“Enough of this,” Clarke announced. He raised his arms out to his sides. His power reached into the bricked alleyway and the walls started to crumble. The very ground shook, knocking the gangsters to their knees as they could only look on. The walls bulged and bent as Clarke walked towards them, until the stress was too much for the decaying walls to handle. They collapsed all around the four men, falling on all four of them.

The gangsters tried to shield themselves as best they could, but with three stories worth of bricks falling onto them, there was nothing they could do. All three of them screamed as every inch of their bodies were bludgeoned, battered and beaten. Their cries were soon deafened by the falling buildings, until only silence remained.

As the last loose bricks fell, an eerie calm fell over the alley. None of the gangsters or Clarke could be seen below the massive pile of rubble. Both buildings adjacent to the alley were destroyed, with their walls and parts of their roofs adding to the pile of ruin.

There was a moment of silence as only the wind passed through the buildings. Any onlooker would have sworn the four men inside were dead, but then the shaking returned. Bricks began flying from the rubble and back into place where the wall once was, only to fall back seconds later. They moved in a wave, clouding the area so thickly that no one would have been able to see through to the other side of the alley. When the last of the pile was flipped into the air, Clarke emerged, unharmed and alone.

He glanced back at the rubble for a moment as the last brick fell again. The police would find the gangsters dead underneath, Clarke would be labeled as a vigilante and a murderer again, and he would move on. It wasn’t like there was anything the cops could do to stop him.

Just then, Clarke heard a whining echoing among the other building. These structures were so old that it was unlikely anyone other than squatters lived in them, but perhaps someone had seen him and gotten frightened. It wasn’t unusual for people to be alarmed around him. His powers made him famous, praised, condemned and feared. However, Clarke turned his attention back to the groaning when its voice started calling for help.

Clarke checked around the corner, where the sound was coming from. After a moment, he saw something moving in the darkness. The junkie who had come to the gangsters to get drugs had run around the corner to hide, but in the collapse of the building, a brick had come loose and broken his leg. The junkie was desperately trying to crawl away.

“No, please don’t kill me!” the junkie yelled. “I won’t do it again! I swear!”