The city stank.

I believe most normal people would agree. Big cities have their specific aroma, and it's far from pleasant. One could get used to it, even become fond of it with time. Still, the aura was offensive, especially to a finely tuned nose.

A lot of people believe that the natural scents of human body are repulsive. Sweat, sebum, dirt – gross.

Nothing more misleading in the world. We are mostly turned off by dangerous smells, ones that promise infection, poisoning or other harm. The natural scent of the human body is neutral at worst, pleasant at best.

It's the civilisation that produces the most offensive smells.

Most of our unpleasant smells don't come from our bodies. Humans are clean animals. We aren't compulsive cleaners like flies, for example, but we invest a lot into our hygiene. It's our clothes that reek. While it's easy to remove our secretions from our skins, our clothes get saturated in them.

That's why so many people find the smell of sweat offensive: They associate it with the moisture stuck in the fabrics. Clothes are not an extension of our bodies, keeping them clean is not an instinct. The result is a thick crust of organic filth worn over our flesh.

To be fair, our sweat could smell awful depending on our diet and health. This day and age, our diet habits were downright deplorable. Again, we could only thank the civilisation for it.

Our decaying secretions pale in comparison to city's exhausts. Gasoline fumes, metal, grease and rust. Concrete, alcohol, paints, synthetic and natural oils. Glues, smoke from combustibles, natural and artificial. Every structure, pave-stone, tree and living creature was tainted by this smell. Even if we disappeared from the face of the planet, the ruins would hold this scent for decades. Or rather, this chaotic mixture of myriad scents, each more disturbing than the last.

I'd tried to push through the scent of the city once as a child. I hadn't even scratched the surface, and I never found courage to do it again. It felt like staring into a chasm so deep the bottom was out of sight. It was there, for certain, but I'd never see it unless I threw myself into it.

The overwhelming stench of the city was the same. Getting to the bottom of it would mean bathing in every toxin, cancirogen and allergen known to mankind, and some. A dive I had no hope of surviving. I was pretty certain I'd die of suffocation before reaching half way through.

I'd quickly learned to treat this stench as white noise, something I had to filter and ignore. Some days, though, it forced itself into my nostrils. Whenever it did, I went through a primal, low dread. The mixture of pathogens screamed danger, urged the lower parts of my brain to run away. This place is dangerous, it said. Leave. Leave, now.

I always wondered if normal people felt the same without realising. Did they find the polluted cities instinctively threatening? Did it erode their sanity? Drive them into anxiety, an unspoken fear they had to suppress?

A muffled moan tore me out of my thoughts. It came from a back alley to the right, the dark, empty space leading to the unloading areas of the nearby shops. It was followed by the distinctive muffled slap and another groan. Then another, and another.

The sounds of a fist punching into flesh.

I instantly sprang into alert, my aimless musings venting from my mind. All my senses focused. My ears set on the sounds of violence. Eyes strained to pierce the darkness.

Before they did, I picked it up. Blood and sweat, thick with fear and agitation, and then – that scent. The scent of danger.

Spandex soaked with sweat. It seethed with adrenaline, endorphins and some secretions not found in a normal human system.

My stomach turned into an ice block.

Only one thought came. Clear, rational, absurdly focused in face of an overwhelming threat.

10 mm or .44 magnum?

We had two firearms, each powerful enough for game hunting. Completely excessive for police work. We were armed to face an angry bear at all times. Sometimes, it wasn't enough.

Which one? The deer gun? The big-game revolver?

I inhaled the air, reaching out to the sweat in the spandex.

No two people smelled the same, but I struggled to approximate it. A trace of Max' aroma, only different. Growth hormone of some sort. Rapid protein build. Different. Much, much weaker. More hormonal. More stress and arousal. Some kind of adrenal-like cocktail –

It was intense.

Intense in an unnatural way, but not only. There was something more to it. I couldn't put my finger into-

Another punch reached my ears.

This time, no painful moan followed. The scent of cortisol and catecholamines grew faint. The blood was much more vivid now, invading my nose.

Oh no.

I threw myself into the alley, quickly reaching for the smaller gun.

Adrenal-like hormones. Arousal. Excitement.

A fast, agile type. Probably superhuman strength. Not a hulking monster. Stopping power wouldn't save me. Smaller recoil gave better control, at least.

Judging by the smell, I stood no chance either way.

There they were.

The bigger silhouette, a muscular man in a white tank top, leant limp against the wall. A petite figure in a black bodyglove froze above him, fist raised in an exaggerated punch. It – she – stared at me, her head crowned with two weird, triangular shapes.

“PPD! Freeze!” I shouted, levelling my sights with the aggressor.

First, a demand to stand down. Then a warning shot. Then I could try to go for the legs.

I stood no chance.

Cold sweat ran down my back. The world slowed down. My heart thumped in my ears.

The scents sharpened.

The aroma of the city flooding me, gnawing at the lowest part of my brain. Threatening to throw me into panic.

Then, miraculously, I smelled the same from the figure down my sights. Shock. Fear.

She sprang into action, kicking the ground, launching itself into the air like a rocket. Before I could react, she bounced off the opposite wall. Then the other one. In a blink of an eye, she reached the third floor.

I rose my gun up. Slowly. My arms moved as though I was stuck in tar. The sights traced the walls, one brick after another, trying to keep up with her.

She was already on the rooftop.

I waited for a few seconds, pointing the pistol towards the parapet. Nothing. Only the strange adrenal smell. Moving away, fast.

I felt the strength leaving my legs. I leaned against the wall, shaking from fatigue and fear.

That speed. That agility. That strength.

If she'd attacked me, I'd be a goner. I was lucky she wasn't hostile. Or that panic had triggered flight rather than fight. I was too shaken to tell.

I could hold the most powerful hand-cannon in my hands. It wouldn't matter. When superpowers came into play, a vigilante had a physical edge eight times out of ten.

I was in the other two. A fine, healthy specimen of a normal human being. Completely out of their league.

I shook my head, trying to collect myself.

Enough dallying. I still had a job to do. The important part.

I tried to run towards the motionless man. I could only muster a wobbly limp. The encounter shook me way too much. I had to get the grip.

Easier said than done.

“Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

Nothing.

I lowered myself down to him. His right cheek was so swollen twice the size of the other one. There was a deep, red bruise forming in his eye socket. A steady trickle of blood ran from his nose. His lip and right brow were cut open. There was a big bump on his forehead.

I gently patted his left cheek. No reaction. Jesus. He was out cold.

I put my fingers on his neck. There was a pulse, slow but steady. Next, I put my cheek next to his face.

His breath stank of badly digested alcohol, a permanent junk food diet, blood, fear and pain. He needed to cut smoking down from two packs a day. But it was still a breath. I felt it on my skin.

Thank God.

I leaned against the wall next to him. Thank God for what exactly?

I quickly put him in a recovery position, then grabbed my cell and picked the emergency number.

“This is detective Sun. I need an ambulance and back-up to the 48^th Street. A single victim, assault and battery, head and chest injuries. An Empowered vigilante in the vicinity.”

A spandex clown who read too many comic books. She probably thought beating that guy senseless was the 'right' thing to do. He'd black out, then wake up like it's nothing. A mild act of violence with no lasting consequences. A hero saved the day. A villain was stopped. Everyone was happy.

Sheer nonsense.

Who knew happened beneath his skull? Bone fractures? Brain damage? Internal haemorrhage? Intense head trauma often caused invisible injuries. If he was lucky, they'd only come back to haunt him after a long time. Brain strokes, cerebral hepatomas, neurodegenerative diseases – they could follow years, even decades, after the injury.

The vigilante had probably given this man a death sentence. Just in brackets of twenty – thirty years.

I looked around the crime scene, waiting for the sound of sirens. There was a switch knife lying on the ground, not far from the man's hand.

What had really happened here?

Ah, there it was. A faint scent of another person, mixed up with feminine perfume. The smell was womanly, too . Just around twenty, barely past the hormonal storm.

The scent was saturated with terror. Not just startled or surprised, but genuinely scared for her life and physical safety.

So, a robbery gone wrong.

I started to piece it together. Our unconscious friend was mugging some poor girl. Then, an over-enthusiastic Empowered intervened.

From a legal point of view, it was crystal clear.

A man beaten half to death. A perp identified by a police officer. No evidence of his crime, no witnesses. In short: This attack was an unprovoked act of violence.

This was why we made little difference between the so-called superheroes and super-villains.

In the long run, they both did the same thing: Broke the law and harmed others, drunk on their power. The few rare smart vigilantes at least tried to procure some evidence against their targets. Most of the time it was invalid, illegal, paper-thin, or all of the above. The majority 'heroes' didn't even bother with that, though. They just acted like comic book characters, leaving us to collect their unconscious victims.

Unsurprisingly, most of my cases were assault-and-batteries on petty thugs. No matter how many awareness campaigns we ran in the media, the 'superheroes' never changed. They were an oblivious, violent, self-absorbed lot, never looking beyond the tip of their nose.

I slumped against the wall, then raised my cell again, picking my partner's number. What a time for a new debut. As though we weren't stressed enough.

“Morgan? What's the matter?”

I moistened my lips with my tongue. Passing the bad news off-duty always left the figurative bad taste in my mouth.

“Sorry to bother you in the evening, Dan, but we've got a new perp.”