RELAY || Virtual Reality AU

8

The chase was longer than he would really have liked. Ghost pains flared up in his torso and legs as he ran, telling him he couldn't breathe, telling him he was at the edge of his strength.

Shit, why now? he thought, pausing on the corner of a long street to radio in a request for containment privileges.

The pains slowed him, despite his best efforts. If he'd been running full-tilt—but he couldn't, not in a quiet, suburban maze like the one he found himself in at that moment. The griefer had taken to back streets and alleyways, obviously aware that with a tagged account, he could be followed. Very probably he was simply hoping to evade capture for long enough that he could log out, and then scrub his machine and account from the other side.

It was a worrying trend. There had been a wave of trolls—most of them two-bit hackers barely out of school—who had developed, almost overnight, an ability to break into their own account details and remove certain features, such as tags and ban warnings. Most troubling of all, a few had even managed to break into the official police database and disassociate their accounts from criminal activity, leaving their owners free to log in from a different computer and effectively vanish without a trace all the while they were logged into the Interface.

All of which meant that Toshinori couldn't afford to charge in without a plan...which was a bit of a problem when his normal plans consisted of pummelling any wrongdoers hard enough that they were too stunned to resist arrest. Still, there was no reason that shouldn't work, he mused. He'd just need to find a better way of holding onto the guy once he was laid out.

It was a problem which dispatch ought to have a solution for, anyway. All he needed to do was apprehend the bad guy, and that was one of the easiest forms his job could take. No problem. No sweat. No worry at all, in fact, save for the shooting pains down his right leg which were throwing him off a little.

Stop it, he told himself firmly. You just have to catch the guy, so worry about this later.

Fortunately or not, when he finally did catch up he had something of an incentive. The griefer had grabbed someone as a hostage, stretching his body so that the poor lad was hanging off the ground, clearly struggling to breathe. It didn't matter that nothing was obstructing his real airways—all the while he was logged in, the Interface would do a good enough job convincing him that something had pressed itself against his mouth that his chest would likely lock up as a reflex. Even as Toshinori ran forward, the boy's struggles grew weaker. If he lost consciousness he would be disconnected, but the trauma from an experience of that sort could be very severe indeed.

"It's alright, Citizen!" Toshinori called, as much to distract the griefer as to reassure the poor boy. "I am here!"

This was what he was meant for. This was his role, his livelihood—his life. Charging in with the full weight of One For All behind him, and stunning the griefer with a single blow. Not enough to render him fully unconscious, but definitely enough to render him senseless for a few minutes. Time to check on the status of the civilian, and receive the containment device dispatch would generate in order to hold the captured criminal while a full ban was enacted.

It might have started out as minor harassment, but by hostage-taking he'd more or less guaranteed a permanent ban, somewhere further down the line. The minimum penalty was an immediate six-months without access, while the report was processed.

The griefer had dropped the boy as Toshinori charged—for which he was sorely grateful. Laying the man out would have been a lot fiddlier if he'd still had someone in his grasp. As it was, panic had once again lent Toshinori an edge. His reputation preceded him, of course, and that was always a useful factor when it came to apprehending troublemakers.