The Wraith

The city has a protector that will stop at nothing to bring evil to justice! Cramp Winner!

The city forgot his name a long time ago.

Before the mask, before the armor, before the streets whispered his legend, he was just another ghost in a city built on broken promises. His real name Joseph Argent had been scrawled on a gravestone next to his parents' a family crushed in a crossfire between two rival gangs on the Southside. He was thirteen.

The system sent him to a shelter. The streets taught him everything else.

He learned to vanish, to survive. Then he learned to fight. Underneath bridges, in bare knuckle backroom cages, in alleys behind shuttered pawn shops. By twenty, he was a phantom. By twenty five, he was something else.

When the gangs that killed his family became businessmen and politicians, he didn’t disappear.

He transformed.

No more courts. No more deals. No more masks for the devils.

Only him and the darkness he wielded like a weapon.

Now, the old steel factory waited. Midnight. Rain slammed the city in sheets, turning streetlamps into melting halos. The Wraith crouched atop a rusted ventilation shaft, watching through a cracked skylight as five men gathered around a pallet of unmarked crates.

The intel was solid. A new gang Red Vultures smuggling weapons in from Eastern Europe. The kind that could arm a militia. The kind that could burn a neighborhood.

One of the men lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. Below his coat: a submachine gun.

The Wraith’s gloved hand tightened on the steel. His eyes glowing faintly behind a reinforced mask scanned the perimeter. Four guards outside. Heat signatures confirmed. Silent takedowns first.

He dropped from the roof like a stone.

Thud. Thud. Whump. Snap. Four bodies unconscious in the mud before anyone could radio in.

Inside, the men joked, laughed nervously, unaware that the devil had arrived.

The Wraith slipped into the rafters. Waited.

The seller pried open a crate.

“You sure this place is clear?” asked the buyer, sweat glistening on his brow despite the cold.

“Factory’s been dead since the recession. No one comes here,” the seller said, grinning.

Then...

The lights went out.

Total blackness.

A beat of silence. Then chaos.

“WHO’S THERE?!”

CRASH.

A man flew through stacked metal drums. Gunfire erupted. Shouts bounced off rusted beams. Somewhere in the shadows, something moved.

Fast. Precise. Relentless.

“Back to back! BACK TO...”

Too late.

The Wraith dropped from above, cape flaring like a scythe, fists crashing into two men at once. One went limp. The other screamed before going silent.

He rose slowly, face unreadable behind a mask that looked carved from nightmare.

“Drop your weapons.”

“SHOOT HIM!”

Muzzle flashes lit the dark. He weaved through them, armor deflecting rounds, smoke bursting from his gauntlets. A flashbang blinded the last two.

The buyer stumbled, coughing, only to be lifted off the ground and slammed into a pillar.

“Where’s the shipment going?” The Wraith snarled, voice like steel dragged across stone.

“Dock 17! The port! I swear, man!”

The vigilante held him a second longer. Then dropped him like trash.

The police sirens were already closing in. He’d sent the tip minutes before descending into hell.

When they arrived, they found the factory littered with groaning bodies, crates of weapons, and one message, scrawled on a concrete wall in blood red paint:

“THIS CITY IS UNDER THE WRAITH'S PROTECTION.”

By then, The Wraith was gone, the rain erasing his presence as he vanished into the night.

Written for: "The Writer's Cramp" 

Prompt: "

WINNER and NEW PROMPT - Due Thursday, May 1"