Chapter Text
A ping breaks him out of his reverie.
Blacklights from his fish tanks cast the dark in a soggy, ghostly glow. In his tired eyes, his spreadsheet monitor smears through his notetaking monitor—white-lined charts, Arab numerals, and hanzi blur together over a black background into an artsy, geometric mass of nonsense. The news monitor, on the other hand, glows blindingly white with a new pop-up. The brightness reignites his cluster headache, like an ice pick attempting to lobotomize him through his left eye. He has to screw up his face to push the pain away, squint to focus.
Ah. Another news story about his target.
Ever since he received an anonymous tip a couple years back, he’s been digging up dirt on the Perfect Hero, Nice. It’s one of the most challenging investigations he’s conducted so far; TREEMAN Corp is notoriously tight-lipped about their brightest star, and they keep just as tight control over any media regarding him. All public records of his birth, his accomplishments in school, even his ballet career have been rewritten to hide his civilian name and erase any potential connections to his peers. Any Nice-related videos, news articles, blog posts, and forum threads that aren’t explicitly authorized by TREEMAN are scrubbed within minutes of posting—sometimes before his algorithms can even catch wind of them.
FOMO posts are barely any better. Gossip, of course, is allowed; TREEMAN needs to know what the public thinks in order to market their perfect little hero properly. Nice Spotters™ are also plentiful in this day and age, so he’s put together a fairly comprehensive system to track the fraud around X-City based on posted sightings. But anytime someone shares useful info outside of that—talk of injuries that don’t match up with his publicized battles, speculation on his private life and relationships, sightings and encounters that paint a darker image of Nice’s goals, or whatever else—they’re mobbed with cultish replies until they delete or their account gets mysteriously suspended, wiped from the internet altogether.
Thankfully, he’s got several bots scraping content like that and saving it to his private servers, so at least he has some material to work with. But the fact that it gets removed at all, and so quickly that nobody has the chance to see or discuss it…
And don’t get him started on official channels. All they put out is blatant propaganda. Any attempts to dig deeper are stonewalled. Even his old contacts in the courts and the police force won’t give him anything, not even security camera footage—whether it’s because they have nothing to give, or they’ve been bribed or coerced into silence, he can’t say. Bribery, usually, is traceable; coercion is harder, but not impossible to track. Whoever’s behind it is a pro, though, because he can’t find traces of either even though he knows something is afoot.
So he’s been making do with what he has: creating a timeline of all the strange, controversial, nefarious moves Nice has made, all based on deleted snippets from suspended accounts. Cross-referencing Nice’s off-record movements with unusual occurrences in the areas he allegedly visits. Drawing any parallels he can find between Nice’s potential actions and TREEMAN Corp’s interests—investments, land purchases, the works. When he can, he’s hunted down alt accounts, traced IP addresses, interviewed private citizens with the promise that they’ll remain unnamed when he goes public. It’s long, slow, tedious research, conducted in the scant time between client cases, consultations, and the pro-bono jobs his viewers bring to him during streams.
The past few weeks, though, he’s noticed some… deviations from the typical pattern. More inoccuous photos of Nice have been removed, even from the fanatical Nice Spotter accounts. He sees why everytime he digs through the library his bots use as a dumping ground: more and more often over the last month or so, people have captured candid photos of Nice that aren’t… Well, flattering is the wrong word; he’s always good-looking. But his smile is tight, strained, more visibly fake. His eyes are glassier than usual, nearly doll-like. There’s the tiniest slump to his shoulders.
Honestly, the recently removed videos are more alarming. In one, Nice flinches away—just barely—from Moon’s touch during a talkshow. In the next, Nice freezes up in the middle of a battle, a few seconds too long to dive out of the way of a thrown car; it clips his arm as it sails past, snapping his shoulder out of its socket, bending his elbow backwards, slashing open his forearm with a nasty gout of blood. In another video, the camera catches Nice dropping that oh-so-perfect mask for just a few seconds—revealing a blank, hollow-eyed look in its place—only for him to drag perfection back up and paste it haphazardly over his features, uncanny and wrong, the moment he realizes there are eyes on him. And in the worst, most recent video, he leans forward into a telegraphed sword swipe—the sort of obvious, amateurish attack he could have dodged with his eyes closed—and accepts a clean slash down his torso as if it’s a hug from a friend.
It’s maddening. He doesn’t like it, not one bit. It’s why he hasn’t taken a single break from his investigation in the last three days.
And he doesn’t want to be worried about this target, this corporate attack dog, this sanitized joke of a hero. Of the current Top 10, Nice is the fakest of them all. But… damn it, these aren’t the only concerning things he’s noticed about Nice recently.
He drags his gaze back to the news. “No.15 Hero Nice Donates 20 Million Yuan to Bailuo Children’s Institute,” is splashed across the top. Timestamped two minutes ago. Accompanying the article is a dazzling photograph of the man of the hour, perfectly windswept, smiling that vapid smile of his as he shakes hands with an elderly man in a suit.
Charitable donations are, of course, a great way for top heroes to spend their obscene wealth. Great for publicity, but also great for the community. It’s something he can—begrudgingly—respect. What makes his stomach drop is the timing.
The sizeable donation Nice made two weeks ago was notable. The media ate it up, praising his selflessness so superfluously that he shot up half a rank on that alone.
The second donation, only last week and just as significant as the first, was startling and suspicious—at least, it was to him. Once again, nobody else batted an eye; Nice became the media’s darling for several days, and then the world moved on.
Today’s donation—the third, likely final one—is damning. But based on the live chat blowing up at the bottom of the article, nobody else seems to be connecting the dots. They don’t have a goddamn clue.
As a minor celebrity who became a top-100 hero within a month of signing with TREEMAN Corp, Nice’s salary—as well as the hefty paychecks from modeling and brand deals—has been public record for all seven years he’s worked on the scene. With the addition of this latest, beefiest donation, he’s given away nearly six years worth of his wealth—all in less than three weeks. It’s obvious to anyone with working eyes that he’s draining his savings, getting his affairs in order.
Unfortunately, as usual, it appears that the rest of the world is blind to the things they don’t want to see.
In the photo—captured only minutes ago, if the article is to be believed—Nice’s smile isn’t the shallow simulacrum of heroism he’s been using in recent years. His smile is dazzling, boyish and full and true, actually reaching his eyes for once. And the eyes. They aren’t glassy or dead—not like they’ve been all month, all year. They sparkle in the sun, glittering with determination. With resolve.
He’s been trying to ignore it. He’s been half-heartedly deluding himself, telling himself that he’s seeing things—falling for the propaganda, sympathizing with a fraud. But he’s never been able to lie to himself, not really, not even before he gained enough Trust to become a walking lie-detector. So he hasn’t left this computer for three days straight, neither to eat nor to sleep, neglecting his hygeine and health in a way that would be intolerable to his civilian half, looking for proof that the pattern he’s been tracking is a fluke, a trick, a cheap media stunt. But now, looking at those eyes…
There’s no denying it anymore. He knows what this is.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit,” he swears, lurching from his chair. The world swirls around him, but Trust gives him the endurance he needs to throw himself through his blackout curtains and into his flat proper. The afternoon sun jolts like electricity through the icepick headache in his eye, but the pain dies off quickly—it always does, on Day 3. (Day 4 is a much harder beast to battle, but he’ll take a break before it comes to that. Just. Not now.)
Bathroom. Strip. Shower—keep it cold, can’t spend too long sinking into the heat. He fumbles through his civilian self’s age-old haircare routine, skips half the steps in his haste, moves on. Hands shaking—blood sugar’s too low—the jar of sugar scrub slips from his numb white fingers, cracks open like an egg, splatters jasmine-scented slush across the tiles. Fuck. Just use the bar soap. Clean up and replace that later. God, it’s fucking cold.
Turn off the water. Towel off. Brush teeth. Sprint out of the bathroom, towards the dresser—far wall, behind the screen, next to the bed, upper two drawers.
A fresh, clean copy of his hero costume settles over his shoulders like armor. It brings just enough clarity back to his sleep-deprived brain that he remembers to fill up his bag: work phone, wallet, transit card, burner phone, a handful of pre-packaged snacks from the pantry because god damn he’s shaking so badly, a water bottle, and the extra-large hoodie, joggers, and baseball cap he never returned to his ex—just in case he needs to smuggle the fakest “hero” in existence away from any cameras.
He’s halfway out the door when he realizes he’s still in his house slippers and curses some more, but turns back. His custom compression boots are a medical necessity, but they’re such a damn hassle to put on and he’s on a time limit—
Precisely fifteen minutes after that article was posted, the truth-seeking hero Enlighter steps onto the fastest train he can catch towards that press conference, hoping to hell and back that he’ll get there before the perfect hero Nice decides to slip away from the crowd and commit suicide.