The apartment building of Bloodshot, a superhuman secret agent, is attacked by an arsonist. The attackers turn out to be Cinder and Glyder, two Harbingers (superpowered people) who seemingly died in a previous run-in with Bloodshot, and are now desperate for revenge...
There's not much to this issue. Two bad guys want the good guy dead, try to kill him, fail, The End. Other scenes throughout do prevent this from being an issue long fight scene, but there's a serious lack of substance, especially in regards to the boring title character. His narration isn't awfully written or anything, but he's just so bland, and has little personality.
As for the two villains, Cinder and Glyder, the return of these characters is appreciated, as their crimes in their last appearance were huge enough that they deserve more story and better sendoff than the abrupt offpanel 'death' they got. However, their characters still aren't all that fleshed out, and are still somewhat boring.
The writing here is ok, but not special, and there are some poorly written exposition dumps in two scenes. The first is when Cinder and Glyder are discussing their revenge, and out of nowhere, Cinder suddenly explains how the duo escaped their 'deaths' last issue*, and the second when Bloodshot's boss, and coworker Neville and Jillian Alcott are discussing the destruction of the Weaponeer organization (who featured in Issue #13), and he too abruptly says something random, which Jillian should already know anyway.
*As it turns out, I accidentally read the characters' dialogue in the first panel of said scene (pictured below) the wrong way around due to a confusion with their real names, which really made Cinder's sudden history lesson feel out of nowhere. Now that I've read the scene properly, the line is less forced (as it could have been a lead-in to real dialogue if not for Glyder's interruption), but only slightly.
There are a couple of scenes tying this to the 'Search for the Vault' story in other Valiant series Secret Weapons, which is pointless, as we already saw the ending scene here in that series. Especially worse is the continuity error, which shows characters Gilad and Geoff in Bloodshot's apartment about to be briefed on MI6's 'search for the Weaponeer arms vault'. The problem is that in Secret Weapons, this conversation happened in a park, and the moment Bloodshot approached the two friends for help, they were dragged into the nonstop adventure.
There's also a pretty dumb scene when Bloodshot and the issue's villains are fighting on a rooftop, and a couple of simple fire blasts manage to make the roof cave in instantly, and make the building's top structure drastically unstable. Unless the roof was made out of tinder wood, I'm not buying it.
The artwork here is mostly decent, but there's one pretty major screw-up when Glyder's talking while in front of a mirror. Her mouth is open, but her reflection's mouth is shut! The cover is ok, but a bit bland, though that's probably more due to how boring I find these characters rather than in any part due to the artwork.
This is a pretty wasteful issue, and it gets across very little, especially when it comes to its characters...
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