from there.
Windshear, the wind hero, maintained defensive air walls that prevented Crane's toxin from reaching the other heroes. Titanfist, the close-combat specialist with enhanced strength and steel fists, had immediately charged Suguro, recognizing him as the primary threat that needed to be neutralized quickly.
Elastigal, a heroine with a stretching Quirk, tried to counter Ivy's botanical assault. The attempt was pathetic however as she was a poor matchup and Ivy's assault forced the hero to retreat behind Windshear's wind barriers.
Shadowstep, with a quirk that could create shadows into fighters, harassed Ivy from multiple angles, appearing and disappearing, trying to disrupt her concentration. And somewhere in the chaos, the fifth member, Sparks, with electricity generation, had vanished, either fleeing or positioning for an ambush.
Suguro found himself in direct combat with Titanfist, and the matchup was brutally unfavorable.
His Quirk made him a master of psychological warfare and chemical weapons, but in close-quarters physical combat, he was just a nineteen-year-old man with basic self-defense training against a hero whose Quirk granted enhanced strength and steel fists as weapons.
Titanfist's first punch would have caved Suguro's chest in if it had connected cleanly. He dodged by inches, feeling the air displacement, his analytical mind calculating that he couldn't win this fight through direct confrontation.
He tried to throw his needles with liquid toxin looking for any gap in the protection. But the wind hero was well-trained, maintaining overlapping air currents through the battle zone that blew the toxin needles away and broke them.
Titanfist pressed forward, his enhanced strength with those fists making every movement a potential ending blow. Suguro fell back, using the warehouse's debris and structural columns as cover, trying to create distance and opportunities.
Behind him, he could hear Ivy's battle, the screams of Elastigal and the frustrated shouts of Shadowstep as he tried and failed to land meaningful attacks, the building itself groaning as Ivy's modified vegetation grew through its structure with impossible speed.
A piece of rebar, torn loose by Ivy's plants, fell near Suguro's position. He grabbed it without thinking, wielding it like a staff, using it to deflect Titanfist's next punch just enough that the blow glanced off rather than connecting directly.
The force still sent him stumbling, his ribs protesting from the impact's shockwave.
"Give up!" Titanfist shouted, his voice showing the strain of the fight. "You're not a physical fighter! You can't win this!"
He was right. Suguro knew it with the same clinical certainty he brought to all his calculations. In a direct confrontation without toxin support, against a hero with enhanced physical capabilities, he would lose.
So he changed the parameters.
Suguro let himself stumble more dramatically than necessary, falling to one knee as if genuinely exhausted. He dropped the rebar, his posture suggesting defeat, his breathing deliberately labored.
Titanfist approached with the confidence of someone who'd won, his guard lowering slightly as he prepared to restrain rather than kill.
"Smart choice," the hero said, reaching for the specialized restraints all Gotham heroes carried. "You're under arrest for—"
Suguro's hand moved with speed born from desperate practice, pulling the concealed compact pistol from his coat's inner pocket. Not a sophisticated weapon, just a basic 9mm, five rounds, purchased from Penguin and carried specifically for situations like this.
He fired three times in rapid succession.
And the hero fell for the final time
causing all others to lose focus.
Which was when Ivy struck.
Her attention had been divided between Elastigal and Shadowstep, her plants holding defensive positions while looking for opportunities to counterattack. But the gunshots made the two heroes she'd been fighting glance toward Titanfist instinctively.
And Ivy was someone who could exploit a moment's distraction with lethal efficiency.
Vines erupted from the floor beneath Elastigal and Shadowstep simultaneously with sharpened tips hardened to near-metal density, moving with speed that made them essentially organic spears.
Elastigal didn't even have time to scream. Three vines impaled her from below, through abdomen, chest, throat. Lifting her off the ground as blood poured down the organic weapons that had ended her life. Her body spasmed once, twice, then went still, eyes wide with shock and terminal trauma.
Shadowstep tried to strike back, but Ivy's plants had been tracking his movement patterns throughout the fight, and when he closed the distance with the cover of his shadows around fifteen feet away he found vines already waiting.
They wrapped around his legs, his waist, his arms, restraining him completely before he could activate his Quirk again. He struggled desperately, trying to break free while partially bound, but Ivy's plants were far stronger than human muscle.
Windshear, the wind hero who'd been maintaining protective barriers throughout the fight, saw his team being slaughtered and made a choice. He abandoned defense, redirecting all his air manipulation into a concentrated offensive blast aimed directly at Ivy.
The wind attack was powerful enough to disrupt her plants, throwing her backwards into the warehouse wall with devastating force. For a moment, Windshear's face showed triumph, he'd landed a solid hit on the plant villain, possibly incapacitated her.
Then Ivy stood up, her plant-based physiology making her far more durable than he'd anticipated, and smiled with predatory satisfaction.
"My turn."
The team leader barely had time to raise another wind barrier before Ivy's counterattack arrived. The vines that burst through the warehouse floor were thicker, faster, more aggressive than anything she'd deployed previously.
Windshears wind barrier held for approximately three seconds.
Then the vines broke through, and three of them impaled him simultaneously, one through his lower abdomen, two through his chest cavity, the angle and placement suggesting Ivy had specifically targeted to cause maximum trauma while keeping him briefly alive.
The team leader looked down at the vines protruding from his body with an expression of disbelief, blood already filling his lungs, his wind Quirk failing as his respiratory system collapsed.
He tried to speak, maybe a warning to his remaining teammate, maybe a curse, maybe just a final statement, but only blood emerged, and then he collapsed as the vines withdrew and let him fall.
Shadowstep remained alive, restrained by Ivy's vines, watching his entire team die around him with mounting horror. The hero was young, maybe early twenties, probably only a few years into his hero career, one of the last allowed by the government into Gotham before they blocked it to transfers.
"No..." he whispered, the word breaking as tears started streaming down his face. "No, no, no!"
The vines began to tighten, slowly increasing pressure around his torso and limbs. Not enough to kill immediately, but enough to make breathing difficult, to promise that death was coming gradually and painfully.
Suguro had risen from his feigned defeat, moving toward the restrained hero with deliberate steps. His hands produced gas again directed specifically at Shadowstep's face.
The hero tried to hold his breath, tried to avoid inhaling, but the crushing pressure from Ivy's vines made that impossible. His body's desperate need for oxygen overrode conscious control, and he breathed in the fear toxin with desperate gasps.
The effect was immediate and devastating.
Shadowstep's eyes went wide, his pupils dilating, his expression shifting from physical pain to psychological horror as the toxin activated and began rewriting his perception of reality.
He saw his team rising from their corpses, crawling toward him with their fatal injuries still bleeding, their expressions accusing, blaming, condemning.
You let us die.
You weren't fast enough.
This is your fault.
The hallucinations spoke with the voices of his dead teammates, but the words came from Shadowstep's own guilt and trauma, the toxin simply bringing his darkest self-recriminations to life.
And Suguro kept spraying, kept dosing him, kept increasing the concentration far beyond what was necessary for simple incapacitation.
Something in Suguro had broken during this fight it was the realization that his usual tactics had failed and only desperate improvisation had saved him.
He was angry in a way he rarely allowed himself to feel, and the anger demanded expression.
So he kept dosing Shadowstep with toxin, kept watching the hero's mind fracture under the weight of manufactured fear and guilt, kept going well past the point where the effect was clearly terminal.
The hero's screaming became incoherent, his struggles against the vines becoming self-destructive as he tried to escape hallucinations that existed only in his toxin-saturated brain.
His eyes rolled back, foam appeared at his mouth, and his body went into seizures before finally going still.
Ivy watched from her position near the warehouse wall, vines retracting back into the floor, her expression showing fascination rather than horror at what she'd just witnessed.
"That was... intense," she said, approaching Suguro carefully. "I've never seen you dose someone that thoroughly before."
Suguro was breathing heavily, his hands still producing trace amounts of gas, his usual cold control fractured by adrenaline and lingering anger.
She stepped closer, studying his face with those bright green eyes.
Suguro was about to respond when they heard a sound—rubble shifting, debris falling, somewhere in the warehouse's shadows.
They both turned immediately, combat instincts activating.
The fifth hero, Sparks, the one who'd vanished at the fight's beginning, emerged from behind a collapsed section of wall. He'd been hiding, apparently, waiting for an opportunity to ambush or escape, his electricity-generation Quirk crackling across his skin with visible arcs of blue-white power.
He saw Ivy and Suguro notice him, saw his entire team dead or destroyed around him, and made the desperate decision to attack rather than flee.
Sparks unleashed his Quirk at maximum output, creating a wall of electricity that arced toward both villains simultaneously, enough voltage to stop a human heart instantly, enough amperage to cook flesh, a desperate all-or-nothing assault.
Ivy reacted with superhuman speed, her plant-based reflexes faster than normal human response. She launched herself upward and sideways, vines propelling her toward the ceiling where she clung like a spider, completely avoiding the electrical attack.
But Suguro was still on the ground, still recovering from the previous fight, his analytical mind calculating that he couldn't dodge in time.
His hands came up instinctively, a defensive gesture, his Quirk activating automatically as his body responded to mortal threat.
Gas erupted from his palms the usual black mist, but then something different, something that had never happened before.
The gas... changed.
It shifted from dark obscuring vapor into something that glowed with pale yellow-orange light, solidifying into a semi-transparent barrier that interposed itself between Suguro and the incoming electrical attack.
The electricity hit the barrier and dissipated around him.
The barrier held for approximately three seconds, glowing brighter as it countered the electrical assault, then dissipated as Suguro's concentration failed and the effect collapsed.
Sparks stared in confusion, his attack ended, his Quirk exhausted from the maximum-output assault. He tried to generate more electricity but his body was drained, his reserves depleted.
Ivy dropped from the ceiling, landing behind the hero with predatory grace. Vines erupted from the floor and walls simultaneously, wrapping around Sparkwire's body, lifting him off the ground.
"No!" he screamed, trying desperately to activate his Quirk again, to generate any electricity at all. "Please, I don't—"
The vines tightened suddenly, and there was a series of wet crunching sounds as bones broke and organs ruptured under the pressure. Sparkwire's screams cut off abruptly, his body going limp as Ivy's plants crushed the life out of him with efficient brutality.
She dropped the corpse carelessly, her attention already returning to Suguro.
"What was that?" she asked, her voice showing genuine fascination. "I've never seen your Quirk do that before."
Suguro stood motionless, staring at his hands, his analytical mind trying to process what had just happened. His Quirk produced fear toxin, It had never, in all his years of research and experimentation, produced any kind of physical energy.
"I don't know," he admitted, his voice showing the rare quality of genuine uncertainty.
He looked at his hands again, trying to recreate the effect deliberately, but nothing changed. The gas remained gas no sign of the glowing yellow energy he'd manifested moments ago.
"Quirks can evolve," Ivy said, moving closer.
"We should leave," Ivy said, glancing around at the carnage they'd created. "GCPD will respond eventually, and Batman might be close by. This much noise and death tends to attract attention."
Suguro nodded, moving toward the warehouse exit. But he paused at the doorway, looking back at her.
"Go ahead," he said. "I need a few minutes alone to process what happened. I'll catch up at the rendezvous point."
Ivy studied his face, recognizing that he was asking for space rather than dismissing her. One of her vines reached out, wrapping around his arm.
"Don't take too long," She smiled, then released his arm and moved into the ground, her quirk letting her navigate through the ground like a plant's roots. Within seconds she'd vanished completely, leaving Suguro alone in the alley behind the destroyed warehouse.
He stood there for several minutes, reviewing the fight, trying to understand the moment when his Quirk had manifested that strange energy. His hands came up repeatedly, trying to recreate the effect through conscious effort but.
Nothing…
The gas remained gas. Whatever had happened, whatever evolution or awakening or impossible fluke had occurred, he couldn't access it deliberately.
It was frustrating and fascinating in equal measure, evidence that his Quirk had capabilities he didn't understand, potential power he couldn't yet harness, but also a reminder that even after years of research he still didn't fully comprehend his own abilities.
He was so focused on his hands, so absorbed in analysis, that he missed the initial warnings.
The subtle sound of displaced air, the faint scuff of boots on concrete, the presence that materialized in the alley behind him.
By the time Suguro's instincts screamed danger and he started to turn, it was already too late.