The Glades, Resolve

[Star City, The Glades 9:43 PM] 

On top of a building across a small warehouse, Oliver stood and gazed at his third stop for the night. His two earlier visits to the Ninth Circle mansion and 'meetup' warehouse yielded no results. Both were empty, unlike this one which served as the personal residence of Emiko. 

Thoughts of a complicated nature ran through his mind as he peered at his younger sister's gold form while she slept. After Robert abandoned her and her mother, she became a courier for the Bertinelli crime family at a young age of 12 to support herself. 

She met Dante during one of these deliveries and pilfered his wrist watch, to which the latter threatened to slit her throat should she ever repeat such a stunt. However, despite the seriousness of the threat, it seemed her brazen yet skilled  actions impressed the man so much that he took her in and trained her. 

In essence, he continued from where Robert left off, becoming not only her mentor but father as well. This somewhat complicated things for Oliver, who wanted to destroy the Ninth Circle completely. For it meant killing Dante, a somewhat fatherly figure to Emiko, and Emiko herself…that is if she'd accepted his invitation into the circle. 

If she had, then he would have to kill her along with them, an act he had no difficulty accomplishing. As far he was concerned, she was an adult who could make her own decisions. He would not spare her just because she was "family." He didn't believe in that nonsense. 

"If you do the crime, you do the time," is what he believed. And the Ninth Circle was definitely guilty. They needed to do their time and die so that he could grow in power and knowledge. So that he could cleanse the world of their kind of scum. If family was involved, so be it. It made no difference to him. 

Guilty was guilty.

He never understood that "family" nonsense where people sheltered or protected their relatives after they committed heinous acts. Actions had consequences, that's what he believed. Everyone knew this fact, even children. So why would he spare Emiko just because they were supposed to be "family?" 

Then again, all of this depended on if she had knowledge on the Circle's true nature and still decided to join them. If that was the case, then..,

'Sorry Miss Adachi, you should've taught your daughter not to hang out with bad people.' 

But if that wasn't the case, all he had to do was eradicate them and leave her alone. Who knows, maybe after that he could approach her and improve the relations between her and the Queen family. For now though, he needed a way to ascertain her allegiance. The way he saw it, he couldn't ask her, not without alerting Dante that he was alive. 

He was the one who gave her the evidence of Malcolm's boat tampering after all. That alone meant the Ninth Circle were responsible for carrying out the hit, or they knew of the organization who did. Either way, no one other than his family could know about him. Not yet.

As such, he had to determine her stance another way. The other warehouse then came to mind. 

'Dante goes there every week, probably to work and train Emiko. If she has truly joined the circle, I'll know then,' he thought, giving his sister's warehouse a last glance as he took out the phone to call Moira and inform her of his return. 

In the midst of doing this, a sharp scream pierced through the night and caught his attention. Instead of being repeated or prolonged, it disturbed the silence for just a split second. as though someone silenced the screamer in time. Well, not really since he heard it. 

Releasing [Eagle Pulse]'s radius bit by bit, it wasn't until it reached six of its improved 800 meters did he discover the location of the disturbance. Five crimson silhouettes had surrounded something or someone that seemed to be invisible to his [Eagle Pulse]. 

Were it not for [Enhanced Synesthesia] feeding him the sounds of whimpers and a vicious beating, he would have thought this to be a gang fight of some sort. But no. This was one person at the mercy of five individuals, and the fact that this person was invisible meant that he or she had no relation to him. 

'A random civilian!' he thought and jumped, leaping from building to building towards the incident. 

As he did, the beating ceased, but the laughter of the individuals continued. What replaced the beatings though, was the distinct opening of multiple zippers, a development that caused his eyes to widen. This abrupt shift in the situation caused him to speed up and disregard the surroundings, leaving cracked roofs and havoc in his wake. 

The moment he arrived in the secluded corner, a scene he never imagined to experience graced his sight. A young woman whose clothes had been torn to rags lay unconscious on the ground, splayed in a manner that exposed her bruised skin and private parts to the chilly night air. 

In between her legs, a man knelt while his friends had their pants lowered and their members in their hands. They ceased the furious work on themselves when they noticed him. Shocked by this development, they paused and just stared like a couple of deers in headlights. 

But that didn't last long as they came to their senses and pulled up their pants and grabbed their baseball bats. The one on the ground about to make entry sensed the oddity and turned to look around. 

Once he did so, he felt a light gust of wind and heard his friends panic audibly. Meanwhile, he laughed as he saw nothing behind him, making him think it was a prank. Turning back to tell his friends what a nice joke it was, he found their prey for the night gone. 

His friends ran past him at that moment, clutching their baseball bats while turning their fearful gazes to look in a particular spot. He followed their line of sight and saw someone kneeling by the woman's side and covering her in what looked like a jacket. 

Being less scared than his friends, he tried to grab his baseball bat and found it gone. 

Suddenly, the high-pitched screech of metal scraping against concrete reached his ears as he saw the unknown person stand up with his bat in hand, dragging it as he approached. Realizing why his friends ran away, he turned to do the same only for a familiar -PING!- to sound as his kneecap said adios. 

The force was so great that it sent him airborne, a position that primed him to receive a downward smash to the chest. PING! The strike broke his ribs, sternum, and also damaged his organs.

As he lay on the cold, hard ground, choking on his blood and dying from his injuries, Oliver raised the bat to finish him off but paused, deciding that this torturous end was more fitting. 

Ignoring the piece of human filth, he sped off after his friends. Upon arrival, he marked them with [Master Tracker II], meaning that for the next hour they could not hide from him. And indeed they couldn't.

Despite the differing paths they took, he caught up to each of them and left them in such hopeless and terrible states that no amount of medical intervention would save them. 

Their fates were sealed. 

In less than two minutes he returned with a bloody and mangled bat, one he stored as he closed in on the unconscious woman. Checking the surroundings for her belongings, he picked them up and checked her injuries afterward to make sure he didn't exacerbate them. 

Picking her up, he rushed at a manageable speed and brought her to a nearby hospital. 

…..

[Queen Mansion, January 7, 2008 10:11 PM]

Standing by her window and gazing into the darkness, Moira had a pensive expression on her face. Her son's insistence on investigating Malcolm by himself confused and worried her, but she decided to trust him, finding no fault in his logic earlier today. 

Those strange abilities he displayed also gave her confidence, but that didn't stop her from worrying, after all she just got him back. However, it seemed her worries were unfounded as her vision of well…nothing was blocked by Oliver as he appeared behind her bedroom window in a flash. 

His sudden appearance made her heart skip a beat, but the same heart calmed down as relief filled it; her son had returned. Quickly recovering herself, she opened the window for him to enter and shut it afterwards, turning back to see him take off his cap and hood with traces of blood on his hands. 

"Oliver! What happened?" she exclaimed, using hushed tones as she grabbed his hands and examined them. "Are you hurt? Should we go to the hospital?" 

"I'm fine, really…" he uttered with a weak smile. 

His face didn't match his words, and Moira would be blind if missed this. "What happened?" she asked.

Oliver gazed at her for a bit before looking away. He had killed many, but the scene he witnessed tonight shook him to his core. How can a person be so evil to another, and treat them in such a horrible way? If he didn't believe it before, he believed it wholeheartedly now. 

Some people were truly evil and beyond saving. 

As for his mother, he truly wanted to tell her how he felt, but a part of him feared her reaction. After all, normal people don't have such radical beliefs or ideologies. Nevertheless, he remembered her unconditional love for her children and his no lies policy, and thus spilled the beans. 

  Sitting on the bed, he looked down at the floor and started. He explained what he witnessed to her, his tone leaking rage as his perfect memory served up the scene to him as though he were there again. 

His voice shaking, he said, "When I looked at the woman, I couldn't stop thinking of Thea and how easily that could have been her. I got so angry, so scared, that I did the only thing I could think of. 

In my mind, as long as they died, they could never hurt anyone again. And so I killed them, and it made me happy that they were gone." 

Oliver wasn't wrong, his words truly scared Moira. Happy they were gone? Perhaps the island has changed her son more than she realized. However, his words about Thea and how afraid it made him resonated with her so much that recalling his description of the scene caused an intense chill to grip her soul. 

When she imagined the young girl in such a situation, beaten and raped, lying naked and exposed on the cold hard ground, she didn't find his reaction to their deaths not so scary anymore. Even she would have done the same in that situation if she had the means. 

This notion became further solidified when she remembered that something of this nature happened to the daughter of Robert's friend, who as a result had been paralyzed from the waist down. It scared her so much she hugged her son to drive away the chill she felt. 

"You're not a monster," she said and turned his head to face her. "Listen to me. Even thinking about it scares me too. Remember Amanda Chen, Frank Chen's daughter? The same thing happened to her, except she wasn't so lucky. They found her too late.

Now she's scarred for life and has to use a wheelchair. So no, I don't think you're a monster. You're my son, the man who saved a girl from a terrible fate. You're a hero," she ended and hugged him tighter. 

Hearing these words, Oliver felt a bit warm inside. But it was his surprise that grew and reached an all time high. A hero? He didn't think that of himself. To him this is something he was supposed to do. A responsibility not to ignore a bad situation if he could make it better.  It wouldn't sit right with him had he acted any other way. 

With regards to the part about being afraid for Thea, that wasn't particularly true. He had three sisters in his past life. They were the ones he spoke about. Though Thea and any woman was included since he didn't want to see any female in the way he did tonight.

But that's besides the point. 

Whenever he saw news or movies about pedophiles, rapists or human trafficking statistics, they made him deathly afraid and enraged. He just couldn't stop imagining his sisters in those horrible situations. He always wished he had the power to eradicate such people from the world and ensure nothing like that ever happened to anyone else. 

But alas, he was an ordinary mortal in a world run by people who profited off such ventures. Well, not anymore. Here he had power, and power meant change. Change in the lives of others, change in terrible events, and change in this crooked world. 

He could bring about massive change, and he would be damned if he didn't.