[DUBLIN – ROOFTOP, CITY CENTRE – 4:27 PM]
Darren was supposed to be patrolling.
Instead, he was lying flat on a rooftop like a lazy gargoyle, eating crisps straight from the bag, mask pulled down, feet kicking in the air like he was sixteen again and on summer holidays.
Phone in hand. Vine open. ADHD in full, chaotic bloom.
"WHAT ARE THOOOOSE!"cackle"My Watermalone!"cackle"Storytime!"wheeze
He crunched another crisp loudly, crumbs sticking to his glove. "Thomas Sanders is hilarious," he mumbled to no one.
Swipe. Scroll. Laugh. Repeat.
Jump to Twitter.
Back to Vine.
Are crisps a real dinner?
Would Áine like crisps?
Why am I thinking about Áine?
No, wait—this cat video is awesome.
He almost dropped the phone laughing at a guy falling off a chair yelling "it's WEDNESDAY my dudes"
And then...
BOOM.
The rooftop shuddered. His crisps went flying.
Darren blinked. Sat up, fast.
BOOM.
Second one. Closer. Deep, heavy, wrong.
Phone clattered. He didn't even look for it.
Mask up. Hood up. Body moving.
Darren moved before he could think.
He launched himself off the edge of the rooftop.
Boots struck a slanted tile slope, wrong angle, wrong surface. He skidded hard, soles scraping loud, arms windmilling to recover. His left hand slammed into a chimney, fingers clamping down. Clay cracked beneath his grip, flakes tumbling down the roof.
"Okay, okay, bad roof. Noted."
He didn't stop.
Kicked off the edge, legs snapping down, dropped onto a crooked lower extension. Landed heavy. Skidded. Regained footing. Body jolting sideways, one knee buckling, he twisted and shoved off again without thinking.
No pause. No plan. Just motion.
Fuck it. Just GO.
This wasn't New York. Wasn't some parkour-friendly fantasy grid. This was Dublin—uneven, jagged, built to defy rhythm.
Peaked gables. Random drops. Slate rooftops slicked with grime and rain and pigeon shit. Nothing aligned. Nothing helped.
He vaulted a gapped ledge, six feet horizontal, two feet vertical. Slipped on algae. Boot hit awkward. Ankled twisted, he rolled into it, tucked his body mid-fall, hit shoulder-first, bounced, kept moving.
Caught a gutter mid-swing. His grip hit too hard, metal groaning under the torque of his momentum. He swung like a wrecking ball and flung himself toward a fire escape, boots clanging as he bounded up it, three steps with every lunge.
Fast. Unthinking. Clockwork.
BOOM.
Another blast. This one sharper, echoing off the buildings.
Screams now.
Real ones.
"Shitshitshitshit"
He sprang from the last step onto the next roof, barely a foot of ledge. Didn't slow. Just ran it like a tightrope, every muscle in his legs tensed like springs.
Kicked off a rusted vent pipe. Cleared the drop. Landed on corrugated metal. One boot crashed through it up to the ankle.
"FUCK."
He snarled, ripped it out, stumbled, sprinted again.
Slate to brick. Brick to a rusted-out ladder. It snapped before he was even halfway up.
Didn't matter. He leapt.
Tucked midair. Twisted. Caught a drainpipe with one hand. Swung. Released. Hit the next surface with a grunt and kept going.
Rain hammered him now. Soaked his hoodie. Dripped into his mask.
His breath rasped hard and hot through clenched teeth. Chest burned. Limbs pumping fast—not perfect, not polished, but sharp.
He was running faster than he ever had. Muscles firing in sync. Feet barely touching the ground before pushing off again.
What if it's a bomb? What if it's alien? What if I'm not enough?
Shut UP. MOVE.
The skyline cracked open like a wound.
Smoke. Purple flashes. Sirens.
He scaled a half-crumbling wall, fingers scraping cement, and dragged himself up the final ledge onto a wide, flat rooftop overlooking the pedestrian plaza.
Dropped into a crouch, panting.
Heart jackhammering. Arms shaking. Vision swimming.
The city skyline finally opened up, and there it was:
Smoke.
Fire.
Screams.
[PEDESTRIAN SQUARE – 4:33 PM]
Chaos.
A public tram had derailed and was halfway into a storefront. One car flipped on its roof. Pavement cracked and cratered. Smoke everywhere. Fires in bins. Civilians running for cover.
He spotted a woman limping away from the wreck, blood streaking down her sleeve.
A little girl was hiding under a bench, trembling, eyes wide as she screamed for her Mom.
His heart twisted.
And at the center of it all, someone in some kind of... mecha exoskeleton suit.
Darren blinked. "What the fuck am I looking at."
The thing looked half-built, like someone started making a war machine and rage-quit halfway through. A mess of scorched plating, exposed wires, and glowing purple veins that crackled with electricity. One shoulder was bulkier than the other, bronze-colored, dented to hell. The other looked newer, shinier, almost like it came from a different suit entirely.
The helmet was the worst part, all steel and angles, no face, just two burning red slits where eyes should be. No mouth. No features. Just this heavy, glaring skull, like it was built to intimidate.
Thick black tubes curled from his back and shoulders into a glowing purple core embedded in the center of his chest. It pulsed. Bright. Angry. Buzzing like it hated everything around it.
The armor wasn't smooth. It was rough, welded, bolted together by someone who clearly didn't care about elegance, just power. Some of it looked like scrap metal. Some looked military-grade. It was impossible to tell what was original and what was improvised.
Yet at the same time he moved way too fast. Rigid, awkward, but fast. Like his body was being pushed harder than it should've been. Like he wasn't controlling the suit, more like the suit was dragging him forward, and he was just trying to keep up.
Then Darren spotted the gun in his hand.
Definitely a Chitauri weapon.
Or… it used to be.
He had seen enough footage from New York to recognize the shape, those sleek, alien curves, that bronze-gold finish, the weird ribbed barrel that glowed like a bug zapper.
But this one had been butchered.
The barrel was chopped down, rebuilt with some kind of human frame bolted onto the base. Like someone took a high-powered alien rifle, cut it in half with an angle grinder, and stuck a pistol grip on it just to say they could. Wires were spilling out around the sides like veins. The power core, glowing purple, wasn't even sealed properly. It pulsed and twitched like a dying battery, and every now and then it sparked violently
Darren's heart dropped.
The Mecha guy screamed below.
"Where's that Masked LITTLE SHIT?! THAT SHIPMENT WAS MINE! Because of YOU the fucking police took my shit!"
The voice modulator warped his words, deep, metallic, distorted, but the anger came through clear.
He was shouting.
Shipment?
Wait... what shipment?
He scanned the wreckage below. Trashed tram. Fires. Civilians screaming.
Someone did this over a shipment?
Darren's brain ran flat-out trying to catch up.
Was this me? Is this about me?No, it can't be. Right? Can it?
His thoughts scrambled back through the last few months. Every alley bust. Every gang den he raided. There were a lot of crates. A lot of shipments. Most of them filled with stolen phones, weapons, dodgy pills, or some weird glowing alien scrap
Alien scrap.
Shit.
There was that one a couple days ago the one where he went viral. Wait didn't one of them say something about their boss?
"Diaz'll kill us if we lose this crate."
Darren blinked.
Wait. Diaz.
Diaz.
OH.
OH FUCK.
He was supposed to look into that. Run the name, dig for connections, maybe tail someone.
He never did.
"Fucking hell," he muttered, breath catching.
This wasn't just a random psycho in a janky power suit.
This was the fallout of something he half-dealt with and forgot about.
He looked down again, at the tech suit, at the smoking crater, at the civilians crawling behind flipped cars, and felt his stomach twist.
Someone started this mess.
And it might've been him.
"…Fuck."