Small Step

You know, skulking around in the dark would be a whole lot easier if I didn't show off to the waitress—making my eyes quite literally glow in the dark.

The fire had faded mostly, but it still managed to catch the eye of one or two who travelled the main streets in this late hour. The Gek woman, Gehne, had been right, of course—even the main streets weren't safe at night. I saw more than a few men get the contents of their pockets taken from them, the subjects of the attacks to belligerently drunk that they didn't even notice. As much as I fancied myself the virtuous hero, I turned a blind eye for the moment. Not only were the victims all relatively wealthy travellers, but their coin poches were already woefully empty by the time that the thieves and pick pockets got their hands on them.

Seems like the businesses around here were a little… brutal on the customer's wallets. My rationalisation for not bonking every thief on their head was pretty simple; if they had money to waste or were wasting money at establishments like the ones they were leaving, then I can't say that I was all that inclined to protect their wallets.

I felt my eyes slowly leach the warmth that I'd accrued in the Skinned Lizard. When I had called for the power—to give her a little show—I had only intended for a small amount of the flame to come to my eyes, but it seems like my domain itself had ideas about that. I couldn't tell just yet, but my domain clearly feels stronger arounds places of great hearth. Maybe that was also part of why I picked that particular tavern, an unconscious understanding of its internal atmosphere. A handy trick.

I walked through the main streets, keeping my head on a swivel, and looking for a particularly dingy side alley to walk down—which didn't take long to find. I soon stood in front of a clearly well used alleyway facing into the south west quadrant of Crossroad. To put it in blunt terms, it looked downright scary. If I weren't a literally Demigod, I knew that my mind would be racing with the numerous ways that I could die when I turned the next corner. Now though, I was almost amused by the slight mortal panic still residing in my gut and took a step forward, letting the darkness of the side street overwhelm the brightly coloured and lit establishments to its left and right.

My eyes adjusted to the almost pitch black in an instant, letting me wonder forth through the veritable maze of buildings. If you every wanted to experience urban hell in action, apparently Crossroad was the place to do it. The buildings were old, and newer additions had clearly been built up rather than out. My guess would be that everyone wanted to be as close to the inner city as possibly, unless you are abandoning the idea altogether and going to live out in the houses that actually have a front yard outside of the direct reach of the city.

I kept my eyes wide open as I casually walked through its labyrinthian walls, seeing absolutely no one and nothing but also knowing very well that they lurked behind every corner. Who 'they' were was a more difficult question to answer, to be truthful with you. But from their mental state alone, I could tell they weren't the nice locals, hoping to give you directions to make sure you got to your accommodation on time.

I travelled forth through the inherently boobytrapped maze, skirting by every little encounter and illuding quite a few watchful eyes. It felt good, I'll be honest. It felt powerful to use my powers of empathy and general senses to so thoroughly trump the predators that sat around the corners of the increasingly slum-like district, trumped in so far as they never even got a chance to fight me.

The convoluted passageways that comprised the districts closer to the main roads were nothing in comparison to the torturous paths of the not so nice districts. The buildings loomed overhead, most without much of a window to speak or, likely because any window would simply face directly into another across the street. I could feel the minds of the people within, families too scared of the night and the predators lurking within to dare let their presence known. Some even had senses good enough to see me in the darkness, even though my steps were almost entirely silent against the thoroughly tarnished from years, or even generations of use without so much as a single cursory wash. Now that I think about it, didn't most people deal with their waste by throwing it from their window into the streets?

Suddenly every small pile of detritus, that likely could have been anything, caught my eye—my brain hellbent on walking around them, staying as far away from what could be actual human shit. Or non-human shit too, I guess. We're inclusive here. The stench of the streets had been something I'd experienced on the main streets, and it only threatened to ger more pungent the further I pushed through. Thankfully, from being exposed to the truly most vile smells that the human body could produce after being slaughtered by Rethi's blade for months, I was pretty well desensitized to sour smells in general.

'What was I looking for?', you might hesitate to ask. Though the answer was as simple as could be. A location of promise. My directionless walking through the ever-branching paths of the slums—their looming threat to keep me within their walls forever—finally produced a location that I would consider promising.

There was a tiny little nature strip—a solitary spot of green in the hell of grey, brown, and red stone. I suspected that it was a piece of history, left behind from when this area of the city was actually nice—or at least tried to be. Now, the both overgrown and slowly dying greenery had every building's back turned to it. I wouldn't even be remotely surprised if those who lived in those buildings—as dour as their emotional states were—didn't even know it existed, the only entrance to it being an obscure and abandoned path. If I hadn't seen the strange street out of the corner of my eye and chose to duck through the narrow and confining sheltered walkway—clearly crafted to service people at least a foot shorter than myself.

There was a little stone bench, one that sat flush against a wall that was just the back of a building. I sat down on that bench, finding it to be surprisingly clean in comparison to the grimy and gritty surface that I had expected. I made a quick adjustment to my pocket, making sure that just a glimmer of coin was visible in my pocket, the pouch I had filled with various coins filled to the brim and almost overflowing with mostly 'worthless' coins—in comparison to our sudden net worth, anyways.

Then I simply sat, giving my surroundings one last cursory glance before I closed my eyes and crossed my legs on the comfortably wide bench—placing my large and still surprisingly callous-less hands on my wiry thighs.

The nature that still existed here was beautiful amongst the sad surroundings. Most of it was undoubtedly weeds of various strains, and it was probably why the little area was dying after so many years of neglect, the grass and small collection of flowers no contest to the nutrient depriving weeds that menaced them. There was one solitary tree, one that had clearly lived here long before the city had been built, at least before it had become what it was today. Its old and wizened bark, a noticeably lighter than the stone that perpetually surrounded it, gave way to its soothing light purple leaves. The only reason that the tree was still alive was probably because the sun was always directly upwards, shining its light through even the most dilapidated alleyways. As a side note; the only reason residents of Virsdis still used the typical measures of time here—like midday—was because it was a hold over form Orisis, and was probably way easier than reinventing the wheel.

Of course, the world had continued to move along even in my contemplation of this small slice of it. To be truthful with you, the amount of time I had been sitting there was more than I'd have liked—but such was the patience of a fisherman. I was no fool and was increasingly finding myself to be far more powerful that I'd thought, just in general. The little town I had lived in was so much less complicated than even a single—almost abandoned—alleyway in this city, and my powers were drinking it in with reckless glee.

As soon as I had walked in this alley, I knew that there was a person sitting atop the roof—far above the looming walls. I had also taken a good, long look into their emotional state and determined a few things. They weren't a bad person, but they would rob me. They would feel bad when they went home that night, after buying food for their small family and I could somehow intuit that—if they stole any amount of money from me—my face would forever be impressed in their memory as a snapshot of the one person's wallet who changed their life. It was the clearest emotional state in the range of a few streets by a wide margin—though still paling in comparison to the sheer strength that Rethi and Mayer were capable of exerting through their emotions alone.

I waited patiently until the form on the roof noticed me, and then the almost twenty minutes that they took to decide to rob me. As they crawled down the wall, their body pressed flat against the messy stonework, I kept almost entirely still. I could feel the calm fear that coursed through the person's veins—far too experienced to let true fear and anxiety run its course, a deadly mistake in a game like this. Though, even now, they know that their target is far more dangerous than any they had tried before—something deep inside of them knowing that they were walking right into a trap, even if desperation pushed it to the furthest reaches of their mind.

I felt as the person crept up right behind me, their form mere centimetres from mine as they hung on the wall without slipping at all. I could feel their hand reach towards my pocket, my senses brightening slightly with the faint pulling sensation of the monstrous purse's weight leaving my possession. I could feel the mental state of the person, their mind alight with any movement I made—which was the total absence of any. I had come a long way in my physical self-discipline since those early days of me trying to amend my terrible posture.

I let the purse leave my pocket and felt the person's guilty eyes glance over my 'sleeping' face before retreating up the wall, just as carefully as they had come. Of course, as soon as their attention left me, my eyes snapped open and my body flooded with movement. Let me tell you; when you have enough physical strength, so much that it easily dwarfed your own bodyweight by at minimum of ten times in the most disadvantageous positions—with at least passable skill in a complicated movement structure that is inherently linked to kinetic shifting—you can truly pull off some physics defying stunts.

If course, I had never practiced this particular movement—yet with less than a thought, my body danced up the side of the building, conjoining, and whispering the words of movement and motion, pushing me body upwards with a silent vertical speed. The world whirled as my feet—wearing a light and flexible shoe I had come to prefer—gripped against the wall, my toes instinctively finding the cracks and cervices to pull my body forward with the blinding speed I wouldn't have thought would be remotely possible on a sheer vertical surface like this.

The wall I danced up was out of the line of sight of the thief, their careful ascent up their own wall focused on not making sound, rather than speed. Though as I had silently made my way up to the roof, finding myself looking at a strangely beautiful view of the city, I walked over to the roof of the building that they were still climbing up. I positioned myself a few metres from the wall, waiting amusedly as the padded reptilian hand finally made an appearance—pulling the rest of their cloth clad body over the precipice. They laid there, staring up at the night sky for a while, just breathing quietly as the adrenalin seeped from their system, giving way to a beautiful relief that I was honestly loath to destroy.

"You're quite good at that, you know?" The thief's mental state jolted into an immediate, terrified panic—though on the surface the thief barely moved, their eyes slowly shifting over to where I stood on the open rooftop, my only backdrop that of the night sky itself—the building being tall even amongst its peers.

"Aw, fuck." An anxious voice jittered out. It was the same almost shrill voice that the Gehne had possessed, and even more feminine than that. It was a distinctly older voice—though not elderly by any means, just older than the much younger waitress'. I smiled gently at the woman's sprawled form, her wiry muscle underneath the patterned light brown skin that peaked through the gaps in the cloth wrap.

"Don't worry. You aren't in any trouble." The suspiciousness only rose further, becoming a wild fear—the brutal emotion burning across her brain.

"Oh fuck, you're a Shadow Walker—shit, please Gods, don't kill me!" Well, I can't say that I had heard the title before—though I could only assume that it was an assassin of sorts, with a name like that.

"I could try to assure you that I wasn't a 'Shadow Walker'—whatever they may be—but I have the distinct impression that you wouldn't be interested much in hearing it." I could already sense that from their emotional state, so it was hardly a surprise when the effectively prostrating woman didn't move an inch.

"P-please, I can give the money back! I only need my life." I raised an eyebrow at the begging Gek. I had almost expected more weeping and theatrics—at least that's what I would have assumed from the trashiest of media back on Earth, the criminal or evildoer shamelessly begging for their life. But even as the woman literally begged, there was a little spark of pride within here. That sort of pride you had in yourself when you play an imaginary scenario in your head over and over, one where you don't look the other way when someone is being bullied or attacked—one where you step in and selfishly make yourself the hero in your mind. The pride that you had when the situation you'd repeated in your mind a hundred times happened right in front of you and—despite maybe a little dithering—you held true to that ideal version of yourself.

Right now, even as she prostrated herself in front of what she believed to be a shadow-walker—a subject of her mind holding no small amount of terror—she took pride in the fact that she hadn't dissolved like a puddle at my feet. Aside from a healthy amount of nerves when threatened with what to her embodied death incarnate, of course.

I walked towards the woman, slowly reaching down to pick up the pouch of mostly iron hum—taking care to not spook the woman as I lifted the pouch from where she had thrown it to the ground in her fear. I looked at the practically quivering woman and—while sometimes it didn't feel like it—I realised that she was probably quite a few years older than my measly early twenties. The night hadn't gone exactly to plan, and I had hoped to get quite a bit more accomplished—yet somehow, I was satisfied despite myself. Maybe just one last act then, shall we?

I reached into the pouch gently, ignoring the iron coins and instead reaching for a singular silver hum. The kind of money that could only really be spent on real estate and in Gram's Apothecary back in that little town of mine—but was a much smaller amount of money here. I crouched down, only a few metres apart from the woman, and I placed the single hexagonal silver coin on the ground between us. The Reptilia's eyes flicked towards my hand and the coin, then up towards my face.

"Come here, tomorrow night. I hope that you feed your family like royalty with that money, until then." I smile widely, giving the woman a reciprocal edge to my sudden charity. When I turned and danced away through the air, my movements guiding my body from the building in a massive leap, I could only feel one residual emotional state—mired in confusion and a tearing anxiety as it accepted the money in front of them.

It wasn't much, but it was something.