"Hey, answer me. Who are you?" Paleoumbral asks again.
I sigh and finally respond, "Do you brush those big teeth of yours? Or do you enjoy smelling like a decomposing skunk?"
His reaction is definitely the first time I've ever seen an offended dinosaur. It's kind of funny how he raises his nose and uses his big eyes to glare down at me. "How rude. Do you talk that way to everyone you meet?" He asks me with a sense of indignation.
"Only the ones who piss me off." I retort. I suppose the actual reason he's a bad person is that he manipulates the elderly to put him in their will before killing them and making it look like an accident to get the money. But I think my petty grudge from over a year ago is the real reason I'm so determined to complete the mission.
Now that I think about it, the elder abuse pisses me off even more. So I think it's now a mix of the two, now that I remember his crimes.
"I am Chameleon, my mentor is the legendary Wraith. She tasked me with taking you down. So I shall." I announced to him. Activating Mr. Eun-ji's power and getting into a fighting stance.
"And why would you tell me that 'Chameleon'? Wouldn't that be compromising information for me to know? It's now common knowledge among heroes that Wraith is back, but her having a little protégé? I'm sure the higher-ups would promote me if I told them that." He responds, his big dumb dino tongue licking his non-existent lips.
"Well, I assume you won't live long enough to spill that info," I tell him.
He doesn't respond to that. However, I notice with my heightened senses that he's about to lift his leg to try and stomp on me, so I wait a second before running to the left to avoid it.
Getting a closer look at him, I see blue stripes all over him. That makes me think. Do Giganotosauruses have stripes? I don't have time to think further about that, because I see out of the corner of my eye, I see him leaning down to attempt to swipe at me.
I dodge forward. I'm now fairly close to his underbelly. This is so tedious. I can only manipulate shadows within a certain radius around me, Miss Claire's range is way larger than mine. If I were like her, I wouldn't have to do this.
Regardless, I've completed part one of my plan. I take a few seconds to charge up a larger shadow tendril to shoot straight at his underbelly, which looks rather unarmored, just as I thought. Paleoumbral notices that I'm charging up something, and he goes to stomp on me before I can launch it.
I have three options: launch the tendril now. Dodge his stomp, which will break my concentration and cancel my attack. Or I can take a gamble and keep charging until the last second and launch the tendril, hoping that it knocks him off balance and stops him from stomping me.
I decided on the latter, waiting about three more seconds before launching the tendril right before his foot tramples me.
My gamble half worked. It clearly hurt him and made him stumble; however, it only made his foot fall faster towards me, even though it's slightly farther back. I move my head back to prevent my mask from sustaining damage. It misses my head, but the middle claw gives me a scratch right across my body. If I took the whole force of that, I would've been bisected. I feel a little bit of blood pool on my clothes underneath the cloak.
Great. That puts me on a timer to end this.
I jumped back from underneath him on pure instinct, for some reason, I sensed danger. I hear him roar as the blue stripes on him erupt into flames of the same color. I feel the burning heat even from a distance away, my skin perpetually feeling as though I touched a hot stove, without any of the marks to show for it.
Blue fire, the hottest kind. My situation just keeps getting better, doesn't it?
He shoots a large fireball at me. I hop out of the way as it hits the ground where I was and explodes. Before I know it, a smaller one hits me straight in the abdomen. I drop and roll on the ground, trying to salvage my cloak from burning. The fire gets put out; however, my cloak has some burn holes in it, and my arms have some burn marks on them.
"Not so tough now, are we?!" He laughs. No wonder he's C rank. If the fight ended when I first hit him, he'd be no tougher of an opponent than Mad Hound was.
Think Chameleon. Think! At this rate, I'll either slowly bleed out or burn to death. If Miss Claire thought that he was an opponent I could win against, there must have been a reason.
For now, I need to focus on not getting hit by the fire. I reactivated Mr. Eun-ji's power. It's my only viable method of evasion. I haven't tried it yet, but since I have an okay handle on the basics of his power, my next step is to try the precognition aspect of his power.
I try to replicate Mr. Eun-ji's precognition aura movements from memory. I see less than a second into the future, where Paleoumbral slightly shifts to the left, which he does right after.
I need to stop this horrible habit of trying new things mid-combat, at least until I get better at improv. Right now, I suck at it.
Regardless, since I already tried it, I should go all in. I attempt again. I see his mouth slightly open half a second into the future, and in that moment, I jump back. When I do, a fireball hits the ground in front of me.
I suppose that even half a second can make a difference. Because I'm almost certain that if I get hit again, I'm dead.
I don't need precognition for this next part. I see him charging up a large fireball. He could torch the entirety of the block with that. He must be immune to his flames, because there's no way he'd try it otherwise.
Wait.
His outer armor! That's it! He's immune to his flames on the outside. That gives me an idea.
He's still charging that large fireball. It must take time for him to make something that powerful. I make a small portal in front of me, and on the other side of the portal is his snout. I punch through the portal full force, having a shadow hand punch him in the snout. The hit makes him stagger a bit, I take that opportunity to make another portal in front of me, but this time the other end is in his mouth. I palm strike in the portal, and a shadow hand hits the fireball, sending it back in his throat as it explodes inside of him.
The large, dark flaming Giganotosaurus in front of me falls on its side and shrinks back down into a human. The man is masked up and in a black bodysuit, but I can tell he is fairly built. He slowly stands up and swings at me with a jab to the face. I weave under it. He is much slower now. Obviously, the fireball exploding in him hurt.
When he saw that I weaved under his punch, he front kicked me straight in the center of my stomach, hitting my scratch mark just right enough to make me bleed more.
Damn he still hits hard.
I put my hands up in a fighting stance. I need to end this. Now.
I rush in and hook him right in the chin, knocking him off balance. I then jump up and wrap my legs around his neck, swinging myself down and flipping him over onto the ground whilst I land on my feet.
I reach my hand out. And two tendrils shoot out and pierce Paleoumbral in the heart and the stomach.
I…
No, Chameleon, killed a hero. I turn around, trying to avoid looking at my deed. I walk back over to Miss Claire, who was watching from afar, leaning on a nearby street lamp.
"Well, Chameleon, if ya didn't stop that large fireball yourself, I was gonna swoop in and kill him before he launched that thing. Good job. I'm proud of you." She says while pulling down the hood of my cloak, just to ruffle my hair affectionately.
"I had it handled, Miss Claire," I reply.
"Of course you did, kiddo. I'll say, nice improv back there, sending the fireball back down him. You're a battle-smart little Chameleon, aren't ya?" She says, praising me. It makes me feel warm inside, not in the lit-on-fire way like earlier.
"I'm happy you're proud of me, Miss Claire, but I'm still bleeding out, and my burns hurt," I say weakly, now sitting down against the street lamp.
Miss Claire doesn't verbally respond, but I see her visibly panic. She scrambles to open a portal, and she grabs a first aid kit out of it. She opens it up and grabs a few things that I can't exactly see. My vision is getting hazy. I feel something prick me, it seems that she's stitching up my wounds.
Soon she finishes up and helps me stand. From that same portal, she grabs a water bottle. She takes my mask off and puts it to my mouth. I get a nice drink of water. She tosses the water bottle and the first aid kit haphazardly into the portal before putting the mask back on me.
"Well, I was gonna let you tag along to observe me taking down a target, but-" I cut her off before she could finish her sentence. "I'm perfectly fine if I'm just observing you, Miss Claire."
She nods and lets go of me. I wobble a bit before stabilizing on my feet. Miss Claire starts walking, motioning for me to follow her. I walk behind her.
The walk is long but silent. Walking down the dark, dreary, and empty streets. This is way too convenient. I understood why there were no other people by the Giganotosaurus that was Paleoumbral; however, we are quite a bit away from there now. We should have run into a passerby at the least.
We arrive outside a parking garage. I am noticing a pattern here. Targets seem to be in these often.
We walk inside and up a few floors. I see a pillar that has a big white number five on it. I spot a man a few rows down. Assumably the target. Miss Claire takes my hand and we run over there. When the man notices us, he steps behind the pillar, and we see him run to the edge and hop down.
However, before Miss Claire can give chase. A tall, bald, and darker man steps out. Coated mostly in iron, aside from his head.
The ranker, Ironhide. First time in a while since I've seen him in person.
"It seems Sonar's intel was right," he says gruffly before following up, "You do have a young sidekick with you, Claire."
Sonar…
Mr. Eun-ji?! He fed info to Ironhide?!
Actually, that shouldn't surprise me. Mr. Eun-ji seemed to admire Ironhide based on what he told me.
Miss Claire, on the other hand, seems to be seething. I hear her mutter, "Eun-ji, that loose-tongued piece of-" She sighs and cuts off her muttering.
"Stooping so low as to indoctrinate a mere child? That's a line I didn't think even you would cross, Claire." Ironhide says, chastising her.
Oh, where does this guy get off saying that?!
I step forward and poke his chest with my pointer finger, "Shut your goddamn mouth you half-baked bystander! Where do you get off talking to Miss Claire like that when you sit in a cuck chair watching the top two heroes take turns having their way with your life!"
Miss Claire's jaw drops as she physically recoils, and her mask falls off. "R- Chameleon! Who taught you to talk like that?!" She says with a mixture of shock and pride. A smirk is plastered on her face while she resists laughing.
Ironhide seems equally in shock, "It seems it's worse than I thought, that woman has warped your mind." He says, not even looking at me, clearly affected by my words.
He reaches out to grab my arm, but Miss Claire intercepts by smacking his hand away with a shadow tendril that launches out of the ground between Ironhide and me.
"Claire, you know better than anyone that I could take the boy and you couldn't stop me without risking hurting him too." Ironhide states.
Based on the way that Miss Claire reacted when he said that, her face scrunching up as she scoffed, Ironhide must be correct.
That wouldn't be good. If Mr. Eun-ji's stories about what happened to him say anything, I'd be forced to take the same path.
Hell no.
I refuse to ever be one of those pathetic, rotten heroes, even the "good ones" perpetuate the system. I'd rather bite my tongue off and die. Seeing Ironhide's sorry face only reminds me of my hatred, making me regret my kill less and less. Adding to my conviction of completing Miss Claire's mission.
Regardless, my next step should be finding a way out of this mess. Being taken away is equal to death for me. So I need to prevent that since Miss Claire can't.
I decide to speak up, a gamble based on that man's pathetic and hypocritical honor code. "How about this? A game. If I win, you leave with no complaints. If you win, I'll go with you and comply fully."
Ironhide seems visibly interested in my words. "What is this game you speak of?" he inquires.
"Hit me three times full force. I lose if any part of me, aside from my two feet, touches the ground." I explain, looking up at him expectantly
"Make it five times, and I'll agree to your game," Ironhide replies.
Well, he made it harder to win. However, at least he took the bait of the game. Even if he probably only considered it because the thought of me realistically winning didn't enter my mind.
Miss Claire's jaw drops. She says nothing, knowing she can't do much about it at the current moment. But she's probably thinking something like: "What the hell do you think you're doing?!"
Well, it's this or nothing. I need to tank five attacks from the rank 25 hero.
Seeing as I almost died from a C rank earlier, alongside my current injured but patched-up state…
This is gonna be near impossible, but I have an idea.
"Deal," I tell him.