A knock, sharp, exact, broke through the quiet.
Darren blinked, peeled the blanket off his shoulders, and shuffled to the door. The flat smelled like damp textbooks and microwave noodles. His laptop glowed faintly across the room, paused on a Kengan Ashura episode. Wasn't sure what episode but Kaolan was fuckin up that little weak guy whatever his name was. He didn't even remember pressing play.
Outside, rain sliding off the brim of his hood, was Chapman with a black suitcase.
He gave a nod. That was it.
Darren stepped aside. Chapman entered and dropped the suitcase on the table with a dull thud, then stepped back.
Arms crossed. Staring.
You could cut the tension with a knife.
"Go on," was all he said.
Darren moved on instinct. He opened the Suitcase...
...and forgot to breathe.
It was beautiful.
The suit wasn't folded, it was laid out. Each piece nestled like a puzzle of his own skin, all deep tactical green, sharp lines and pressure-point armor. The gauntlets shimmered faintly under the kitchen light. The hood was tucked under the collar. Reinforced boots. Grips on the fingers. Compartments on the belt.
And the helmet.
It sat there like a glorious god, matte green, the edges weathered like stone.
The eye-slits glared up at him.
His heart thudded.
That's mine.
He reached out, touched it.
Cool. Solid. Real.
His fingers traced the modular seams. He remembered Johnny explaining the magnetic clasps, the HUD integration, the bone-conduction speakers. All of it, everything, was real.
Not comic books. Not cosplay.
This was armor.
This was Sentinel.
He felt like a kid.
It wasn't just cool.
It was his. Designed around his chaos. Built for him, his spiraling, his pacing thoughts, his low-sugar crashes, his need for control and comfort and silence and noise all at once.
He slid the upper mask down over his face.
Click. The seal locked with a soft hiss, smooth, magnetic.
The HUD flickered to life. Simple, clean. Just a faint glow across his vision, no clutter, no overload. Compass lines. Pinged motion blips. Heart rate in the corner. A thought was all it took to shift menus. Zoom. Filter. Night vision.
"Okay… very cool. Very cyberpunk. Very dangerous for a brain like mine."
A notification blinked, [Tactical Mode: ON].
"Yeah, nah." He winced. "Not trusting myself with this much input right now."
He tapped the jawline switch. The top half of the mask clicked free and folded back. Half-mask mode engaged. Breathable. Grounded. Safer.
Back to real-world noise. Real air.
He looked back. Chapman didn't answer. Just raised one eyebrow.
Darren looked at the suit again. The stitching. The weight. The fuckin' snack compartment.
You're not a normie, his brain whispered. You're a bloody superhero.
He tried to smother the grin, failed. "It's perfect."
Chapman didn't respond.
Darren bent and picked up the gauntlet. It slid on like second skin. Flexible. Tight. Responsive.
This is what Batman must've felt the first time. Or Robin. Or any of them. Suiting up for the first time and realizing... yeah. This is who I am now.
The gloves made a soft click as he balled his fists.
"Johnny made good time," he said, voice low.
Chapman shrugged. "He wouldn't shut up about it."
He looked down at the suit again, fingers brushing the curved lines of the chest armor.
It felt like stepping into a story.
He shut the suitcase.
"Thanks," he said. Simple.
Chapman nodded once more and walked to the door.
Then he was gone.
And Darren stood in the quiet, the weight of the suitcase in his hands, a grin twitching at the edges of his mouth.
Not everything was okay.
But this?
This was a start.
A couple weeks later...
It starts slow.
A few late-night walks in his gear. Hood up. Mask on. No music, couldn't handle the noise. Just his breath, the wind, his heartbeat thudding against the inside of his ribs like it's trying to get out. Just moving. Just trying to get back in the groove, even if every step felt like walking on glass.
He spent a while hyping himself up. Staring at the suit like it might bite. Boots tight, grappling hook on his belt, fingers flexing, fidgeting. The window creaked open and cold air slapped his face.
His brain screamed don't do it but his body said go.
The first rooftop was the hardest.
Every part of him clenched. Like the concrete might explode. Like someone might be watching. He's not even sure what he's afraid of, guns? Drones?
But then his hands grip stone. His knees pivot. His breath syncs with the wind. And suddenly, he's not Darren anymore.
He's Sentinel.
Motion is the only language that still works. There's no talking, no thinking. Just do. Just go. The city rushes past under his boots and for five seconds at a time, he's okay. For five seconds, he forgets that he ever cried against a hospital wall or punched a man's skull into wet meat.
For five seconds, he's free.
Then a car alarm goes off five blocks away and his whole chest seizes up.
Every sound is a threat. Every corner a memory. Every pigeon that flaps near his face gets half a spin-kick by reflex. He keeps thinking he hears Diaz's voice, laughing, gurgling, whispering.
"You liked it. Don't lie."
"The blood under your nails? That was real."
"Go on, little hero. Show 'em what you really are."
He shakes his head hard enough to blur vision. No music. Too dangerous. He needs to hear everything. Every hiss of wind. Every footstep. Every snap of a branch that might be a weapon. Or a memory.
The rooftops are awful. Slanted, wet, uneven, like Dublin was designed by a drunk carpenter (which knowing Ireland It might have been) but he's getting used to it. The grappling hook's a game changer.
He even starts to like it. There's a thrill to it now, flipping over old pubs, balancing on ledges, pretending he's not scared shitless half the time.
Over the past few weeks, Chapman's been dragging him into sparring drills every few days.
Brutal stuff. No padding, no talking, just pain. Chapman doesn't praise. Doesn't yell. Just watches like a hawk, corrects posture with a grunt or a look. Darren's punches are cleaner now. His kicks sharper. He's learning restraint. How to hit without maiming. How to hold back the tidal wave.
Chapman calls it progress. Darren calls it survival.
Also in all this time the internet found him again.
A blurry photo, green silhouette against the Liffey skyline, hits Reddit. Then another. A Vine of someone vaulting an alley captioned "Yo that's Sentinel back from hell or whatever."
The Forums explode:
"Sentinel's back?"
"Didn't he kill someone?"
"Yeah, but that psycho was in a Exo suit thing!"
"Still murder."
"He saved my cousin on that tram line. I don't care."
Darren sees it all. He scrolls in the dark, hunched under his blanket, mask still on, cracked phone burning holes in his brain. His brain doesn't let him stop. Just keeps feeding him dopamine and dread at the same time.
Twitter's at war:
"DID BRO SELL OUT??"
"Bro got gov funding. Tactical as hell."
"Where'd he get that helmet? Shit looks SICK."
"Yeah you're sick. You're a sicko. You literally watched a man die and clapped."
"New suit's mad tho. Can't lie."
"Sentinel built like guilt in a hoodie."
Vine's worse. Edits with Linkin Park and dubstep. Someone made a Sentinel cosplay doing backflips in a Tesco parking lot. He nearly chokes on his own spit laughing, then Zones out pondering the meaning of life and stares at the wall for five minutes.
One post stops him cold:
"I don't care what he is. Sentinel flattened that fucking psycho like it was a boss fight. That's the kinda mad bastard we need."
He wants to laugh. He wants to throw his phone. He wants to vanish.
Instead, he pulls his mask back on and gets up.
Because under the chaos, the spiraling, the static in his head, the cold wind against his neck, the city screaming and whispering at the same time, there's still that pulse. That need to move. That mission.
And as time goes on he's starting to notice that something's off.
He feels it in the alley shadows. In those weird new gang tags scratched into bricks. In the way missing-person posters stay up longer than usual. In the way some rooftops feel watched.
A week later
He starts hearing voices again when the second guy hits the wall.
Not voices voices... not really. But something in his head starts whispering the second he drops the last thug, muscles trembling from adrenaline, boots soaked from alley runoff. Four of them. Armed with some kind of jury-rigged plasma blade and what looked like a Stark Repulsor duct-taped to a car battery. Definitely not standard issue for street robbers.
They're unconscious now. In a heap. Darren zip-ties them like garbage and stacks them neatly on the footpath outside a Lidl. He drapes a stolen hi-vis vest over the pile like a twisted little ribbon.
The whisper again:"That's it. That's who you are now."
He yanks his hood tighter. Shakes his head. Breathes too fast.
"Nope," he mutters under his mask, pacing back and forth in the shadows. "That's not—nope. That's adrenaline. That's exhaustion. That's not real."
But it feels real.
He ducks into an alley, presses his back to the wall, and scrolls. Twitter. Reddit. Vine. Anything. The noise helps — gives his brain something else to chew on. People are still talking about him.
"Bro looks like an evil Power Ranger."
He double-taps a meme of himself photoshopped into Riverdance mid-spin. Laughs. Then freezes. A door slams two blocks away and he drops into a crouch so fast his knee cracks.
Hypervigilance is eating him alive.
But he still patrols.
But things are changing in Dublin. Every night, there's more. More robberies. More weird kit. More screams. Stuff doesn't feel random anymore, it feels structured. Patterned. Thugs moving like units. One of them barked orders in French last night. Another had a comms earpiece and hand signs that looked way too rehearsed.
He starts jotting it all down, first in his head, then in a battered notebook he keeps tucked under his belt. New gang signs. Red angular symbols that show up near docks, then a week later near hardware shops, then on college walls. Same ones. Over and over.
He circles them. Adds timestamps. Takes quick photos when it's safe. Tags the coordinates.
There's a symbol that looks like a bootprint with sparks around it that one makes his stomach churn.
He watches CCTV footage from a petrol station on the northside. A guy with an alien-tech baseball bat slams it into a streetlight, dents it. Then brings it down again and a shockwave ripples out, blue and sizzling, buckling a goddamn sidewalk like it's tinfoil. The clip loops.
Darren watches it seven times.
His fingertips tingle. He can't tell if it's fear or rage.
Another witness interview: "Boots. His boots lit up, sparks came off 'em every time he moved. It was really freaky."
Not normal.
Back in his room, the walls close in. He throws his hoodie on the floor and just paces in socks, blasting a playlist through the helmet's internal system: Linkin Park, Skillet, SiM, even a bit of Sia just to ground himself.
He's seen this tech before.
Not just in SHIELD files — though yeah, those were bad enough — but in person. That alley a couple weeks ago. Diaz's goons.
They were smuggling tech even then. Prototypes. Broken pieces of something alien. Something powered.
Chapman said the source dried up when Diaz went down.
But now it feels like a floodgate has been opened.
Darren flips through his notes, thumb jittering at the edge of the page. Sharp slashes of pen ink. Diagrams half-doodled. The tag appeared three more times this week, once near Pearse Street, once on the South Circular, and again scrawled across a burnt-out van in Inchicore.
It's spreading.
He clocks one guy breaking a storefront window with a silvery sphere he pulled from his coat, tosses it, and a ten-meter radius goes dead quiet. Sound gone. Just pressure. Pure pressure in his ears like he's underwater.
Not random. Not freelance.
Someone stepped in to fill Diaz's shoes.
Someone smart enough to avoid cameras but dumb enough to think Darren wouldn't notice.
He watches the latest news clip in his room, curled up against the radiator. Audio grainy. Gardaí baffled. Another robbery. Tools stolen. Power boxes yanked off walls. Doors melted like wax.
He watches the replay three times before freezing on the frame.
Darren swears under his breath. Fidgets with his knuckles. Chews the inside of his cheek raw.
They're not just back. They're rebuilding. Re-arming. Smuggling again. Diaz may be dead, but the rot didn't die with him, it moved. Shifted shape.
And it's growing.
The next morning, he meets Chapman at a tucked-away café near Camden Street. Darren picks the booth in the back, near the toilet, minimal angles of attack. Still checks every window twice.
Chapman doesn't speak. Slides into the seat. Wearing a plain hoodie and tracksuits.
Darren pulls out the napkin, unfolds it. Photos. Graffiti. Weapon sketches. Street names. Dates.
He explains it all in a quiet, fast voice. Thoughts blurting ahead of his breath. Chapman doesn't interrupt once.
Finally, Chapman stares at the sketch of the energy bat. His face doesn't change, but his jaw locks.
"So off-world tech's made it here again," he mutters. "And someone's selling it."
He doesn't raise his voice. Doesn't need to. It feels like someone shut the air off in the room.
"Keep watching," Chapman says. "Don't engage. Not yet. Gardaí won't back you. SHIELD can't step in publicly. Not unless we want a political shitstorm."
Darren nods slowly. Eyes on the napkin, heart pounding.