The city hums with neon lies, heroes posing for the cameras, smiles stretched thin like plastic over fear. I walk among them, the wounded ones, the ones who learned early that power is just another kind of hunger.
Some men wear capes, others wear trauma, both stitched together by hands that never learned gentleness. I see the way their eyes flicker— a childhood flash, a lab room, a mother’s absence, a father’s shadow.
Truth doesn’t shine here. It bleeds.
And still, in the alleys where the noise dies down, I find the quiet survivors— the ones who laugh through pain, the ones who fight because they must, the ones who know that justice isn’t a symbol, but a scar.
In this city of broken capes, no one is pure, no one is saved, but some of us keep walking anyway, carrying our damage like lanterns to light the way for someone else.
They preach salvation from billboards twenty stories high, faces glowing with the kind of holiness you can only buy with a marketing budget.
Crowds gather, hands raised, praising the miracles performed by men who can barely look themselves in the mirror.
Behind the curtain, the gospel changes. It smells like chemicals, contracts, and childhoods carved open for the sake of a brand.
The city kneels to gods who never learned mercy, and mortals pray that the collateral damage won’t land on their street today.
But somewhere in the noise, a few broken souls refuse the sermon. They write their own scripture in grit and blood, in truth and consequence, in the stubborn belief that humanity is worth saving even when heroes aren’t.