With this, patreon now has 3 advanced chapters in total. I intend to slowly raise this up to around 6-7 chapters. Aspirant has access to 1, Acolyte 2 and Archon 3.

Mercantile Violence 1.08

It amused me. Amused and irritated me in equal measure, watching the way Adam's face scrunched up in disgust as I strolled toward him.

"You seem... sober," I remarked, genuinely a little surprised. Had he somehow stumbled onto the exact same revelation I had?

"Never been more dry," he grunted, remaining rooted in place and letting me do all the legwork. Cocky piece of shit.

"Did you finally figure it out, then? That drugs are no way to Reach Heaven?"

His response was deeply disappointing. I made sure to let him know it.

"Was discovering how reality actually works what finally broke your pansy-ass brain?" He sneered. "Is that why you went from a pathetic little whiner to completely stark raving mad? What the fuck are you babbling about?"

I calmly reminded him of our old conversation. Of his grand philosophical professing on how drugs were the true shortcut to Heaven.

Skidmark threw his hands up, clawing at his greasy hair in sheer exasperation.

"OF COURSE IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO REACH IT THAT WAY, YOU FUCKING CUM-GUZZLING RETARD! THAT'S HOW THE BUSINESS WORKS!"

"So you knew?"

"I—" He seemed genuinely floored by the question. "Is that why you started snorting the product so goddamn heavily?! Jesus Christ on the cross, you really are a fucking retar—"

I backhanded him.

His head snapped violently to the side, and his scrawny body crashed hard into the dirt. For a second, I worried I’d accidentally snapped his neck, but the distinct absence of a system reward for the parahuman kill—alongside the murderous, venomous glare he slowly turned back up at me—reassured me that he was quite alive. I'd never seen that level of pure hatred directed at me before.

He tried to push himself up, so I planted a heavy boot directly into his forearm, thoroughly enjoying the wet crunch and the pathetic yelp he made as he collapsed back into the muck.

"Is that what this is about?" he spat through bloody teeth. "Petty fucking revenge?"

"I wouldn't exactly call it petty."

If Skidmark were a dog, he’d have been frothing at the mouth. "You killed all of them! John, Kyle, Tyrone—"

"Did I?"

I glanced around the ruined, body-strewn lot, my lips thinning into a contemplative line. The names he rattled off were the original crew. The guys who made up the gang back before it ever rebranded into the Merchants, back when it was just an old, broken-down van and a bunch of half-baked idiots in way over their heads.

Well, a bunch of idiots and me. Not that I considered myself a genius, but if there were three functioning neurons rubbing together inside that rusty shitbox back then, two of them were definitely mine.

"Perhaps," I conceded with a shrug.

While I was reminiscing, Skidmark had started dragging himself across the asphalt on his stomach. I let him crawl, casually following behind him at an easy, predatory stroll.

"You know, I built this confrontation up in my head so much," I mused, shaking my head. "Yet, looking down at you right now, I can't help but feel... profoundly disappointed. You were so much grander in my memory, Skids. Is this just what having real power does to a man? Is this how you felt back then? I suppose, looking at it through that lens, I can finally start to understand your betrayal."

I raised my hand, curling my fingers into a tight, solid fist as I felt the unnatural, equine-boosted strength humming through my sinew.

I glanced at the interface timer ticking down in the corner of my vision.

Three minutes left.

"What betrayal, you cunt? I gave you every fucking opportunity and you squandered every single one of them!"

"If you're going to lie, at least try to be convincing, man. This shit is pathetic, even for you."

He jabbed a filthy, trembling fingernail in my direction, flecks of spittle spraying from his cracked lips. "You damned autistic shitbag! Don't you dare act like you ever actually tried! That look in your eyes—the one you aren't even bothering to hide right now! You always acted like you were better than the rest of us, with that... that..."

"Contempt? Condescension? Perhaps a simpler term like cocky would fit your limited vernacular better."

His dark face contorted into a furious sneer. "Yes. That. Exactly that." He shook his head, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the pavement. "Let's stop playing these stupid fucking games, Rex."

I stopped walking, watching with something approaching mild pity as he continued dragging his battered body across the dirt.

"You and I both know what this is really about," he wheezed.

I cocked an eyebrow. "Elucidate me." I briefly debated explaining what the word actually meant, but he kept right on talking.

"It's because I cucked your pasty white ass."

Whatever slight reaction flickered across my features, it brought the bastard the first genuine spark of filthy joy he'd felt since the slaughter began. He was dead wrong though, of course.

"You sad, self-pitying sack of shit," he rasped, shaking his head as a mixture of blood and saliva dripped from his chin. He finally stopped crawling, propping his back against a pile of broken concrete. "All these people dead because you couldn't handle reality. It's not like you ever could’ve satisfied her anyway, not with the little white button you call a dick."

"Is this really what we've been reduced to, Stain? Baseless, petty insults?"

"Sorry, boy. Squealer—" my jaw tightened at the sound of her name "—needed an actual fucking man to handle her. Not a limp, passive little bitch like you. Still, you should've just spoken up, man. I'd have saved you a fucking..." He broke into a wet, violent coughing fit, hacking up dark phlegm. "...I’d have set up a fucking chair in the corner for you!"

He burst out laughing—that loud, grating bray of a lowlife who’d just delivered a crude, bottom-tier punchline and fully expected the knuckle-dragging degenerates around him to treat it like comedic gold.

Was the dirty bastard actively trying to get me to put a bullet in his skull?

"For whatever it's worth, Adam," I said, resuming my slow, steady pace toward him, "I really did have fun back in the day. It's a shame things had to end like this. Still, from the moment I woke up with these powers, I couldn't picture it playing out any other way."

"Yeah," the piece of shit sneered, turning his head to spit a glob of blood. "Course you wouldn't. The single biggest mistake I ever made in this miserable life was handing you a hit off my blunt two years ago."

"No," I corrected, looking down at his crumpled form from a few paces away. "Your greatest mistake was convincing yourself you deserved to be anything more than a bottom-feeder, and acting like i—"

A sudden, screaming siren went off in the back of my mind.

DANGEROUS!

"BURN: THERMAL VISION!" Five seconds!

...

Rolling…

[Induce Baldness]|Trash Ability (0.7)|"A power so cruel" allows you to induce baldness within a target by making contact with them, whether that is making them lose hair over the course of a long time or instantly making all of their hair fall out. Beware, using this may make you the mortal enemy of most.

"Well," I let out a sharp, breathless laugh, my eyes still glowing with residual, superheated energy. "That could have gone exceptionally poorly for me."

I stared down at the smoldering, half-liquefied hunk of slag that had screeched to a halt barely twenty centimeters from my face. It had probably been an entire chassis of a car a few seconds ago. Looking at the puddle of melting scrap now, nobody would ever be able to tell.

Squealer's work? No, her rigs were loud as a freight train; I would've heard the roar of her engine minutes before it arrived.

"Huh. You actually pulled off the railgun trick, didn't you?" I asked, whistling softly. "Funny how the very first time you ever actually listen to my tactical advice, it's to launch an improvised missile straight at my skull. You always were a slimy cunt."

Well, it was more of a Coil gun than a Railgun really, but I didn't expect this neanderthal to know the difference.

I turned my head to look back down at him.

"Ah, now that is a priceless look on your face. You were betting the whole goddamn farm on that one, weren't you?"

I wouldn't admit it out loud, but the close call had left me genuinely rattled. The raw thrill of survival was surging through my veins, but underneath the high, I was disgusted by how thoroughly pitiful it would have been to get killed by Skidmark of all people.

Not that his power was weak. Layered enough times across a surface, the kinetic multiplication could probably build up enough velocity in an object to topple even Behemoth. Such is the terrifying reality of exponential growth. But pulling that off required the person holding the trigger to actually have a brain between their ears.

"You don't get it. You really, truly don't get it, you shit-guzzling social retard," Skidmark wheezed, blood flecking his chin. "Why I couldn't ever use any of the shit you 'advised' me on. Not with the smug way you talked, and not around the boys... Fucking hell. What’s your actual endgame here, Rex? Come on, man. We both know you aren't built for this life."

I could practically hear the rusty gears grinding inside Skidmark’s head. Whatever few functional gears were left after a solid lifetime of snorting chemical waste, anyway.

"You ain't built for the streets, man. You know that deep down," he stammered, scrambling desperately to prop himself up, only for his broken arm to give out completely. "So look... you wiped out all the normies. Fine. That's fine! We can start over, right? You want Squealer? I—I don't give a fuck, man! Take her, she's yours! You know I don't care! Come on, Rex, you said you had fun back then, right? You admitted it! You really think you're gonna have that kind of fun without your boy Stain around?"

I almost laughed in his face.

"I feel both completely justified and profoundly disappointed," I sighed, looking down at my former partner in crime. "Right up to the very end... you were just too stupid. And you want to know something, Stain?"

I flashed a wide, malicious grin down at him, tapping the side of his head with my boot.

"In return for trying to take me out, you're going to die bald. Goodbye... Adam."

"No, wait—" he sputtered, his eyes going wide with pure horror as thick, greasy clumps of hair began sliding down his forehead and dropping across his lap. Pure, unadulterated outrage overtook him. He flared up his power, his hands beginning to glow, but it was too late. "YOU FUCKING PSYCH—"

My leg lashed out.

With the brutal, unnatural force of an angry stallion, my heel drove down, completely caving his ribcage in—before slamming down a second time, crushing his throat beneath the heel of my boot.

With his death confirmed by the glowing System screen, I skimmed through the list of rewards and burst out laughing when I reached the third option.

3. The lower the practical utility born of the power of the resulting Burn, the higher its power-up is boosted. Only works on Trash Burns.

It fit the man Skidmark was so absurdly well that I didn't even bother considering the other two. I locked in the choice without a second thought.

I let out a long, heavy exhale, letting the quiet satisfaction of a job well done wash over me.

"This feels... nice."

Yes, it felt nice. Nice, indeed. Just... nice.

Wasn't it supposed to feel like something more than merely nice, though? Had I miscalculated somewhere along the line? Should I have allowed Skidmark to rise and put up more of a fight? Use his power a bit?

Should I have dunked some more on him before punting his ass into the afterlife? Would that make this feel better? Looking down at Skidmark's battered, filthy face, the urge to unzip my fly and make his corpse literally rest in piss was rising with every passing second, but surely that wasn't the final key to Reaching Heaven, was it?

Had my path up to this point been correct? I mean, of course it was—I'd never felt more excited, more focused, more alive!

Yet taking down Skidmark had been built up in my head as a watershed moment. If not outright spiritual enlightenment, then at least a qualitative shift. Something fundamentally different.

And yet... it wasn't.

Was I really just going to have to keep this up forever? Relentlessly? Just grinding, fighting, and butchering until either old age or an encounter with a cape way out of my league finally put a permanent stop to it all?

It's not like it wasn't fun but... where did Reaching Heaven actually fit into the equation?

"Bit late to ask your opinion on it, I suppose," I muttered down at the cooling corpse. "Not that you would've had a clue what was missing anyway, dumb as you were."

The jab came out sounding properly insulting, yet I couldn't quite strip the faint, lingering note of strange fondness out of my voice.

"Isn't it obvious?"

A voice purred from the shadows behind me. Smooth, sultry, and deliberately, aggressively sexy.

Before I could tense up, a pair of soft arms wound their way around my chest, followed immediately by the unmistakable, heavy pressure of a pair of large breasts smooshing flat against my back.

"Now the new boss takes the spoils of war home," she whispered, leaning close until her hot breath tickled the sensitive curve of my ear in a heavy-handed, performative attempt at seduction. "Well... not that I'd object if you wanted to handle business right here in the dirt. What's the call, boss man?"

I turned my head to look at a face that had, once upon a time, occupied every single one of my teenage daydreams. Unlike Skidmark, who I'd seen approaching sobriety for the first time in his life, she was high as a kite.

"Hello, Sherrel." Despite myself, I felt a pang of nostalgia inside my chest. "Long time no see."

Author's Note

Yeah I'm a bit of a hack for ending this chapter in a similar vibe to the previous one. Still, no matter how much I ran it in my mind, I couldn't really see it going another way, so here it is.

Not fully satisfied but I'm not putting it off any longer. Can only improve if I continue writing after all.

Also, no need to worry my fellow NTR-dislikers, he is not taking Sherrel's ass back. Well, I say "back" but it's not like they were ever together to begin with. Skidmark's accusations were mainly to rile him up more than anything else, having an actual basis on reality was secondary to getting Rex to follow him into the spot where the car was gonna hit.

Gonna try to get the next chapter up sometime this weekend.

On an unrelated, I finished reading the first book of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy. Personally I never really read historical fiction before, but it was pretty good. Also it leant far more into "historical" than "fiction" so that was good too. Besides writing, reading is the next best step to improve my stuff after all haha.