Power Up

Chapter 1 ~ Flairs

Asher Cloud, one week after his graduation, wakes up prepared for another productive day. He doesn't have a job, so he gets to spend his time doing whatever he wants, but he won't waste the time he has. He immediately gets dressed, opens up his blinds, and eats the breakfast he prepared all on his own. Asher does this every day, before going to the basement to work out. He isn't the most athletic person out there, but he tries his best to put on some muscle and stay in shape.

Asher does some lifts, but after the first couple, he notices the weights getting lighter, until soon enough it feels as if he's just lifting a stick. A little freaked out, Asher drops the weight on the ground with a slam. "What the...?" He bends over and picks it up to test its weight, and it feels like normal again.

What is happening? he wonders. He remembers hearing about young adults getting strange powers called Flairs when they turned 18, which have existed for as long as humanity, but he couldn't possibly be awakening one himself, could he? And yet, the weight in his hands began to grow lighter as he lifted it once again. It was too unordinary for it not to be caused by a Flair, but what exactly was it doing? Was he making the weight lighter with gravity? Did he have super strength that just made it seem lighter relative to his normal strength? However, the strangest part of it was the fact that it hadn't immediately been light. The weight gradually got lighter as he was holding it, rather than suddenly being light as a feather.

He was sure to find out exactly what his Flair was eventually, but he wondered if he would live long enough to solve it. Asher knew that, in modern days, people with Flairs tended to have shorter life spans than other people. Why? Because, if someone with a Flair is murdered, the person who killed them gets that person's Flair. By taking one's soul, you also take the Flair hidden within, allowing that Flair to be passed on. If a person with a Flair dies of a natural death, their Flair is inherited by a newly born baby, waiting to awaken once they become an adult. It was at this moment that Asher realized today was his birthday.

"Why me?" he asked himself, expecting to just be killed off in the streets by some greedy scumbag looking for power. "How could the world become this way just because one hero died?" That hero Asher is referring to was the most popular hero 20 years ago, named Paladin. Paladin wore a full suit of slick armor and could do just about anything you would expect out of a hero; he could jump several stories, run faster than a car, rip up any part of the road he wished to, and send villains flying for miles. If there were ever a hero to ask for, it was Paladin, and he would always answer.

Unfortunately, just under 20 years ago, Paladin's reign had gotten him into trouble. A certain few villains had devised a plan to take him out, and it all revolved around getting him out of his suit of armor. Everyone knew that Paladin wore a suit of armor so heavy that no normal man could even stand in it, yet he would catch villains in an instant all the same. There had to be a reason to wear it, and the answer is sometimes the most obvious choice; it was for protection. Any bullet, any blade, anything at all barely made a dent in it due to how bulky it was, meaning the person underneath it was weak to all of those things, leading to the villain's kill strategy.

Plan A was to trap Paladin and try their best to either smoke him out of his armor or force the helmet off. Plan B, if it came down to that, was to focus everything they had on the eye slit in the front of his helmet, which was possibly the only place that could reach the person inside, in hopes of either killing or blinding him. In preparation for Plan B, one of the villains, who had a Flair that gave them pinpoint accuracy, would stake out from a building near the setup spot. All that was left to do was to lure Paladin to his execution grounds.

After the villains all gathered, one of them fired a pistol into the sky to catch Paladin's attention. If another hero came that wasn't Paladin, they would just kill them first since they already had the preparations to kill even one of the strongest heroes alive. Though it would never come down to that, since as per usual, Paladin rushed to the scene at top speeds. When he arrived, he could tell this was different than normal circumstances, as all that was there to meet him was a group of people in the middle of the street.