I slowly woke up, feeling the usual discomfort return to me. Despite it being only my third day sleeping in here, I’d learned to stay still and keep my eyes closed until I was sure nobody was around. In theory, if people could see me sleep here, seeing me wake up here wouldn’t make much difference, but even the thought of being seen like that still brought me a great discomfort, so I avoided any situations where I’d be required to think about it. Not that being seen in general felt any better, but that’s how anxiety led me to live my life.

After a minute or so of silence, I got myself up from the pseudo-couch that was my sleeping place now. It was supremely uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like I deserved anything better. I took out a nutrition bar from my bag, and ate the whole five thousand kilocalories in three quick bites.

With breakfast done, I decided to sit there for a couple more minutes before starting my job. As soon as the automatic door opened, I realized my mistake.

The person that entered wasn’t just a random passerby, Ms. Mann was the psychiatrist that made sure everybody on the job was in the right state to do it, both by providing care, and by taking down the clearance for those who weren’t. It wasn’t the first time we’d met like that.

“Good afternoon,” she started diplomatically.

I nodded in response, as I preferred not to use my voice, unless it was absolutely needed.

After taking a moment to sit down next to me, she spoke again. “I heard what happened after the bill passed, I’m sorry.”

Right, the bill, one that effectively lowered a lot of salaries around here. Mine got cut to the point where I couldn’t afford to pay for a place to live and for those custom-made nutrition bars at the same time. I still had enough savings to pay the bills for a couple of months, but my landlord apparently didn’t care about that.

“You know, we could figure something out, you don’t have to be left like this… You kids may not have been around back then, but this place used to be about mutual aid and figuring our problems out together just as much as it was about going out there and doing the job. There’s a lot of good people here, just let them help you,” she said.

I shook my head. I really wouldn’t want to be any more burden than I already was.

“That mindset is only going to lead you to a worse place than you already are in.” she sighed. “Fine. I’m not going to stop you from doing the patrol; you’re not there yet. Just please, reconsider my offer to help you with your problems, at least the mental health ones, okay?”

She looked at me expectantly.

“Okay…” I muttered. I really did hate using my voice; after the mutation it sounded more like one of a monster than one of a human person…

She nodded in turn, and left the multipurpose community/waiting room that was now also my ‘bedroom’.

I took a couple of deep breaths, got up, and left the building to begin my patrol.

While traveling around the city, quite literally looking for trouble, I couldn’t help but get lost in thoughts, and today I pondered the nature of my job. I was what most called a superhero, though I really disliked the term. I wasn’t really given much of a choice when it came to what I’d do in life, given the grotesque nature of my body, as well as my status as a high school dropout.

Do not get me wrong, though, just because it was my primary reason for getting the job didn’t mean that it was the only reason I did it. There were a lot of reasons people become heroes, and not all of them were good; hell, I was willing to admit that my reason was one of the bad ones, but my point is that if you chose this job for a wrong reason, whether or not you were a right person to do it usually became clear really quick. If I had to be honest, even after the three years I’d been doing it for now, I still didn’t know if I was exactly the right type of person to do it.  All I knew was that I disliked it when people got hurt, and being a hero gave me a way to do something about it. It was really the only good thing that ever came out of my existence.

That wasn’t, of course, what people saw when they looked at me. When there was a cover to judge by, and a couple of loud examples that seemed to suggest a certain interpretation of facts, it was really easy to get the wrong picture. I didn’t blame anyone for thinking that; after all, even though I wasn’t one, whenever I looked into my reflection in a mirror, I saw a monster. I didn’t really have a reason to, but I just… did. I was just over two meters tall, literally almost as wide, a real mountain of muscles of a man, and I don’t mean it in the usual way; even the ones that were described as most muscular in normal circumstances looked skinny compared to me… And then there was the fact I stayed silent most of the time in fear of my own absurdly low voice, refusing to comment on any incidents to the press, ever refusing to take the offer of a press conference when it came up several times.

So that’s what I was for most people; I was a huge man who never spoke, powerful enough to crush most heroes or villains with one strike if I so desired, known mostly for a couple incidents that framed me as a more… brutal person than I was. And I knew the media had a habit of over exaggerating things, even if I didn’t follow the news.

My reputation had its benefits, of course. Most interventions with offenders during my patrols ended in non-violent surrenders. After all, I was one of the most powerful heroes, and they’d heard I could get really brutal with those that didn’t surrender…

So, as the day passed, most of my patrol went as always, without an issue. Whenever there was anything signalling a need for help in the comms network, I assessed if I could be of any help, chose the ones where people were in actual danger, and resolved the problems quickly. I probably did much more than most people thought I did; most powerful heroes seemed to be expected to help only with the most powerful threats, but as I didn’t have anything better to do with my life, I spent every day going around the city and helping where I could.

My regular cycle was disrupted, however, around 7 PM; the sun was setting behind the docks I was patrolling as a report popped up of a break-in. I usually was wary of those; it wasn’t exactly the type of incident where my powers were most helpful, not even mentioning all the callers concerned just about property damage, but then I heard that the mafia was reported at the scene. It was all I needed to know to take a surprisingly short detour from my patrol route.

They didn’t even call themselves anything, as most evil organizations tended to do, so everybody just called them the mafia. They weren’t really like most villains; they were much more down-to-earth, but they also had a rather strong affinity for murder during their operations, and that was really all I needed to know to take them as a really serious threat. And that wasn’t even to mention the fact that their activity had increased greatly over the last couple of weeks, going as far as injuring several heroes too badly to continue on the job, while other heroes had straight up gone missing. Even with all my antisocial tendencies, I knew that most thought they were planning something big.

When I entered the address where the break-in was supposedly happening, I didn’t worry about such details as what might happen to me, like always. This time, however, it was a mistake.

Something relatively large hit my back, and I felt a really strange sensation. As I fell to my knees, I understood -- I was being drained of my strength. I never experienced it before, but I knew it meant I was hit with a power neutralizer. As I tried to get back up, another one hit my chest, and then another two hit my sides. Whatever was their plan, they were going for an overkill, these things were really hard to get too.

The mafia agents surrounded me, at least a dozen of them, and they began to restrict my movements, then picked me up and started to carry me somewhere. I should have probably been panicking, but I knew how to keep calm on the job. Besides, it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to having no control of my life…

As I thought about it, I realized something important -- I didn’t just get randomly kidnapped due to my lack of attention, I just got caught in a trap set specifically for me. I didn’t understand why I would be the one targeted; I was sure there were a lot of much easier and much more dangerous individuals to take out, and that wasn’t even mentioning my invulnerability, as it was the only type of power not affected by power neutralizers.

I was brought into a larger dock filled with many almost identical mafia agents, and not much else, except for two large chairs surrounded by what I could only recognize as some sort of magical runes. I got restrained on one of those chairs, and I could only wait for what would come next.

After less than a minute, several teleport beams flashed as two people, surrounded by more generic agents, appeared in the middle of the hall.

My attention was immediately drawn to the man known as the Demolisher. He was one of what was politely called the ‘higher tier’ mafia thugs, and his power set was actually comparable to mine, even if significantly weaker. His fighting style was that he was big, strong, and durable enough to literally run into all of his problems. When he was told to break into somewhere, he went through walls, straight up slamming his body into them. That’s how one earned the title of the Demolisher, I guess.

The two of us… had a history. And by that I mean that he’d once decided to fight me, put too much force into his first punch, effectively breaking his arm on me and collapsing in pain, and then apparently decided that I was his enemy or something, and that he wanted to take his revenge on me. The feeling wasn’t mutual; the most I could say about him was that he’s a rather annoying man.

However, I realized he apparently wasn’t the one I should focus on, as the woman who’d teleported alongside him, of whom I knew only that she possessed some sort of super strength, sat down in the second chair next to mine. A man I’d mistaken for one of the generic agents began chanting things in a language that, while I didn’t recognize, sounded eerily familiar.

As Demolisher’s smile evolved into full-on laughter, I started to suspect that he was only there to witness what was going to happen to me as an act of his ‘revenge’.

“Let’s get this over with.” commanded the woman in the chair next to mine in a rather harsh voice.

I suddenly felt the sensation of all my senses getting… further away. I couldn’t explain it, but I definitely wasn’t passing out, this was different… Then the sensation turned into pain, as if every single connection to every one of my senses was a rope that was being stained under too much tension. One of the last things that came to me before my connection to my senses was broken were distinct sounds of fighting.

And then there was nothing. I was floating, completely separated from my body and the world around it. The feeling was indescribable.

I might have been moving, but I couldn’t really tell.

After an amount of time that I was unable to identify, I started feeling connections coming back to me, but… they were different.

Even if with the little I had, I could tell the connections didn’t lead to the parts of me I’d grown to hate so much.

Unfortunately, alongside new connections, I felt what this time was surely my consciousness slipping away. As I recovered my sight, most of what I could see were my eyelids going down. When most of my senses returned, I couldn’t even analyze them properly, instead slowly passing out.