How to be a Superhero

Six

"THROW HIM," LEBECHI advises in my ear and I frown, beads of sweat stroll down my neck.

It is Kitans turn to tell me what to do, "No, punch him, your punch can end things."

Before me stands the most bulky man I think I will ever meet. I just stopped the robbery he was about to commit and he is pissed at me. My team and I—it sounds really cheesy—assembled outside of school when the last bell rang and Kitan shared everything he brought. The reason why he had arrived school late is because he was getting some gadgets from his fathers company. Mr. Abiade is a technology expert, he owns a store which showcases and sells gadgets that people never thought they needed. I always believed the love for technology ran from father to son, but Kitan took his own towards the ICT area.

He gave Lebechi and I small black devices that we were to put into our ears so we could communicate better unlike the cheaparticle—his words not mine—earpiece I wore the previous day. He also made me put on a body camera on my back and chest, that way they could both see what I see and what I did not, and for video recording purposes—Kitans words again. The outfit fit like a second skin and the best of all was the face mask that stopped over my nose. I found out it was not made of leather to enable easy breathing for me.

"Don't tell me what to do," I tell them both, regretting that I ventured into a robbery scene in the first place. The owner of the store was famous among the students of Excellence Secondary School, he sold almost everything we needed and goofed around with us. So it annoyed me when Kitan said he always got robbed on Thursdays by a burly man with no hair on his head. He looked away when we asked him how he knew, then said he hid in a corner of the store when he saw it happen on two of the Thursdays. One had been on purpose, the other had been to confirm if it was an occasional thing.

"Then do something or you will have broken bones," I did think that with the way the man matches towards me with a partially swollen head as a result of the bottle water I threw at him. His small beady eyes are every definition of red and his teeth are bared. Good thing humans don't have fangs.

"Shit," I run down the stationery aisle, looking over my shoulder to see the man walking fast. "Shit, shit, shit. If I die, I am haunting the two of you."

"Just do something, raise the ground or something."

"Easier said than done." I run until I get to a wall, a dead end. When I turn to make my way out of the area, the brown man is growling before me.

"You get liver to do wetin you do, but after I remove am, you go learn to respect yourself," he speaks in Pidgin English and I cower. I really did grow extra balls to make an appearance like this, and it is the fault of those two, who are safely in the school premises.

"You are a Superhero, not a Supervictim, do something!" Kitan yells in my ear. It knocks a little sense into me, I am the one with the powers not him.

"You have some nerve to always rob a poor man just making a living," I place both hands on my waist, "Now I will teach you why you need to have your own legitimate means of living." Crap, this is the worst superhero speech in the history of Herohood.

The man bounds towards me and makes to grab my hand but I beat him to it, I take his fingers in mine and bend them backwards slowly. He whimpers, then try to punch me with the other, I close my fist and send a blow to his stomach, the action has him spiraling into the shelves at a speed I cannot comprehend. He slumps the next minute, eyes rolled back.

"Shit," is all I say, mostly because it feels amazing to be able to do that, to be able to take on someone as huge as that. "Did you guys see that?"