by Jason Krate
It couldn't be!
These five….they were Metahumans!
But that was impossible!
All Metahumans save for her father had been destroyed a long time ago.
Hadn't they?
* * *
The one who had been driving the tank, the one with no hair, obviously the leader, stepped forward before her.
"Well, well…lookie what we have here" he said with a smug smile, "a cape, a sexy looking outfit and the nerve to go up against us? I thought all the heroes died a long time ago. This is a unique opportunity."
The girl who had previously turned into gas snickered.
"You're probably wondering how I knew you were taking pot shots at us from the top of that apartment building" the bald headed marauder said casually, he then sniffed the air "I can "smell the metal in that fancy looking gun of yours from a mile away"
He then examined her, and Nightborne swore it was the exact kind of sizing up that a lion would do when it was eyeing its next meal.
"What do you call yourself sexy legs" the bald headed leader asked, "Strip girl? The Silent Pussycat? You look like a ninja and a whore made love and you were the result."
Nightborne didn't say anything, she was struggling to reach for her trump card in the back of her suits fanny pockets.
Only, when she managed to squirm her hand around to that area, she found that her haversack and her fanny pocket reserves had been taken away from her.
She then saw the bald headed leader of this team of marauders pull out from behind him, her haversack and the ultrasonic signal stun balls.
Nightshades heart sank.
Not good!
"Yeah, we're not stupid girl" the bald headed leader said mockingly, "we searched you while "Silencer" had you knocked out by her knock out gas form. Interesting toys, I think we'll keep them. No I'm going to make this clear. We want to know who you are, and if your one of us, if not…then you're going to tell us if there is any more others like us that we don't know about…and then we'll kill you."
"And it won't be done quickly" the other female sneered, "it will be slow and painful. There is a reason why we call ourselves "The Sadistic Five".
"So who are you?" the bald headed leader asked.
Nightborne refused to give this creep what he was asking of her.
"All right then…" the Baldheaded guy said apathetically, "You made your choice. Bone breaker, put this Hero in her place."
One of the male Marauders of the five standing before her as she hung there hanging in the air, suspended in the grip of that evil "Mr. Fantastic" knockoff, slid himself off the side of the downed Echelon Tank.
He then stretched out his hand towards her.
Suddenly Nightborne felt excruciating pain flowing through her body, coming right from her very bones.
She tried not to scream or make any indication whatsoever that she was in pain, but it was no use.
As she screamed in pain, she felt the skin rip open from her legs and it felt like her leg bones had just grown right out of her body….and she was right.
Her leg bones were jetting out and rapidly growing unnaturally out of her legs, jetting down into the ground beneath her, until she was erected there in place by her own bones like a scarecrow!
The rubbery arms that were wrapped around her released her, they were no longer needed to hold her in place now.
The five marauders laughed at the sight of Nightshades current state.
"Well, who wants to go next" the bald headed leader asked his crew jovially.
"I do" the female with the fiery orange hair snickered, and then she shot out her hands towards Nightborne.
Nightborne watched in horror amidst her excruciating pain as a stream of intense fire shot out from the woman's hands straight towards her!
* * *
"KILARI!" a voice she knew too well screamed her name.
Suddenly she felt something slam into her side, causing her unnaturally grown bones that were spiked into the ground beneath her to snap and break, freeing her, and sending her tumbling to the sidewalk on the other side of the road.
She then heard a male voice scream in pain, and despite her agonising pain, she turned around to see that it was indeed her father who had pushed her out of the way…only to take the full brunt of the fire blast in her place!
He was now on the ground, engulfed in flames!
As Minra tried to "stop, Drop and roll", the five marauders laughed at the sight of the old man on fire before them who had almost appeared out of nowhere.
"Hey Masonry" the evil "Mr. Fantastic" marauder chuckled, "Check it out, a new player in the game!"
"Well then…" the bald headed leader grinned, now revealed to be called "Masonry", "the boss's keep on saying that we need to work on our aim with our powers and weapons. Let's do some target practice! Bone Breaker…you know what to do."
Nightborne then watched in horror as the bone manipulating metahuman who had tortured her then used his powers on her father as he tried to douse the flames off his body, causing his leg bone to jet out through the bottom of his feet into the ruined asphalt of the street.
Before Minra could recover or react to this, the five marauders attacked.
And Nightborne watched in horror as her father was suddenly shot, burned, gassed, and clubbed violently by these five metahuman marauders.
The bone guy didn't need a gun, he had the ability to shoot "bullets" made out of his own bones out through his fingertips at his target, riddling her father's chest with these deadly projectiles!
The sadistic assault only stopped when Masonry declared in an annoyed tone, "damn, I'm out of ammo!" in regards to the machine gun he was holding in his hands.
"Hey Masonry" the gaseous metahuman woman declared, "he's still alive"
They all looked on in surprise as Minra was still standing, but in obvious agony as he did so.
He was riddled with bullets and bone shards, bleeding profusely, severely burned and most of the bones in his body had been broken by the assault…yet he still stood tall and alive in the face of the sadism of these five metahuman marauders.
"Okay….fun is over" Masonry declared in a bored tone, "he's just a slump who stuck his nose where I don't belong, it's the girl we want. Silencer…asphyxiate him."
"With pleasure."
Minra didn't even see it coming before the woman known as "Silencer" turned into a poisonous gas form, chlorine to be exact, and flew across the road and down into his lungs.
Death took a hold of him almost instantly…or so it seemed.
* * *
When Minra awoke, he had no idea how much time had passed from when he passed out.
He noticed that he was now lying on his back in the middle of the ruined main street of Lost Hallowing.
He didn't have to guess why he was still alive after all of that, he figured his old but still reliable Healing Factor had saved him from death yet again.
Only a bullet through his head might have killed him, and that was the one place those monsters hadn't shot him at during their attack on him.
Suddenly fearful realization overtook him when he realized that he was all alone in the middle of the street.
No metahuman marauders, no screams, no explosions….it was all silent.
He sat up instantly, and found that Kilari was nowhere to be found.
"KILARI!" he screamed out his daughter's name, but he heard no response.
He then got back onto his feet, and called out for his daughter.
His screams echoing through the now empty sub-urban city of Lost Hallowing.
He then tried using his "Shadow Sense" power to find her, hoping that it wasn't too late to save her.
He didn't have to look far with his "Shadow Sense" ability, for it found her soon enough…broken, battered and bloody in an alleyway adjacent to where he now stood.
No.
It couldn't be!
He ran over to his daughter still form as fast as he could
, hoping that his worst fear wasn't what he was seeing at this moment.
He checked her over, and to his horror he found several stab wounds in her chest and stomach…and the area between her legs had been savaged.
It was like a dark nightmare, a memory of an event in his life he wished he had never witnessed happening all over again.
Those monsters while he was healing from the deadly blows dealt to him by them, had finished what they were doing with his daughter.
Torturing her and then raping her.
This couldn't be happening again, not to his daughter.
Maybe.
Maybe she was still alive?
She had to be still alive!
He couldn't lose her too!
He placed two fingers against her wrists in order to check for heartbeat and pulse.
He felt no heartbeat and no pulse, in fact her very skin was ice cold, possibly due to bloodless.
No.
No.
It couldn't be!
He then desperately looked around for something to cut himself with, there was one last thing he could do that might save her.
He found a piece of broken window glass nearby and grabbed it.
Upon returning to his daughters still form, he quickly cut his wrists, and placed his open wound over her mouth.
Watching in anxious anticipation as the mutated blood that was his own that he had used to cure so many people of afflictions ranging from diseases to near death sickness poured out of his veins and down into her throat.
Hoping that it would be enough to rescue his daughter from the hands of his greatest enemy, death itself.
His hopes were in vain.
His blood couldn't save her.
She was already gone.
* * *
They say that when your whole world shatters, that the world around you shatters as well.
Those people where right.
Because for Minra, his whole world had just died.
He embraced his daughter's dead body, and for the first time in a long time, he wept.
His anguished cry's filled the empty streets of the now abandoned Lost Hallowing.
Why?
Why did this have to happen?
Why couldn't she have listened to him?
* * *
"No Minra…" a voice he had not heard in a long time spoke to him from the darkness of his own mind, coming from the shadows of the alleyway beside him, "The real question is "Why couldn't you have understood and gone out with her?"
"You!" Minra said with utmost contempt at the voice in his head, remembering it as the "Baron Knight" persona's "avatar" that only showed itself to him in times of great mental emotional stress or times of danger to get him to focus and to persevere.
The "jiminy Cricket" on his shoulder that he figured he had gotten rid of a long time ago when he got rid of being Baron Knight entirely.
Apparently this tragedy had awoken that part of him, and it was now "speaking" to him yet again.
"You shunned me for almost two and a half lifetimes, and look what happens as a result" the Baron Knight Persona avatar said with disdain, "At least your daughter had the sense to do the right thing. If you hadn't shut me out she would be alive now."
"Wrong!" Minra snapped at the spectre in his head, "If she had only listened to me, she would still be alive."
"But that's not how you raised her Minra" the Baron Knight persona Avatar pointed out, "You may have cut yourself off from the world, she never did. You didn't raise her to be the emotionally stunted shut in that you let yourself become when you abandoned what you really are all those years ago. You raised her to be the kind, caring, compassionate woman and superhero that she is, was, and always will be. She didn't disobey you, she was honoring your memory. Your legacy. You once couldn't stand by while evil had its way with people, and neither could she. Don't you understand, she loved you…loved you enough that she couldn't let go of her memory of who you were or her faith in that someday you might become again the man to you once where. She gave these people enough time to get out of town, she stopped them from killing any more people. If those monsters weren't Metahumans she would have stopped them completely. That's the woman you raised her to be, selfless!"
"They took my daughter" Minra said, holding his daughter dead body in his arms, "They murdered her…they raped her and then they murdered her….They VIOLATED HER and….I…couldn't stop them. I was completely unprepared for the fact that they might have been Metahumans. I thought all of them had been wiped out and I was the last one. It's all my fault."
"No. It's those five Metahumans fault. No one else's Minra" the Baron Knight Persona's mental avatar corrected, "they did this, not you."
"I could have saved her…" Minra said in despair.
"Maybe. But now is not the time for "What if" now is the time for what is happening in the present time right now. You can't save her now Minra, the past is the past" the Baron Knight avatar said, putting a hand on his shoulder comfortingly, "But you can still avenge her."
"How?" Minra Moraes asked, not letting go off his daughter corpse as he did.
"You know how" the Baron Knight persona said cryptically.
Minra soon got what his "Jiminy Cricket" was telling him.
The Baron Knight.
It was telling him that the way to avenge Kilari, was to become the Baron Knight once again.
"I don't know if I can" Minra said looking up at his Baron Knight persona's mental avatar, "It's been so long since I used that part of my powers…since I've been the Baron Knight."
"Then I suggest you get started" the Baron Knight persona said cryptically, "It's time for us both to come back."
It then extended its hand to help Minra up off the ground, and Minra in response, and now wanting revenge for what had been done to his daughter, received it.
The "Baron Knight" persona's avatar vanished from his sight the moment he and it touched hands in a handshake agreement to bring vengeance upon the Metahumans who had done this.
"Yes…." He said to himself, "I guess it is time for me to come back."
Lightning flashed above him as he said those words, as a storm began to fall upon Lost Hallowing.
A torrential downpour of rain began to fall as well.
He then took his daughters dead body, and used his Shadow Walking power to transport the both of them to the cliffs overlooking Brightmoon Bay.
He then gently placed her upon the wet rain soaked grass, and then he went around to collect stones to bury her under to make a grave.
Once it was done, he placed his hand on the stone pile that now entombed his daughter's dead body.
Here he made his goodbyes to the last piece of his old life he had now lost forever, as well as a declaration of war against the evil forces that had taken her from him.
"I swear to you Kilari. I will not rest, until there is not a breath in me, I will avenge your death….and I'll make each and every one of those sons of bitches pay for what they did to you. And if I find any other evil scum attacking innocent people like those five did to you, I will bring the righteous furry of justice upon them. Let the evil that has a hold on this land and the city that had once been my home heed my warning. You all crossed the line, just as your predecessors who hurt me and my family before you crossed the line so many years ago. You are all going to regret this. The Baron Knight is back…and he is pissed off!"
The Baron Knight Returns: Chapter 3
* * *
Chapter 3: "One down, Four to Go!"
* * *
Far Side Slums, Rachel's Apartment complex: October 7th, 2063: 9:00 PM
Rachel Addison hadn't stopped running since she had glimpsed Baron Knight in the alleyway near the subway station, and she hadn't stopped thinking about seeing him either.
She couldn't believe it.
A metahuman, a demon, here in the city.
She realized she was living on borrowed time before all the chaos and destruction her pa
rents had told her about that those THINGS caused would occur.