Lucien reached the location in seconds. His perception had locked onto the disturbance - a surge of fear and desperation that stood out against the background noise of the city.
What he saw when he arrived made his jaw tighten slightly.
A man lay on the ground, blood pooling beneath him from a gunshot wound to his chest. Standing over him was a thug holding a pistol, the weapon now pointed at a child who couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old.
"Should have given me the money when I asked," the thug was saying, his voice rough.
"Now your kid's gonna learn what happens to people who try to act brave."
The child was crying, sitting beside the man on the ground, and shouting through his tears. "Dad! Dad, please wake up! Dad!"
Lucien understood the situation immediately. The man was the kid's father.
Robbery. And now the thug was about to murder a child in front of his dying father.
The gun was already rising, the thug's finger tightening on the trigger.
Lucien appeared directly in front of the child before the shot could fire. His hand shot out and covered the barrel of the gun completely, his palm pressed against the opening where bullets would emerge.
The thug stumbled backward in shock, frightened by the sudden appearance of someone who definitely hadn't been there a second ago. He trembled for a moment, his drug-addled brain trying to process what his eyes were showing him.
"What the— a monster?" The thug's fear quickly turned to panicked aggression. "Die!"
He pulled the trigger repeatedly, emptying the magazine in a rapid series of shots. Each bullet struck Lucien's palm with a muffled crack, the impacts barely audible over the sound of the firing mechanism.
But not a single bullet penetrated. They hit his skin and simply stopped, the metal flattening against flesh that was far harder than it should be. Not even a scratch marked his palm.
Lucien's hand closed around the gun barrel and crushed it like aluminum foil. The metal crumpled and twisted, the weapon becoming useless scrap in his grip.
"No, no, no—" The thug's voice cracked with terror as he released the ruined gun and stumbled backward. Then he turned and ran, his survival instincts finally overriding whatever bravado the drugs had given him.
Lucien could have killed him easily. One quick strike, and the problem would be permanently solved. But he looked down at the crying child still sitting beside his wounded father, and decided against it.
'Not in front of the kid.'
Instead, a shadow slipped from his own shadow, barely visible. It flowed along the ground like liquid darkness, following the fleeing thug as he disappeared around a corner.
The man wouldn't get far.
Lucien turned his attention to the wounded father. The man was still alive, but barely. The gunshot had hit him center mass, probably piercing a lung or major blood vessel. Without immediate medical attention, he had minutes at best.
Reaching into his inventory, Lucien pulled out a low-grade healing potion. It should be sufficient for a simple gunshot wound.
He knelt beside the man and carefully poured the glowing liquid between his lips, making sure it went down properly. The effect was visible almost immediately - the bleeding slowed, then stopped entirely. Color began returning to the man's face, and his breathing, which had been shallow and labored, deepened and steadied.
The man was still unconscious, probably from blood loss and shock, but he would live. The potion had done its job.
Lucien considered his options. He could bring the man to a hospital, or try to find his house and leave him somewhere safe. But then he heard the sound of police sirens approaching from a few blocks away. Probably a nearby patrol car responding to reports of gunshots in the area.
He looked down at the child, who had stopped crying and was now staring at him with wide, confused eyes.
"Don't worry," Lucien said with a slight smile, his tone gentle. "Your dad is fine. He'll wake up in a few minutes. The police will be here shortly to help you. You're safe now."
The kid's eyes burst with fresh tears, but these were different from before - relief instead of terror. "Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
Lucien reached down and ruffled the boy's hair once before standing up. Then he disappeared, using his speed to move to the nearest building and scale it in seconds.
By the time the police cars pulled up to the scene, he was already on a rooftop several buildings away, watching from a distance.
Two officers emerged from their vehicles, hands on their weapons as they approached cautiously. One of them spotted the child and the unconscious man and immediately called for an ambulance while his partner checked on their conditions.
"It's okay, son," the officer said, kneeling beside the crying child. "You're safe now. Can you tell me what happened?"
The kid tried to explain through his tears, his words tumbling over each other. Something about a man with a gun, his father getting shot, and then someone appearing who made the bad man run away and made his dad better.
The officer exchanged a look with his partner as they examined the father's chest. There was blood on his shirt, but when they checked underneath, there was no wound. Just smooth, unbroken skin.
"Dispatch, we need that ambulance, but downgrade priority," the officer said into his radio. "Victim appears stable. Possible false alarm on the gunshot wound, but we have a child in distress and need social services."
Lucien watched as they loaded the father into the ambulance that arrived a few minutes later. The man had started to wake up, groggy and confused, but clearly alive. The child rode with him, still holding his father's hand and refusing to let go.
Remembering the kid's repeated thank-yous, Lucien felt something warm settle in his chest.
'Is that why people obsess over being a hero as soon as they get powers? It does feel nice to help.'
The thought made him consider something he hadn't really focused on before.
He'd killed countless enemies - Sinister, Belasco, Thanos, and hundreds of dungeon monsters. Each victory had felt good in its own way, satisfying the part of him that craved growth and power.
But none of those victories had felt as satisfying as saving that child's father.
Curious about this new perspective, Lucien decided to test something. He closed his eyes and focused his perception outward, letting it expand to its full range.
The city opened up to him in his mind's eye - a sphere of awareness roughly ten to twelve kilometers in radius, centered on his current position.
Within that sphere, he could sense thousands of people going about their lives. Most were mundane - going home from work, eating dinner, watching television, sleeping. Normal activities of a normal city on a normal evening.
But as he focused specifically on negative situations, the picture changed dramatically.
In an alley three kilometers to the east, a group of thugs was mugging an elderly couple at knifepoint.
Two kilometers to the north, drug dealers were forcing teenagers to take their first hit of something that would ruin their lives.
Five kilometers south, in what appeared to be an abandoned building, several men were attempting to force themselves on women who clearly didn't want to be there.
Throughout the city, children were being kidnapped. Not many - maybe a dozen within his perception range - but each one represented a life that would be destroyed if no one intervened.
The sheer volume of crime happening simultaneously within just his limited range of perception was staggering. And this was just what was happening right now, in this moment, in this small section of the city.
Lucien opened his eyes and stared out at the New York skyline. The thought crystallized in his mind with perfect clarity:
'Crime is happening all around me. This city, even with all these so-called heroes, is a shithole.'
'Shouldn't at least New York, the hub of heroes, be free of such scummy activities?'
'Are the heroes so busy dealing with the larger animals that they ignore that their city is being eaten up by bugs?'
The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. The Avengers fought aliens and robots and cosmic threats. The X-Men dealt with mutant-human relations and worldwide conspiracies. Spider-Man swung around, stopping bank robberies and supervillain attacks.
But who was dealing with the everyday scum? The drug dealers, the human traffickers, the murderers and rapi*ts, and kidnappers who operated in the shadows while the spotlight was on bigger threats?
Apparently, no one.
At that moment, a shadow knight materialized behind him. It was one of the Elite-grade warriors from his army, and it carried something in its hand.
A severed head.
The thug who had shot the father and tried to kill the child. The shadow had caught up to him several blocks away and executed him cleanly. Justice delivered without trial, without mercy, without hesitation.
Lucien looked at the head for a long moment, studying the frozen expression of terror on the dead man's face. Then he spoke, his voice carrying absolute certainty.
"I've decided. This city can be shitty, but not as shitty as it is right now."
He extended his perception again, identifying every major crime happening within his range. Murders, assaults, kidnappings, drug operations, human trafficking rings. He cataloged them all, creating a mental map of where his shadows would need to go.
Then he gave the command.
Multiple shadows emerged from his own shadow - not just a few, but approximately two hundred of them. Elite-grade warriors, skilled killers, beings that felt no fear and showed no mercy. They materialized on the rooftop around him, a silent army waiting for orders.
"You know what to do," Lucien said quietly. "Clean up this city."
The shadows dispersed immediately, flowing off the rooftop in every direction like dark water. They moved through the city unseen, traveling through shadows and darkness, heading toward every location where Lucien's perception had detected serious crime in progress.
In an alley to the east, three muggers found themselves facing a creature made of living shadow. They died before they could scream.
In a drug den to the north, dealers forcing teenagers into addiction discovered that shadows could kill just as easily as bullets. The teenagers survived. The dealers did not.
In an abandoned building to the south, men attempting to assault women found themselves torn apart by entities that appeared from the darkness without warning.
Throughout the city, kidnappers died in silent confusion, never understanding what had killed them. The children they'd taken were left unharmed, found by authorities in the morning with no memory of how they'd gotten there or what had happened to their captors.
Each criminal eliminated, each victim saved, each small piece of filth removed from the city he now considered under his protection.
He felt that the usual saying that if you kill a killer, the number of killers remains the same was wrong... wouldn't it go down if you kill multiple of them?
Well, whatever it may be, but New York was about to become much cleaner.
...
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