He Who Fights with Monsters 5

3

Jason only jabbed a pinprick against Thanh’s soul, but it was the most violating thing the man had ever experienced. He shrieked in fear and pain, even though the sensation lasted but a fraction of a second.

“I really don’t know!” Thanh begged. “They tracked your boat; that’s how they knew you were coming. That’s all I know, I swear!”

Thanh still couldn’t see Jason standing behind him and his aura senses were clamped down by Jason’s aura suppression. As for his magic senses, with the absence of the light, Shade was once again masking Jason’s presence. Thanh’s nerves rose towards panic, as all he could sense was the razor claw gripping his soul.

“I’m not going to kill you,” Jason said finally. “You should be doing your real job, which is not trying to hunt me down. It’s protecting people from the dangers they don’t even know are there. Your power is too valuable to lose from that fight, so you get to live. I suggest you go back to your job and be very, very diligent about carrying it out.”

The pressure suddenly vanished from Thanh, who immediately shot off like a rocket. A path of light spread out under his feet as he fled with all the speed he could muster.

“Shade,” Jason said. “Have Farrah tell the Network what happened. Make sure they buy up the recordings of all these on-lookers. Tell them to be generous about it too. These people could use the money.”

“I imagine the Network will want to speak to you.”

“I don’t want to speak to them. Remind them that part of the agreement was that the Network would stop coming after me, and let them know that if they are going to be sloppy about the terms, then so will I.”

“I don’t think they’ll like that,” Shade said.

“I’m done caring about what people like,” Jason said. “If they want something from me, they can pay for it.”

The stars from Jason’s cloak that were floating around him returned to the cloak, then dimmed down to nothing. The street was once again plunged into darkness.

“…should be doing your real job, which is not trying to hunt me down. It’s protecting people from the dangers they don’t even know are there…”

Adrien Barbou closed the video file with a sigh, created a folder and moved the file into it. He pressed a button on his desk.

“Fiona, please arrange a meeting with Mrs West at her earliest convenience.”

ALL I CAN DO IS MY BEST

Jason walked down the single street of the dilapidated West African township. Buildings of clay brick and rusted, corrugated iron were silent and the streets empty. The only people he saw were amongst the tents set up at the far end of the town, where people in hazmat suits were bustling about. They had too much to do, too few people to do it and too little resources to do it with.

He made his way down the dusty street, the heat pounding down like a blacksmith’s hammer. It wasn’t until he drew close to the tan tents, set up in neat rows, that the busy humanitarian workers noticed him. A hazmat-suited woman rapidly approached and started yelling at him in French.

“What the hell do you think you’re…”

She trailed off as she met his eyes, seeing their silver colour.

“Are you him?”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Who are you?”

“Dr Chloe Baudrillard. What do I call you?”

“It’s probably best I don’t leave a name. It’s one less thing you have to tell when people come asking about me.”

“You seem certain they will.”

“Once you see what I can do, you will be too.”

“I’ve heard the stories. From people I trust, but it doesn’t seem possible.”

“A place like this could use a little impossible, don’t you think?” he asked.

“You’re damn right it could. If you can do what they say…”

“I can. But only for as long as people don’t come looking for me,” Jason said.

“I was told that keeping quiet was your rule, but I can’t promise that we can stop people from talking,” she said. “I was told to give you whatever you need and stay out of your way, but people talk. Obviously, or I wouldn’t have heard about the Eurasian man with silver eyes.”

“I’m not looking to build a legend,” Jason said. “I’m just looking to help people. The goal is to do as much good as we can for as long as we can, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is. So, what do you need?”

“Some privacy and all the sick people you’ve got.”

She led Jason, but after a short distance, he stopped.

“Is there a problem?” she asked.

“I need to see someone,” he said. “Go to where I need to be and I’ll find you.”

She frowned, turned to look at the tents and then back to Jason, but he was already gone.

“What the… does he think he’s Batman?”

Elsewhere in the camp, Jason stood outside a tent and let a little of his aura show. Shortly thereafter, another hazmat-suited woman appeared, this one with a bronze-rank aura.

“You’re here,” she said. “You’re Jason Asano?”

“Yes.”

“You realise that the Network isn’t slacking off on this, right? We are helping. We just aren’t making a spectacle of it.”

“I respect that,” Jason said. “We’re both working in secret, only at different points on the scale. If we aren’t more direct in using what we can do, though, secrecy will cost lives.”

“If the secret comes out, you think it will make things easier once the world descends on us?”

“This isn’t a hospital full of camera phones and media saturation,” Jason said. “We have leeway here and we should use it.”

“You think we don’t want to march through here, raising people up off their sickbeds? We have to look beyond today, to the next outbreak and the next one. Plus, there’s only so much mana to go around.”

Jason plucked a wooden box out of the air, sliding off the lid to reveal stacks of bronze-rank coins.

“Would this help?”

The woman didn’t answer for a moment as she looked at the coins, then shook her head as if to clear it.

“You’re willing to just hand these over?”

“You want some iron ones as well? Actually, give me a list of everywhere I can find Network personnel working on this and I’ll make some drop-offs.”

“That’s very generous,” she said. “It doesn’t change the fact that what you’re doing puts us all in jeopardy.”

“You could look at it as a safety precaution,” Jason said. “If anyone latches on to your activities, you can pass it off as the work of the magic healer roaming around.”

“It’s not as simple as you make out.”

“It never is. All I can do is my best, based on what I know and what I can do.”

“Well,” she said. “I don't like what you're up to, but it's not like I can stop it. And I am going to take these coins.”

Jason walked into the large tent, Chloe beside him in her hazmat suit. There were people laid out in rows, letting out a discord of feeble moans.

“Are you sure you want to see?” he asked. “Once you do, you’ll never see the world in the same way again.”

“You think I should choose ignorance?”

“As a rule, no, but it's not so easy to pick up your regular life after peeking behind the curtain of the universe.”

“Just do what you came here to do.”

“Alright,” he said. “So be it.”

Jason moved to the first patient, who was agitated and delirious. The man’s aura was in chaos and Jason used his own to guide it back to calm. After months of practising, his aura control had eclipsed his abilities of the past.

From Chloe’s perspective, Jason’s mere presence calmed the man, lulling him into sleep. Then that presence passed through the room like a wave, the pitiful moans dropping away. Chloe felt it herself, like being in the presence of a benevolent dictator. Then Jason raised his hand, speaking words in a language she didn’t recognise.

Red light started glowing from within the patient. Chloe's attention transfixed. Looking at the light felt like looking at the man's beating heart, although it was stained with black taint. As she watched, the taint seeped out of the light, streaming up into Jason's waiting hand. It only stopped once the red light was clean, at which point it retracted into the man's body. Still unconscious, the patient looked immediately better.

Chloe looked on in disbelief as Jason went through the patients, one by one. He didn’t so much as glance at her until he had gone through every patient.

“You have more tents, right?”

Despite their misgivings, the aid workers had cleared out to let Jason loose on the patients after getting implausible but emphatic word from other camps. Now that he was gone, they were swarming over the patients, running tests multiple times out of raw disbelief. Chloe suspected that she herself was in some stage of shock, the unreality of it all completely disorienting.

“What you did in there, I can't explain,” she told Jason at the edge of the camp. “It looked like you were healing people with a magic spell.”

“It did, didn’t it?”

“You were right,” she said. “I’m not sure how to just move on after what I saw.”

“I imagine you’ll be busy in the next little while. By the time you have a chance to stop and think about it, you can just pass it off as some weird trick.”