"A stick?" Kevin muttered, inspecting the utility belt of his new black suit.
Tucked between the tactical compartments, he noticed a silver metallic cylinder—cold to the touch and no bigger than his own cell phone.
He pulled it out with curiosity, turning it over in his claws. As he inspected the device, searching for a hidden button or mechanism, the baton reacted to his mere intention.
It extended in a flash with a sharp, metallic SNACK!, missing Kevin's face by mere millimeters. Out of pure feline instinct, he tilted his head back just in time, feeling the rush of air graze his nose.
"Awesome, Kevin. You're a regular Jet Li," he mocked himself, letting out a heavy sigh and rolling his yellowish eyes. "You haven't been a superhero for five minutes and you almost poke your own eye out."
He weighed the baton in his hands. It was incredibly light, yet the metal felt dense enough to dent a vault door. He gave it a few twirls, surprised by the fluidity of his own movements.
"While a stick isn't exactly my weapon of choice, at least it'll be good for bashing some heads in," he reasoned, a half-smile creeping onto his face.
Determined to test the limits of this magic, Kevin extended the baton toward the alley floor.
The weapon lengthened at breakneck speed against the pavement, launching him upward with brutal force. He launched into the air, gripping the tip of the baton tightly, catapulting himself high above the Parisian skyline.
"Wooohooo!" an involuntary shout of pure, genuine thrill escaped his throat as adrenaline began flooding every corner of his body.
The wind whipped across his face, and his new white mane billowed wildly behind him. The feeling of weightlessness was intoxicating. At the absolute peak of his trajectory, the baton retracted automatically, returning to a size Kevin could easily hold in a single hand.
He began to free-fall, landing gracefully on his feet against the red clay tiles of a nearby roof. He braced himself mentally for the impact, but to his amazement, the touchdown was as soft as landing on a mattress.
It hit him just how incredible this suit really was; despite dropping from at least a four-meter height, his joints didn't feel the slightest twinge of pain.
He straightened up, marveling at the sensation. The magical Black Cat suit didn't just grant him superhuman agility; it came hardwired with several physical buffs. He reached for his left shoulder, fully expecting the sharp, stabbing pain from Silas's blood spear, but there was nothing.
The suit's dark magic completely numbed and suppressed the burning of his wound, allowing him to operate at one hundred percent capacity.
He was ready for action.
Clack! Sshhh! Clack! Sshhh!
Kevin repeated the process over and over: extend, retract, extend, retract. He was drilling the baton's movement mechanics with almost surgical focus.
Even though he would never admit it out loud in front of Plagg, he was genuinely enjoying the endless possibilities of this magical suit.
It had been a long time—perhaps since the "machine" changed his life—that Kevin had felt this intoxicating rush of freedom. It was like stepping into a sports car, flooring the gas pedal, and feeling the engine roar to life, bending entirely to your will.
For the first time, he didn't have to pull his punches or measure his steps to keep from cracking the floor; the suit absorbed his excess energy and dialed his reflexes up to eleven.
When he finally stopped at the ledge of an apartment building, his yellow eyes were wide, glowing with a mix of euphoria and sheer surprise. An involuntary, almost goofy grin spread across his face as his chest heaved rapidly from the exertion.
He wasn't tired in the slightest; he was pumped, and adrenaline was a hell of a lot better fuel than any painkiller.
"Aaaaaahhhhh!"
A shrill, feminine scream sliced through the air right above him. Kevin reacted on instinct, tilting his head up. A red blur streaked across the sky at top speed, arms and legs flailing in a desperate, failing attempt to control her trajectory.
CRASH!
The girl, clad in a bright red suit covered in black spots, didn't quite make the roof. Instead, she slammed violently into the branches of a tree growing by the sidewalk, getting hopelessly tangled in the leaves and wood.
Kevin let out a sarcastic snort. He rested his baton on the edge of the roof, extended it with one fluid motion until it hit the street, and slid down like a pro, landing silently on the pavement.
"So... I'm guessing you're the 'partner' that magical creature mentioned?" Kevin asked, his tone dripping with skepticism as he stared up at the violently shaking canopy.
Finally, a branch snapped under the weight with a dry crack. The girl fell flat on her back, landing in a highly ungraceful heap directly onto the sidewalk.
While she let out a groan and rubbed her backside, Kevin planted himself in front of her, blocking out the sun.
He gave her suit a quick ocular pat-down: it was flashy, maybe a little too flashy for his taste, but it radiated the exact same magical energy as his own. With a gesture that screamed "Don't sweat it, it's my first day too," but keeping up appearances, he extended his clawed hand to help her up.
"I'm Black Cat," he declared, his voice ringing out.
The girl blinked, clearly disoriented by the white-haired hero's bizarre appearance. She hesitated for a second before finally taking Kevin's hand. He yanked her up with a firm, sharp tug, getting her on her feet in a single motion.
"And I'm... I'm..." the rookie heroine started to stammer, desperately searching for a name she hadn't even thought of yet.
But before she could finish, a heavy, solid metal yoyo that had been snagged on one of the higher branches suddenly gave way. The object plummeted and clocked Kevin right on the top of his head with a dull, heavy thud.
THWACK!
"Damn it!" Kevin hunched over, instinctively dropping to a crouch and clutching the point of impact, cursing under his breath.
"Ouch! I am so, so sorry! It's just... this is all so new and I'm a little clumsy!" the girl apologized frantically, waving her hands in a panic as the yoyo rolled across the ground.
Kevin stayed crouched, rubbing his head and glaring daggers at her with his yellow eyes. Clearly, saving Paris was going to be a lot harder than he thought if his own partner kept trying to accidentally knock him out.
The painfully awkward interaction between Paris's new, highly dysfunctional superhero duo was abruptly cut short.
ROOOAAAAARRR!
A monstrous bellow, so deafening it rattled the nearby windowpanes, echoed in the distance, shattering the peaceful afternoon. The sound was coming straight from the city's massive soccer stadium.
"There's the akumatized villain!" the girl in red exclaimed, the nerves bleeding into her voice. "We have to stop him!"
Kevin blinked, shaking his head. "Oh, right. The monster. Gotta stop him," he muttered, scratching the back of his neck.
To be completely honest, for a hot minute he had entirely forgotten about the mission and the league of assassins. He'd been too busy enjoying the high of leaping across buildings without feeling like he was falling apart.
A cocky smirk crept back onto his face. "I'll race you, Wonder Woman. Last one there is a rotten egg."
Without waiting for a response, Kevin slammed his baton against the street and vaulted into the sky, tearing through the air toward the stadium with feline grace.
"Wait! You can't just run off like that!" the girl yelled from below, waving her arms. "We need a plan or something!"
The rookie heroine was completely overwhelmed. The sheer thought of rushing blindly into a fight with a giant supervillain made her stomach churn, but seeing the cat-boy already fading into the distance, she had no choice but to throw her yoyo and awkwardly swing after him.
In a matter of seconds, Kevin landed in a crouch on the highest steel beam of the open-air stadium. From his vantage point, his slit eyes scanned the pitch.
Down below, in the lower bleachers, the colossal stone monster had a student in a red shirt cornered. The kid tripped and fell backward, utterly terrified, as the rock beast raised a massive fist to crush him flat.
FWEEEEET!
Kevin let out a piercing, ear-splitting whistle that echoed across the empty stands.
Stoneheart halted his attack and slowly craned his heavy head toward the roof.
"Sorry, pebble-brain," Kevin yelled down, his voice loaded with lethal sarcasm, "but I'm about to turn you into gravel."
Kevin dropped from the beam, plummeting in a total free-fall toward the monster. As the wind roared in his ears, he balled his right hand into a fist. Ignoring the magical baton and Plagg's power entirely, he tapped into his own raw strength.
He channeled the latent power of the Gura Gura no Mi.
A dense, vibrating sphere of white energy instantly enveloped his gloved fist.
In the fraction of a second before impact, reality itself around his arm seemed to protest. Space warped and, with a deafening shatter that sounded like the sky itself was tearing apart, a web of blinding white cracks webbed outward into the air.
Stoneheart barely had time to cross his arms in defense when Kevin's fist connected.
CRAAAAAAAAACK!
The impact wasn't just a physical blow; it was a pure seismic shockwave. The earth beneath the stadium violently bucked. The blast rippled straight through the villain's stone anatomy and plowed into the stands.
Concrete splintered in milliseconds. An entire section of the glass roofing caved in, raining jagged shards down onto the bleachers. Plastic seats were ripped cleanly from their bolts, and the stadium's steel foundation shrieked in agony, on the verge of total collapse.
Stoneheart was blasted backward like a ragdoll, crashing dead center into the soccer pitch and kicking up a massive mushroom cloud of dust, dirt, and shredded turf.
Kevin landed smoothly at the lip of the crater, bending his knees to absorb his own momentum. He slowly stood up, but that cocky smirk was completely wiped from his face.
He looked around, his yellow eyes blown wide. Thick dust choked the air. The stadium was half-destroyed. There were fissures the size of compact cars ripped through the ground.
A cold knot formed in his throat. Shit... he thought, grinding his teeth. I held back as much as I physically could and I still almost brought the whole damn stadium down.
It was the first time he'd used his Devil Fruit while jacked up on the Miraculous's physical buffs. The magical suit channeled his seismic energy way too efficiently.
A dark thought crossed his mind: if he ever accidentally stacked his seismic power with the Black Cat's Cataclysm... he'd probably wipe Paris clean off the map.
A heavy, grinding noise snapped him out of his spiraling thoughts.
From the dead center of the crater and the dust cloud, a violent purple glow began to pulse. Stoneheart's body hadn't shattered. In fact, the kinetic energy from Kevin's seismic strike had been completely absorbed by the akuma's magic.
With an even more guttural roar, the rock beast hauled itself up. But he wasn't the same size anymore. His shoulders broadened, his arms thickened into petrified oak trunks, and his height literally doubled, morphing him into a genuinely terrifying stone titan.
"So, if I hit him, he tanks the damage and just gets bigger?" Kevin muttered, highly offended by the villain's stupidly broken mechanics. "Rats. That's just cheating."
Stoneheart's massive boulder of a fist cleaved through the air with a horrifying whistle. Kevin launched himself backward, executing a flawless backflip that cleared the impact by inches.
BOOM!
BOOM! Every missed swing from the giant slammed dead into the soccer field, blowing fresh craters into the artificial turf and shaking the grandstands.
Kevin dodged with fluid, cat-like precision. He was fast—ridiculously fast, thanks to the magic suit's buffs—but playing a permanent game of dodgeball wasn't a winning strategy.
Think, Kevin, think, he scolded himself, vaulting over a torn-up stadium seat hurdling right at him. How the hell am I supposed to put him down if every hit just juices him up?
He jammed his baton into the cracked earth and vaulted into the air, desperately searching for a new blind spot to assess the battlefield.
He touched down softly several yards away, claws primed. However, he was so hyper-fixated on the stone titan's erratic, raging swings that he completely ignored his own six.
An unbreakable wire suddenly whipped around his waist.
Before Kevin could even twitch or dig his claws into the dirt to anchor himself, he felt a brutal yank that threw him entirely off balance. He was dragged backward across the turf, slamming hard against the bottom wall of the bleachers.
When he opened his eyes, he was lying right at the feet of his new partner, who was gripping her magical yoyo tight.
Kevin looked up at her from the dirt, propping himself up on one elbow and raising an eyebrow behind his black mask. "You know... if you ever decide to actually lend a hand instead of dragging me through the dirt like a sack of potatoes, I wouldn't be mad," he deadpanned with his usual sarcasm, dusting the debris off the white fur around his collar. "Why aren't you fighting?"
"Because I already saw what happens when you fight," she shot back firmly, pointing at the walking natural disaster. "Physical attacks just make him bigger and worse. My kwami told me we have to destroy the akuma. That's the only way to beat him."
Kevin stood up, shifting his brain into tactical mode. "Well, the flying cat that gave me this ring said the akuma is hiding inside a personal object," he muttered, narrowing his newly enhanced feline vision to scan the monster's anatomy. "But this guy is a hundred percent solid rock..."
Suddenly, his yellow eyes locked onto a tiny detail that anyone else panicking for their life would have easily missed.
"Hold on a second. Did you notice that?" Kevin pointed one of his claws straight at the monster. "He's been swinging and smashing everything with his left hand... but he hasn't opened his right hand once. No matter what happens, he keeps it locked shut like a vault. I'd bet my life the object is right in there."
The rookie heroine blinked, genuinely caught off guard and impressed by her partner's lightning-fast deductive reasoning. "You're right," she nodded, her confidence finally bleeding back into her voice. "Okay. We just have to find a way to force his hand open. Lucky Charm!"
The girl launched her yoyo straight into the sky. A magical burst of pink light bathed the stadium, swirling through the air until it materialized into a physical object that dropped right into the heroine's hands.
It was a roll of absurdly thick, oversized fabric. A heavy silence settled between the two heroes for a few agonizing seconds.
Kevin slowly lowered his arms, staring at the harmless piece of cloth with a look of absolute disbelief. "Yeah... right," he drawled, his voice dripping with pure irony.
"A heavy curtain against a sixty-foot stone golem. Exactly the weapon of mass destruction we needed. Are you completely sure that magic of yours isn't glitching out?"
The girl completely ignored him. Gripping the heavy fabric, her blue eyes began to dart frantically around the environment, searching for the missing pieces of an invisible puzzle.
She looked at the cloth, and inside her mind, everything suddenly clicked into place perfectly.
"I've got it!" she exclaimed with a bright, fiercely determined smile, spinning to face the Black Cat.