SCI Stories, Book 3 Prologue

Prologue – Kill Shot

This whole setup is so stupid! We should just take out the heroes and be done with it!

Misaka sighed. It wasn’t her place to question the Master’s will. He wanted the heroines to be broken, so he could remake them. That was fine, and all, but she wished they didn’t have to hide, and could just take over. Unfortunately, Master was playing things close to the vest. An armed insurrection would only get the army involved. She could do a lot, but dodging bullets wasn’t in her skill set. Maybe that ‘Accelerator’ guy from high school, but not her.

She’d been an innocent fool in high school. Born Mikoto Misaka in Tokyo, she discovered her powers quite early on, which got her sent to the national school for powered youths. Basically, boarding school for kids with powers, so they didn’t accidentally hurt anyone. Nothing like the crazy system they had here in the US. She hadn’t known about that, not back then.

She’d come to the US, wanting to study abroad for college. She didn’t know then that the SCI was as… intrusive as it was. Or what some of them were willing to do to get their hands on powerful superhumans. She still had the shakes when she remembered the Facility. If the villain Negatron hadn’t shown up to bust a friend of his out, she’d probably still be trapped there. Fortunately, Master found her, when she was trying to slip into New York, to find a way to get home, since she was legally ‘dead’ after the car crash. He found her, and gave her a purpose: taking down the SCI.

Now, she was perched on a rooftop, looking down over Central Park, waiting on the moment to finally start striking back at the bastards who had ruined her life. She wished she could take on all three of the targets that were coming, but Master had plans for the other two. Pity, that. But at least she got to kill the pretty boy.

“Frosty, Railgun, get ready. The sheep are arriving.”

Onyxia’s message brought a smile to Misaka’s face. Good, time to start the payback! She pressed the button on her radio, and replied, “Understood.” That done, she focused the goggles she wore on the clearing, magnifying and enhancing so that she could get an accurate sightline. She doubted the so-called ‘heroes’ could touch her from all that way away, but Master would be happier if she made the kill in one shot.

The dragon-lady’s comment about sheep was appropriate, really. These people were inside the system, not knowing or caring what it did to keep itself maintained. They hadn’t been to the Facility, or seen what happened to the poor souls who were sent there, the experiments they endured. No, they were dumb sheep. It wasn’t right to hate them. Pity them, yes, but not hate them. They couldn’t help being what they were. But some of them could be wolves, if they were just woken up, like Master had started waking people up.

Three figures walked into the clearing. She could easily see them, with the help of her goggles. The rangefinder told her the distance. Wind speed wasn’t important for her, and the ‘bullet’ she shot wouldn’t drop enough in that distance to matter. Oh, they weren’t immune to physics, or anything, but it was just that friction tended to get the best of the bullets before they could actually drop, unless they were super-dense materials. And unless they were in a hurricane, wind speed wouldn’t matter enough to affect her shots. That wasn’t arrogance, just simple truth, tested by science. Science that would stick it to the SCI as painfully as she could manage.

Her target was the one on the right-hand side. Adonis was the man’s name. Proud and egotistical as most Americans. Just what she would expect from a bunch of gaijin. Still, his powers made him problematic to take and hold. He had some resistance to injury, and, as far as she knew, couldn’t be drugged, and his abilities were supposed to give him some way of escaping most snares. No one knew exactly how it worked. Even the SCI didn’t understand the mechanics of what he did, according to the files Master had been able to obtain. That made it difficult to capture him before he could call for help. And that could not be allowed. Not yet. It was still too early.

So, the call had been made to execute him. This, too, would cause a certain degree of insanity in the city, as people reacted to the death of one of their ‘heroes’. But that chaos could be managed. It didn’t happen every day, but this was not the first time that a hero had been killed by superpowered ‘villains’, and it wouldn’t be the last. People would mourn, and the heroes would go on alert, but they didn’t know that the Master was already inside their defenses!

There. He was in the perfect position. A clear line to him from where she was, no tree limbs or anything getting in the way. Wouldn’t even clip his wife or her fake boobs as it killed him. She whispered into her radio, “Firing in ten seconds.”

She pulled a quarter out of her pocket, and flipped it up into the air. Electricity began forming around her hand as the quarter flipped end over end. Through the goggles, she could see the cop turn towards her target. The target got a worried look on his face, too, but it was too late. The quarter met her fingers again, and she let go the energy she was holding back.

Time to show New York why she was called ‘Railgun’.

Down below, in Central Park, a woman screamed as an explosion carried her away from the headless corpse of her husband. The shot was perfect, right in the middle of his head. The man never had a chance, and there was no regeneration that was going to bring him back, not from that. Finally, the start of her revenge for what had happened. Better still, the kill had been flawless. Master would be so pleased with her!

Misaka whistled happily to herself as she headed down from the rooftop, using the hat she wore to keep her face from being seen on cameras, like Master showed her. She could just fry them, but Master didn’t want her to overexpose what she could do. Let them think she was just an instrument of destruction, and they wouldn’t know what to do when she showed she had other talents. Now, if Frosty and Onyxia got their part of the job done correctly, then all would be well.