Three people advancing. Steps in the night, breaking silence. Breaking stillness, movement. Not with the wind, not from afar the cities noises. Just here. Presently, company. Martins smile broke into pieces, literally flowing apart like crushed ice melting into a puddle under New Yorkian summer sun. “One would do what you just did. The other would do what I will now. Maybe worse.” Most certainly.

With the words being spoke even Martin flowed up, just like the smile had vanished. With one movement standing up, a leg forward. His balance was perfect, his speed marked with the grace of the frequent fighter, the practitioner who hid it normally under a mask. Masks breaking now, falling apart, step by step. His headcover fluttered in the sudden wind, slipping off under his hand. He moved as if to shake out his hair in the wind. Brown fluttered there in the wind indeed, fluttered a shadow in the darkness, crowing his head. Yet, there was more. He stepped into the path of the passing strangers. Stepped, flowed. And threw the first two punches for liver and sternum without looking twice. He knew where things were that hurt in a human body, and these three were arguably human. They showed no difference to the eye at least.

You did not tell about the organizations. You showed. Taught for the bone. For remembrance. For effectiveness. He was Martin Stein not some wayward teacher. He was a killer. He could do this. A third punch went for a nose. Just flying along. Not even breathing hard. Eves widened. Not his three, three other pairs. Three pairs that wandered around looking at the thing that was attacking them, suddenly. Surprisingly among them. Moving. With grace.

The man hopped up with a certain measure of fluidity that marked him as nothing shy of well rehearsed. The three young people slowed their pace, but didn’t stop their advancement towards the pair at the bench. Shane watched the stranger with equal parts interest and confusion, trying to figure out what he was getting at. So far every action he’d made had seemed rather minimal and always, seemingly, to maintain an image. This, however, seemed to break with both of those constants. At least so far, anyways.

The one boy among the three of them began to take a few steps ahead of the two girls he was with. He tossed a smug smile back at one of the two girls who returned a frustrated and concerned look back in his direction. He started to open his mouth as he approached the man, but never quite got out much more out of his mouth then “so, what kind of a…” before he noticed a third eye on his opposite. Before he’d really had time to react, he’d already received two well-placed punches, and dropped to his knees. The two girls cried out in protest, and Shane leaned forward in his seat, impressed by the display. The boy lunged for the stranger, throwing a haymaker punch that didn’t come close to connecting with anything. The stranger landed a third punch centered in the boys face, knocking him out, collapsing face first to the ground. The two girls were screaming for help, but unwilling to move closer to their friend, and by proxy, his assailant.

Shane wasn’t entirely sure how best to handle the situation. He certainly wasn’t horrified by what he’d seen. Sure, the boy hadn’t asked for it, or provoked them in any way, but nature didn’t really demand a moral code when it came to natural selection. He stood up from the bench and walked up beside his fellow mutant. The two girls looked at him in horror as he approached the motionless body. Removing his hat, he revealed his bizarre face, bringing up their fear and frustration.

“You monsters!” The one girl shouted out, furious and on the verge of tears. Shane wasn’t impressed by the choice of words. If there was anything that he wouldn’t tolerate, it was name calling in relation to his appearance. ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me’ was an expression he’d often heard that seemed to play out in the opposite for him, more often then not. He could take a blow better then most, but he had a pretty fragile ego, and he did not deal with damage to it very well.

He dropped a few inches in height for a moment, very quickly. As if the ground he was standing on opened up all of a sudden and he’d fallen down a shallow hole. His one arm shriveled up into the sleeve of his tattered coat as well. His left arm, however, shot out very quickly, stretching out towards the screaming girl, taking on the appearance of a tentacle, or a whip. It wrapped itself around the girl’s neck as she tried to run away. Squeezing tightly, it began reeling the girl in, dragging her body along the dirt path towards the three men. His height didn’t seem to return, but his shriveled arm began to grow back again, only larger and more claw-like then it had been before.

He dragged the girl on top of the boy, not removing the whip from her neck. He looked to his three-eyed friend, seeing if he’d perhaps passed a test. He still didn’t know what the man had been trying to prove. He then turned his attention back to the girl, crouching down so that he was eye level with her. “So, I’m a monster then, eh?” He questioned. The resentment in his tone was unmistakable.

The fight was over ere it had really begun. The third girl was simply added to the pile of bodies by ways of a leg movement that made her appendages give off quite strained sounds. Breaking sounds really. Martin stood over them impassively, talking in a calm voice to Shane.

“You are. And you are not. The two ways of being. Two places to be. Your choice.”

He walked out into the night without making a sound. Just unnaturally flowing to the shadows and vanishing.

Shane wasn’t really quite sure what to make of the man’s parting words. Some kind of riddle, perhaps? He’d never actually learned his name, and the fact that Shane had seen the man do quite a fair bit, but still didn’t seem to understand him was both shocking and frustrating to him. He hadn’t set out that night to make a friend, so he wasn’t bothered that he hadn’t. In all honesty, he wasn’t sure why he was so irritated. As he stood there, he contemplated following the man, but was reminded of more pressing issues when one of the girls began to make a few groaning noises.

He took a few steps back, looking at the pile of motionless bodies piled up on the path. He’d killed before. He’d kill again. This time was different though. In every other instance, he’d hunted for the sake of survival. This was more of a senseless attack. Then he realized that it didn’t need to be that way. On any other occasion, just one of them would be enough to satisfy him, but there was a bit of an event that was coming up in the next few days, and packing on a few extra pounds might not be such a terrible thing for him to do.

Standing up, he cracked his knuckles and stretched wide. He took off his jacket and shirt and made his way towards the pile. The girl he had wrangled was the only one that seemed to be conscious, though her expression was empty. Shane formed his arm back into a whip again, looking around at the three young people, wondering where to start.