[center][color=ff0911][h3]Jason[/h3][/color][/center]
[b]Balibago, Angeles City - 10/18/2022, 20:33 UTC+8[/b]

He's always liked people-watching, even back when he was a civilian. Watching passersby isn't particularly stimulating, but hubs of activity tended to offer revealing windows into the irrationalities of people. It gave him a more reliable measure of what constituted normal behavior, free from the bias of entertainment or the specific quirks of his direly limited social circle.

It's become a more fruitful pastime, as of late. His intuition has since become strange, and behaviors he had originally dismissed as impractical or nonsensical make more sense in the context of social manipulation. He could recite a book on the topic word for word, but he's always struggled to identify how the underlying principles are or could be put into practice.

He stared at the ramen shop from a nearby rooftop. The way that man leans over his ramen, despite having finished eating. The way that woman seems to laugh at every other thing her companion says. The subtlety of simply tilting one's head towards another. The way that woman from earlier begins to stare off into space, like- yeah, that's the first infection within the restaurant. The other patrons scream. Ironic, considering they didn't even notice when one of the other patrons turned outside the restaurant and attacked someone in full view of the windows.

Looks like his people-watching time is over. 

He dismounts the rooftop, not bothering with a safe landing. His steps are a little awkward for a few seconds after, but it's nothing he can't walk off. The zombies seem to be proliferating well, though they've always been rather stupid things. If nothing catches their attention, they tend to shamble aimlessly, and while they don't ignore the hustle and bustle of the city, they aren't exactly the running type unless they catch sight of prey.

He decides not to linger with them, walking down and off the street. The zombie virus is, honestly, pretty harmless in the end, but unless ASEAN quickly puts together that the symptoms match some random arms user that has only been active in Ukraine, the damage from the panic they cause tends to be vastly more devastating. After all, it's rare for zombie movies to end because the virus has a shorter lifespan than the common cold or flu. Granted, reinfection is a serious issue, but even without a quarantine, it tends to burn out in a week or two at most. Reinfection often happens before they get the chance to drink anything, so they tend to die of dehydration during the second round.

Still, that left the question of whether he should add more points of infection or leave it as-is. Dropping even a few zombies into a highly populated area is usually enough, but dropping them into different locations massively speeds up the infection rate. Knowing Ai Chen, he doubts she'd care how much collateral got involved. In fact, she might egg him on to cause more, even if it isn't beneficial.

Wouldn't it be, in this case?

Something about the thought is upsetting, though he can't particularly fathom why. He doesn't care for anyone here - probably no one in the country, even. He's unleashing a zombie virus that will have an indeterminate death count, even if it's all indirect deaths, so why does he feel opposed to the idea of spreading it more?

He tamps down on the feeling as he passes by another man. He doesn't particularly need to make a scene to infect him, so he doesn't, withdrawing some blood and guiding it to the man's face without pausing his walk. It only takes moments for the man's spluttering to cut out before, no doubt, being replaced by a thousand-yard stare.

He keeps walking.

His newfound fixation on preserving human life is pointless and detrimental. Life is not precious. Earth has had a chronic overpopulation problem even throughout the rise of Noble Arms. It's that damned OPL code.

It really was incredibly stupid, using normal human brain chemistry as the regeneration template. The idea that it wouldn't matter is laughable to him, now. At least his Noble Arm got it right.

He still hasn't tested his regeneration without his Noble Arm. He should have some degree of it in theory, but he knows that normal people view his thinking as lacking, somehow, and he'd hate to think the same. He'd much rather have an emotional blind spot than a logical one, thank you very much. Hypocrites, the lot of them.

He enters a nearby alleyway and lifts up his jacket and shirt to avoid creating a hole in them, then manifests a simple kitchen knife, feeling the throb of unfelt pain in his back. Reaching back, he pulls it out, letting his clothes drop, and hides the knife under his jacket. He can feel his blood staining the back of his shirt, but the jacket is water-resistant and his regeneration is fast enough to keep the wound from making a mess. Blood clotting is child's play.

He waits by the alley entrance, waiting for another passerby. Eventually, a woman holding a baseball bat does, and he uses his Hemokinesis to pull the knife out from his jacket and launch it at her. Human life isn't precious, and he needs to prove to himself that he believes it; that he can take it when the need arises.

The knife sinks right into her neck, catching her completely unawares, but the wound is pathetically shallow. An exercise in utilization of minimal force, he tries to justify, except he knows he can't lie to himself. He hasn't caused any meaningful damage. Frustration bubbles up within him, and he telekinetically pulls the knife out and jams it into her lower abdomen. It was something he did on the spur of the moment; something to take his anger out on, except why bother pulling the knife away from her neck, then?

It's a waste to kill her, he mentally argues. It's a waste to kill everyone haphazardly too. Human life isn't precious, but it has more use alive than dead. The justification rings hollow to him, but it's an acceptable excuse this time. He has no reason to kill people here. He can more closely examine his self-endangerment later... except there may never be a better time to do so than now. If he fails to pull the metaphorical trigger once, what's to stop it from happening again?

He can feel a headache coming on, already far too late to stop. He decides that if he's going to kill the woman, it's now or never. He reaches out - an unnecessary motion, but a steadying one. He could pull the knife out. The blood loss alone might be enough to do it, eventually, though it wouldn't be enough to clear his doubts, and he's not sure he wouldn't hesitate to stab her again. He instead reaches for the virus, barely accessible through her stab wound, and changes it to the rage variant, something that ensures she'll aggravate her wound and burn out - to death. There. He's done it.

When the headache hits, he finds it easier to keep his gaze locked onto the pavement. It's not painful, per se, but it's probably the closest thing to pain he can still feel, like resting your head on a bed of uneven porous rock. It's an intrusive sort of discomfort that he's become excruciatingly familiar with, since pushing against the resulting mental fatigue is both pointless and sharpens the rock's jagged edges. It's certainly worse than the feeling of the woman slamming the bat into his head.

"American Bastard!" She yells out something he barely registers, and doesn't even bother trying to understand.

He kicks her back as his skull repairs the minor damage she managed to deal and she snarls, brandishing the bat for another home run. Why is she even carrying... doesn't matter. He can still identify an enemy when he sees one. He grabs the bat as it swings at him. He probably sprains his wrist in the process, but he wouldn't care even if he were in his right mind to. He sees flicker of movement in the corner of his eye, and, preparing to take on another assailant, he angles the bat and pushes it back at her, hitting her in the chest and forcing her back, before following it up with another kick, pushing her out of the alleyway and into the street. That should give him the time and space to deal with the new arrival.

He stares them down, arms raised, prepared to fight, and they stare back through slitted green eyes. The staredown drags on and on for what feels like forever, until the loud sound of glass shattering rings out from a ways across the street, and the tabby cat he's been staring down darts away, probably scared off by the noise.

Did he just... get into a standoff with a stray cat?

He clutches at his forehead, not sure whether the lingering discomfort of his headache or his mortification is worse. He glances at the woman with a baseball bat ransacking some storefront before walking away as shouts of alarm begin to ring out. He'd rather not put on the mask and give up the element of surprise just yet, and it's not really his concern what trouble that woman gets into. The rage virus isn't really the infectious type, if only because the behaviors it causes aren't conducive to it, but maybe she'll infect more people by accident, who can say? Ai Chen hasn't said anything about friendly fire, so it's not like a particularly ornery Noble Arms user getting infected should matter. Even if the Philippines gets blown up, he'll probably be fine as long as it isn't vaporized. Probably.

[@Lewascan2]