Frost Direshard was obsessed with the feeling of cracking someone in the head with a crowbar, and he loved it even more when they hit back. It was one of the only things in his life that made him feel alive. He felt in control knowing that he'd put another person out of action, and even more in control when he stole everything on their person.
He thought this to himself as he followed through on his swing. The man's head snapped back at an unnatural angle and his body hit the ground like a bag of bricks. Frost stepped back and danced, lightly bouncing his weight from foot to foot with a low whistle. That was a good swing, maybe even one of his best. If he'd been swinging like that on his highschool baseball team, maybe he'd have seen a future beyond robbing people on the street.
No time for hypotheticals. Life didn't bother to entertain hypotheticals, so why should he? He'd knocked out this poor sod who was dressed quite rich and carrying a bag from a nearby convenience store. This was the way things were. The scenario where this man had overpowered Frost didn't exist, just as the scenario where he woke up with all of his belongings didn't exist.
Frost knelt down excitedly. To him, the feeling of looting someone was like gambling. Why spin a slot machine when you could run some guy's pockets? Maybe it would be one hundred. Maybe it would be one thousand if the guy was really stupid. Best of all, it was free. Free was Frost's favourite word, only sharing the top of the list with cheap and plentiful. As for tonight's gamble, he already saw something he quite liked.
"Oh…You idiot. You poor, poor man." Frost mumbled to himself as he removed the watch from the man's wrist with the practiced precision of a pickpocketer in only a single swipe of his hand. He dangled it before his face and inspected it in the glare of the streetlight above. No doubt about it; Frost had done his homework on valuables, and this was an authentic gold Rolex. What kind of person went on a walk at night while wearing something like that? Lunacy, that was.
He patted down the rest of the man's body and found nothing of particular interest. He had a wallet, of course. No money, but plenty of cards and a picture of a lovely looking family with a wife and two quite adorable children. Frost regarded that picture while pointedly ignoring the man's head leaking blood onto the concrete. The cards could be handy, he thought, tucking the wallet away into his own pocket.
How about what he was buying? Time for another gamble. Frost rummaged through the bag and chuckled. A box of condoms. A bottle of Coke. An Aero bar. It seemed like Frost had cut in the middle of what was shaping up to be a good night. He was almost sorry, but his sweet tooth overpowered that sorrow. He ripped the Aero open and stuffed a bit of it into his mouth greedily.
"You must be the one, yeah?" A deep voice came from behind Frost. He'd heard the footsteps coming, but figured he'd just ignore them until something happened.
Frost turned around, caught in the headlights rummaging through food like a raccoon, chocolate stuck on his lips and cheeks full. "Huh?" He managed.
Five very angry looking men were staring down at him. Their leader – the man who spoke – was as bald as a baby and had a face so sharp and defined that he could have been a skeleton. The scar over his lip was what gave it away to Frost. These men were gangsters of some kind, specifically the kind that didn't enjoy having their turf infringed upon. What a pain. Frost shook the grime off of his hands, grabbed his crowbar, and stood up to greet them.
"The white-haired fox," Baldie said. "That you?"
It was the dumb, stereotypical question that real-life tough guys for some reason loved to ask. Frost was standing there, stolen goods all over his face and an unconscious body behind him, white hair glowing in the streetlight. Even so, he asks are you the White Fox? Frost hated linguistic gymnastics more than anything. His favourite kinds of people were the ones that said what they meant. In this case, a simple 'we're going to beat the snot out of you' would have sufficed.
The men mumbled amongst themselves when Frost did nothing but sigh. "He's so young," they said. "Are we sure this is really the guy?" They asked.
"Of course I'm the White Fox," Frost said, growing agitated.
All of them turned back to look at him.
"Disappointed?" He asked. "Hey, did your guys from last week forget to tell you that five wasn't enough?" Frost spun his crowbar around dramatically and then leaned on it like a cane while gesturing with his free hand. "Just go home. This is my last hit of the night, and I'm really not in the mood for this right now."
Baldie seemed to consider his words. Frost took that time to crouch down, pick up the Coke, and crack it open loudly. Coke, like many things, tasted a lot better when he knew he wasn't supposed to be drinking it.
"They had the mind to say you've got an impressive mouth on you," the man said. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and flicked it open. "We'll see how long that lasts."
Frost pulled the bottle from his lips and burped loudly, quite disgusted with himself to find just how quickly he'd inhaled the whole thing with the greediness of a pig on the trough. "Sure man, whatever," he said, not even attempting to feign interest.
Baldie flipped the knife over and over in his hand and stared at it hard like he was trying to melt it with his mind. Frost watched him with a confused expression as if wondering what he'd said wrong, like these men hadn't been called here specifically to kill him. Indeed, his goal was just to piss them off further, and this was something that Frost Direshard was very good at if nothing else. He sported the type of cocky smile that could make even an omniscient narrator angry.
Now, Frost thought. Sure enough, Baldie stepped forward with a heavy and probably intimidating foot. Frost had gotten used to the mannerisms of these people already, and so he wasn't surprised at all when the knife came at his face. These were nothing but low level flunkies, while Frost was the player that had spent too much time overleveling in the starter area. He waited until the last possible moment to move out of the way, and then sidestepped the knife with little difficulty.
Frost had never formally learned to fight. He'd grown up being bullied at the orphanage, and so he had to learn to defend himself by the age that most children were learning to read. The other children, most of them older, quickly found that Frost simply had higher growth potential than them. Even as a young boy, he seemed to understand innately the most effective ways to hurt somebody and subvert authority. Those children stopped their attempts soon after the day Frost broke the arm of one of them and shoved him down a lengthy flight of stairs. Frost was only six, and the boy he'd hospitalized was thirteen.
He'd had fourteen years of practice since then. The knife moved with inferior speed to even the orphanage kids. Gangsters like this were used to strong-arming people with money and guns, not close quarters combat. If they were at all clever they'd have definitely just shot him and been done with it. Frost was always grateful to be going against idiots. Idiots were the worst to argue with, but they'd always be the best to fight against.
Frost wrapped around Baldie's overextended arm and applied force in a quick burst. The arm snapped backward in a way that arms usually did not, but the almost gentle noise it accompanied identified it as a clean break. Baldie winced and clenched his teeth in pain, stumbling backward and completely giving up on defending himself. Frost waited until the moment he opened his mouth to scream, then jabbed the throat with four fingers and followed through with a left handed crowbar thunk to the side of the head.
Baldie hit the ground hard, his knife tumbling away from him. Frost had seen a man get up from a hit like that before, but this particular man already seemed to be sleeping with the intensity of a middle-aged man after a long day of work and a six-pack of beer. This, at least, was good news.
"This is ridiculous," Frost said. "You're all stupid. Just nameless flunkies. You only exist to power scale me." He walked over to the unconscious body and nudged it with his foot to be sure. "Do you at least work for somebody plot-relevant?" He asked.
The four remaining men looked at him like he had four heads, or as you might stare at a man with a severe facial defect or perhaps a man in a clown costume at a restaurant. None of this was unwarranted, to be sure. Frost Direshard did not speak this way because he was aware of any hypothetical story being told about him. He spoke this way because he was quite insane, about as egotistical as the average cyclist, and was probably in desperate need of either therapy or someone to genuinely love him. He had exactly none of those things though, and there was no one left to take it out on but the men in front of him.
Frost numbered them in his head, and it was the man called "One" that approached first, flanked by "Two". Frost swung up and caught One on the chin, his head snapping back at an unnatural angle and his teeth clamping together loudly. He snatched the man's body and used it to block a knife coming in from Two. This, he decided, was a murder that he technically wasn't responsible for. He made a pointed look of disgust as blood shot out onto his arm uncontrollably. The stab in question had most definitely hit an artery.
It wasn't his problem anymore. Frost pushed One's weakened body into Two, who stumbled and fell to the ground with the weight of the other man on top of him. That left Three and Four to circle Frost from either side, Three being armed with a knife but clearly not feeling confident in his skill with it. Frost prioritized the knife, catching Three's wrist while simultaneously eating a punch to the face from Four.
Three's wrist started shaking slightly as he attempted to escape the grip. Frost squeezed tighter until the circulation cut off to the man's hand, and his fingers started turning purple. He smiled. "C'mere and gimme a kiss," he said, and then headbutted Three in the face as hard as he could. He stumbled and then fell, hitting his head off of the concrete and going still.
Four was busy beating on Frost's unguarded side, but promptly stopped when attention fell upon him. "You've had enough free shots," Frost said, blood running down his forehead. He was blushing uncontrollably from a mix of pain, excitement, and adrenaline pumping through his veins. Frost wanted the battle to last forever, but alas his practicality overrode those thoughts. He cracked Four on the side of the head with his crowbar and watched him fall. The street fell deadly silent when the last man hit the ground. Frost was left standing as he always was. It had turned out a similar way last time.
A little bit away, Two crawled out from underneath One at long last and ran off into the night.
Frost ignored him and walked over to the man he'd been robbing before the rude interruption. He padded around in the man's pocket and pulled out a phone, stuffing the rest of the Aero bar in his mouth as he dialed nine-one-one. It rang once, twice surprisingly, and then was answered by a woman.
"Nine-one-one."
"I'm down on Ninth Boulevard, and I uh… Happened upon what looks like some sort of robbery." He took a moment to count the bodies, feeling stupid. "Five men down," he said. "You get all of that?"
"First responders are on their way, sir."
"Great. I've gotta go, though, so I won't be sticking around to give a statement."
"What–"
Frost hung up the phone and tossed it to the pavement with a sigh. Law enforcement always asked too many questions. Who made the call? Why did they make the call? Did it matter? He'd done this same thing on ten different occasions now, so it was about time they accepted that he was an elusive creature… Kind of like Spider-man if only Spider-man cracked heads with a crowbar and… Well, maybe he wasn't really like Spider-man come to think of it.
Hearing sirens in the distance, he disappeared into a dark alleyway while admiring his new watch.