The man in the flashy costume flinched nervously at the child’s expression and twitched his head slightly.
‘…Must have imagined it,’ he thought, looking again at the boy’s face and seeing only nervousness and fear.
Chameleon was unlucky.
He hadn’t quite caught the phrase the kid had muttered.
If he had, he might have kept some of his wariness.
But no.
“Where are the people who let you out?” the man asked in a cold, pressing tone.
For a moment, surprise flickered in the boy’s eyes at Chameleon’s words.
But it lasted only an instant, and the villain didn’t catch it.
Instead, he saw the slightly calmer face of a kid who was thoughtfully glancing somewhere to the side.
“Hmm… You mean those strange guys? There’s this one funny old guy. He looks almost like a mole, can you believe it?” Chameleon listened intently.
The man thought the boy didn’t even realize how important the information he was casually blurting out really was.
“And he has this cool red hard hat.” The boy’s eyes darted again, and Chameleon involuntarily followed his gaze.
“And his mustache is so bushy. And he waves his arms around a lot!”
‘Behind me!’ A chill ran down the man’s neck as he realized where the boy was looking.
The details he was describing weren’t something you could just remember from a single glance.
Chameleon reacted instantly.
Without turning around, he lunged straight at the child.
It was a reflexive decision, but no less correct for that.
Wasting time looking behind him would be a loss.
This kind of move could catch an opponent off guard.
Plus, he could take the kid hostage.
Why didn’t Chameleon just use his Quirk and disappear?
It was the nature of his abilities.
To activate it, he had to freeze completely still for a few moments, or be out of sight.
On top of that, the disappearance wasn’t instantaneous.
An opponent might be able to figure out what he was doing and stop him from escaping.
But all that was just words.
In reality, the villain didn’t care about any of those reasons right now.
As said, he had lunged on pure reflex.
Only halfway to the startled-looking boy did he realize what he had done and why.
An instant later, he was standing behind the child, holding him by the neck with his right hand.
“Stop!” Chameleon shouted.
But after looking around, he didn’t see anyone.
Still, he didn’t relax.
Who better than a master of disguise to know that an empty hallway isn’t necessarily empty?
“Try anything, and this kid’s neck will snap like a…”
His consciousness was flooded with intense pain.
Only at the very edge of passing out, already falling to the ground without strength, did he catch the cold gaze of the boy who had been trembling just a moment ago.
***
“Tch, what a jerk,” Samuel grimaced, looking at the body frozen at his feet.
“He had to flinch like that. What if I hadn’t had time to shrink the shield’s area? My ‘guide to the kitchen’ would be gone, and I’d be wandering around here until the end of time.” Follow the newest chapters on NovelPing.
He skeptically examined the unconscious “LGBT fan.” A thought crossed his mind.
Had he overdone it?
After all, the method he used to neutralize the guy was unconventional.
There was no guarantee he hadn’t made a mistake.
What if his guide to food croaked without medical help?
Samuel scratched his head.
‘That would be a little inconvenient.’
Speaking of the neutralization method, Samuel hadn’t borrowed it from A Certain Magical Index or even Railgun.
He took it from the Accelerator spin-off manga.
Not that it was particularly interesting, but the voice actor gave a very good performance, and the title was worth watching just for that.
Plus, the character himself was interesting and contradictory enough to be entertaining even alongside completely bland antagonists.
In the manga, Accelerator explained the trick as the ability to change the vectors of bioelectricity in the human body.
Samuel tried something similar.
In theory, this method was the least harmful from the huge list of possible ways to neutralize people that his abilities provided.
But Samuel didn’t really understand what “bioelectricity” was, so he translated it into his own terms.
Accelerator can’t complexly influence vectors he isn’t in contact with.
Thus, he couldn’t, for example, make a person’s blood flow backward by just touching their skin.
To do that, he would need to touch the bloodstream itself.
So how did he manage to control this “bioelectricity” if it doesn’t seem to flow along the surface of the body?
Samuel gave himself only one answer: nerve impulses.
Maybe there was another way, and Accelerator himself acted differently in the anime.
But with his knowledge, Samuel could only implement this version.
The point is that by touching, say, a hand, a person triggers a nerve impulse whose nature is similar to electricity.
The impulse travels to the brain through a complex system of fibers, trying to deliver the signal encoded in it.
Simple and clear.
But what does this mean for Samuel?
It means that for a fraction of a moment, he has the opportunity to directly influence the vector of that nerve signal.
Which is exactly what he did when Chameleon “grabbed” his neck (actually, his fingers dug into the vector shield, which was fitted to the skin within a millimeter).
After that, it was simple.
He amplified the signal and gave it a broken trajectory.
Theoretically, such a signal should have traveled along a path not intended by nature.
Then, amplified, it would stab into the brain.
How this would affect a person, Samuel didn’t know.
But looking at the body not in a hurry to wake up at his feet, he could guess it wasn’t good.
After hesitating for a few seconds, the guy bent down and put two fingers on the man’s wrist.
He had a pulse, though noticeably accelerated.
Looking closer, Samuel saw that the “body” wasn’t as still as it seemed at first glance.
Chameleon’s forehead was covered in sweat, and his pupils darted frantically under his closed lids.
Samuel would have sworn they moved independently of each other.
It looked creepy.
With each passing second, the guy believed less and less that his unexpected guest would be able to guide him anywhere, let alone to the kitchen.
“Next time, I’ll have to not amplify the vector so much,” he whispered into the air.
The fact that the man might die, or might already be dying, didn’t bother him much.
It might seem like the change from a kind, responsive guy to an indifferent killer happened too quickly.
But it wasn’t.
Samuel had always been like this.
He cared little for the fate of people he mentally classified as “bad.” He cared just as little about the fact that their “badness” was his own subjective opinion.
Take the case of “saving” that weird devil girl.
If, after his questions, he had determined who the “victim” was and who the “villain” was, he would have joined the fight without hesitation.
The result would most likely have been broken bones for the thugs.
After all, a non-working leg and the need to move on crutches doesn’t exactly help with restraint.
Much more than the possible death or injury of an unknown villain in a flashy costume, the guy was concerned about the fact that the inhabitants of this underground complex had clearly deluded themselves about what had happened.
That was expected, though.
The villains couldn’t possibly have assumed that the brat who, a few hours ago, could barely move light wooden blocks with his power would be capable of escaping on his own.
The presence of some third force that influenced the boy’s release was the most likely assumption.
Now, Samuel needed to figure out how to profit from this situation.
He had already caught one opponent off guard once.
That could work again.
He wasn’t about to ignore even the smallest advantage.
***
“Chameleon lost, sand in my pockets!” the dwarf exclaimed expressively.
He had been sitting in silence for almost ten minutes, focused on listening to something.
“What?” Leo flinched.
He had spent all that time trying to calm his raging instincts.
“Already? Did he just completely let his guard down?”
“I have no idea, hammer in my suitcase! And I have no idea who the intruders are or how many there are, cement in my tea!”
“You can’t sense them at all?” the giant raised his shaggy eyebrows in shock.
He understood perfectly well what Gaster was capable of in the tunnels he had dug.
It was almost impossible to escape his gaze down there.
“Most likely, there’s someone with a strong earth-control Quirk, pliers instead of a key. Yes, a jackhammer in my oven! That’s probably how they dug in here. Now they’re using him to hide their presence, stalactite in my bedroom!”
“That’s crap,” Leo growled.
“We might have a mole… damn, I mean a traitor,” he winced at the accidental and completely inappropriate pun.
“You really don’t sense anyone? Not even a hint?”
“…There is one, nails in my pocket. The little brat. Walking around, wandering through my tunnels, crowbar in his pants leg. He was next to Chameleon when he lost, screw in my mayonnaise!”
“…Bait? Hmm… Too harsh for heroes. Well, unless there’s a scavenger among them, but then everything would already be on fire… Another villain group?” Leo put forward the most likely possibility.
The dwarf just shrugged.
“…Fine, we can guess forever.” The half-beast stood up from his chair, making the dimly lit room seem even darker.
“We need to smoke them out.”
“You’re going alone, cement in your basin?”
“Do I look like an idiot?” the man growled, ducking to get through the door.
“I’m gathering everyone. Follow me. You’ll be our radar.”