Chapter 9 : GREEN ARROWS IN THE DARK
The guards at Dock 14 were unconscious before I got within two hundred yards.
I came in through the north fence gap at 12:10 AM, crowbar in my belt, pepper spray in my jacket — the same loadout as 4th and Rackham, because Charles Weston's arsenal had not significantly expanded in the intervening weeks. The night was cold, the port smelling of diesel and salt water and the particular metallic tang of shipping containers baking in the sun all day and releasing their heat into the dark.
The first guard was face-down by the gate. Not dead — breathing, slow and steady, with a zip-tie securing his wrists behind his back. Professional restraint. Clean, tight, no excess. The kind of work that said the person doing it had done it hundreds of times.
The second guard was slumped against the warehouse wall, also zip-tied, also breathing, with an arrow shaft protruding from the concrete two inches above his head. A warning shot. Or a signature.
The arrow was green.
I crouched behind a container stack and processed this the way the project manager in me processed a missed deadline — not with panic, but with the grim recalibration of someone whose plan had just been rendered obsolete by external factors.
The Hood had beaten me here. Oliver Queen, on his second or third week of operations, had hit a weapons shipment at Dock 14 sometime in the last thirty minutes and done what I'd planned to spend two nights preparing for. The guards were down. The operation was disrupted. My forty-CP mission was currently being completed by someone else.
I should have left. The smart play was retreat — walk out the fence, go home, accept the loss, wait for the next mission. The Hood was lethal to criminals and suspicious of everyone. Getting caught at his crime scene by a man in a green hood with a quiver of arrows and a five-year education in violence was not on my list of growth experiences.
I didn't leave.
The warehouse door was open. Not forced — unlocked, which meant someone inside had opened it for a visitor who arrived via the roof or through a window I couldn't see. The interior was lit by the amber glow of port security lights filtering through grimy windows, throwing long shadows across pallets of crates and the shipping container that sat at the loading dock like a beached whale.
The container was open. The crates inside were smashed, their contents scattered across the warehouse floor — assault rifles, handguns, ammunition boxes, the dismantled components of what looked like a heavy-caliber weapon that had no business being in a domestic shipping container. The Hood had been thorough. Every weapon was disabled — bolts removed, firing pins extracted, magazines emptied. Not destroyed — rendered non-functional by someone who knew firearms well enough to gut them in minutes.
The weapons were done. But the paperwork was untouched.
A clipboard hung from a hook on the container wall. Shipping manifests. Bills of lading. Chain of custody documents with company names, routing numbers, and signatures. Oliver had wanted the weapons off the street. He hadn't cared about the paper trail behind them.
I cared.
The clipboard came off the hook. I photographed every page with the prepaid phone, the camera flash throwing harsh white light across the documents. The image quality was poor — the phone's camera was four generations behind current technology — but the text was legible. Company names. Dates. Port of origin. Destination. And at the bottom of the third manifest, a signature above a printed name: Authorized by Pinnacle Logistics Group, a subsidiary of Merlyn Global Holdings.
Merlyn Global.
The connection I'd expected but hadn't proven. Malcolm Merlyn's corporate empire funneling weapons through the port, feeding them to the criminal ecosystem he planned to destroy with an earthquake machine. The hypocrisy was staggering — arming the people he intended to murder, profiting from the chaos he would use to justify their destruction.
I photographed the signature three times to be certain, then tucked the original manifests inside my jacket. Physical evidence. The first tangible thread connecting Malcolm Merlyn to something the police could investigate, if the police received the information through a channel they couldn't ignore.
[MISSION: DOCK 14 WEAPONS SHIPMENT — PARTIAL COMPLETION]
[SHIPMENT DISRUPTED (EXTERNAL PARTY). INTELLIGENCE GATHERED (YOU). REWARD: 20 CP.]
Twenty, not forty. Partial credit for partial work — the System acknowledged that the disruption wasn't mine, but the intelligence was. Fair. Pragmatic. Exactly the kind of cold arithmetic I was learning to expect from a mechanism that measured impact without regard for effort.
[TOTAL CP: 30]
Thirty CP sat in my balance. The math of progression ticked forward — enough for six stat points in the low range, or a skill acquisition, or a combination. But the manifests in my jacket were worth more than CP. They were worth a future where the Undertaking had a paper trail, where someone other than a warehouse clerk from the Narrows knew that Malcolm Merlyn's fingerprints were on the guns killing people in the Glades.
I pulled the green arrow from the concrete above the guard's head. It came free with a grinding sound, the broadhead scoring the surface as it extracted. The shaft was custom — hand-made, if I was reading the fletching correctly, with a balance that spoke to the kind of obsessive craftsmanship Oliver Queen had developed over five years of having nothing to do but practice.
The arrow was evidence. It was also a souvenir. I put it inside my jacket next to the manifests and walked out through the north fence gap, moving slow, staying low, letting the Stealth skill guide my footsteps through the port's ambient noise.
---
The payphone was on the corner of 8th and Harbor, three blocks from the port. A relic from a previous decade, smelling of rain and old metal, the handset sticky with something I chose not to identify.
I fed it quarters and dialed the SCPD Anti-Crime Unit's tip line. The number was public — printed on posters all over the Glades, part of a community outreach campaign that Charles Weston's host body had probably walked past a hundred times without reading.
The recorded message played. I waited for the tone.
"Dock 14 at Starling Port. There's a weapons cache in a shipping container, already been hit. The manifests you're looking for connect the shipment to Pinnacle Logistics Group. Look at their parent company. Follow the money upward."
I hung up. Wiped the handset with my sleeve — not because I expected anyone to dust a payphone for prints, but because the habit of caution was becoming instinctive. PER 9 didn't just sharpen vision; it sharpened paranoia.
The tip was calibrated. Enough detail to trigger an investigation. Not enough to point at the Hood — the arrow evidence was gone from the scene, in my jacket. Not enough to point directly at Merlyn Global — I'd said parent company, not Merlyn, forcing the cops to do the investigative work themselves. An anonymous tip that led to a Merlyn connection carried weight. An anonymous tip that named Merlyn directly smelled like a setup.
The walk home took forty minutes. I took the long route — south through the warehouse district, east along the trainyard fence, north through a residential block where the streetlights actually worked and the houses had yards and the Glades felt like a neighborhood instead of a combat zone.
The manifests sat against my ribcage, paper warm from body heat, edges digging into skin with every step. I'd keep the originals. The phone photos were backup, poor quality but legible, stored on a device that could be lost or destroyed. The paper was primary evidence, the kind that courts accepted and journalists published and prosecutors built cases around.
I didn't have a court. Didn't have a journalist. Didn't have a prosecutor. I had a locked drawer in a Narrows apartment and a timeline on butcher paper and the knowledge that Malcolm Merlyn was building a machine to kill five hundred people, and now I had proof that his machine had a supply chain.
---
The apartment was dark and quiet. I locked both locks, slid the chain, and didn't bother with the chair — the habit of barricading the door had faded as the confidence in the Bonfire grew. If someone kicked the door in, I'd die and respawn. The worst outcome was losing the manifests.
I opened the locked drawer — a cheap desk drawer with a padlock from the corner store — and placed the manifests inside, flat, with the phone photos transferred to a micro-SD card I'd bought during lunch break as backup. The arrow went on top, its green fletching catching the streetlight through the window.
Oliver Queen had been standing in that warehouse thirty minutes before me. The Hood — episode one Oliver, terrifying and righteous and armed with a grudge list and the ability to put an arrow through a man's eye at fifty yards. The gap between us was an ocean. His STR was in the twenties. His AGI was off the chart. His combat skills were Master tier at minimum. I was sitting at STR 7 with a Basic CQC registration and a crowbar I kept losing.
But he'd walked past the manifests. He'd gutted the weapons and left the paperwork because paper didn't fit his mission. He was hunting names. I was hunting systems.
Different targets. Different methods. Parallel operations in the same city, one in a green hood and one in a flannel jacket, both circling the same monstrous thing without knowing the other one existed.
The CP investment was waiting. Thirty CP in the balance. PER was still the priority — the difference between 9 and 10 was the threshold from above average to a new classification tier. Ten was the gateway to above average, where the System started offering real perceptual advantages beyond sharpened senses.
[CP INVESTED: PER 9 → 10. COST: 5 CP. REMAINING: 25 CP.]
The world tightened by another notch. Micro-expressions became readable — the corner-of-the-eye flicker of someone about to lie, the weight shift of someone about to move. Sound separation improved, each frequency distinct and catalogued. The apartment hummed with data that PER 8 had blurred and PER 9 had hinted at and PER 10 delivered in full resolution.
I sat on the bed and let the new normal settle. Twenty-five CP in reserve. Two deaths on the record. Three registered skills. A locked drawer full of evidence. A wall full of timeline. An arrow from the most dangerous man in Starling City.
Three days later, the SCPD raid on Dock 14 hit the news. The Starling City Register ran the story on page three — weapons cache found, arrests made, investigation ongoing. Pinnacle Logistics Group was mentioned by name. The parent company connection wasn't in the article — that investigation would take weeks, months, the ponderous machinery of law enforcement grinding through corporate records at a pace that tested the patience of anyone who knew what was at the top of the chain.
But someone at Merlyn Global noticed. Someone in their security division, monitoring the news the way security divisions do, flagged the Pinnacle name and started asking questions about who had tipped off the police.
A ripple. Small. Quiet. Moving outward through the corporate structure of the man who intended to destroy the Glades.
I couldn't see the ripple yet. But it was there, expanding in the dark, and Malcolm Merlyn's people would be looking for its source.
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