Illustration by Emma Raughley
In Keyscore City, it’s dark with a pretty night sky, but the dirty streets are filled with crooks. One such group tops the Keyscore City Trust, until a hooded figure swoops in.
They all charge at him, but he still manages to overpower each one of them. He punches the first one, kicks another, throws the third one into the fourth, then clobbers the last. While triumphant, there was something suspicious about the whole operation, and that suspicion was proven right when lights suddenly glared onto him.
More thugs showed up and surrounded him. It was a trap, and one man approached him with a smirk. The leader was named Douglas Wallser, the toughest out of the entire gang, and he had set up this trap to lure the hero out. Pointing a bat at Phantom-Venger, they all swarm him.
He’s outnumbered and pushed to his limit dodging every strike, stab, kick, punch and other attack. Douglas watches, entertained with the hero’s struggle. He turns away to smoke, but then everything suddenly goes silent. Concerned by the silence, he turns around to see everybody lying on the floor; everybody except for Phantom-Venger.
With the hero having taken care of his minions, Douglas challenges him to a one-on-one fight. Suddenly, Phantom-Venger appears in front of Douglas, startling the criminal enough to deliver an effective, precise punch. Douglas is hurled through the air, crash-landing into a car — convincingly ending their battle. Phantom-Venger stands triumphant, but the moment is cut short when he hears police sirens wailing in the distance. Using a grappling hook, Phantom-Venger treks up the side of a nearby building, and disappears.
When the police arrive, they find only the piles of crippled thugs lying everywhere. They’re disoriented and battered, wondering who — or what — could have done this to the criminals.
“I’ll make that freak pay!” Douglas shouts.
The whole gang is arrested and shoved into trucks, transported to prison like vermin. Douglas watches Phantom-Venger loom over a rooftop, and he feels his face turn into a grimace toward the vigilante. Looking towards the roof, an officer also caught a glimpse of this shadowy hero, but wondered if he was seeing things. Phantom-Venger watches the cops drive off, though his work isn’t done yet; he jumps to another roof, scouring the ground for criminals. Leaping from building to building, he fades into and out of the darkness like a ghost.
The next day, the news published a report about the shadowy figure the city would come to know as Phantom-Venger. Footage caught brief glimpses of him in alleyways, rooftops, piers, on top of cars, climbing walls, but his true identity is unclear. Reporters spend time asking civilians what they know, believing he’s either a demon in disguise, a ghost out for revenge, or just a person in a costume. Regardless of these speculations, conjectures and unclear news reports, there was still a lingering question in everyone’s mind:
Who is the Phantom-Venger?
The hero sneaks into his apartment by scaling the fire escape, then entering through his unlocked window. He takes off his mask when he’s inside, revealing himself as Mark Phanstrom — a pale man living in his dirty apartment, alone, struggling to make ends meet. A man like everyone else.
He’s about to sit on his chair to rest. Just as he’s about to relax, though, there’s a knock on the door. Mark suddenly realizes what day it is today, and rushes to hide his Phantom-Venger costume. He is quick to place it in its usual hiding place: a dim space under a broken floorboard, cleverly hidden underneath a shelf. The visitor continues knocking feverishly.
As soon as he’s changed into his everyday clothes, he opens the door, and lets Dr. Fred Giff inside. After a young Mark watched his parents die in a fire, his trauma required special care. Fred was a reputable doctor, and took initiative to help Mark due to both his skill, and because he knew Mark’s parents. But no one, not even Dr. Giff, could know that such loss gave birth to an avatar of vengeance.
“You missed our appointment last week.” Dr. Giff reminds Mark.
It was silent.
“Recovery can’t take days off,” Dr. Giff reprimanded. “Socialize more, the job at the café is great, but you have to stop spending so much time alone.”
After their session, Dr. Giff had left the apartment, Mark put on his costume again and swung from rooftop to rooftop around the city. Things were calm, until he noticed something amiss in a house with a broken window.
Carefully entering the house, he is startled by a murder scene with a strange symbol drawn on the wall in the shape of a cross. Investigating the symbol, he concludes he does not recognize it. He assesses the victim laid out on the floor: another innocent Keyscore life taken by crime. Suddenly, the police burst into the room. The vigilante disappears into the shadows before they can spot him.
Phantom-Venger stands on a rooftop, the nighttime wind blowing fiercely against him. He looks through the window as the police go about their routine investigation, knowing they’ll eventually come to find nothing. In that moment, the desire for retribution surges within him. He was a phantom, one who lives only to punish scum. One who stands for vengeance, all he’s ever known since his parents were murdered. One who haunts evil, he who will have his vengeance, vanishes into the darkness.
