(GMR) CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: BACK TO THE REGULARLY SCHEDULED EVENT

Greg kicked at a loose can, sending it rattling into a nearby gutter as the sun dipped low over Brockton Bay, the orange haze turning the city’s grime into something almost picturesque. He had hoped the night air would clear his head. It hadn't. The sour taste of Taylor’s brush-off still lingered, an ache in his chest he couldn’t quite shake off. He’d stood up for her—done what no one else ever had for him, or for her—and she’d just walked off like it hadn’t meant a thing.

Patrol would fix that, he told himself. Patrol always did. Out here, even with his makeshift costume and empty hands, he could pretend he wasn’t Greg Veder, perennial loser. Out here, he was useful. He was Arknight, a hero. Someone who mattered.

Or at least, that was the idea. 

Tonight, though, the comfort refused to come. His thoughts kept circling back, replaying every detail of the hallway confrontation until the ache became something worse. His focus slipped, his foot caught the lip of a roof tile, and his stomach dropped out from under him as he pitched forward. 

He barely caught himself on the edge, gloves scraping against cold tar paper. Heart hammering, Greg clung there for a second longer, breathing ragged. All he could think then was that it would’ve been a perfectly Greg Veder way to go, falling to his death because he couldn’t stop sulking over a girl who didn’t even like him as a person.

“Still thinking about her?” Ruby’s voice asked gently in the back of his mind.

Greg pulled himself back onto the rooftop, his hands trembling. He slowed to a walk, then stopped altogether, staring out into the distance. “It was like I made things worse by stepping in.”

“That doesn’t mean you were wrong,” Blake’s words soothed, though it didn’t quite reach the knot in his chest.. “But it’s not something that gets fixed in one moment.”

“Regardless, sulking about it achieves nothing.” Weiss chimed in. “Patrol will clear your head. Focus.”

“Yeah,” Yang added, practically bouncing. “Let’s hit something until you feel better.”

Greg smirked despite himself, the tension easing for a breath. “You’re all terrible influences.”

He didn’t get the chance to say anything more, because that was when a flash of something appeared in the corner of his vision. 

Greg barely ducked in time as the world behind him erupted in an explosion, the heat of an explosion licking at his back, heat licking his back and a shockwave roaring where his head had been an instant earlier.

The culprit—Oni Lee—appeared an instant later, crouched on the fire escape railing of a building over, like some kind of gargoyle. The grenade pin was still clutched in his hand before it clattered uselessly to the ground, his mask turning toward Greg, leering and fanged.

“Oh hell no,” Yang hissed. “That’s—”

“Oni Lee,” Greg finished, breath catching in his chest.

Ruby’s voice screamed in his head, shrill with panic. “Move, Greg!”

He did as instructed. Instinct, aura, and sheer panic shoved him sideways just as another Oni Lee materialized, a grenade already swinging. The clone dissipated into white ash when the attack missed, but two more appeared, one above and the other behind.

Greg hit the rooftop hard, aura flaring without conscious thought in time to blunt what should’ve been a lethal finisher into a bruising shove. His chest ached from the impact, lungs seizing as his heart pounded. Sophia Hess was terrifying in her own way, but Oni Lee was something else entirely: a relentless, sociopathic machine of murder.

“Too fast,” Weiss hissed in his head. “You cannot simply dodge forever. Commit to a weapon. Any weapon.”

“Yeah, thanks for the pep talk, Weiss-cream,” Yang snapped, her voice almost gleeful despite the danger. “C’mon, Greg. He’s just one psycho with knives and grenades. You’ve got us.”

Blake calmly slid into the conversation. “Focus. He’s testing your defence. The moment you overextend, he’ll gut you.”

Greg’s hand clenched into a fist, and for a heartbeat Crescent Rose flickered into reality. He swung awkwardly, half-remembered images from Ruby’s memories guiding the motion. The scythe sliced clean through a clone before winking out of existence again, leaving him holding nothing but air.

“Damn it!” he swore, his concentration failing.

“Do not panic,” Weiss snapped. “Observe his movements. He teleports just after he throws his grenades or knives—”

“Yeah, I’ve read PHO,” Greg muttered, backing up. His aura flared brighter, Ruby’s speed prickling at his legs. “Not exactly comforting right now.”

He leapt down into an alley just as a knife sliced past the space where his neck had been. Another blade struck the ground at his feet, aura flaring bright from the strain of deflecting shrapnel. Oni Lee didn’t say a word; he didn’t need to as he kept up with Greg’s movements. The cape’s presence alone was enough to set his nerves on fire, the intent obvious. 

To kill Greg quickly.

And then the cold realization slammed into Greg: Oni Lee—and by proxy the ABB, and most of the Brockonites on PHO—knew the approximate location of where he lived.

He had shoved that worry aside as there had been too much else: the PRT’s testing, Armsmaster’s warnings, the Butcher, and telling his parents and getting their support. He had eventually forgotten about it. 

But now, the memory of that night, of Oni Lee’s silent, murderous attention as he watched from a rooftop resurfaced, sending a chill down Greg’s spine that even Yang couldn’t laugh off. His parents were downstairs, right now, probably still reorganizing the basement into a workshop for him. 

“Crap, crap, crap—” Greg hissed, fumbling for a plan. He couldn’t let Oni Lee get near them.

With a burst of aura and desperation, Greg sprinted deeper into the alley, narrowly outpacing another grenade’s blast. His sneakers skidded on loose gravel as he vaulted a trash can, panting hard.

He didn’t stop running until he reached the dead end, and when the alley ended in a brick wall, he spun on his heel. Greg knew he wasn’t the smartest, but he had played enough video games to know the basics about fighting a teleporter: limit the angles to box them into a killzone. With the wall behind him, Oni Lee’s options narrowed, making it far easier to predict the cape’s movements and dodge them. 

It also limited his own movements, but Greg had Ruby’s speed and Blake’s clones to make this plan manageable. 

Now, all he had to do was fight. 

Heat bloomed through his limbs, anger and fear mingling until Crescent Rose appeared again into his grip, more solid this time. He leveled it at the cape.

“This was supposed to be a stress walk,” Greg said, breathless. “But fine, I’ll rethink my life choices later.”

He braced himself as Oni Lee’s group of clones closed in, grenade pins already pulled.

There was no doubt about it: dealing with Sophia was a hundred times more preferable to dealing with this silent murder hobo.