(SHATTERPOINT) IMPENDING DOOM

The bus stop on the long street full of hole-in-the-wall businesses was little more than a crooked bench and a leaning scrap of metal roof, stained with dirt, rust, and the remnants of a dozen old posters. The kind of place that attracted people you didn’t want to talk to, skeevy loiterers with twitchy eyes and even twitchier hands, and the streetlights worked just often enough to give you false hope of visibility.

Anakin didn’t wait for the bus. He preferred to walk.

His shift at Dorothy’s Auto had run late again, compressor trouble on an old truck, and he hadn’t wanted to leave the job unfinished. The air was thick with the typical city smell, and his apartment, a crumbling one-bedroom above a struggling laundromat, waited five blocks ahead. But he didn’t mind the walk. It gave him time to think.

He hadn’t come back from death to spend his second life fixing faulty vehicles.

But without the Force, what else could he do?

That absence still scraped at him, especially because he could sense in its place, something else. A subtle, young presence that was vastly different from the Force yet similar in so many ways.

He’d seen glimpses of it around the capes when they fought, even from a distance. Armsmaster practically bled it, the armor he wore even more advanced than those in his Galactic Empire. In the fiery power bubbling just beneath Lung’s skin. There was power in this world, raw and ugly in its intentions, but still power.

Could it be learned? Could it be bent to his will? Or was it bound to this world’s people and, as the rumors said, products of trauma and broken minds?

He didn’t know yet, but he intended to find out. Before he chose a path in this strange new life, he would understand the rules that governed it. He wouldn't move blindly here, even if he was fond of making rash decisions. 

Hands buried in the pockets of his long coat, Anakin scanned the street ahead. It was late and quiet, even with those out. 

Then, he heard it. A high-pitched mechanical whine, the kind no standard vehicle should make.

He turned.

A car—or something that had once been one—roared around the corner, glowing blue from underneath and riding low on wheels that didn’t touch the pavement so much as skim it. The body was bulky and reinforced with welded plates, a monstrous truck on steroids, and suffused with that same energy all cape had.

It slid to a stop ahead of him with a squeal of tires. The doors slammed open, and two capes stepped out.

The first was a caucasian man in a rusted, crude, but bulky power suit, steam hissing from piston vents along the back and shoulders. The suit looked like it had been scavenged from a scrapyard, bolted together by a madman—which, Anakin suspected, wasn’t far off—and made functional in the ugliest way possible. 

A metal mask and goggles covered the upper half of his face, and his voice was a thuggish drawl when he bellowed, “This the guy?”

The second was a shorter, pink-skinned, and pot-bellied man, his skinny arms twitching at his sides. As he giggled wetly, a part of his body stretched out and reconfigured itself into a mass of vein-like tendrils that picked at the loose matter around the area. 

It was vaguely disgusting to see—though Anakin had arguably seen worse, so he kept his expression in check—but a part of him wondered about the disparity in powers between capes. What if he ended up like this?

The third stayed behind the wheel, a woman with streaks of grease on her bare skin and more oil in her hair than on the engine. She wore a shirt that wasn’t much of one, and cut-off shorts that didn’t leave much to the imagination. 

Her laughter carried across the lot.

“Well damn,” she said, eyes raking over him. “He really is pretty. Skids won’t be happy.”

There was no warning. 

The first one’s arm jerked, and Anakin barely moved away in time. Pure kinetic force shattered the ground where he’d been a second earlier.

Dangerous.

He sprang forward before the next blow could come, his boots hitting the pavement in a dead sprint as he closed the distance. The power suit was undoubtedly strong, but slow. Each step shook the ground, each motion telegraphed. Anakin waited for the rhythm—pivot, step, punch—then slipped inside its reach, slammed a corrugated pipe from the ground into the hydraulic knee joint, and wrenched.

Another disadvantage of the suit was that its limbs didn't actually enclose any part of the man, allowing Anakin to sever them.

The metal groaned, steam burst, and then the leg collapsed.

The brute fell sideways, staggering, arms flailing for balance. Anakin followed, dodging a wild backhand, and slammed his makeshift weapon at the exposed portion of the man’s face. Blood spurted, and the cape screamed.

Anakin didn’t let up, swinging again and again. A final, vicious blow silenced the man inside. The power suit crashed, hissing steam, and fell still.

One down.

The pink-skinned cape let out a wet, gurgling roar as his body split, numerous veins of tendrils exploding out and spearing into the surrounding garbage, faster than he had done initially. There wasn't much, but every dirt clump, concrete chunks, broken glass, cans, garbage, and twisted metal were pulled toward him, fusing into a grotesque shell.

In seconds, he stood as tall as the first one—an uneven, shifting colossus of junk and sludge—with stop signs embedded in his shoulders and half a dumpster attached into his chest. 

Then he charged.

Anakin moved, not away, but forward, slipping beneath a swinging fist that tore up the sidewalk and sent gravel flying. He darted in close and leapt up, using rebar and exposed pipes like rungs on a ladder to climb up one massive arm.

He had spotted it before his ascent: a knot of tendrils near the shoulder where the organic shell hadn’t fully sealed.

Anakin slammed the pipe into it, feeling something soft and slick give under his assault. Then dropped as the man howled, the entire mass convulsing.

He hit the ground hard, rolled, grabbed a loose scrap of sheet metal, and plunged it into the back of the knee. The man staggered. His balance shifted too fast, too much mass moving in real time, unable to stabilize. Anakin struck again, driving another loose pipe through the opening where one bloodshot eye bulged, initially filled with panic, then just the makeshift weapon. 

The towering body collapsed in a wet, loud heap, debris falling off in chunks. 

The second was down, but Anakin wasn't done.

The woman behind the wheel—Squealer, though he didn’t know her name yet—was already throwing the car into gear when Anakin moved. He slid across the hood, yanked the door open, and dragged her out by her shirt. He slammed her head into the chassis.

“You’re going to tell me who sent you,” he said, voice level despite the exertion mere seconds ago.

She spat blood and laughed, a facade of defiance against cracked lips. “You’re dead, you freak. You think this means anything?”

He slammed her face against the chassis until she whimpered.

“Name.”

“S-Skidmark!” she blurted. “It was Skidmark, alright?! He thought you’d make a good get! I was just supposed to drive!”

Anakin stared at her for a long moment, almost disappointed in how easy it was to get the information he needed. It seemed this capes lacked the discipline the Jedi and Sith were famed for. 

Then he let her go. She slumped to the ground, spluttering.

“Drive,” he said.

“What?”

He kicked the door shut. “Take me to him.”

“I—if I don’t—”

“You won’t need to worry about what he’ll do to you.”

She looked into his eyes, and whatever she saw there made her flinch.

“…Yeah. Okay,” she whispered, scrambling back into the driver’s seat. “You’re insane.”

Anakin said nothing as he climbed into the passenger seat beside her.

He didn’t know who Skidmark was. But tonight, he would. And when they met, he would teach him a lesson.

Something permanent.