It was a sweltering summer day when members of the Typhoon gang flooded the streets of Braver City. There were a dozen of the blue-and-white-clad free runners in total, each one moving swiftly around corners, through alleyways, and across fire escapes. They’d grown up in the city and were comfortable enough to use it as their own playground, even with the city’s absurd tempo of ever-changing layout and construction.
That gave them quite an advantage when they’d entered the race for the mysterious FORMA cards. While the actual act of acquiring them was still something they had to develop better methods for in the future, once they’d actually managed to snatch one from a small squad of Pyro Punks, there were few who could hope to chase after them, and even fewer who could realistically hope to ever catch them.
But the young gang of free runners would soon learn that if anyone in Braver City could realistically hope to catch them, it was the field agents of GLYPH. And unfortunately for those Typhoon members who had nabbed their very first FORMA card on that sweltering summer day, the specific field agents of GLYPH that they would learn that lesson from were BB and Ryder.
“Get outta my way if you wanna keep yer fuckin’ brains in yer skulls!” BB roared as she rounded the corner. There were several fleeing Typhoon members not far ahead of her, though none of them were the ones currently holding the card, so she didn’t have much interest in them.
The one lagging behind the most smirked and spun around, ready to catch BB off guard and rock her with a clothesline. But as his arm extended out, aimed for her throat, his eyes went wide as he saw her flying towards him, moving way faster than he thought she’d been capable of.
She struck him across the cheek with a flying knee, and as her body started sailing past him, she quickly wrapped her legs around his extended arm, and that arm bar, combined with the momentum of her leap, quickly sent the poor guy hurtling through the air. He collided with one of his other Typhoon buddies, and the two rolled and bounced together into a nearby brick wall.
The third member glanced over his shoulder at the commotion, but didn’t have much time to look as BB came sprinting after him next, and he could’ve sworn he saw actual lightning bursting out from behind her sunglasses.
With a surprised yelp, he pivoted around and opted for a sideflip, narrowly avoiding getting gored by the charging bull as she flew past him and slammed her shoulder into the wall behind him.
“Ow! Son of a bitch!” BB whined rather pathetically, rubbing at her shoulder before turning and knocking the guy’s lights out with a vicious backhand. He evidently hadn’t thought to do a second sideflip.
Rolling her shoulder, she mumbled, “Tch, why these guys gotta be such a pain in the balls…?”
Spurred on by the distant sounds of their allies getting their faces battered by BB’s fists, the Typhoon members at the forefront of the fleeing pack kicked it into high gear to put some distance between themselves and their pursuer. They quickly decided to split up as they came to the end of the alley to further throw off which one of them was in possession of the FORMA.
The wielder of the FORMA card in question glanced over at one of his allies and nodded up towards the side of the building to his right. His partner understood, unhooking the water bottle she kept strapped behind her back and, still in mid-sprint, uncapped it and threw its contents up into the air.
The wielder scrambled up the brick wall and kicked off of it towards the spray of water from the bottle. He kicked off of that spray as well, as though it were a second wall, using that momentum to leap up to the roof in one clean, swift motion.
Satisfied, the girl returned her water bottle to her back and exited the alley, taking a sharp left and disappearing into the crowd of pedestrians.
Atop the roof, the Typhoon member with the FORMA card in his possession turned westward and ran, leaping off of the roof of one apartment building to the next, zigzagging in a multitude of directions to really ensure that the GLYPH agent had no chance of figuring out what direction he’d gone.
After a few minutes of running and jumping, he came to a much, much bigger rooftop gap than he’d done so far – this one requiring him to leap across the traffic-jammed streets of the city below to the other side. It was a risky jump, but it certainly assured he’d be completely free of the GLYPH agent, and, if he was being honest with himself, it’d be a big stroke of his ego to make a jump like this.
He wasn’t really worried about it – sure, it was too ridiculous of a jump for a regular person to make, but as a member of Typhoon, he felt confident he could do it, especially as he unstrapped his own water bottle from his back and loosened the cap, having saved it for an opportunity just like this.
With his heart racing at the exhilaration, he took off towards the edge of the roof in a steady jog, then leaped as high and as far as his legs could naturally take him. In that moment, he really did feel free, soaring high above the city streets, the wind rushing past him. It almost felt as though he were moving in slow motion, and he wished that sensation could last even longer.
As he felt his body reach the apex of his jump, still having a half the distance to go, he held his water bottle out, ready to spray it at just the right moment and angle to ensure he could land on it with his foot and kick off of it like it were a temporary solid platform.
But just when he began tossing the water out, he heard the loud crack of a gun firing, and the bottle exploded in his hand, shattered to pieces. He panicked, flailing his arms around, just barely managing to step the front of a single foot on the completely-off-the-mark spray of water and use that to throw himself forward.
His botched jump was nowhere near as clean and optimal as he needed it to be to properly finish leaping from one roof to the next, but it was enough to at least get him nearly to the roof. All he needed to do was grab something, and he should be okay – he could stabilize and then climb up to the roof, and then he’d be fine.
He didn’t have much time to think, and even less to work with as far as grabables went, but there was some sort of cable hanging from the roof out of the corner of his eye, and his hands instinctively reached out to grab hold of it, catching himself and preventing a fall to his death.
But before he could breathe a sigh of relief, a surge of pain shot out from his hands and coursed up his arms, eliciting a howl from his lungs. His eyes frantically looked to the cable, only to find that it was, in fact, razor wire, now coated with blood from his hands. He needed to get to the roof fast, so he could free his hands from the razor wire, and free his body from the dizzying heights it was dangling from.
Unfortunately, another obstruction to reaching the roof suddenly manifested, in the form of a white-haried, dark-skinned, icy-eyed man in a black blazer and gray hoodie standing on the roof right above him. In the man’s hand was a revolver, the barrel aimed directly at him.
“Pretty stupid to take that jump,” the man, Ryder, said, his voice low and cold. “Shoulda just went back down to ground level. Better to get knocked out than fall to your death.”
“L-let me up! Let me up, please!”
“Hand over the FORMA.”
The Typhoon member grimaced, eyes darting over to the razor wire digging into the flesh of his palms. “I-I can’t! I’m holding onto th-!”
“Then pass it over while you still have enough arm strength to keep yourself up with one hand,” Ryder said, cutting the gang member off. “Make it quick. Clock’s ticking.”
“J-just lemme up first! I-I’ll give it to you after, I-I swear!”
The revolver fired, blasting a piece of the roof right off and striking the dangling Typhoon member in the eyes with broken concrete and dust that had him screaming and coughing and momentarily sliding further down the razor wire. “Pretty stupid to make demands of me in your situation. You should shut up and listen to me while your life’s in my hands.”
As the Typhoon member opened his eyes again, he found himself looking down the dozen floors to the streets far below, his heart lurching at the sight. With a quivering lip, he looked back up at Ryder. “Okay! Okay! H-here…!”
Gritting his teeth, he released one hand from the razor wire. The other one slipped down a few inches, the blades tearing further into his palms, but he ignored the pain as best he could as his other hand dug around inside his jacket to retrieve the FORMA card.
When at last he pulled it free, he held it up towards Ryder. “Here! Here! T-take it! Lemme up! Please!”
Ryder’s frosty eyes peered at the FORMA…
And then his revolver went off again, blasting a hole right through the card.
“A fake,” he muttered, rolling his eyes and turning away. “Can’t believe I wasted my time with this shit.”
And then the GLYPH agent walked away, leaving the Typhoon member to desperately struggle to climb up the length of razor wire and pull himself up to the roof.
BB, meanwhile, had been quite busy chasing after the other Typhoon members. She punched each of them several times, demanding they either fork over the FORMA if they had it (which none of them did), tell her where the one who did have it went (which none of them knew), or…well, she mostly just punched the other ones at that point just because she was annoyed at the previous ones and it was a bit cathartic to.
The gang of free runners certainly didn’t make that easy, each one proving to be just as slippery and elusive as the last (which certainly contributed to her aforementioned annoyance), and it wasn’t until a good hour later that she was essentially forced to give up, having punched the last of the members she could find, with no FORMA or leads in sight.
That put her in an even worse mood as she stomped down the sidewalk just as the sun began to set over Braver City. Not only did it feel shitty to fail a mission, that meant she probably would have to stick around in town even longer than she wanted to, and that wasn’t to her liking at all. She had a lot of shit going on back home in Breaker Bay, and wanted to return ASAP. Getting sidetracked chasing after all of those Typhoon members had just prolonged her return, and left her not really knowing what to do next.
Eventually, she decided to try returning to HQ and reporting the mission as a failure, but as she passed by the windows of the Derring-Do Diner across the street, she spotted Ryder sitting at the GLYPH agents’ usual booth, and her eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she pressed her hands and face against the glass.
“Oi! What the hell’re you doin’ in there?!” she barked. Ryder glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, but resumed reading over the menu without answering her. Growling, she stomped into the restaurant and took a seat on the other side of the booth. “Did you fuggin’ bail on the mission?”
“Card was fake.”
“And ya didn’t bother tellin’ me that? Bruh.”
Still, annoyed as she was, that did mean that the mission was finished, more or less, and that meant her return home was no longer delayed. That was enough for BB to be satisfied, and she kicked her legs out, slipping her aching feet from out of her sneakers and calling over a waitress to order herself a double bacon cheeseburger.
“This GLYPH shit’s been gettin’ kinda annoyin’ lately, yeah?” she asked. “Feels like there’s tons more of these dumb missions, and more annoyin’ buttfaces we gotta beat up while we’re out there.”
“No,” Ryder responded flatly. “You’re just a whiny brat.”
“Fuck you, bro,” she said, kicking her feet up and resting them on Ryder’s lap. “Maybe the reason you haven’t noticed it’s cuz yer borin’ and don’t have shit else goin’ on.”
“Or maybe it’s because I’m not a whiny brat.”
As BB sat there hissing like a whiny cat, a young woman suddenly slid into the booth right next to theirs, resting her arms on the top of the shared seat and peeking over to their area. “Excuse me! Did you just say you guys were with GLYPH?!”
BB, being the one nearest to the girl, raised a brow at her. She was fairly nondescript – her red hair kinda sorta stood out, she supposed, but there weren’t any other strong features about her, although she did appear to be carrying some kind of notebook or journal in her hands. “Why? Ya got beef with us?”
“No, no, not at all!” The girl peeled open her notebook and retrieved the pen nestled over her ear. “Actually, I’m a pretty big fan of you guys, and I was wondering if I could hear some stories of your awesome battles and adventures!”
BB narrowed her eyes. “Why? You a narc or somethin’?”
“No, no, it’s nothing at all like that! My name’s Tori! I’m a writer! I’m planning out a super cool fantasy series as my masterpiece, but I don’t want to just write the same-old same-old that’s been done a billion times before, you know?”
She turned the notebook over to show BB and Ryder a few of the pages. BB couldn’t make much sense of the (admittedly very pretty) cursive in the short few seconds the girl showed the pages to her to actually read what she’d wrote, though she did spot a little doodle of what appeared to be Hiroto’s HYPER HAWK helmet in the corner, as well as a cartoon of BB punching a bunch of people, so she assumed they were notes about the various GLYPH agents.
“But then I had this brilliant idea!” Tori continued, apparently so caught up in her monologue that she completely failed to realize that her audience wasn’t very interested in her performance. “Braver City is home to so many exceptional people from all walks of life! People constantly battling each other in the streets! For what purpose, who knows?! But with exceptional people from all walks of life come beautiful stories! Stories that I think would make a wonderful inspiration for my own series! My masterpiece!”
The waitress returned to the booth, passing BB her burger. The redhead flipped through a few more pages and hastily showed them their contents (in a still-impossible-to-actually-read-and-comprehend fashion). “I’ve been slowly learning, bit-by-bit, of all these interesting, colorful gangs in the city, and the one that seems the most interesting of them all is GLYPH! So mysterious in what they do, but full of fascinating characters! Characters who must have an absolute treasure trove of tales! Tales that can inspire my pen to weave an epic saga of my own! And what better source to hear those stories than the mysterious heroes of GLYPH themselves?!”
Tori turned to face BB, eagerly awaiting confirmation that the GLYPH agent had been swayed by the prospective writer’s passionate speech.
BB, cheeks full of burger, turned away. “Nah.”
The girl slumped in her seat, holding her notebook to her chest. “Aww…”
On her way back home from her judo dojo, from out of the corner of her eye, Joei Sablan spotted the unmistakable blue-and-white colors of the Typhoon gang in an alley across the street. There was a small group of them huddled together – they’d clearly been in a scrap, with many of them bearing bruises, cuts, and swollen eyes, and one in particular whose clothes were soaked in blood.
She hurried over to them. “Hey! What’s goin’ on?! What happened?! You guys okay?!”
Though the Typhoon leader Marco had made it clear that Joei had been kicked from the gang, many of the members were still on friendly terms with her, at least in secret, and they were quite relieved to see her in their time of need. “We had a fight with those, ngh…those GLYPH guys…”
Joei’s eyebrow raised as she slipped into the circle and slung the most badly-injured member onto her back to carry him out of the alley. “GLYPH? What’s that?”
“They’re some bigshot organization here that goes after FORMA cards. Marco just told us about them a few days ago.”
“They messed y’all up this bad?” Joei asked, glancing around at her old gang to really take in all of their battle wounds. “They must be pretty tough, then.”
One of them let out a nervous little laugh, but had to stop so her chest wouldn’t hurt too badly. “Yeah, and the crazy part? It was just one chick who kicked our asses this badly.”
“Eh?! One girl beat all of ya?!”
“Yeah…She was this crazy-strong chick with black-and-purple hair. Hngh…” The Typhoon girl brought her hand to her cheek, gingerly tapping against the big bruise on her face. “I’ve never been punched that hard in my life…”
As Joei led the injured members to her dojo, she mused over the information she’d just been given. “Black-and-purple hair, huh? I’ll keep an eye out for her, I guess.”
Though her statement was meant to comfort her old allies and assure them that she had their back in the event they had another run-in with the “crazy-strong GLYPH chick”, internally, Joei was quickly growing more and more occupied with how fun it sounded getting to fight someone strong enough to take out a dozen Typhoon gang members by herself…
Woooo the main story’s finally continuing with Arc II. Dunno if anyone was lookin forward to it but it’s been fun to write so far, especially since it’s been a few months and I’ve done a lot more thinking/planning/making characters and figuring story and lore stuff out for this lil OC universe thingie that I’m p excited for lol
I haven’t actually finished writing this whole Arc yet so hopefully I don’t fall behind on it like I usually do with projects lol
dis story updates every other Tuesday as a reminder
BRAVE BANGERS 
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