Thunderclaps: Chapter 2 - Sins of the Sister

“To preserve a spirit of fair play, the International Swimming Federation will henceforth ban participation in official events by people who can breathe underwater.”

(1961, from an official proclamation regarding the banning of professional swimmer Lolly Lemar)

Shortly afterwards, Lolly Lemar announced she would be working as Aqua Angel, the world’s first female superhero

A bizarre and horrific scene was playing out in the Ikebukuro West Gate Park in front of the Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre.

Several cars had crashed into buildings or flipped over in the park and a crowd created a chorus of screams while fleeing. Like a school of fish fleeing hungry sharks, the people ran every which way, bumped into each other, tripped over those who had already fallen, and fell themselves.

The cause of the panic was also human in shape. A group of gentlemen wore old-fashioned tuxedos and morning coats with bowties.

Their faces revealed a wood grain pattern, glass eyes were embedded in that surface, and their painted-on mouths showed toothy grins.

These were clearly wooden puppets.

They must have had some kind of machinery within because they turned their empty smiles around and swung their arms down on the backs of the people who had failed to escape in time. The wooden fingers extending from their tuxedo sleeves glittered with sinister metal claws.

Police ran from a nearby police station and drew their handguns, but they could not fire in the middle of such a panic. They were instead swallowed up by the panicking crowd.

The knife claws slashed a young man’s flesh and blood sprayed. The puppet with blood splattered across his smile turned its glass eyes toward a new target: a crying kindergarten-aged boy who had gotten separated from his mother. One claw on the puppet’s left hand pierced the young boy’s short collar and easily lifted the small body with stiff, awkward movements.

The puppet readied its right hand’s claws in front of the small child dangling in front of its bloody wooden face.

When the young woman finally found her child within the chaos, she screamed in terror while others shoved her out of their way.

“Help! Someone please save my Masaya! Please!”

No one on the ground there responded to her desperate plea.

The response came from the sky.

A pure white boot dropped on the head of the puppet holding the boy.

Dry snapping sounds replaced a scream as the puppet’s head and torso were splintered. A white-costumed arm caught the boy while floating in midair.

The gentleman puppets stopped moving, inhumanly rotated their heads, and focused their eyes on the fluttering white cape.

The plaza was filled with the hopeful cries of the mother and of the other people.

“Flare!”

“It’s Flare of the Thunderclaps!”

“Flare is here!”

Hyuuga Kirara, aka Flare, handed the child back to his tearful mother and called out in a loud voice.

“Show yourself, Grand Guignol!”

At the same time, her white cape and skirt fluttered and she flew above the people’s heads like a speeding bullet.

Not even Flare understood how it was she could fly. She simply tried to fly and she moved through the air as easily as using any of her muscles. In the same way, it wore her out to fly for long periods of time or to raise her speed too far. Rei had speculated that she was subconsciously using her willpower to control gravity or inertia.

After covering more than 20m in the blink of an eye, she slammed her right fist into the head of a puppet stepping on an office lady. The wooden head was knocked off and bounced along the pavement.

“I know you’re around here somewhere.”

She flew again and threw a kick that snapped the spine of a puppet grabbing at a police officer. Its torso broke in two, but no machinery or contraption could be seen within. These killer puppets were not robots and they were not being remotely controlled. They truly were simple wooden puppets, but that did not surprise Flare since she had already known.

“Face me instead of the innocent people!”

She burned with anger and her call was answered by the puppets. They did not seem to care she had destroyed their companions, but they did all rush toward the superhero with awkward movements. Their deadly claws extended forward to pierce her white costume.

She broke all those wooden arms at once with a single wave of her arm. The many arms audibly snapped and rolled along the asphalt. Her hands flashed this way and that with blinding speed to crush one puppet after another. Splinters scattered, heads flew, torsos split, and legs tore off.

Once every last one was destroyed, she called her enemy’s name once more.

“Show yourself, Grand Guignol!”

A cream-colored Peugeot was crashed into the metropolitan theatre’s front door. Its door flew open and a bloody woman rolled out onto the pavement.

It was obvious at a glance just how badly she had been treated. Her legs would normally have been lithe and attractive, but they were now bent at an unnatural angle at the thighs. Nevertheless, she was still conscious. Her bloody and tearful eyes looked up at Flare and she moved her mouth to communicate something, but only an intermittent groan escaped her throat.

Then a sparkling black leather shoe stuck out from the car and stepped down on her chest.

“Stop, Grand Guignol! Get away from her!”

Another man in a tuxedo leisurely exited the French car.

His head was as wooden as the others. His face was that of the stereotypical mustache-twirling villain from a cartoon, his wooden eyebrows clacked up and down, and his wooden lips opened and shut.

But the rest of him had the smooth and elegant composure of a human. This was a flesh-and-blood human with his entire head covered by a wooden mask.

Flare just about flew toward the strange man, but the cane in Grand Guignol’s hand had an army knife at the end which was pressed against the throat of the woman at his feet.

“I do so hope we can have some fun today, Miss Flare. Thanks to you capturing me and throwing me in the Ogasawara Pit, it has been a year and half since my last performance of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.”

“Let that woman go. I’m the one you want, right?”

He answered her angry words with a flourish of his bloody left hand.

“You are of course my greatest audience member. If you can defeat my theatre’s newest member, I will spare this woman’s life. Now, allow me to introduce you to the new star of Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, Monsieur Gilles!”

The Peugeot floated up from the road.

Two thick wooden arms had burst from underground to easily lift it.

The arms were attached to the shoulders of a tuxedo-wearing puppet more than 5m tall that erupted from the pavement. The large wooden face had glass eyes and a painted mouth like the others, but this one had a broom-like blue beard added around the mouth.

Flare grimaced.

“Is that supposed to be Bluebeard Gilles de Rais?”

Gilles de Rais was a famous French hero who had served as Joan of Arc’s second in command, but after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, he sank to devil worship and slaughtered countless children. Even now, his story continued to inspire fear under the nickname of Bluebeard.

“I see you have been properly educated. Do it, Monsieur Gilles.”

The giant puppet creaked like a straining tree as it threw the Peugeot.

The cream-colored car tore through the air as it flew straight toward Flare. The feminine body in that pure white miniskirt looked so powerless compared to that giant projectile.

But Flare held her head high, spread her arms, and did not move a step. If she dodged this, the car would instead harm the people watching on behind her.

It hit her!

The bumper crashed into her chest, causing her breasts to bounce, but that was all. She swiftly moved her arms below the tires and firmly caught the vehicle.

Her feet slid a bit back on the asphalt, but she held her ground.

Of course, no matter how powerful her arms, a head-on collision from such a large mass should have launched her backwards with its kinetic energy. That did not happen because she had flown forward at the exact moment of impact to cancel out the kinetic energy.

Just as she caught the Peugeot, Monsieur Gilles dashed forward with unimaginable speed for its size.

Thick arms rushed in at her as she lowered the Peugeot to the road. What appeared from its hands was truly befitting of a puppet inheriting the name of an infamous villain.

On the right hand, blades as long as Japanese katanas extended from the fingers.

On the left hand, a rapidly-rotating chainsaw burst out.

The blades tore into Flare’s right shoulder and the chainsaw into her right side. Her white costume was shredded and scraps of white cloth fluttered through the air.

But that was all. The five blades only pushed in at the soft and resilient skin of a young woman, but they could not pierce it. The chainsaw teeth got caught on her skin and the chain ground to a halt. They could not slice her flesh or even cut her skin.

“Did you forget? My body can repel artillery shells and not even lasers can cut it. So…”

She swiftly grabbed Monsieur Gilles’s arms with her hands and easily tore them from the puppet’s shoulders. Before the two thick arms could fall to the pavement, she jumped with cape fluttering. The tip of her boot smashed through Gilles’s face, which was thrice the size of an ordinary human’s.

“Your silly puppets are useless against me, as is your Offbeat power to break off pieces of your mind and possess said wooden puppets. Give up and release that woman.”

“Useless? No, not useless. That gave me the time I needed to focus my mind.”

Flare did not recognize this new voice, nor could she identify from where it came.

“What!?”

She looked around and the entire scene changed before her eyes. The buildings and road vanished and the blue summer sky disappeared. She was no longer in Ikebukuro. Nor was she in Tokyo or even Japan. This was nowhere in the world.

Everything above and below her was colored an unnatural red and it all twisted and swirled.

The entire space looked like paint dripped into oil and it was crawling with people who had not been around before.

Every last one of them was nude.

The naked men and women were sharing carnal embraces in every pose imaginable. They kissed, sucked at each other’s tongues, greedily went after each other’s bodies, brought genitals together, and produced an obscene chorus of countless moans and wet rubbing sounds.

She thought it had to be some form of hallucination, but the raw scent of sex and the oppressive heat seemed all too real.

“Now I know Grand Guignol couldn’t do this.”

“Indeed he cannot.”

A figure much like shimmering heat rose from the men and women who continued moving their hips.

This man alone was clothed in gaudy primary colors that gave him the look of a stage magician. He bowed deep.

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Flare. My stage name is Daydreamer. Grand Guignol and I met in Ogasawara and became fast friends.”

“Your codename was Cold War, wasn’t it?”

Rindou Rei, aka Star Thunder, spoke calmly to a masked man in front of Seybu Department Store’s book center.

The man’s entire face was covered by a cloth mask bearing a drawing of a snowflake. His eyes, the only thing left exposed by the mask, were a beautiful cobalt blue. The blue costume covering his powerful body showed off every contour of his muscles and was also covered in snowflakes.

The wall of the book center behind him was covered by thick ice.

“I read your file. Your real name is Helmut Ulrich. You belonged to a special forces unit in the East German military, but after the German reunification, you began working as a terrorist for hire. You were one of the east’s human weapons that escaped into the world after the collapse of the old Communist Bloc.”

“Then you must be familiar with my power as well.” An icicle of a voice left Cold War’s snowflake mask. “I admire your initiative in offering yourself up as eye candy with that revealing costume, but I fear you will be chilly once things get cold.”

The German man thrust his arms forward and ice began to cover Star Thunder’s sexy body. He soon had a beautiful ice statue before his eyes.

He crossed his arms and laughed darkly.

“Too easy. Is that all the Thunderclaps leader can do? Hm!?”

Within the ice, a change came over the color of Star Thunder’s exposed skin and costume. They grew red hot, much like nichrome wire. His blue eyes opened wide and he held his arms out again, but the ice covering her melted too quickly.

Steam rose from her wet black hair as she spoke.

“My body and costume will heat up when I pass a certain level of current through them. Freezing me is simply not possible, so I suggest surrendering now.”

“This is how I make a living, so I’d be out of work if I gave up so easily.”

“That’s too bad.”

Now Star Thunder raised her right hand. Bluish-white lightning flew from her finger tips and soared toward him like a serpent attacking its prey.

But the electricity was blocked by a black metal wall that suddenly rose in front of him. That wall took the form of an absurdly broad human.

“Oh, and who are you?”

A grin formed on a face that looked all the world like it was a cast metal sculpture.

“Surely Cold War’s file mentioned he has a partner.”

“Let’s see. Your real name is Johann Gehlenbaum, isn’t it? And your codename is…”

“I am Iron Curtain, the German metal man. I am living metal, so your lightning has no effect on me.”

Star Thunder tilted her masked head.

“Oh, dear. That may be a problem.”

“Ocelot is on the scene, meow!”

Yanagi Isabella Mika, aka Ocelot, ran to the area in front of Sunshine 60, the tallest building in Ikebukuro, and loudly named herself.

The shopping mall bordering the road had been reduced to rubble.

“Meow? Hey, you, weirdo. Did you do that?”

A muscular and odd-looking man stood tall atop the rubble with arms crossed.

He only wore two things.

The first was a pair of swim goggles on his face. For some reason, the glass portion was reflective like sunglasses. The second was a shiny gold speedo that left very little to the imagination.

Ocelot tilted her head, twitched her ears, and ignored the fact that she was technically nude.

“Why aren’t you wearing anything? Are you an exhibitionist?”

The gold speedo man made a bold announcement with his arms still crossed.

“My name is Tidepool. Bring it on, little kitty.”

Ocelot preferred not to think too much, so she decided this man was the same as a character in a fighting game striking a challenging pose. His composure must have rubbed her the wrong way.

“You’ll regret underestimating me!”

She extended the bestial claws from her hands and kicked off the pavement. She gained inhuman speed to leap the several meters to Tidepool in a single bound.

Her right hand’s claws stabbed into his thick chest.

“Meow!?”

Her right arm sank into his chest up to the elbow. It felt like plunging her arm into a large piece of gelatin.

“You fool. It seems you know nothing at all about me.”

He had been imprisoned in the Ogasawara Pit a year and three months ago, which was before Ocelot arrived in Japan. The computer in Rei’s home – where Ocelot was staying – had data on many Offbeat criminals, but she had not reviewed that information.

The rubble shook below their feet.

“Meow!”

Water erupted up from below and she saw his body liquefy and join that water. She quickly tried to escape the water, but her right arm would not budge.

“Meowwwwwwwwwwww!!”

A pillar of water rose skyward. It carried her up to the same height as Sunshine 60’s sixty-story roof. When she looked down, the cars parked on the curb looked like toys.

The peak of the water pillar swelled out and once more formed the upper body of Tidepool, swim goggles and all.

“Does a catgirl like you always land on your feet? Not that you can survive a fall from this height regardless.”

She flailed her free left arm, her legs, and her tail.

“S-stop! Are you trying to kill me!?”

“That is the general idea, yes.”

Water erupted perpendicular from the pillar and pushed on her chest with powerful pressure.

She left the pillar and spiraled through the air. And she began falling toward the asphalt far below.

A large explosion erupted on the sixth floor of an extremely conspicuous and super-cheap camera store outside of Ikebukuro Station’s west gate.

The blown-up concrete rubble, glass shards, and office equipment from the store rained down toward the many fleeing pedestrians below.

A young mother could not escape in time and clutched her young daughter to her chest in the hopes of at least saving the small child. An old man with a cane was knocked to the ground on his stomach. A high school girl tripped over him and fell. When she looked back with despair in her eyes, she only saw a giant chunk of concrete falling right toward her.

That girl in a white sailor uniform raised the scream that should have been the last thing she ever said.

But instead of the death she had expected, her eyes reflected a sparkling green light.

The concrete, the glass, and the computers froze in midair.

The high school girl, the old man, and the small child peeking out from her mother’s body all spoke the name of the superhero who had saved them.

“Rose Device!”

Emerald green armor floated in the air between the people on the sidewalk and the falling rubble.

The armor provided the beautiful silhouette of a grown woman. The entire body was colored a lustrous metallic green, save for the large chest where a rose decoration glittered with a ruby light.

Inside the armor, Kitahara Shizuko, aka Rose Device, checked the rear monitor directly linked to her brain to confirm no one remained below. She then used her mind to eliminate the spatial stasis field she had opened. The armor was linked to her nanomodule nervous system, so she could control it as easily as moving her arms and legs. It responded to her thoughts by switching off the field generator embedded in its chest.

Her audio monitor detected the voice of the rescued high school girl joining the sound of the rubble falling to the pavement.

“Thank you, Miss Rose!”

When she had made her hero debut as a fourth member of the Thunderclaps half a year ago, they had announced to the media that Rose Device was not a robot and there was someone inside. She of course had the machine alter her voice, so the general public used the armor’s appearance to assume the person inside was a curvy woman in her late twenties.

The armor containing her body was something her late father had started developing and she had completed in his stead. She had not had any actual plans for using the armor. She had simply wanted to complete her father’s research. In the end, she had used it to escape from her uncle.

Until Rei had asked her if she wanted to join the Thunderclaps, it had never occurred to her she could use her body and that armor to become a superhero.

The armor had originally had a more utilitarian design, but she had given it its current appearance after Rei said she wanted it to look more heroic.

The rose on the chest was a nod to an anime heroine she had seen on TV. That gallant girl had worn a rose on her chest and wielded a sword to fight for what she believed in. That had left a deep impression on Shizuko, so she had added the rose even though it had no practical purpose.

Rose Device fired jets from the bottom of her feet and ascended toward the large hole in the building wall. She used the armor’s sensors to investigate the damage and they told her brain there was no sign of explosives.

“Was it some kind of energy then? Eh!?”

A ball of light burst from the building and touched her chest.

Boom!

The ball of light swelled out all at once and a massive amount of energy scattered in all directions. She took a direct hit and was blasted diagonally over to the six-lane road in front of Ikebukuro Station’s east gate where she crashed into the large TV on the opposite building’s wall. The shock absorption system protected Shizuko’s physical body, but the armor sent more and more damage reports to her brain. That was far too much information for a human to process, but her nanomodule brain accurately sorted through it. She only became consciously aware of the most important info.

“No affect to my movement. And based on the attack pattern…”

Data on many different Offbeat criminals raced across the surface of her conscious mind until a single image stopped there.

It was a man with an unnaturally large upper body, especially the breadth of his shoulders. He had clearly received physical modifications. As if to prove that, several metal rods pierced his skin to jut out from his shoulders and shoulder blades.

“Ground Zero. An Ogasawara escapee.”

That very same man appeared from the hole in the building. His thick chest was covered by a black running shirt bearing the Japanese character for explosion and his lower body was covered by jungle camo pants.

In a slight change from her data, his eyes were mechanical now. He must have received a further modification surgery after breaking out of prison.

Ground Zero parted his wide and thick lips to produce scratchy growl of a voice.

“The Thunderclaps’ armor woman, huh? I heard rumors of you while behind bars.”

“My name is Rose Device.”

After politely naming herself, she wrinkled her brow in regret.

(I’m supposed to be strong with criminals like Kirara-san and Bell-san are. They’re going to make fun of me on TV again.)

“They say you’re a mighty fine thing to look at below those tin clothes, but I think it’s high time someone stripped you to find out. And then I’ll show you a good time with my thick stick of dynamite.”

(H-he’s so crude!)

Rose Device screamed inside her armor.

(I really don’t want to deal with such a crude man. Oh, why didn’t I install an air purifier in the armor? Then I wouldn’t have to breathe the same air as someone like him.)

“But first I’ll show you why they call me Ground Zero.”

He shook his enlarged shoulders and the metal rods growing from his shoulders and back grew even longer. Orbs of light blossomed from the ends.

“Eat this!”

The orbs all left the rods and flew through the air like fireflies. That alone would have been a beautiful sight, but these glowing orbs carried blatant hostility as they flew rapidly toward her.

She immediately flipped her emerald green body around, and one of them reached the spot her right shoulder had just been.

Boom!

More of the large broken TV was torn away.

More and more glowing orbs attacked her.

Boom! Boom boom boom!!

She dodged a third of them. They touched the road and cars and wreaked unbelievable havoc on it all. Fortunately, all the people had already fled, so no one got hurt.

While flying above the road, Rose Device rapidly-fired nonlethal rubber bullets from the railguns installed in her arms. She shot and ruptured another third of the orbs.

The remaining third of the energy weapons unleashed their fury upon her armor. The slight malfunctions and damage to the armor deluged into her brain.

She lost attitude control midflight and crashed headfirst into a bronze statue in the road’s median. The statue of a man and a woman moving in strange ways was knocked from its pedestal and rolled along the road.

When she received a report saying the attitude control system required three minutes to self-repair, her face stiffened within the armor. She could not fly until that was complete.

(He’s sure to hit me if I can’t complete the calculations in time.)

Ground Zero boomed with laughter.

“How about that? My fireworks pack a punch, don’t they? But that was just a bit of fun. It’s time to take this seriously.”

More glowing orbs appeared from the rods extending from that human bomb. These were far larger than before.

The nanomodules’ predictive calculations said a solid hit from one of those would do critical damage to the armor and her body within.

At the same time, she completed the calculations underway in a different part of her brain.

“Take this!”

The powerful orbs of light left his body. However…

“What!?”

They stopped moving after only a few centimeters. Shocked, he stopped his moving arm with a grim and pale look on his face. Those would explode even if he was the one to touch them. And those would not vanish until they had exploded.

“What the blazes is this? What did you do!?”

“I surrounded you in my spatial stasis field.”

The spatial stasis field was another of her father’s partially-completed inventions she had finished after his death. The system manipulated physics in a special way that artificially solidified space itself. The specifics of what it did were too complex to express with words. The phenomenon could only be expressed using the calculations of her nanomodules, so she was probably the only person in the entire world who could comprehend it.

Locking the spatial stasis field emitter onto Ground Zero’s surroundings had required buying time by letting him attack.

“Please do not move. I do not want to hurt you.”

“You fucking bitch! You think I’m doing what some woman tells me to do!?”

“Ah, wait.”

He snapped and charged right into the spatial stasis field himself. His own orbs of light unleashed all their energy within the small space enclosed within.

Ocelot rapidly recited a spell while falling alongside Sunshine 60. The black spots on her back fur moved and large bird wings spread from there.

She called the name of the condor spirit that had appeared from her back.

“Fly, Elizabeth!”

The condor’s legs grabbed her shoulders and it flapped powerful wings to ascend.

Tidepool gave her a curious look from atop the pillar of water.

“I see. So you’re a magic Offbeat like me.”

Ocelot spread her arms toward him.

“Salma, Michaela, get him!”

A green-glowing snake spirit burst from the leopard pattern on the back of her right hand. Instead of the small size that had brought Rei to anal orgasm twice, it was now large enough to swallow a cow whole.

A puma burst from her left hand.

“You fool. I am water itself, so animal fangs mean nothing.”

The pillar of water ignored the laws of physics by bending. Tidepool sent himself crashing down toward the snake, the puma, the condor, and Ocelot.

“Meowwww, bubble, bubble, bubble…”

The water fell with Ocelot contained within and created a giant dome of water on the road in front of Sunshine 60. The condor, snake, and puma had disappeared after being swallowed by the water. They had been returned to the spirit realm they called home.

While Ocelot struggled in the water prison, several large bubbles appeared in front of her eyes.

“!?”

They burst and several sharks appeared from within. They bared their fangs for her to see and began swimming playfully around her.

She flailed her arms and legs while hearing a perfectly clear human voice reaching her through the water.

“I am known as Tidepool because I can summon ferocious oceanic beasts within my body’s water. Your land magic cannot touch me, so resign yourself to being shark bait.”

“Thanks for the tip, but nah.”

When Ocelot spoke just as clearly, the water shook in surprise.

“How can you speak underwater too?”

“Idiot. The South American Spirit Elder Council chose me as a spirit wielder because I’m the best they’d seen in 300 years.”

“So what?”

The sharks stopped circling her and instead opened their mouths wide and rushed toward her.

“Come forth, spirits of the Amazon!”

All of the spots on her body moved at once. Dark muddy water erupted from her chest, back, stomach, butt, arms, legs, and tail and it enveloped the attacking sharks.

The color red was already seeping from the muddy water. That was blood. And the shark blood was soon followed by floating chunks of shark skin and flesh.

The water wailed at the change within itself.

“Piranhas!?”

What had looked like muddy water was actually a swarm of countless piranhas. Those carnivorous fish of the Amazon had swarmed the giant sharks and stripped the flesh from their bones in no time. Even their bones were smashed and consumed in a matter of seconds.

“Impossible. You can’t just eat the sharks I summoned. Gwah, gaaaahhhh!”

Cries of pain shook the piranha-filled water.

“Found you, meow!”

Ocelot hid within the spiral of black piranhas to move through the water, grabbed something with her right hand, and roared at it.

“You can’t fool the world’s best spirit wielder. This is your true form, meow!”

Her right hand’s fingers held a tiny doll made of coral.

“You aren’t a human who can transform into water. You were only tricking people into thinking the water was your body. You were actually just a soul sealed inside this cursed doll. Now, it’s time you behaved yourself.”

She released the doll just in time for a piranha to swallow it and vanish back into the spots on her hand.

The magical surface tension vanished from the giant dome of water, so it burst. Water splashed across the road and Ocelot stood cockily at the center of it all while her furry body dripped with water.

“I’ll release you once we’re back at the prison, meow.”

“Ahn, nh, you mustn’t. N-not – ahh – out in public!”

Iron Curtain held Star Thunder from behind and sank his iron fingers deep into her half-exposed breasts.

Those living metal hands were strong enough to tear asphalt from the road, punch down streetlights, and easily throw a bus, but they demonstrated unbelievable delicacy as they distorted the shape of those soft mounds and teased the nipples through the costume.

“Nh, nhh, stop…please stop this. Ahh.”

“Stop? I’ve never felt such gropable tits. I never want to stop. C’mon, boss, this is our chance to have our way with a superhero’s body.”

Her curvy body twisted in protest within his arms.

“N-no. Nhh, if you both go at it at once, ahh, I’ll…I’ll…”

“Shut up. Send even a volt of electricity boss’s way and I’ll crush your heart in my fist. So behave yourself.”

“O-okay.”

A sticky grin came over the blue eyes seen through Cold War’s mask. His muscular but smoothly waxed hands reached toward the high-leg crotch of her costume.

“My caress is a cold one, but once I tease a woman while keeping her love juices just short of freezing, she moans like crazy and can’t get enough of it.”

His fingers pushed into her vulva through her costume.

“Nhh!”

Faint crackles of electricity ran between the three of them. Except it came from the men and moved toward Star Thunder.

Iron Curtain and Cold War’s fingers came to a stop.

“Th-the hell? I can’t move!”

“What did you do to us!?”

The two human weapons grew as motionless as sculptures.

An affectionate smile appeared on Star Thunder’s flushed face.

“A woman’s got to have her secrets.”

(This is my ace in the hole. I can’t let anyone know I can absorb other people’s nerve impulses.)

Star Thunder’s superpower was more than producing electricity. She could also freely control the flow of electricity around her. Humans could move their bodies as they liked because the slight electric current produced by their brain passed through their nerves and stimulated the target muscle, causing it to contract. When in direct physical contact with someone else, she could absorb those nerve impulses before they arrived at the muscles. That made it physically impossible for them to move.

“I know plenty of electric Offbeats, but I’ve never heard of one who can stop people without shocking them!”

“Your praise honors me, Mr. Cold War.”

“You bitch. You let us catch you and grope you so you could do this to us, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did. Now, let’s end this, shall we?”

She placed her right hand on Cold War’s head and her left on Iron Curtain’s head.

She was only touching them, but they lost consciousness in a matter of seconds.

The red blood cells carrying oxygen to the body’s cells contained a lot of iron, so they could be guided with electricity. By reducing the number of red blood cells reaching their brains, she deprived their brains of oxygen.

“This will knock you out for a while, but you can rest easy because it has no lasting effects.”

“Stop! Stop thi-…”

“Stop, you-…”

With a gentle shove on their heads, the unconscious criminal superhumans fell to the pavement like dolls.

Flare’s sense of hearing was inundated with male and female cries of pleasure.

Her sense of sight was flooded with scenes of sex.

Her sense of smell was engulfed in the fragrances of sweat, love juices, and semen.

“This is no hallucination. Nor is it a psychological attack from a telepathic Offbeat.”

The one man not having sex spoke while seemingly dancing. That man in a bizarre magician’s outfit was known as Daydreamer.

“You were transported from Ikebukuro to a daydream dimension of my creation. This is my imagination made corporeal.”

Flare sounded less than pleased.

“This trash is what you spend your time imagining? You’re a real piece of work, huh?”

“Trash? You wound me. This is the true form that all humans should strive for. Miss Flare, why not try being honest with yourself instead of holding back for silly societal reasons. Everyone feels their desire growing in my daydream. Hundreds – no, thousands – of men and women have received my invitation and experienced the greatest of pleasures. I am not like those cruel and heartless criminals. I do not hurt or kill anyone. All I do is provide them with a brief moment of pleasure.”

“I notice you failed to mention the part where you drive those people irreversibly insane. I’ve read your horrifying file, serial nightmare rapist Daydreamer.”

“If you have read the grand tales of my exploits, then surely you know that everyone becomes a slave to their carnal desires in my daydream. From the children too young to have even heard of sex to the decrepit and elderly who stand on death’s door, they are overcome by an irresistible desire to engage in the pleasures of the flesh.”

With a jaunty dance step, Daydreamer leaped over a group of writhing female bodies and approached Flare.

“Bodies of all kinds burn madly until it feels like every last part of them is a sex organ. The slightest touch and they will ejaculate or squirt in ecstasy. And then begins an endless journey of pleasure. Yes, just like this.”

The fingers of his hands moved to Flare’s chest and slipped below her miniskirt. He tightly gripped her breast and rubbed the crotch of her costume.

The obscene smile plastered on his face soon twisted in surprise.

“Why!? Why aren’t you writhing in pleasure? Wait, you aren’t even wet. Gwah!”

Her fist slammed into the sex pest’s face.

Blood squirted from his nose and his broken front teeth flew while he himself soared backwards. He rolled along the mysterious redness that functioned as the ground or floor of his daydream dimension.

“Your powers are useless against me!”

Driven by her erupting rage, Flare kicked at his chest. The sensation of his ribs breaking arrive through her toes. But even this was holding back for her. His body was no sturdier than the average person’s, so if she had kicked with all her might, it would have torn him in two.

“It’s high time you received some painful consequences for your misdeeds.”

After a second and third kick, a dry groan escaped his throat.

“H-he was right. I didn’t believe it, but you really do feel no sexual pleasure. Your sex organs are useless decorations that can provide no pleasure at all.”

“What?”

She stopped kicking.

(How does he know that? Does he know who I am? Was he sent here to check and see if I’m still incomplete?)

She lifted him up in one hand and shouted at his bloody face.

“Who told you this!? Who is ‘he’!? What do you know about me!?”

“I know enough. I know you’re worthy of true pity. You’re a poor, poor defective product that can never understand the pleasures of sex. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Earth’s worst rapist shook with laughter even as he passed out.

The scene around them returned to being Ikebukuro West Gate Park. The eyebrows on Grand Guignol’s wooden mask rose.

“What!? You defeated Daydream- gwah!”

His words were cut off when Flare chucked Daydreamer at him, sending the puppet user flying and knocking him out along with his fellow criminal. The wooden mask broke open when it hit the pavement and a surprisingly kind-looking old man’s face appeared from below.

Based on things around her, she could guess less than a minute had passed in reality while she was in that daydream dimension. She quickly ran over to the woman Grand Guignol had been using as a hostage. The woman’s gruesome state told her she did not have time to wait for an ambulance.

“It’ll be okay. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

She gently lifted up the badly-injured woman and made sure not to shake her while flying up into the sky. She often performed rescue work as a superhero, so she knew where all the major hospitals in Tokyo were. She flew above the buildings to reach the closest one.

“There is nothing to worry about. We will be at the hospital soon.”

“Thank you. I’m glad we could finally meet, my sister.”

She looked down at the voice coming from her arms.

“Eh? What do you mean sister?”

“The time to pay for your sins has come.”

“Ugh.”

Flare, aka Hyuuga Kirara, experienced several things for the very first time in her life: the pain of having her skin cut, the agony of having her flesh shredded, and the torment of having her internal organs stirred up.

The woman in her arms had jabbed her right hand through the white costume and sunk her hand up to the fist in Flare’s solar plexus.

Unfamiliar signals raced through her nerves sand her entire body went limp. Just before losing consciousness, she realized she was no longer flying while holding the woman.

The woman was flying while holding her.

After gathering in front of the metropolitan theatre, Star Thunder, Ocelot, and Rose Device repeatedly called Flare with each of their communicators, but none of them received a response.

They exchanged a glance and Star Thunder spoke for them all.

“This is not good.”