“Oh, shit!” one of the younger gangsters calls out, all the way down on the ground floor.

He runs past the reception desk over to the large man on the ground, proceeding to shake him by his collar. The rest of the hooligans arrive, looking both of them over and remaining a pace away from the suspicious scene. The fat man’s gun is missing.

“Damn, did someone ice Andre?” one of the hooligans in the back-crowd whispers, looking around anxiously.

In the corner of his eye, he sees something reflective catching the moon’s light just behind the stairs.

As he turns, stressing his neck to get a better look, it moves further into the staircase’ shadow.

“There!” he calls out, pointing at the spot where he’d seen the thing. At the same time, he’s drawing a colt.45.

The crowded hooligans turn around, looking to where the boy’s gun is pointed.

“Come on out, bitch! What kinda beef you had wit’ Andre?!”

Something begins extending, slowly, from behind the staircase after the boy calls out.

Andre’s gun is finally illuminated, held by its barrel in Scott’s hand.

“Drop it!” the kid yells.

Scott indeed drops it, stepping out with his hands up. His palms, however, are opened towards the hooligans, all looking him up and down in awe of his armor’s swagnitude.

The palm-lights are soundless as they flash on, the ridiculously strong beams of illumination making all but Scott fall to the reception, to their knees, to the floor, or even straight into the wall behind them as they grasped at their blinded eyes. All are yelling in pain, panic and rage.

Some of the gangsters with their guns already drawn fire wildly in Scott’s direction, with little worry for each other, and but one bullet grazing his shoulder-plate as he steps, swiftly and quietly, to the left of where they’d last seen him.

Some of them are getting to their feet, now, as Scott skulks around to their side. Their cacophonous swearing, threats, and groaning drown out any sound he makes, including the “click–click–click” his electric baton makes as he extends it.

Scott waits, cracking his neck and rolling his wrists and shoulders as the mob rises in more of its entirety, flicking the baton on as he moves in.

A sharp “crack!” sounds as he strikes the first of many hooligans in the arm with it. Their arm spasms, much as a meat-appendage tends to when hit with electricity. 

The gangster cries out, a gurgle behind his shouting, but the rest, in their blinded and confused state, cannot react at all. The gangster falls to the floor as Scott strikes him in the back of the neck, arcing shocks and sparks flying as he goes.

Moving on, Scott takes his baton to yet another’s exposed shoulder.

He is deliberate and careful in his thwacking. These brief meetings between their vital spots and the baton’s intense shocking power seemingly knocking the gangsters unconscious, providing more for the others to trip on. He skirts around the mass of discombobulated felons and psuedofelons, avoiding getting pulled into the mess they were creating for each other, swinging as he goes. Some of the smarter ones even have time to yell to not fire, lest they hit each other.

Scott’s momentum only stutters when he nearly swings straight into a younger boy, dressed like the other gangsters but obviously much shorter and scrawnier. His features, much weaker. Younger. The boy is standing there, shaking, having entered a shuddering, twitchy protective stance upon feeling Scott’s approach. Like many of those he’d just blasted, his face is caked with tears.

Scott had just lowered his baton and moved to skirt around the boy when the voice of another rings out from behind his small form, on the ground.

“Missed an eye, fucker.”

In a crawling position save for one raised arm pointing a long-barrelled revolver at Scott is a Korean-looking thug, with only one of his eyes shut. Both are streaming tears, but one is left open, reddened but obviously focused on Scott’s visor.

Scott plants himself firmly between the younger boy and the line of fire as the Korean squeezes the trigger, pushing the former behind his bulky self. 

The Mark-One’s onyx-black plating at Scott’s rightmost hip forming huge cracks as the bullet buries itself into it, Scott lets out a wrenching grunt. We get an X-ray of the D-30 blocking the bullet’s progress, underneath the suit’s plating and coat, barely bruising his lower torso.

Two more shots go off, hitting Scott in the upper body and further unbalancing him as he reels from the first, but one more flash is all it takes.

Opening his palm towards his attacker as he reaches to stabilize himself, yet another scream can be heard as his other eye is put out of commission.

They manage to fire but one more panic-shot straight into the ground before Scott stomps on their wrist, proceeding to strike them right in the side of the neck with his baton.

He clicks the baton off and steps away from the now-unconscious young brute, catching his breath.

Scott twists around, seeing his handiwork. The only movement among the hooligans, mostly entirely downed as they are, are the twitches of those who had recently been electrocuted. Those, and those of the younger boy, still cowering crouched near the ground, but unharmed.

Meanwhile, Ranov is far upstairs, sat tapping down a call number on his fancy-looking smartphone. Beside him on a counter is his shot glass, entirely empty.

Back downstairs, Scott turns to the staircase up. 

He doesn’t sheath his baton as he starts, slowly and measuredly, making his way up them.

At the top, he sees written in thin lettering, the words highlighted by the moon: “floor 2”.

“That was a lot of them, may’ve even been all of ‘em–” Scott thinks to himself.

“I could leave now, just gotta find someone who looks like a leader…” he continues, as he swings the door haphazardly open.

“Take them down, and it’ll really put some defeat in their hearts.” he finishes, as a bat comes careening straight into his helmet’s visor.

Reeling back, Scott barely manages to catch himself before falling entirely back down the stairs.

Through his visor, now cracked on one side, he sees the rough outline of a man on the other side of the doorframe. His face, suggestive of an older man of mexican origin and home to an all-obscuring and graying beard, is illuminated by a clip-on flashlight affixed to his hoodie’s breast pocket.

“Gah, fuck!” Scott nearly says aloud.

“Really should’ve finished up that helmet-mounted display thing rather than going into this shit dark!”

The man’s voice comes out husky, hidden just as much under his thick accent as his mouth’s movements are under his beard.

“What’you think you’re doing?! Do you seriously plan on messing with Ranov’s affairs, boy?! On his home turf!?”

The man swings at Scott yet again, grunting as he goes! The very way he breathes is suggestive of a life filled with cigars and spicy food!

Scott barely manages to parry this with an arm-guard!  He twists this arm’s hand to face palm-out at the man, but is hit with a shoulder-tackle before he can fire!

 Scott’s sent plummeting down the stairs, crashing hard twice before rolling down the rest of the way. Thankfully, the armor takes most of the shock.

He’s forced himself to a sitting position by the time the man’s bat is flying at him yet again!

This time, he cracks it aside entirely, feeling little-to-no strength behind the blow! He sees no hands behind it, however, as it had been thrown! A clever distraction by the man, still charging his way down the stairs to Scott!

Scott raises his palm-lights towards his attacker as he bounds off the stairs at their end, but is too slow! Both his arms are grabbed by the wrist, and the man’s arms are strong! He forces Scott’s hand-beams to face away from him as they light up!

With an adult’s strength, he forces Scott to the ground, planting a knee on his chest.

“You think you’re dealing with some old fella, who’s gone soft, or’s just too scared of the police to anythin’ serious?!”

Scott continues, starting to yell as he does, trying to bring the beams to hit the man’s bewhiskered face. In response, the man shifts his grip to obscure the lights themselves, locking his and Scott’s fingers as he plant’s Scott’s knuckles on the floor.

“He’s young, guey. Young, and angry, and strong. He don’t care who you work for: this challenge is gonna have ‘im raining fire. Now, even if I let you go, he’d cap you dead eventually.”

Scott tried to knee the guy off with his unrestrained legs, but the man was heavy. Slightly overweight, even.

“You know why that is?” the man says, bringing his face closer to Scott’s.

“‘Cuz he lives for control. He’s gonna be number one ‘til he dies, like he told all of us, and he ain’t gonna let any disrespect slide.”

The man raises his head away from Scott’s visor, now foggy from his breath, and looks towards the mass of passed-out criminal underlings.

“And it seems you’ve disrespected him, boy.”

“So what?” Scott pipes up defiantly, though it is obvious the man’s knee on his chest is making breathing hard.

“I don’t see him anywhere.”

The man laughs. “That’s ‘cause I’m not gonna call him down here, boy. I can tell you’re just a kid, and you deserve to live a bit longer. We’re gonna wait for the police to get here, an–”

Scott gives the man no time to finish. “No,” he thinks to himself.

“This guy just confirmed their boss is in here. I didn’t want to do this, but I’m gonna neuter this gang if it’s the last thing I do.”

Scott pulls his wrists to the side, managing to move them just enough under the man’s forceful hold to shift the pressure to a small plate on each one’s side.

On either wrist, this section of plate is pushed in like a button, producing a dull “click” sound.

Before, Scott’s palm-lights made no sound when they fired, but now they produce a low, ominous buzz. 

The light shoots through the man’s fingers as he covers any that would come to his eyes with his hands, but soon these same hands begin to produce a sizzling sound.

The man cries out in Anguish, yanking his hands away from Scott and beginning to stand as he tries to escape the beams. As he does this, Scott delivers a kick to his stomach, sending him heaving.

Standing, picking his baton up from the ground and clicking it on, Scott steps up to the man and delivers a downwards strike straight into the back of his neck. As he rears back, he resists the urge to utter an “I like ‘ya cut, G.”

Having caught his breath again, Scott begins back towards the stairs. Being more careful this time, he begins by looking behind him. The only bodies he can see are unconscious. In the back of his mind, he could tell something was missing.

As Scott ventures up the stairs, switching his palm-lights back to blinding-mode, we switch focus to a smartphone’s screen.

Something is being texted, and upon completion it reads: “hes gone but im still scared” and “what if he comes back”.

It is the smaller kid from before, hiding behind the reception desk.

“Even if he does, he won’t hurt you–” we see a responding text say.

Far above, in Ranov’s bathtub, Yaga continues, using a speech-to-text function on their own smartphone to accommodate their wounded hand.

“–my methods allow me to learn things about all who enter and all who will enter this building, and that man is not one to hurt a child. Why do you think I chose you for this?” 

“Ok” the child responds, standing up. “how do I fix the electricity?”

“Just connect whatever’s blue with whatever’s yellow,” Yaga responds as the child steps towards the torn-open box of circuitry. “There should only be one of each.”

Now, Yaga’s voice comes out soft and measured, to the point of taking on a sinister tone.

“Connect only those two, understand? If I tell you my screens have turned back on, and the building’s lights are still off, then you’ve done everything right.”

 Scott, stepping out onto the second floor, finds the place a ghost-land. It is entirely quiet, and every door is closed. He flicks on the fat man’s flashlight.

“‘Til you die, huh?” Scott mutters.

“Let’s see about that.”