All Capes are Bastards: The Shadow Ban

The game of life and death is rigged with loaded set pieces. 

The driver’s hand brushed the rearview mirror—again. Every thirty seconds, like a tick, like a habit he couldn’t shake, his fingers trembling as he fought the tightening in his chest.

There's No way they got the plate. He’d switched the numbers. It was clean, and smooth—just like always.

Clean. But clean felt like a lie, the sweat on his palms slicker than the night air pressing in around them.

Wasn’tt the Sinner’s Den that had him twisted up, not the usual dive full of broken men and lost souls. No, it wasn’t the place or the players—it was the man in the mask.

That presence. A hooded reckoning that stalked the streets to deliver a verdict. The gangs? They’d turn you into a fine mist—quick, brutal, and forgotten. But the street judge? He wasn’t quick. He didn’t rush.

He never had to. He took his time. He lingered like death was making its rounds, standing just beyond your reach, waiting for you to notice.

He’d let you feel it—the weight of his eyes on you. He didn’t need to act fast. You’d know he was there. And when he was ready, he’d give you the chance. Not to escape—no, not that—but to turn yourself in. To surrender to whatever godforsaken fate he had planned for you.

He offered it, the cold hand of choice, before the end came. His fists gave a moment of clarity before everything went dark.

But you never knew when that moment was coming. You never knew if it was already too late.

The driver’s eyes flickered to the mirror again, not really looking, but searching. And there, at the corner of his vision—something shifted, just out of reach. Something he could feel but couldn’t see. A chill crept down his spine, and he clenched his jaw. The mask wasn’t just a disguise.

It was a warning. The city was alive with whispers—no one spoke the name, but everyone knew.

He swallowed hard, fingers still hovering near the mirror. It was too quiet. Too still. The streets were always alive with noise, tension, with chaos. But tonight, it was silent. Almost waiting.

And that was the worst part. When the silence stretched out too long, when the air itself seemed to be holding its breath, that was when you knew—he was already here.

College was never in the cards for Kyle Dirk—not in any way that mattered. He could crunch numbers, he could read the field, but the SATs weren’t a ticket to anywhere he wanted to go.

A sports scholarship?

That was a sucker’s game. Thousands of kids grind themselves to dust for a shot at the big leagues, most ending up with nothing but scars and regrets. The stadium lights weren’t for him. He needed something with a payout now, not a promise that would never come.

"Three million views..." another murmured, his eyes twitching toward the flickering screen in the corner. "We can cash out or crash out."

A cold sweat ran down his spine as he waited, his heart thumping like a drum in a dark alley. The shadows that danced at the corner of his vision weren’t just tricks of the light. He could feel them, something waiting. Watching. The low hum of the city seemed to drown in the static around him.

The old heads in the lower district, the ones who had seen too many lives fall apart in the gutter, never spoke the name out loud. They only whispered—like a prayer, like a warning, like the last words before the inevitable.

 Bullets didn’t seem to touch him; they just disappeared into the shadows, swallowed whole by the man who walked like death itself.

Those who survived encounters with him often ended up visiting the X-ray unit, their bodies rearranged by something far beyond the world of men. Cracked ribs, broken limbs, and fractured minds.

There was no cure for the kind of fear he instilled. The kind that gnawed at your bones and made you question whether you’d see the light of morning.

And the wasn’t afraid of the light.

The stick-up game made sense. A cleaner break. But even in a city where desperation made the rules, Kyle had his own. He wasn’t about to shove a snub-nose into Mr. Singh’s ribs at the mini-mart in Hunters Point. The old man had been good to him once, called him “kid” like it meant something. And his brother? He stayed quiet in the back aisle, but everyone knew about the shotgun within arm’s reach.

Kyle wasn’t here to make the evening news. He wasn’t here to lose. He just had to find the right job—the right mark.

The South City Serpents have their fingers firmly planted in the pulse of Bay Area nightlife and underground culture. With their easy promises of gin, girls, and glory, they lure in locals desperate for a taste of excitement and wealth in a city where many have struggled to get ahead.

They offer a tempting escape, a way out of the harsh realities of the streets—but at a steep price.

The Mafia doesn't have much ground to stand on in this volatile atmosphere. There was a time when Italians weren’t considered white enough.

They were other, thrown into the gritty neighborhoods with the rest of the “ethnics.” They fought for a seat at the table, and when they finally got one, it came with a price—complacency. But now? They’d gotten what they wanted—what they’d fought for.

They were accepted as white, their children now walking into good jobs with their crisp collars and perfect ties. The streets didn’t hold the same allure anymore. The heat was off, and so was the need to take risks.

 Their old-school ways don’t align with the shifting tides of a region where the cartels are much more cautious, fearful of drawing the attention of Washington's militant forces. The cartels know that the moment they attract a federal executive order, unmarked units with no insignia to show, men who followed orders without questions.

They didn’t come with badges or affiliations; they came with silence and precision, and they’d get the job done without a trace. Imperialism played favorites, like a crooked dealer at a rigged table. It handed out favors to the powerful and kept the rest of the world betting on the wrong cards.

Lady Justice, once so proud and impartial, turned her face red with shame, her scales tipping towards the wealthy and the well-connected. Her blindfold slipped, revealing the truth—the law was never a fair game, just another weapon in the hands of the powerful.

It wasn't about justice anymore; it was about who could pay to have their name written in the books. And Lady Justice? She was too embarrassed to speak.

All they had to do was respond to the invitation. [Y or N.] A simple choice, but the weight of it lingered like a dark promise. The higher the view count, the higher the payout. Keep the cash. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems when the stakes are so steep.

The masks came first, descending from the drones, like specters in the night. Cold, lifeless, waiting to swallow the humanity beneath them. Then the body-cams—unblinking eyes, capturing every shiver, every breath, every quiet prayer for salvation.

They kicked in the door—no warning, no mercy, as though they were stepping into the pages of a script they’d rehearsed a thousand times. Theatre kids in tactical gear, playing their parts like ghosts who forgot they were pretending.

But this wasn’t a show. There was no applause waiting at the end. The air was thick with something more than fear, something older—like the faint scent of rot, creeping through the cracks in the walls. Their footsteps echoed in the silence, hollow and unforgiving.

The cameras kept rolling, capturing it all, like vultures circling overhead, hungry for the story they’d weave. And somewhere in the darkness, they all knew—this wasn't just a heist, this was a performance, a sacrifice to something much older, much darker than the cameras or the cash.

Kyle didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on it. The screech of the tires was the last thing he heard before the fissures in the rubber gave out. A sickening tear, like flesh splitting open, as the tread was eaten by the metal spokes. The wheels, once a silent partner in his escape, became nothing more than jagged teeth, gnawing on the pavement beneath.

White and orange tears—fire—streaked the ground. They stained the asphalt like a wound that couldn’t heal. The metal circles scraped, kissed, clawedand at the road as if they, too were in a passionate embrace.

Every turn, every curve, only made the noise louder, more relentless, like a man’s soul scraping against the edge of his last breath. And Kyle? He wasn’t sure if it was the car that was breaking, or if it was him. The triggermen got out, shaky hands of the safety prepared to shoot at the shade.

The primtive sinking in their stomachs, the known world eroded as they saw the weapon embedded in the back tire—silent, lethal, the steel glinting in the street light like a predator’s teeth. They bit into the rubber, each sharp edge leaving behind a jagged scar, tearing through the flesh of the tire. Imagine what they would do when they cut through the bone.

 They, bore the marks of something ancient—like the wings of a bat folded in mid-flight, poised to strike. They were a warning, a call to the shadows, as though the very air had grown heavy with the scent of a hunt, waiting to pounce.

Kyle felt it in his bones—the silence thickening, the tension rising. He wasn’t just losing control of the car anymore; he was losing control of himself. Keep recording. More untraceable crypto had found its way into the account.

The hunt had begun.

"He ain't catchin' no 187!" The gunman muttered like a rosary.

My cousin? Left with busted ribs and a collapsed lung. The pipes? He didn’t care—they were for getting high anyway.” He remembered the purple craters around his cousin's eyes. He maybe got two shells off they hit space and void.

 “But when that fool put hands on his woman? That’s when he caught the shape's attention.”

He found God after that.

“the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.” The verse slithered from the void, a voice neither alive nor dead, unraveling through the hollows of shuttered shops and the bones of abandoned citadels. It echoed without a source, without a mouth to shape it—just words bleeding through the concrete, through rusted grates and broken glass.

The camera flickered, switching to night vision with a mechanical whir. The green lens swallowed the dark, grainy, and unnatural, warping the empty street into something less than real. And then—movement.

Just the tips at first. Ashen wings, too still for wind, too heavy for grace. They hovered at the edges of the frame, phasing between the tangible and the unseen, as if the lens had caught something it was never meant to witness.

The verse continued, hollow and absolute.

The camera stuttered. A glitch. A breath.

The wings twithed.

"Yo, ain't this the part of town even the strays don't wander? Even the hustlers keep it moving out here."  The shooter's arm locked up, fingers frozen around the trigger as the claws sank in—not from the depths below, not from fire and brimstone, but from above. A judgment was written in steel.

Kyle’s ride-or-die, his war dog, his day-one? He didn’t go out in a blaze, and didn’t get to squeeze off a final shot. No, he was lifted—wrenched from the pavement like some cursed soul plucked for a black rapture. Boots scraped air, his body jerking as if the city itself had sentenced him to the void.

The cord tightened. A shadow moved above—not a man, not anymore.

The mist swallowed them whole, rolling in thick from the South District, turning the rooftops into a forgotten world. The only sound was the quiet, the kind that came before the fall.

“The last one alive gets the whole treasure trove.” The camera said.

‘Leave the cash man! He's stacking bodies!” Kyle wasn’t going to end up with angel wings on a shirt today.

“I promised my beauty I’d take her far away from here after graduation day.” The cost of keeping the lights onwase as steep as thehollowed-outt skyscrapers above them. Double or nothing. The screen announced.

The numbers rose into the millions, where were the cops?! He was in the wrong shade and in the wrong district. He’d never been so desperate to be profiled in the back of a 12s squad car. Those mesh frames keep him separated from the shape.

'

Bargains with God were the mid-way levels when processing grief. He repeated the Revenrds copy of the sinner's prayer. “This was so stupid. Community college isn’t even going to break the bank!” The lie it was for college dissipated. The folly of youth and a fresh start drove the allure to accept the heist. He was never a player merely a mark.

The air was expiring from his lungs like a tire that tumbled thru thethronen patches.  Itmatched thee tsunamii ringing in his ears. The sharp edges of theBlade weren'tt felt at first.  Thespectere waited for the adrenal state to sink back into the tide before the threw another one.

Kyle stumbled his arms prevented him from kissing the pavement. The metal nine scrambled to find a sweet spot. The red eyes pierced from the fog, and the ashen and charcoal cloak hid the features of a man.

Sight alignment was easy when firing at paper targets to impress girls at the San Mateo County fair, it was different when the devil dared you.

'

“The steel citadels will have to separate the wheat from the chaff.” The voice, cold and synthetic, slithered through the frozen glow of streetlights, each word sharpened by static.

When the reaper comes knocking, the mind cracks open like a dam giving way—memories pouring out in a flood, too fast to hold, too late to matter.

“It's time to tally up the votes and see if your view count will allow you to stay.”

Kyle could almost see the mouth curve upward in a grimace underneath the mask. An open casket is all he could hope for. His mother and grandmother deserved that at least. The city had lost in sparking aura after the cyber kings stripped it for parts but she never lost her shine. 

If there was a place to haunt Kyle couldn't imagine a better plot. A poet once said even Heaven has a ghetto.

As the specter loomed, blotting out the cold, sterile glow of the streetlights, Kyle’s body scraped along the pavement, each desperate pull a plea for something that wouldn’t come. His blood mixed with the grime, streaking the asphalt. He’d rather paint the black roads red—make it count, even if no one was left to see it.

The city whispered its last lesson before the blackout. There were some devils had wings, and others wore the skin of men. There were some angels with halos as crooked as the city they were meant to save.

The capsule skittered across the pavement, rolling to a stop before splitting open—smoke unfurling, thick and acrid, biting at the night air. A second of hesitation, just enough. 

The Stray struck first. Three shots, rubber-tipped, clean. They hit center mass, punching into the weaved plates, staggering the dark figure but not dropping him. A shift in the air, a recalculation.

The rule still held. No killing. But rules only lasted as long as the night let them.

“Interlopers don’t belong here,” the marauder was told, his voice flat, as cold as the city streets. He didn’t blink. The game had rules, but they were made to be broken, and twisted until they snapped.

Slowly, methodically, he reached under his kevlar wings, fingers brushing against the cold metal.

The razor blades slid out, gleaming in the murk-like teeth waiting to bite.

The blackened hands shook and the winged judge held his breath as the blades left his hand, slicing through the night, silent as the city's last whisper.

The street angel and the devil from the black citadels traded hands of stone. Kyle felt a new lease on life as he woke up from purgatory. A flicker-out instinct and a chance for one last score caused the phone to be in his hands.

Congratulationss you survived the contest.” The view count was going to break the system.

People lost and won small fortunes from his misfortune.

The transfer was complete. The cold glow of the screen blinked out, replaced by a flashing prompt: More content is needed. Double or nothing. Kyle’s lips curled into a grimace, the weight of it sinking in, but he didn’t have a choice. Not now. The game was in his blood, the stakes too high, too sweet.

'

He adjusted his collar. The love of the game and the green—it made strange bedfellows, and Kyle was stuck in the sheets.

Bay Area real estate? Out of his reach. A digital Mayflower, setting sail from the port, headed for a new frontier.

Kyle’s eyes narrowed, the skyline calling him like a distant dream. One way in, one way out. He had to grab that one-day ticket before it was gone before the city swallowed him whole.

The rules of the game were changing, and he was tired of playing with loaded dice.