bookpower Chapter 82 Where’s My Friend?
Chapter 82 Where’s My Friend?
Chapter 82 Where’s My Friend?October 7, 2025. Tuesday. 11:12 a.m.
The road cracked beneath my tires, the vibration rattling through the frame of the bike and into my bones. Asphalt split into jagged veins, weeds prying out from scars left decades ago. Empty stretches rolled on forever, punctuated by the husks of buildings leaning at odd angles, trees crooked as if even nature hadn’t forgiven this place. The Lawless. Civilization’s afterbirth.
I’d never driven this path before. Hell, I’d never even been this far off from a town when exploring the Lawless. The Hesperian Continent on paper were owned by the Council of City-States. In truth, it was more like a patchwork quilt. Some seams were stitched neat, others fraying, and in the torn parts, things leaked out. Brigands. Cults. Forgotten armies. Secret societies like the Monarchy slithering between the cracks of the City-States themselves.
Six months. That’s how long I’d been wandering. Riding highways to nowhere. Delivering parcels, ferrying the desperate, sometimes spilling blood. Call it soul-searching, if I even had one left to find. I’d tried on the hero mask once or twice. Helped when it was easy. But heroics were cheap and rotten on me. I missed the violence. The raw, clean edge of it. Violence didn’t lie.
The bike rumbled as I stomped the brakes. A barricade of rusted cars loomed ahead, stacked sloppily across the road. Smoke stains clung to them like old fingerprints. I killed the engine, listening to the silence spread.
From my jacket, I pulled out a folded scrap of paper, a map I’d stolen off a brigand after a long, slow hour of questioning and torture. The drawing was almost childish, rail lines sketched as crooked lines, landmarks noted with doodles. No mention of a barricade here. Which meant it was fresh.
I raised my eyes. To the left, half-buried in weeds, stood a statue. A naked woman in stone, her features weathered away until she was faceless and anonymous. That crude drawing on the map had her too. A marker. I was on the right path.
I traced the inked rail lines, then lifted my head at the sound of metal screaming faintly on metal. A train. Modern, fast, cutting through the heart of this wasteland. It glided past the trees and ruins like it didn’t belong here, its steel skin catching the weak sunlight. A city-state-class passenger train, humming with order in the middle of chaos.
Above it, capes flew in formation. Guardians of the rail. Bright costumes, spandex stretched over muscle and pride. They were peacocks, but dangerous ones. Even the scum out here knew better than to touch those trains. The Council treated attacks on the rail like sacrilege.
I lingered on the bike, map still in hand, when a shadow broke formation. One of the fliers peeled off, wings of air carrying him down toward me.
He hovered, steady, his silhouette clear against the dying light. No mask, no cape, just spandex fitted around a body built by years of work, not youth. His hair was graying, his face a lattice of lines carved by time. A veteran. Someone who’d lived too long in this business and hadn’t yet died for it.
His eyes locked onto me with unnerving precision. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of command.
“Name’s Tom,” he said. “Stay where you are.”
His glare was the kind that stripped you bare, the kind that measured weight and found you lacking. I kept my hands loose on the handlebars, but the itch was there, the instinct to phase him, gut him, and take apart the arrogant man staring me down.
Then she arrived.
Onyx slid into the seat behind me, black hair brushing my neck. She was a ghost I couldn’t shake, and a hallucination becoming more solid by the day. She leaned close, her lips curling in delight.
“You know,” she whispered, voice like silk cutting glass, “it probably would be fun to phase his skin off. Peel it layer by layer, like you did to that Alpha freak in the Wolf Pack.”
I murmured back, almost reflexively. “That’s a long time ago already, Onyx.”
Her laughter was cruel, low, and hungry.
Then, to my right, Silver appeared. Pouting, arms folded, the counterweight to Onyx’s mania. My illusion, my conscience, or just another shade of madness… I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Come on, don’t always talk about murder…” she huffed. “And Nick, I thought you wanted to lie low. Fighting a Council-backed cape is not lying low!”
I smirked faintly. “I know, I know… I will behave.”
But the words rang hollow even to me. They were just illusions, threads of my empathic power weaving into shape, whispering back my own fractured wants. And yet, I couldn’t help but talk to them. They were all I had left that listened.
The train thundered by, shaking the earth until its steel carcass shrank into the horizon. Order moving on, leaving chaos behind.
Tom gave me one last look. His lips curled in something like disdain.
“Lunatic wastelander…” he muttered, then blasted off in a streak, chasing the train with flight-speed only a veteran could carry. A Flight-Speedster. Efficient, brutal combo.
I exhaled slowly, the silence swallowing him whole.
Onyx broke it first. “If the barrier of vehicles wasn’t for them…”
Silver’s voice sharpened. “It’s an ambush, Nick!”
Onyx grinned, eyes sparkling. “Yeah. Murder.”
The barricade groaned. Figures spilled out from the husks of cars and twisted metal, their silhouettes jagged against the dim light. Raiders. Messy, rag-wrapped, dirt smeared like war paint. Their weapons were a collection of rust and desperation. But my threads spread like a web, probing, prying, and tasting minds.
Three stood out.
The bald brute in front, his presence heavy and dull as stone.
The eyepatch lurking in back, his paranoia a steady drumbeat.
And the clean one, the anomaly. A man in a pristine white tux, spotless against the filth, as if the dust and grime dared not touch him.
He smiled, voice clear as glass cutting through the rabble.
“Now,” he said smoothly, “let’s talk business. But first, what about introductions?”works. I can sell you people off the Monarchy’s list… elite girls, men, whatever you want. I can get you an actress… best in the business, Alina Vale… clones of her even, top-line, not the cheap shit. You want proof?” His voice scraped as if he’d swallowed sand.
Silver hissed in my ear with an animal noise of disgust. Onyx squealed in anticipation. I let my empathy comb his fear; it tasted of slick oil and counting. He was bargaining like a man who thought money could buy an answer.
“I will ask you one last time,” I said, letting the threat hang like a noose. “Where’s my friend?”