Was he protecting the people he loved or destroying them?

He wondered that a lot. It had always been a bad neighborhood, true. But almost everyone really wanted to do better, to get along and – maybe, if they didn’t have anyone left there – get out. And he hadn’t known much different.

The worst thing had always been the drugs. Dealers from outside came into the community and pushed their ‘products’. It destroyed so many families. It claimed so many.

And so, when a little boy had manifested a strange power, he had begun to fight. There were people he wanted to protect. The rest of the world could rot for all he cared.

***

He called himself ‘Baekho’ – the white tiger. His enemies knew him by that name only.

It was a rare opportunity to fight one of the higher ups – one of the main suppliers. But Baekho had tracked the operation down with many rough interrogations and would not pass up on it.

He wore a ski mask. Black like everything else on his body. He didn’t even have any other colored clothes in his closet.

It was quite amazing that the big guys in the drug business lived in the most expensive districts. The structure before him was something between a mansion and a small office building. A dozen guys in suits were guarding the perimeter. Certainly there were more inside.

Baekho wasn’t afraid. He might die if a bullet hit him but he banked on his ability to stay out of range.

The white tiger shifted into the other world.

***

It had been a terrifying experience when he first stepped into ‘Twi’, as he called it – the world of twilight. It was a perfect copy of the real world. A perfect copy except for the total absence of people and other lifeforms. All color was subdued and everything was evenly illuminated by the unceasingly overcast sky. There were no shadows, nothing was truly lit or hidden in darkness. It was always the same, source-less twilight.

Twi was governed by many complex rules but he had learned them over the years.

Rule one: Twi was created anew whenever he entered it. It was as if people ceased the second he shifted. Cars became driverless, huge objects held up by people dropped to the ground and the sound around him echoed from reality for a moment before subduing into an eerie, oppressive silence.

Baekho took a deep breath and strode through the open gate where security guards were standing, back in reality. He only had to get to a convenient hiding place before shifting back.

Rule two: Time passed in both worlds. If he moved in Twi he came out later in the corresponding point in reality. This made it easy to travel to otherwise inaccessible areas.

Having memorized the positions of all guards as far as possible he tried to find a place to come back out - close enough to the building to spot any obstacles he hadn’t been aware of. He had to be fast or the men might have changed their position too much.

Rule three: Everything he took with him into Twi popped back the moment he wasn’t touching it anymore. Similarly anything small enough touched by people stayed back in reality with them. This allowed him to bring some equipment to Twi, but not to camp out there.

He walked behind a huge bush and popped out in reality, surveying his surroundings. He was still unspotted. As there was no way to tell where in the building the master criminal was hiding, he had to stir up a bit of a ruckus. It was sadly unavoidably.

But at least he could get in without notice. The plan was to try the main office – the likeliest candidate for finding the boss, obviously.

Rule four: In Twi he was not bound to gravity unless he wished it. He had to land before popping back, though, or take a fall.

Baekho shifted into Twi and took off, carefully gliding past the foliage, and began to look into window after window. Since he didn’t see the people while in Twi, he’d have to get in before checking if his guess had been correct. If he was wrong he would have to track down the boss by other means.

The back office was a big room with a huge desk and a lot of book shelves. Once he found it, he smashed through the window with his elbow until he could glide in.

Hiding behind the desk so that anyone sitting in the office chair wouldn’t see him immediately, he popped back out.

Rule five: Nothing he did in Twi affected reality. A broken window for example remained untouched and would be whole once he shifted into Twi again. This rule was perhaps the most complicated to work with. It also meant he could never take anything from Twi to reality.

The big boss wasn’t in. But Baekho heard the rustling of at least two men in the room. Looking around the edge of the desk he spotted two suited up henchmen. They were both armed.

Dangerous, but he had to locate the head of the cartel.

Grabbing a paper weight off the desk he shifted to be out of sight and jumped over the desk at the position where he knew the nearest crook to stand.

He popped back out and ran the weight over the clueless man’s head who dropped to the ground with a scream.

Before the other one could pull his gun, Baekho swept an expansive vase off a tiny table and shifted. He threw the vase at where he knew the man to stand and thus let it pop back out. Before popping back himself, he took a few steps to hide behind a leather sofa.

Unfortunately the crook hadn’t been hit too hard and had managed to gather his wits quickly. His gun ready, the man dropped behind the very desk that had been the white tiger’s first hiding place.

Even more unfortunately, the man spotted the boy and opened fire. While this was easily evaded with a shift, Baekho couldn’t let the fire alert the other guards. Once in Twi he lifted off and flew over to where he knew the man to have been last.

They never expected an attack from above and he banked on that a lot. It had worked every time so far.

This time it worked too, thank the powers that be.

Baekho practically popped out on top of the man’s head. The henchman collapsed under the weight of the muscular boy and lost the gun that Baekho kicked away from them.

“Where is the boss?” he shouted at the man while slapping his face. “You better tell if you want to live. Come on. The boss. Where?”

Even though the man was much bigger than Baekho he was clearly panicked and confused. That was enough to make him fear the intruder.

“Right out the door. I swear. He was just in here. Please, I’m just-“

Baekho delivered one big hit right into the guy’s face, not quite knocking him out but leaving him certainly unable to fight back.

Before reaching the door, Baekho shifted again. He used the small table he had gotten the vase from to smash through the door, took a step into the corridor and popped back. Behind him, the real door was still intact, meaning he had left the room without triggering any alarms that were designed to keep people from entering the main office unnoticed. He had learned many lessons in those few years.

***

Big Boss was a short, old man in a white suit and he was with only one other man. It was clear they had heard the shots as the bodyguard-looking guy was rapidly talking into a device. There were windows in the corridor. That was all the white tiger needed.

He shifted, flew a bit, popped out basically atop the bodyguard and kicked the man in the face in flight. Before he dropped to the floor he shifted again and jumped what would be behind the cartel boss.

The terrified man had no time to turn around as the boy in black seemingly teleported behind him. Baekho grabbed the white suit’s collar and shifted them both. After he lifted the boss, Baekho used him as a weight to smash through the window making the boss scream out in pain and flew them both out and to the ground so fast it must have felt like falling to the kidnapped man.

He dropped his victim into a thicket of decorative bushes and popped out on top of him, basically driving his knees into the man’s stomach.

His gloved hand slapped the bosses mouth shut so he would be unable to yell for the many guards around the building.

“Shut up. If you scream, I’ll kill you. Your choice.”

The man nodded, eyes wide, and Baekho let go.

“Y-you’re the white tiger.”

“Oh, my reputation precedes me. Saves me the introduction.”

“I didn’t believe you were real. I though… I-“

“So do you already know what I want?”

The frightened man rambled quickly. “I’ll stay out of your zone, I promise. I won’t deliver and-“

“Exactly. If I see any one of your boys in my district I’ll come after you. And next time you won’t get to walk away from it. It’s that simple, there’s no reason for you to mess this up. You don’t give me trouble, I don’t give you any.”

He wasn’t willing to turn into a killing machine for his mission. Too many good people he knew were entrenched into the workings of drug dealing and he had no way to tell those who had a choice from those who didn’t. One day, he swore himself, he’d get the scum in the city to stop supplying at all. But for now, all he could hope for was to keep his neighborhood clean.

He punched the big boss one last time for good measure and shifted, taking all the time in the world to fly back home through Twi. Better to make sure there was no way to track him. And of course, flying felt pretty awesome, even in the quiet, eerie world of Twi. Too bad he couldn’t go much faster than jogging speed.

***

After landing in the tiny back garden of his shabby family home he took off his ski mask, ruffled his hair and popped back.

He found himself face to face with a young boy. The stranger was not the least bit startled at the suddenly appearing person and had exactly the right distance for a conversation.

“Hi, Baekho. What’s up?”

The boy had known he’d come here.

Baekho assessed the situation. The stranger was slender and dressed preppy. He’d go down in one hit, for sure.

But his fist met only air since the stranger had begun to step aside the moment Baekho had wound up the punch. The same thing happened again and again with the stranger evading perfectly and effortlessly, never losing his sly smile. What that kid psychic?

Baekho shifted and took off. He flew to where the boy should still have been and popped. But the stranger had known somehow and turned around.

As soon as Baekho hit the ground he looked into the barrel of a gun. The weird boy was already halfway through pulling the trigger.

The gun was aimed firmly at the white tiger’s face. He would die here.

Except not.

Baekho shifted again and flew out the garden, down the street. Once he was sure he was out of sight of anyone at the house he landed and popped.

The gun was still aimed at him. The stranger had known where to run and arrived seconds after Baekho.

He shot. The white tiger was hit in the face with a small foam nerf dart. It didn’t even hurt.

The thin, weird boy chuckled. “Boom, you’re dead.”

Next he took a little card in hot-pink out of his chest pocket and handed it to the assaulted shooting victim.

“My name’s Junior. If you want to know more than that, meet me.”

There was an address of a café and a time for tomorrow on the card.

Baekho watched the boy walk away as if he had been taking a leisurely stroll. Once he was alone he picked up the dart and tried to wrap his head around what had just happened.

This was even weirder than first stepping into Twi.

A/N: Are there things unclear about the rules of Twi? Please tell me so I can fix them.