Quantum Dissolve: Chapter Eleven. (Jade Shade meets Combatant)

When Dusty got home to his apartment, there was another package waiting for him.

He was surprised that the landlord hadn't kicked him out, changed the locks, and thrown out all his stuff for being gone so long.

He opened the package when he got inside, and was...confused.
At first.

It was a book.
A yellowed smelly old book from the 1940's.
Accompanying it was a note, saying simply "from a fan".
Again.

The hair stood up on the back of his neck.
Him again.

But....the mask had worked out okay, so he chanced it, and opened it up, and began to read.

Incredulously at first, and then deeply, and then voraciously.
He gobbled it up in an afternoon.

The book was called "Combatant", and concerned the exploits of one Danny Hugo, from birth, to death.

Hugo was transfromed in the womb by his scientists father's experimental serum, and born with superhuman powers.
Strength, speed, super leaping, and bulletproof skin.
Very familiar.

Dusty worked out the dates, and this thing came out just before the boom in superhero comics.

Danny Hugo died in the story, and was forgotten by history, and so too was its author.
Comics had built itself up on their bones.
And so too, by extension, the heroes, both real, and pseudo, inspired by those comics.

So, Dusty figured, it was only fitting, that he, as The Jade Shade, should carve out his legacy atop their bones.

All remaining guilt over the "heroes", he'd taken down so far evaporated.

"I shall avenge you", he whispered to both the book's protagonist, and its author.

He turned the last page, and scrawled out in pen on the inside back cover was "here's your bible- a fan".

"Indeed", he grumbled.

He and "a fan", were going to have to meet someday.