Chapter 96 The Sixth Floor
The elevator jolted once and slowed to a stop at the eighth floor. When the doors slid open, the sll of machine oil and warm tal greeted .
Dullahan’s floor looked nothing like the corporate aesthetic above. This place was raw and industrial. It was half garage and half workshop. Tools and loose machinery sprawled across the concrete floor, tangled wires like veins running between workstations. A hammock sagged on the far wall, a single pillow tossed on it like an afterthought.
Dullahan herself knelt over her bike, welding sparks dancing off the matte-black fra. She wore a tube top and leggings, both flecked with oil stains.
“Damn it,” Onyx muttered in my head. “This woman knows how to show off.”
“Hey, how about we go? Like vanish now?” Silver’s voice had a teasing edge.
“We can’t leave Nick to this—”
“Co on.”
“Fine.”
Their presence winked out, like switching off a pair of neon signs. I stood alone in the elevator, feeling oddly exposed without their chatter.
Dullahan didn’t look up. “What do you want?”
“Gas,” I said. “Lots of it. I want to burn my floor down.”
She snorted, still bent over her bike. “I told you… If you have questions, co to and I’ll answer them as best I can. Not provide you with my stuff. If you don’t have a real question, then fuck off my floor.”
Unfriendly, much? But I got it. I was the new guy. My eyes drifted over her bike.
“We’re free to drag our bikes inside?” I asked.
“I’m doing maintenance,” she said, wiping her hands on a rag. “It’s fine to bring anything inside the building as long as you make Ning aware of it. He records every little thing that goes in and out. Never make the mistake of underestimating him. He thinks at incredible speeds, and he probably uses his electrokinesis to further empower his intelligence, manipulating the bioelectricity in his body, and feeding his nervous system with more power.”
I tilted my head. “How do you know all this?”
She straightened, finally eting my eyes. The glow from her welding visor cast half her face in hard shadows. “Mrs. Mind issues missions and responsibilities that cut off the quota demanded from us per year. Quite easily. She also pays in gold. I research the powers of every mber of the Ten with open transparency and sell those research papers on a subscription basis to each mber. I’m telling you this information is not for free, and I will cash in this favor soday. The Ten works on mutual respect, so I trust you’ll fulfill your end of the bargain when I call for it.”
“Sounds like a losing deal to .”
“The information I possess is evolving,” she said coolly. “I produce research papers beyond the powers of the Ten, our predecessors, local capes, and possible capes we might fight again. My observation ability is not inferior to Ning's. Combined with my mastery of the internet and my innate machinery abilities, I am the most effective information-gathering machine there is. Moreover…” She smirked faintly. “Aren’t you curious what I might write about you?”
I clicked my tongue in annoyance. Here I thought she was cute.
In my head, Silver’s voice purred, “Ooooh, she’s got you wrapped around her finger already.”
And Onyx jeered, “You’re so dead, Nick.”
Dullahan was as sneaky as a rat with a doctorate. She fed half a dossier on Ning like it was casual conversation, then, with the sa breath, turned the favor wheel on . Fantastic. I hated owing anyone anything, especially not soone who could turn my bike into a toaster if she felt like it, but she was my handler now, by her own admission. Antagonizing her felt like poking a sleeping tiger with a nail file.
“Who was the cape who used to live on the sixth floor?” I asked, folding my arms and trying to hide how much I didn’t want to be indebted.
She didn’t look up from the wiring she was fussing with. “That’ll cost you another favor.”
I sighed. “Then answer in a manner that won’t cost a favor.”
She smirked, tal sll clinging to her like perfu. “Cape na: Pervert. Five-eight. Particularly violent. He joined the Ten because he fell in love with ‘Lovelies’. He used to bring won inside the Tenfold Keep and rape them—”
The word landed like a slap. I felt sothing sour in my gut. “What the fuck?” I had no filter when my teeth were that close to the bone. The Ten were a band of villains, sure, but I hadn’t expected the rot to sll this rotten up close.
Dullahan’s hands didn’t stop moving. “He died violently two years ago, soon after I joined. I didn’t like rapists.” Her voice was flat and filled with implication; there was no mourning in it. Just a fact. “The Nth Contract is a mixed bag, morals as varied as their gear. Most join for resources, connections, money, and sotis protection. Terrorism gets the headlines; most of it is bookkeeping, favors, and contracts. But so of them… so of them are quite monster-like both in character and powers.”
It was the honesty that unsettled and the casual way she catalogued human depravity like inventory. The Ten’s ‘work as business’ line felt cleaner now but colder. They offered shelter and pay, and in exchange, you signed yourself into a network that sotis trafficked in sins nobody wanted the SRC to see.
Onyx’s voice slipped into my skull like smoke, soft and wicked. “If they piss you off, you know how it ends, right? One by one. You go through them until the lot of them are nothing but shit-stain.”
She wasn’t subtle about it. She never was. The thought that followed had a warmth to it that made my hands twitch, not pride, not exactly, but so feral satisfaction at the idea of hurting soone. I tamped the feeling down with Empathy
Silver’s worry washed over like cold water. I let it hit and then pushed back with a practiced calm. Her fear was reasonable, god knows I’d stare at myself if I had her vantage, but I’d spent the last six months learning the map of my own insides. I knew how dangerous I was.
I’d been roaming the Lawless and letting the world test . In that ti, I stopped pretending I was anything other than what I was: inclined to violence in a way that chewed through excuses and made my muscles sing. My intangibility and enhancer stacks had once been buffers, keeping the rawness from reaching my conscious mind. The brain could be fooled; the body could not.
Every hit, every broken face, every ti soone folded under my hand, my Empathy read it as a chemical event. Dopamine spiked like an engine ignition. My muscles rembered joy as a reflex. My brain pretended it didn’t count as it rationalized and justified the joy. My limbs just wanted the next thing to break. That steady stream of low-level euphoria kept wired, kept the late-night hunger at bay, and explained why sleep was a guest who never stayed long. Combat wasn’t just a choice; it was a habit baked into my biology.
That explained a lot. Why I told myself the things I did, why I’d rationalized killing Sunstrider, why I’d put a slug in Windbreaker’s leg, and why I’d kicked Chad’s crutch and watched him fall. Each ti, my body rewarded the violence, and my mind invented righteousness after the fact. It explained why I flipped on Royal and Lion King with a kind of clinical, efficient disgust. The logic was simple and ugly: violence felt good, and I learned to want it.
The excuses had co naturally to as a result.
Onyx chirped, bright and dangerous as ever. “Don’t be so doom-sayer, Nick. Silver lining is you could take over the whole Ten and remake them in your image. Harem plans, anyone?
Silver snapped back, half-sweet and half-exasperated. Onyx, stop. You can’t enable him and then be jealous at the sa ti. Also, gross.
Onyx shrugged in my head. “We’ll still be his best girls.”
I closed my eyes for a second, tasting oil and warm tal and the faint mory of blood on my knuckles. Dullahan was still watching from across the bench, her hands stained with grease. Her floor slled like burned solder and old coffee.
She folded her arms and said it plainly. “You’re monster-like, Nick. That’s why I am going to continue keeping a watch on you.”
Her words weren’t an accusation; they were an appraisal. There was a truth to it that made my chest tighten and my mouth go dry. Monster-like. Efficient. Useful. Dangerous.
“I know,” I said, voice flat. “I’ll be doing the sa, Dolly.”
“Don’t call that,” Dullahan shrugged and continued. “I keep tabs because dangerous things are useful, and because I like to know what the market looks like. Also,” she added, softer in a way that sounded almost like human curiosity, “I wanted to see if you’d break in the right places.”
Onyx snorted. “See? She’s flirting with you through industrial surveillance.”
I left her floor with a head full of screws and a toolbox of favors I didn’t want to pay back. The corridor slled like hot tal and old takeout; my floor felt like an insult waiting to happen.
Silver’s voice drifted softly and earnestly. “I know it’s not my place to say, but I think you should just ask her honestly for help.”
Onyx snorted imdiately and viciously. “Or be petty about it. There’s the easier way: phase the trash on your floor and let it fall through the ceiling into the unit below. I don’t think your neighbors downstairs would like that, but it’s easy!” She purred the idea with a grin I could feel in my gut.
Silver gave her a look only I could hear. “Or you do it the peaceful way. Phase them on the wall and let them fall behind the building. Less ss, less noise.”
Onyx was having none of it. “Fine. Or… imagine throwing a dildo upward with intangibility so it lands in Dullahan’s hammock. That’d be art.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. My floor wasn’t just a ss… It was a sex dungeon: stained mattresses slumped in corners, ropes and cuffs coiled like bad wiring, a battered pole bolted to the floor, jars of weird lube on a shelf, and the lingering perfu of other stuff I wished I’d never seen. Later had a way of stretching into forever, so I should deal with this as soon as possible.
I rode the elevator down. The doors sighed open onto the lobby again, and Ning looked up from his comic, one foot propped against the desk. He didn’t bother to hide the grin when he saw .
“Where are you headed?” he asked casually. “Going shopping, I hope?”
“Outside,” I said. “Ride to the nearest town, steal gas, burn my whole floor down.” I kept my voice flat to sound like a joke, even though half of ant it.
Ning didn’t even blink. He folded the comic closed and pushed it off the desk with a lazy motion. “Good luck with the arson,” he said, as if it were a weekend errand. “Don’t worry too much about the building… we over-engineered it. Tenfold Keep is fireproof. You’ll make a ss of the floorboards and sll like smoke for a while, but the place won’t go up. Try not to take out the plumbing.”
Onyx whooped inside my head like a child at a carnival. Silver’s anxiety tightened but softened into reluctant amusent. I should have been relieved that the structure wouldn’t burn, but Ning’s offhand remark about the Keep being fireproof only reminded how permanent so of these people were, how solid they were compared to the way I drifted through life.
I needed to move, so I took Bunnyblade out for a joyride, tal and wind and the thin, stupid relief of speed. The road opened, and my head unclogged a little. I pulled his dashboard up and started skimming the files Dullahan had hinted at. Pervert’s dossier was the sort of thing you read to feel sick and a little vindicated.
Bunnyblade’s text scrolled beneath my thumbs.
NEWS CLIP — LOCAL: “Known locally as ‘Pervert,’ real na withheld. Eyewitnesses describe a cape able to beco intangible and invisible at will. Arrests—never sustained; complaints—many. Tactics include covert surveillance of private residences, removing clothing while victims remain unconscious or unaware.”
POLICE REPORT SNIPPET: “Repeated reports of vulnerable victims found disrobed with no signs of forced entry. Forensic analysis indicates an intruder with the ability to manipulate corporeal presence and vanish between sightlines. Suspect known to have engaged in assaults between 2016–2019; no convictions due to lack of positive ID.”
COMMUNITY BOARD POST: “Warning: Pervert is not a prank na. He used to pick locks, slip into rooms, and walk away with a stranger’s dignity. If you see a shimr or feel watched, get out!”
The language was clinical, thin with disgust. The headlines called him nas. The reports called him an enigma. The truth, people robbed of privacy and agency, rang through all of it. He’d been able to remove clothes without leaving a trace; the idea of that kind of violation made my fists clench until my knuckles popped.
Onyx whispered in my skull, sharp and gleeful in the way monsters enjoy other monsters. “Good. You know the type. But golly, we are blessed you didn’t turn that way, eh?”.
Silver’s worry trailed after it. “Of course, Nick would never… he’s a gentleman!”
I thought about my floor from the sex dungeons, traps, and places where people were used and left. That floor had to go with vengeance. I rode to the nearest town. The plan was stupid simple and deserved to be stupid: steal enough gas, co back, and torch the place so thoroughly it couldn’t be used as a den anymore. No elaborate sche, no moral lecture. Clean it and move on. I slipped into the back of a shuttered garage, lifted a couple of jerrycans, and siphoned from a parked delivery truck. Rust and petrol and the tallic tang of adrenaline filled the air.
By the ti I crested the rise back at the Tenfold Keep, the sun had dipped low and the building lood like a shadowed tooth. I poured the gas across the sex-dungeon mattress, the straps and jars, and the stained sheet that had been a witness to other people’s sha.
Finally, I struck a lighter.
Fla burst through the gasoline. The smoke rolled up fast and black, and the sll of burning fabric and plastic hit like a slap. I pushed away before it mattered, phasing long enough to keep the worst of the heat from my skin and then reappearing a few ters out to watch the ruin I’d chosen. The mattress collapsed slow and ugly; ropes curled like black snakes. Fire ate the things that had made the place useful to monsters.
I returned to the elevator and punched the first floor.
To be fair, Mrs. Mind said she didn’t mind if I burnt the place.
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