Thunderclaps 3: Chapter 1 - Heroic Life in the Big City

 

“I will show you fools just how meaningless the goals of progress and harmony are.”

(1970, from fliers distributed by Sun Thief after occupying the site of the Expo ’70)

Sun Thief fused with the Tower of the Sun to become a colossus that stomped through the city of Osaka.

 

One of the room’s walls acted as a giant monitor.

The single monitor was split into dozens of smaller screens, each displaying different footage.

Suddenly, the division vanished and it displayed a single large image. The blue sky filled the wall, a beautiful view that would put anyone in a good mood.

Smiles appeared on the faces of the three people focused on that electronically-reproduced sky, but one of them was far from healthy.

“Look, everyone. Here they come.”

The first to rejoice out loud was dressed all in white. He wore bright and shining white enamel shoes, a white suit, and white pants. He even wore an oversized white bowtie. Only an entertainer would be caught dead wearing that ensemble.

But it wasn’t just his clothing. He wore a white plastic mask over his face. It was so realistic it must have been molded off the business smile of a hotel manager. He also wore a toy crown of white paper atop his perfectly-styled hair.

He called himself Milk Crown after that last item.

“Right on schedule. They did good work,” said a gloomy twig of a man in a monotone voice.

He was topless and only wore tight pants on his lower body. His head was entirely hairless, so he had no facial hair or even eyebrows.

As if to replace his missing body hair, the man had multicolored writing all over his body. His mummy-like figure was fully covered in textual tattoos that did not belong to any tribe out there. But was the writing on his teeth and tongue really tattoos? And what about the colored text on his eyeballs?

That strange man was known as Storyteller.

The third person spoke in a purring voice.

“Hmm. What a primitive vehicle.”

But was this person even human?

The body wearing that scientist’s lab coat was humanoid, but instead of a head on his shoulders, he had a sphere that almost looked like a hunk of agar-agar. The orb jiggled softly while glowing with an indescribable color.

So where had that voice come from? The answer was found on his chest. A hole in his lab coat revealed eyes, a nose, and a mouth swelling out from the surface of his chest.

That bizarre individual was known as Professor Beyond – hence the lab coat.

A visible change came over the footage of the sky those three monsters were viewing.

A silver light cut across the clouds and flew toward the camera. It was the most stereotypical flying saucer that ever flying saucered. That was the object they were referring to.

The saucer reflected the summer sun while a white object flew alongside it.

“This shall be a truly wonderful show, my emperor,” said Milk Crown.

He looked back behind them, as did Storyteller and Professor Beyond on either side of him.

A reddish-purple curtain hung from the tall ceiling there and someone had approached on the other side. They could not see their ruler, but they all bowed their heads respectfully.

 

After flying alongside the silver flying saucer, Flare changed course for the Ginza business district below.

She had been flying parallel to the ground, but now she stood herself vertically and let gravity pull her toward the center of Tokyo. The ground rushed up toward her and the buildings seemed to grow in size. Her white costume’s cape fluttered behind her. Since she was descending feet first, her short skirt was blown upwards, but that only revealed the white bodysuit she wore below it.

Not even she knew how she could fly and freely change direction midair. For her, it came as naturally as moving her arms or legs to run or swim. When she wanted to fly, her body would begin to float.

The sun glinted off the yellow flame she wore as her symbol on her chest and her feet alighted on the rooftop of a building towering above Ginza. She had tried to land as softly as a feather, but her large chest still jiggled from the impact.

She looked across the rooftop heliport and frowned.

“No one to greet me.”

The silver flying saucer with a diameter of about 6m manipulated gravity to land silently behind Flare. A polarization field was open around the craft, so no one in the surrounding buildings or on the ground would know it had landed.

A portion of the saucer’s smooth exterior spread to either side and three women in various costumes emerged.

“How strange. They aren’t answering our calls.”

“I can’t scan the interior of the building from out here.”

“This smells fishy, meow. The bad kind of fishy.”

Flare listened to her teammates and then shook her head.

“Real or fake, we received a specialized code from the Justice Circus HQ asking us to come in absolute secrecy.”

This 20-story building in the nicest part of Ginza was in fact the Justice Circus HQ.

From the outside, it looked no different from the other business buildings lining Ginza. The bronze plate labeled “Justice Circus” out front was the only thing identifying it.

The building had been donated by Hoshiyama Industry President Hoshiyama Suguru in the 60s since his wife was Comet Hawk, a founding member of the team. Hoshiyama was a skilled engineer and he still handled the maintenance and remodeling of the building.

Flare looked to her teammates and spoke with strength in her voice.

“We can’t just abandon them. Let’s split up and search.”

“You’re right.”

“Understood.”

“So it’s a game of tag and we’re ‘it’, huh?”

The four women exchanged a nod and recited their usual phrase in harmony.

“Thunderclaps away!”

 

“Is anyone there?”
Flare opened the unlocked door and spoke into a room nice enough to be a suite in a luxury hotel.

There was no response. She entered the room, walked across the high pile carpet, and checked the bedroom in the back. Deserted. She placed a hand on the expensive-looking bed and found the sheets to be pleasant on her palm.

“You get a pretty nice room if you’re with the Justice Circus.”

This was a private room on the 15^th floor. While the Thunderclaps all lived together, the Justice Circus members all had their own homes. The rooms at their HQ were a place for them to be alone between training or meetings, but their funder, Mr. Hoshiyama, had made sure even those rooms were exquisite.

“We’re superheroes too, but I guess being Japan’s top team has its perks. If only I’d wound up here instead of at Rei’s place.”

Suddenly, she heard a rumbling and the bedroom ceiling shook.

A white glowing projectile burst through the solid building and slammed into her back.

“Agh!”

Her face and chest were pressed into the bed. The massive bed instantly broke in two, the fancy down stuffing flew through the air, and springs sprang about. The impact caused the floor to crumble, so Flare fell to an identical room below.

“Ahhhhh!”

The white projectile did not slow down. Flare crashed through more and more ceilings and floors, destroying furniture as she dropped from room to room. This was only possible because Flare’s body was far sturdier than a normal human’s.

After dropping five floors, she finally came to a stop on the 10^th floor. The white costumed woman was embedded in the cracked floor.

The projectile in her back transformed. Its white armor split in two and spread out as wings.

A woman emerged from the wings and straddled Flare’s back. She wore a sky blue bodysuit and a small light purple suit that only came down to her solar plexus. The two wings grew from the back of the suit. There were no holes in the material, so the wings simply passed through it.

The woman’s right hand grabbed the dusty short hair embedded in the hard floor. A cloud of dust filled the air as Flare’s face was extracted.

“Why are you doing this?”

The woman gasped, her right hand stopping.

Flare spat out her assailant’s name along with some floor shards.

“Snow Wing.”

The Justice Circus member responded with a quick flap of her wings, rocketing her out of the hole she had created in the ceiling.

“Wait! What is happening here!?”

Flare flew up in pursuit of Snow Wing. They were now ascending through the building, the opposite of before. She accelerated toward the white wings shining up ahead.

“Snow Wing! Stop!”

She was answered by a hail of glowing arrows. Feathers left Snow Wing’s wings as she flew and those transformed into energy arrows that rapidly dropped toward Flare.

Flare had seen this weapon several times on TV. Snow Wing was not just a superhero. She was also Ozora Miki, a rookie announcer for Peace TV, so most of her heroics had been shown live on TV. Humans and robots had their nerves or circuits paralyzed when they were hit by those glowing arrows.

“Fine, then. I’ll destroy your HQ.”

Flare twisted her body to shift her flight path. She dodged the arrows and flew into the next room over. She used only her speed and body to break a new hole in the ceiling like a wrecking ball.

She used both fists to break through the tiled floor of a bathroom, shattered the bathtub, and burst the water pipes as she rocketed upwards. Water erupted from the broken pipes, sending a waterfall down into the building.

 

“My, my. Someone is having the time of their life up there.”

Rindou Rei, aka Star Thunder, the leader of the Thunderclaps, tilted her head behind her red eye mask when she heard the rumbling from overhead.

She was currently searching the training pool on the 5^th floor of the Justice Circus HQ.

The water reflected the mature body of a 27-year-old woman. Her costume was shaped much like a red one-piece swimsuit and it had a transparent section between her breasts and down past her navel. It had a high leg cut situated above her hipbones, making it revealing enough to look about right for a private pool. A blue lightning bolt ran along the red costume, as if to accentuate her alluring curves.

But the sexy reflection grew distorted.

Silver lightning raced across the pool’s surface. It kicked up waves high enough to reach the ceiling and charged straight toward Star Thunder who stood motionless on the poolside.

Just before the lightning reached the other side of the pool and crashed into Star Thunder, a bluish-white orb of light surrounded her.

“Hyahhh!”

The lightning screamed, flew through the air, and crashed into the opposite poolside. A woman in a silver bodysuit with black lightning bolts rubbed her hip but swiftly got back on her feet.

“Wh-what just happened?”

“You were deflected by an electric barrier. You are familiar with my power, aren’t you?” answered Star Thunder, her large chest full of pride. “Now, Silver Bullet. You took over as the Justice Circus’s leader after Captain Sky retired, so why would you be attacking me inside your own headquarters?”
Silver bullet kept her mouth tightly shut and faced her opponent through the yellow goggles hiding her eyes.

Two women with lightning bolt symbols glared at each other across the pool.

One was Star Thunder, whose costume was red with blue lightning bolts. She was 27 and led the relatively new Thunderclaps.

The other was Silver Bullet, whose costume was silver with black lightning bolts. She was 25 and led Japan’s oldest hero team.

They had so much in common as their gazes clashed above the water with such intensity that a telepath would have seen blinding sparks. They continued glaring while a confident smile appeared on Star Thunder’s lips.

“This has happened a few times in the Justice Circus’s history. What is it this time? Were you brainwashed? Or are you a copy android?”

No response. Instead, Silver Bullet once more transformed into silver lightning and raced forward with blinding speed. Moving at supersonic speeds was Silver Bullet’s Offbeat power.

In response, Star Thunder’s hands emitted bluish-white lightning. She was producing powerful electricity with her own body. The lightning bolt symbol may have actually been more appropriate for Star Thunder.

The bluish-white electricity covered the pool’s surface. Because she had predicted Silver Bullet would run across it again.

But the silver lightning was not on the water. Instead of running up to Star Thunder, Silver Bullet had circled behind her. She had used her superspeed to run up the wall and across the pool’s ceiling.

Star Thunder didn’t even have time to realize her prediction had been wrong. The superspeed karate chop to the back of her head instantly knocked her out.

Her curvy body sank into the pool.

 

“No way!”

A mechanically-altered adult woman’s voice emerged from an emerald green suit of high-tech armor. Rose Device’s artificial camera eyes saw something she never should have seen in the Justice Circus HQ.

She had made her way to the workshop in the second basement. The room was used to investigate the machines built by immoral mad scientists that surpassed known science. The room was lined with complex machinery and a terminal for Total Brain, the AI that managed the HQ building.

Several black spheres and cylinders of various sizes were lying in a back corner of that mechanical labyrinth. Those pieces of black armor were crammed full of delicate components. A normal person would probably think they were just more of the same machinery strewn about the workshop.

But for Rose Device, this was an unimaginably gruesome scene. Any hero would visit the scenes of disasters and crimes, but she had never seen anything so cruel.

Her voice trembled as she called the name of the machine that had been scattered in pieces that looked more like a modern art exhibit.

“Black Might-san!”

Rose Device ran toward the dismantled body of the Justice Circus’s intelligent and sentient robot. On the way, a portion of the armor reproducing the proportions of an attractive adult woman came apart. The metal face made of sturdy but elegant curves separated into fine pieces of metal that fused with the torso armor.

A child’s face appeared from behind the shiny green mask. Kitahara Shizuko, the person inside the high-tech armor, had a young face even for a 17 year old.

Generally, fellow heroes did not reveal their secret identity to each other unless they had a special relationship. Carelessly revealing your face like this was out of the question. But as a skilled engineer and a cyborg, Shizuko had looked up to and felt an affinity with a robot like Black Might. She completely lost her cool seeing him in pieces like this.

But even in her panic, she noticed that Black Might’s artificial brain was hooked up to Total Brain’s terminal. She quickly transformed her armor’s finger and connected herself to the terminal as well.

It took her less than a second to contact Black Might’s brain.

<Black Might-san. Please answer me. This is Rose Device of the Thunderclaps. Are you conscious?>

<Thank you. I still exist.>

They were not speaking. This was an exchange of electrons. It was a trick only possible for Shizuko since her nervous system had been replaced with nanomachines.

<What is happening in the HQ building?>

<Unfortunately, I do not know. The power suddenly shut off during my regular maintenance and I lost my ability to perceive the outside world.>

<But this building’s security was supposed to be perf- kyah!>

Discolored paper burst from the monitor in front of Shizuko. This was not a hologram. It was very real. The strip of old paper passed through the machine, wrapped around Rose Device, and bound her arms.

Shizuko activated all the armor’s sensors to instantly analyze the paper binding her. The answer was quite simple: the paper had been made centuries ago, but it was no more than ordinary paper. The writing on it was only written in old ink.

Scientifically, the long strip of paper should not have had any power, yet she could not tear it even with her armor amplifying her arm strength several dozen times over. She was trapped here.

“This is magic.”

Shizuko was a child of science, so magic was her greatest weakness. But that also told her who this had to be. She only knew of one person who used paper scrolls imbued with magic.

“Madam Scroll, I know this must be you.”

Her armor’s sensors told her a woman had appeared behind her, where no one had been a second before. The nanomachines linked Shizuko’s brain to her armor, so she could see the image of the alluring woman in her thirties. She wore a revealing wine-red dress that would have looked right at home at a Hollywood party.

Madam Scroll, Sorceress of the Justice Circus, spoke in a calm voice, like she was chiding a student.

“I can’t believe Rose Device was such an adorable girl. Now, be a good girl and stay put.”

 

“Meow. They get some good food here.”

A large animal was curled up in front of a fridge in the HQ building’s dining hall, chowing down on the chicken sauté she had found inside. She was covered in fur with yellow and black markings scattered across it. Her tail was long and skinny. She had a long mane and triangular ears on her head.

But she was built like a human, not a four-legged animal.

She was the 17-year-old beast girl of the Thunderclaps. Her real name was Yanagi Isabella Mika. Her codename was Ocelot, a South American wild cat similar to a small leopard.

“Does the Justice Circus have their own chef? Rei-chan is rich, so she should hire us a chef too. Meow?”
Ocelot’s ears turned every which way and her nose sniffed at the air. She searched the dining hall with her superhuman sense of hearing and smell as well as her spirit sense that ordinary humans lacked altogether.

“This is weird. Something’s approaching. Meowww!”

Ocelot vanished from the dining hall.

If anyone had been there to see it happen, they wouldn’t have been able to avoid crying out in surprise.

Ocelot had fallen into her own shadow. Only her shadow remained, but that too soon vanished.

 

Intermission 1

 

“It is a pleasure to meet you, President Yamashita. Here is my business card.”
An elderly man in a gray suit in bad need of cleaning held out his card. Narrow, drooping eyes smiled politely behind the old round glasses propped up on his pug nose. The short mustache below his nose would fill people with a sense of ennui.

“Nanjou Shuhei? Never heard of you.”

The middle-aged company president seated behind a large desk was wearing a pricey brand-name suit. But unfortunately, he did not show any of the class needed to match the suit. He gave off an aura that told everyone nearby he did not run an honest business.

The employees who surrounded Nanjou Shuhei in the president’s office might as well have been carrying flags labeled “yakuza”.

“Now, Nanjou-san. This says you are a ‘problem solver’. What does that mean?”

Nanjou continued smiling as the men around him assessed him.

“To put it simply, I do whatever I’m hired to do. If someone has a problem they don’t want going public, they come to me and I discreetly take care of it for them.”

“Oh? And what brings you here, problem solver?”

“I was hired to dispose of a certain rape video that the Yamashita Co. filmed in order to blackmail my client.”

A violent smile appeared on President Yamashita’s lips.

“What a curious thing to say. So did you come here with the money that woman owes us?”

“No.”

Shuhei stomped his right foot. Black smoke erupted explosively from the sole of his shoe, plunging the president’s office into darkness. The employees shouted in anger and fear, their voices joined by the sounds of struck flesh and breaking bones.

And precisely 15 seconds later…

“Sorry about that, president.”

With that apologetic voice, some kind of chemical reaction turned the black smoke perfectly clear.

When President Yamashita’s vision cleared, he saw one of his men lying on his desk, bloody and with his front teeth knocked out. But that wasn’t all. The rest of the employees were unconscious and strewn about the room.

Shuhei’s narrow eyes were still smiling behind the round lenses.

“I am not the type to show criminals any mercy.”

“Who the hell are you!? Did another of the families send you!?”

“No, no. Like it says on my card, I am no more than a problem solver. Now, about that video.”

“Don’t think you can get away with this.”

Those words may have been a signal because the wall to Shuhei’s right crumbled and a large form entered the office. The hulking man wore only pants. He was well over 2.5 meters tall, all of his visible skin was a dark gray, and that skin looked as thick as a rhino’s.

“Not even a machinegun can pierce his skin. He’ll turn you to mincemeat with the first blow.”

Before President Yamashita had even finished speaking, two hands appeared behind the large man and grabbed his thick hips. The hands made swift movements, causing a very unpleasant sound followed by the large man’s deafening scream. The man wailed and fell back onto his butt, the floor thundering below him.

The person standing behind the colossal man came into Shuhei and President Yamashita’s view. The gray-haired man was the polar opposite of Shuhei with his tidy T-shirt and jeans.

“Working as a puny gang’s bodyguard? Offbeats have really lowered their standards these days.”

“Wh-what did you do?”

“I dislocated his hip. When an Offbeat has thick skin but they’re still built like an ordinary human on the inside, joint locks are the way to go. I have no business with you. I happened to spot an old friend, chased after him, and found he was in a bind, so I decided to help out. Hi, Shuhei.”

The smile finally vanished behind Shuhei’s lenses. The arms that had defeated a group of yakuza in mere seconds were now visibly tensed. Yamashita was so overpowered by the intensity radiated by the man that he forgot all about his bluff and backed away.

“Kengo. How did you know where I was?”

“Oh, I ran across a girl with the same power as you and I tracked you down by investigating her.”

Kengo’s gentle smile was met by an even more intense look from Shuhei.

“And what did you want?”
“I want your help. This involves your daughter. The Justice Circus members have been acting weird lately, so I bugged their HQ and made a horrific discovery.”

“You’re worse than I am. To be clear, my services don’t come cheap.”

Yamashita did not know he was witnessing a historic moment. This was Captain Sky and Mister Shadow’s first meeting in more than thirty years.

He also did not know that the pair would go on to easily obliterate his gang.