Power Guardians: VENGEANCE

The Villains have gone too far. Time for payback.

Plot

Kyoto · Autumn · The Night It All Ended Five of them are gone. You are not. Power Guardians Vengeance The villains have gone too far. Time for payback. One night. Two stories. You are holding the bright one. Tonight, both halves of this city were struck in the same hour, and both halves think the other one did it. This is the Guardian’s side of that night. You will play the last hero left standing in the wreckage of your own sanctuary, hunting the ones you are certain pulled the trigger -- the surviving villains. The other half of the night belongs to them. If you would rather walk out of a burning teahouse as the last great villain in Kyoto, certain it was the heroes who did this -- that story is Power Guardians: OBLIVION, the villain POV, run by Nikobloom. Same night. Same lie. Two people hunting each other through it. Play one. Then go find out how wrong you were from the other side. There were six of you. There had been six for seven years, since you were all seventeen and stupid and certain you would live forever. You held the eastern hills and the old city between you. You inherited the work from the team before you, the way they inherited it from the one before that. You were going to hand it on the same way. Tonight the sanctuary came down on top of all of you at once. You woke under a burning beam with your transformation half-fired and the smell of cedar smoke in your teeth. You found the other five one by one. The team has been six for years. Tonight it is one. And someone cleared the whole street before they did it -- which means they knew exactly where to find you. You Are The One Who Walked Out Choose your colour and the survivor is you. Magma, ice, storm, void, toxin, gravity -- the helmet is yours, and so is the grief, and so is the certainty about who did this. Only two of the old enemies still have the power for a strike like tonight, and you intend to find both of them. You read the signature in the rubble. You know what you saw. You are going to make someone answer for every name you had to say out loud in the dark. You spent seven years being the thing the city was glad to have. Now you find out what you are with nothing left to protect. Choose Your Colour Six held the line. You pick the colour, and the survivor is yours -- as he, or as she. Red Wolf Magma · Pack Leader Renji Homura Male Akane Homura Female Territorial and fiercely loyal, they read a room the way a wolf reads a forest -- always clocking who needs protecting and who needs pushing. Disagreement is fine. Disloyalty to the team is not. Blue Rhinoceros Permafrost · Gentle Glacier Tetsu Hyōga Male Kanae Hyōga Female Beneath the crushing silhouette is someone profoundly patient and unexpectedly tender -- slow to anger, slow to forgive, capable of a warmth that surprises everyone who assumed the cold went all the way through. The team's quiet anchor. Yellow Peregrine Falcon Lightning · Sharp-Tongued Optimist Hayato Tsurugi Male Kumo Tsurugi Female Quick with a joke, quicker with a counterargument -- they weaponise levity to keep morale aloft and deflect anything too heavy to face head-on. Underneath the humour is a genuine belief that they can outrun any storm. Black Widow Void · Deadpan Oracle Nuiru Yamikage Male Kuraha Yamikage Female They deliver devastating truths in the flattest possible tone at the worst possible moment -- and are almost always right. The team finds this either invaluable or maddening depending on the day, and they genuinely cannot tell the difference. Pink Viper Toxin · Seductive Nihilist Kairu Shiragami Male Tōja Shiragami Female They have looked at the world's ugliness long enough that beauty now feels like something to be taken rather than given -- charming, selfish in small ways, carrying a venom-edged philosophy the team pushes back against and occasionally, secretly, agrees with. Green Crocodile Gravity · Territorial Elder Guren Kairyu Male Oboro Kairyu Female A primal, almost geologic sense of what belongs to them -- their team, their land, their principles -- defended with a crushing certainty that does not require explanation. Newcomers take a long time to earn their regard. The Ones You Are Hunting Only two enemies still have the power for a strike like tonight. You intend to find them both. Lady Filaria The Composer In The Mask Something ancient wearing a theatrical face, who treats this city like an unfinished score and every fight like a movement that must resolve. She does not raise her voice. She does not improvise. When the baton goes perfectly still, the conversation is already over. Morrven Older Than The Soil A patient, gentle thing that thinks in geological time and speaks of ruin in the language of gardening. He does not rush. He tends what he loves and buries what offends him with the same unhurried hands. Tonight someone offended him very much. What It Costs To Be Hunted You can move through Kyoto as the face nobody has connected to the costume in seven years, or you can pull the helmet the rest of the way up and let the city see a Guardian again -- but the louder you burn, the harder the hunt comes for you. There is no team to call now. Everything you do, you do alone, and every loud thing you do, the city remembers. There is no finish line printed on this. It runs as long as you keep coming back to it. How it ends is a thing you do, not a thing that happens to you. How This Works   What It Means For You The Hunt How badly the city wants you found. It climbs when you make noise and bleeds back down when you go quiet. Push it to the top and something far worse than police comes looking for you. Your Face Whether you move as the civilian nobody recognises or the Guardian the city has not seen in years. The two are treated very differently. So will your enemies treat them. Status & Glossary Type “status” any time to see where you stand. Type “glossary” to see what you have pieced together so far. Play As The Character Provided This story is built to be played as one of the surviving Guardians -- you pick the colour, but the survivor is one of them. Every system, scene, and enemy is tuned around who they are. Choose one and the night fits like it was made for you, because it was. Bring your own character instead and the story will not behave the way it was designed to. You will not get the intended experience, and the outcome is on you, not on us. Before You Begin Turn reasoning on. This story tracks who you are wearing, how hard you are being hunted, and what you do and do not yet know. Without it, threads slip. Look for a reasoning or thinking toggle in your model settings. They made one mistake tonight. They left you breathing. Six names. One left to say them. A Word About Nikobloom Niko built the other half of this story and the world it stands in. A relentless craftsman and the finest collaborator a story could ask for. Go play the villain’s side. Find out what they thought they were doing to you. Power Guardian's Full Song: "Six Neon Locks" ISEKAI ZERO

Opening scene

 DN:Saturday|Threat:0|Loc:Sanctuary Wreckage, Higashiyama You wake to the smell of burnt cedar. You cannot move. A beam from the temple floor pins your shoulder, smouldering at one end, the lacquer black-bubbled and smoking into your throat. The sanctuary roof has come down. Your transformation fired sometime during the attack, reflex only -- half of you is in costume, half in the clothes you wore to the meeting tonight. You drag your shoulder free. Pain in waves, blood at the back of your teeth. You pull yourself up on what is left of the central pillar -- the sanctuary that has sat beneath this temple for 40 years, that your team inherited from the team before, where the 6 of you have met every week for years. The team is around you. 5 of the 6. You can see one of them. The armour has cracked along the ribcage, the element they carried in life cooling out of the room. By the way they are lying, you do not think they felt the second hit. Another against the offering shelf, their charge gone silent in the grooves of their carapace, the air around them dry where it should not be. A third under the doorframe, which came down in pieces. You will not lift it. Not yet. A fourth you cannot see -- the far corner is solid rubble, and a hand reaches out from under it, and the hand is one you know. And the last, the one you have known longest, the one who knew you before the costume. You will not describe to yourself how you found them. You will not. The team has been 6 for years. Tonight it is 1. You climb out through the ruined inner sanctum. The temple above is half-rubble, the prayer hall open to the sky, the bronze bell on its side in the courtyard gravel. The wind moves through the trees the way it has every autumn night since the temple was built. The trees are still here. Almost nothing else is. You stand on the courtyard steps, look down Sannenzaka, and wait for sirens. There are none. By the moon it has been 40 minutes -- a magical-grade detonation in one of Kyoto's busiest districts, and the slope is bare. No fire crews, no police, no drones. Not one civilian. Not one light in the shops below. The lower lanterns burn dim and patient, lighting nothing. Someone cleared this street before the strike. You look back at the temple, and a career of reading magical force does the work. Guardian-side force leaves a clean signature: the snap of light, the spent charge gone where it was sent. Not this. Under the cedar smoke is a second smell, low and metallic and hungry, and where the entry wall stood there is slag the colour of nothing -- the mark Villain work leaves at scale. This opened the sanctuary by appetite, not force. It was the Villains. It had to be. Only 2 are left in this city with the power for it: Lady Filaria, Morrven. That one of them would plan something this cold sits wrong even as you think it -- but the signature is the signature, and no one else could have done this. Something that has held its shape in you for years stops holding. Then the colder thought, the one your training puts first. They cleared a whole district from a list -- which means they know the rest: the safe addresses, the civilian names, the person each of you goes home to. The person you go home to does not know any of this has happened, across the city, lights on, waiting for you at the hour you always come. Two things move your feet at once: whoever did this is minutes ahead, and the people still breathing on that list do not know they are on it. The wind picks up, and under the cedar smoke it carries something else -- a low, hungry tang that does not belong to fire. Villain work, fresh, and close. Far down the slope, between the dark shopfronts, something moves that is not a civilian and is not afraid, there and then gone. One of the two left in this city, already out here, already hunting. And you are barely standing: half-transformed, blood at the back of your teeth, a body that has not been hit this hard in years. To go at them now, like this, could be the last thing you do. You could go down the slope after what you sensed and make one of them answer, and pray the half-broken body holds. You can break for the city and the person waiting who does not know to run. You could pull the transformation the rest of the way up and force whatever is down there into the open, and let every hunter near feel it. Or you could let the half-state fall away and move through Kyoto as the face nobody has connected to the costume in all the years you have worn it. The temple burns behind you. The slope is not empty. Somewhere in the city a door you know is still unlocked. *Move.*

Characters

• Lady Filaria
• Morrven

Tags: Villain Guardian Violence Superpower Transformation Suit Urban Supernatural Thriller Suspense FastPaced Tense HiddenIdentity AntiHero

Chats Started: 189

By: noruincarc

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