[center][h2]Kitsune[/h2][/center]

“…ink she’s dead?”

Akeno opened her eyes behind her mask, or tried to at least; one of her eyelids clung to her cheek, like it was early morning and it was clogged with sleep crust. Her head was killing her and through her one good eye she could see why; the blood staining her white costume and dripping down through the narrow eye hole of the Kitsune mask she wore proof of the open wound on her scalp. Behind her she could feel something solid pressing against her back, propping her torso up; a wall or, more likely, the car she remembered being pinned against during the fight. Beneath her she could feel the rough tarmac of the road she had collapsed onto.

“Maybe. We should… no, wait, she’s still breathing.”

Her head hurt, because someone had tried to kill her with a length of metal pipe. Her neck hurt, because she had been sitting like this for who knew how long after being knocked unconscious and was starting to develop a crick. She didn’t move to take some of the strain away, because someone had tried to kill her with a length of pipe and now she was being woken up by voices she didn’t recognise and given that she still remembered what she had been doing before this, she could only assume they were dangerous. The fire, the fighting, people with powers and modifications crawling out of the woodwork, even the person who had done this to her; it was all mostly clear in her mind, though everything after she was grabbed by the mob of copies was a bit hazy.

“Did you see who did this to her?”

“The clone guy I think. I saw him, well, [i]them[/i] walking away.”

“Ugh, that guy. He really creeps me out.”

“They all creep me out. All of them.”

A man in multiple bodies all wearing the same clothes, copies that didn’t feel pain or stop trying to attack her even when she broke their bones or burned their flesh; that much she remembered. The people, the things roaming the streets were varied but there were clear similarities between some of them; multiple people with jetpacks, multiple muscle-bound hulks, multiple animal-human hybrids. Amidst them she had seen a few unique people that had reeked of danger that she had chosen to avoid; that was probably the [i]they[/i] being talked about. The clone guy should have been one of them, but he looked too innocuous for her to think much of.

Her mistake.

“She’s one of them right? The ones we were told about.”

“Yeah.”

This… this had been targeted at her, everything that was happening. Why? No, not just her, her and the others; Grim and Bouncer and whoever else. They were looking into that human trafficking group, they’d burnt down a building just to cover their tracks and now they’d done this? Released… all of these things, these people.

All those people… because of them.

No… because of [i]them[/i]. 

“So… we should kill her?”

“…yeah.”

Her head snapped up then and the owners of the two voices jumped back. Turning her head so that she could see both with her one good eye, she hooked her foot behind the ankle of the nearest one and then pushed her other foot into the pivot point of his hip; she pulled with one and pushed with the other and toppled him to the ground. Kitsune rose to her feet, back pressing into the side of the car behind her as she fought to get her legs back underneath her; it was a slower process than she would have liked, but the person she had knocked down was even slower to get back up and the second person was backing away instead of taking advantage of her weakness.

Once she was standing again she stalked forward and they both scrambled to get away from her. The one on the ground crawled backwards and raised a hand in front of himself placatingly, until she jumped forward and slammed his head back against the street with the heel of her foot, dealing with the problem a little more viciously than she normally would. Behind them, the second person hesitated before turning around and running; she was quicker, lunging forward and kicking a leg out from under them to send them sprawling to the ground.

Rather than try to pick themselves up and run again, they rolled over on to their back and held their hands out to ward her away. “Please, wait! We weren’t going to kill you! We’re not killers!”

Raising a hand up to her mask, Kitsune reached under it to try and rub away some of the blood caking her eye shut. Once she could pry her eyelid open again she stopped, though once she had some more time she’d need to do something about the wound itself.

“Who did all this?”

“Please, I just want to go home. They said they’d let us go home.”

Two steps forward and she was able to place a foot down on their chest and start applying pressure. Akeno wasn’t one for torture, not one for inflicting pain at all beyond what she needed to, but right now she was feeling like she could stomach it.

“Who is [i]they[/i]? Who [i]did this[/i]?”

All of this chaos, all of this damage and pain and death; just to help hide the kidnappings and the kinds of experiments that led to people boiling themselves alive and losing all semblance of humanity to their powers. She was starting to get the impression that these guys were as much the victims of the people behind all of this as anything else, but they were also guilty for the part they were playing in it.

The city was on fire.

Normally she’d say it wasn’t her place to deal with things like this. All she ever wanted to do with her powers was help a few people, stop them from getting hurt. It wasn’t her job to fight villains or even to catch the bad guys; she helped the would-be victims get away and then either ran away herself or knocked the criminal out and called the cops to deal with them. She wasn’t a hero, more like a vigilante or just someone who made a habit of being in the wrong places at the right time.

“The doctor! The doctor let us all out and said to cause as much trouble as we could!”

But this was partly her mess, caused by a situation that she had tried to ignore and not become a part of. Her getting involved sooner probably wouldn’t have stopped any of this, she wouldn’t put the blame for this on herself like that, but clearly she could no longer take a half-hearted approach to this. She was all in, she was getting to the bottom of this and she was taking the person responsible for it down.

“Tell me everything you know. [i]Everything[/i].”