Chapter 77 Goodbye, Markend

High noon painted the city below in harsh light, every rooftop gleaming like polished steel, every street crawling with restless motion. I sat on the ledge of the skyscraper, legs dangling into empty air as if the drop meant nothing. The wind roared at this height, sharp enough to sting my eyes, but I didn’t mind it. My lighter clicked again and again, the flame sparking for a second only to be devoured by the gust. “Fuuuuck…” I muttered under my breath, shielding it with my hand to no avail. The stick dangled uselessly between my lips, dry as my patience.

I wasn’t going to lose this small battle. I pushed a sliver of my intangibility outward, making the air around me bend, forcing the wind to slip past without snuffing out my flame. The lighter came alive, steady this time, and the tip of the cigarette glowed an ember red. I leaned back with the victory of a petty man and took my first drag, letting the smoke curl in my lungs. The satisfaction lasted all of five seconds before irritation settled in.

It tasted the way it always did, bitter and hollow, the faint scratch in my throat already dulled by my body’s unnatural efficiency. Nicotine didn’t cut it. Alcohol didn’t either. No high, no haze, and no drunken stumble into forgetting. My body refused all of it. A punishment disguised as a blessing. I exhaled and watched the smoke get torn apart by the wind, like it never existed at all.

I wondered if this was what the rest of my life was going to be… chasing thrills I couldn’t feel, and pretending small habits meant something when they never did. Maybe it was for the better. But damn, I’d need an alternative to my violent streaks. Not to mention, I was curious… what made nicotine so addictive?

“Here’s to second chances, I guess…”

The lighter clicked shut and fell away from my fingers. I let it blow off the edge and disappear into the city’s breath, then cranked the Walkman volume up and shoved earbuds into my ears until they blocked the wind.

“I kept a pocket full of sunsets, traded them for a smile,

We ran from the alarms and the empty, quiet miles,

Hold tonight like a lantern, don’t let the darkness win,

Beat the clock with the small fire burning under your skin.”

I’d hate to sound like some murder-hobo psycho who got off on violence, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the fights.

There was a guilty component to it, but it had been fun in its own unique ways.

I pulled an oxygen tank behind me, the straps cutting into my palms as I hauled it up the back of my shoulders. The mask was cold when I pressed it to my face, the plastic smelling faintly of disinfectant and stale metal. I cinched the straps and let the tank hiss into life, the mechanical breath a steady, ridiculous metronome beside the song’s chorus.

I let my intangibility take over fully. I poured power into myself until the world thinned to edges and the music became a distant echo, muffled and cocooned beneath my focus. The city’s noise dulled to a pressure behind my skull, and for a moment, the only thing that existed was the hum of my lungs and the faint, stubborn beat of that pop chorus inside my head. Pushing power this hard made my mind ache; neurons felt like flint grinding together, and clarity came with a white, bright nausea.

I let go and jumped.

For a moment, I felt absurdly sentimental for the place that had chewed me up and taught me how to bite back. I’d spent years carving lines into its flesh; admitting I’d miss it felt ridiculous and true at the same time, like apologizing to an enemy you owe your survival to.

The plunge felt like falling through memory lane. I kept the oxygen mask pressed to my face, the tank hissing a steady, ridiculous rhythm while the world rushed past.

I counted the seconds in my head, slow and even, matching the last time I’d trusted this trick and banked everything on a calculation that had never been elegant, only necessary.

Finally, the earth embraced me.

When the moment came, I let my intangibility loosen just enough for the ground to reject me. The sensation was like being spat out of a mouth: violent, sudden, and blessedly precise. Gravity flipped as if someone had decided to change the rules mid-game, and the earth threw me back into the air with a force that felt like a hand from below. My lungs burned, the oxygen cold and clinical in my throat, but the method worked. It had worked before, and when you live the way I did, you learned to trust hacks that kept you alive even when cleverness outran certainty.

Where I would reappear was never something I could calculate perfectly; destiny, caprice, and a bad mental map took turns deciding my fate. I stopped trying to predict the landing and instead let the physics and my half-baked rituals pick a spot.

The world blurred, then snapped into focus with the violence of a shutter. Sand exploded under me like a thrown bucket of grit, and I shot up out of the earth into a scrubby plain, coughing the grit from my mouth with the oxygen mask clinging to my face.

I noticed the oxygen tank had exploded at some point, so I let go of what remained.

Sand slipped off my shoulders like shed skin when a voice cut the air behind me, raw as a broken wire.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

I turned toward the crooked sedan. Half a dozen men fanned out, guns trained at me. Their clothes hung in strips, patched with mismatched fabrics; their faces were maps of grime and old hurt. One of them smiled at me, teeth stained coal-black, and gums receding like bad weather.

“Ain’t from around here, huh?” he said. “Wrong place, wrong time, mate.”

Another man jabbed the barrel of his weapon toward a small boy tied to a plastic chair. The child’s knees were bruised, cheeks caked with sand; the barrel rested somewhere between the child’s chest and his terrified eyes.

“Keep starin’, stranger, and the kid gets it,” he said, voice as blunt as a hammer. “Ye city-landers are too high of yourselves! Don’t even think we aren’t afraid of you just because you are a cape!”

Pressed against the steel of the car was a woman, specifically a young mother. “Please… please, don’t… don’t hurt my boy! Please, please!”

Her palms were splayed flat on the hood, fingers scraping against hot metal, back bent cruelly as one of the men pressed her down with the weight of his arm. Her dress was torn open at the seams, fabric hanging in strips like a flag of surrender, baring skin she had tried to keep hidden. She whimpered through split lips, the sound muffled against the windshield, as another hand dragged roughly along the line of her thigh, tugging at what was left of her dignity. The desert wind carried sand across her legs, sticking to sweat, while her captors jeered like jackals circling a kill.

“And she sings, boys!”

“Hah~! A good one!”

“Sing for us more, wench!”

I had no idea if I was still within the Council of City-States’ borders. The desert didn’t carry maps, and the horizon was just sand and heat. What I did know was this: the lands between cities were wild, ruled not by laws but by whatever the strongest could enforce at gunpoint. I’d heard rumors of raiders, highwaymen, and drifters who lived off fear. Now I was staring at them.

The boy’s voice cracked, shaking in the dry air. “Mama, I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

The woman pinned against the hood twisted to look at him, tears streaking through the grime on her cheeks. Her words shook, but she forced them out. “You did nothing wrong, sweetie… nothing…”

Thirteen men, by my count. Grimy and sunburnt, wielding rust-streaked guns like trophies. Three vehicles were parked in the sand. There was an old pickup, a sedan coughing out smoke, and a bike with a bent handlebar.

One of the men, face burned and peeling from the sun, started to sing. His voice was raw, a desert rasp, but the others joined in, stomping the sand like it was some barroom floor.

“We’re the highwaymen, we take what we please,

Guns in our hands, bring you down to your knees.

Your gold, your women, your blood in the sand,

All of it ours, by the law of this land…”

Their laughter followed the shanty, a chorus of hyenas circling carrion.

“Stop right there!” one of them barked, jabbing his rifle toward me. His eyes flickered with the edge of fear, but he hid it behind bravado. “I don’t care if you’re a cape, man!”

Another snarled, louder, like he was trying to convince himself. “Be careful… he might be a teleporter! Watch each other’s backs!”

I didn’t answer. My boots pressed into the sand, step by step, straight toward the kid tied down to a plastic chair. His eyes were wide, his face red from crying. A shotgun cracked. The sound tore across the desert like thunder.

The slug phased through me and tore straight through the man standing behind the boy. His body snapped backward, a hole punched through his chest, blood spraying the chair. He collapsed before he even realized what happened, the weapon going slack from his hands.

The others froze, horror etched across their dirt-caked faces.

“W-what the fuck?!” one of them yelled.

I didn’t waste the moment. My hand phased through the corpse’s hand, snagging the rifle with my intangibility. The weapon slid into my grip as though I’d stolen it from another world.

“Your song was off-key,” I muttered.

The rifle barked. Three shots, three bodies falling. The man pinning the woman went limp, sliding down the hood with a wet thud. Another idiot tried charging at me with a rifle tipped by a taped-on bayonet. He dropped mid-sprint, chest torn open. The last was caught mid-shout, the bullet silencing him forever.

“Shit, kill him!”

“Boss, if we capture him and turn him in, we’d be rich.”

I didn’t hesitate as the rifle barked once more, and the so-called boss collapsed as the barrel clicked empty. The pickup’s tailgate slammed; men scrambled like cockroaches toward cover.

A hulking figure charged out from behind the sedan, all bulk and anger, and he bellowed, “WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY DAD?!” His voice rolled like thunder. He moved like muscle molded into movement, likely the gang’s bruiser, and he was quite an intimidating sight.

But, how would he compare to a dragon?

I stabbed him with the rifle with my intangibility, using the stock as a pin, and the lumbering giant folded over his own feet and hit the sand hard, stunned into uselessness.

“Six down.”

Among their numbers, an electrokinetic with too much bravado and not enough skill gave up his handgun in favor of his powers. He tried to throw arcs of light at me, jagged blue tearing the air, but his power was petty compared to what I’d faced before. I walked straight through the crackle until I could feel the pattern of his mind: fear, greed, and the tiny thrill of being noticed. I phased his head to his chest, a disorienting crush of bone against bone, and he collapsed to the sand, clutching at his ribs and gasping for air.

Another man with crooked teeth vanished mid-shriek, teleporting away in a blind scramble for survival. “I am not gonna die here!”

I swiveled, let my empathic threads find the point where he’d end up, and then picked up the electrokinetic’s dropped handgun. The pistol had two rounds left. I fired once, and the bullet met the teleporter’s head the instant he rematerialized; he folded without a sound. The second bullet struck the driver who’d been fumbling at the wheel of the pickup, sending his buddies to a panic.

“Get him off the seat!”

“Fuck, the driver’s side was welded shut.”

“I told you, Gary, not to fucking weld the doors!”

They struggled to get the driver out.

I watched the pickup’s occupants shove and curse, scrambling for the driver’s seat. They had the kind of organized panic that broke into clumsy coordination. They must’ve thought I was an idiot if I didn’t see them thinking of running away. Now… Four left. Three on the pickup, and one... dragging back a hostage that I thought had long ran for her safety.

“Stop, or I’ll kill her!” snarled the thug, thinking I’d fold so easily. “Ya hear me!? Drop the gun!”

I stepped closer to the man holding the woman, letting my voice go flat so it would carry without hint of mercy. “I’ll let you go if you let her go.”

“No… I don’t trust you…”

The woman begged, “Oh please… I don’t want to die…”

“Ha,” spat the man, fury and calculation mixing in his stare. “You might just kill me if I let her go; she comes with me.” His eyes darted to the pickup, to the bodies, to the dwindling options like a man checking doors. But then he turned to the sedan.

“It seems you’re under the mistaken impression that I care whether she lives or dies.”

I flicked the handgun from my palm toward his skull and phased its metal into his face, the weapon materializing solid where it mattered and thumping home with a sick, decisive crunch. He went still, mouth open to curse, only for silence to claim him.

“I just need someone to point me to the nearest civilization… that’s all.”