Two suited men grabbed me by my shoulders before pulling me with all their strength, all their weight, hoping to toss me into the backseat of the car.
As it turned out, rather than opening the doors to let someone out, the guy I'd noticed before was doing so to force someone… No, to force me inside.
Okay.
With a simple jerk of my right shoulder, I freed my arm only to spin on my heel and throw a casual, thoughtless punch at the other man.
And that's where the main problem with me and fighting came.
This thoughtless punch of mine was just like the thousands upon thousands of thoughtless punches I would throw when relying on just my reflexes and habits for the sake of getting into a focused mood.
So, while this wasn't the kind of punch that would give me the satisfaction of perfection, not even by a long shot…
It was still a punch that I didn't hold myself back on!
Crunch!
The nose of the huge man in the suit just… collapsed under the weight of my fist as I pushed its tip, its bridge, and then its entirety inside of the man's skull.
'Situation?'
With adrenaline now pumping into my blood, the world seemed to slow down a considerable bit. Yet, not having the time to even look around, I could only glance around, limited to just the angles that were already well within the reach of my eyes and didn't require any further moving of my head.
Still, what I found out wasn't in the least encouraging.
The people… were so shocked by the sudden and extremely rapidly developing events that they just… stood around, staring at the commotion with not a single thought flashing on their faces.
I couldn't tell how the situation looked behind me or in any other place my glance couldn't reach… But if the people within my field of vision were THAT frozen, then what logic would ever allow me to think others wouldn't be the same?
A hand once again grasped at my right arm.
The guy whose nose I just smashed ignored the pain and disorientation of such a serious punch, not to mention the damage of having their nose actually forced back into their skull…
As it turned out, however, this grab was merely a last hurrah of the man whose eyes soon turned cloudy as his whole body collapsed down to the ground.
And for but a moment, everything just… stopped.
'Did I just…'
Before I could start feeling the dread of actually claiming a life, I saw the man's chest move. Yet, right as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief…
Thump.
'That's new,' I thought as what I initially took for quite the weak punch suddenly enriched with the sensation of slight, cutting pain and then…
An overwhelming sense of cold and numbness that exploded out from the part of my back someone struck.
With my arms freed, I spun around again, using the momentum of my turn to throw another punch…
Whisk!
'Tsk, too late,' I thought as the knuckles of my fist barely grazed the elegant beard of the man as he jumped to the back, some sort of strange, syringe-like device still in his hand.
'Wait, what?'
Pressed by nothing more but a feeling, I stepped up on it and continued with a chained punch with my left, landing it squarely against the side of the attacker's head…
But this feeling of numbness has already spread out to my left shoulder blade, sapping the strength from the punch I just threw.
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And all the way up until that point, not one person said a single word or reacted to this assault in any way or form. That is until one of the random women nearby just started to scream her guts out!
I rose up again, ready to cave the face in of anyone else who dared to approach… But with the cold numbness assaulting all of my muscles one by one in rapid succession, by the time my eyes found my next target, two men grabbed my now powerless arms before repeating what they started with and throwing me into the back of the car.
And this time, whatever they dosed me with, allowed them to actually achieve their goal.
'Fuck!'
There was nothing but obscenity in my mind as I crashed down into the backseat of the elegant and clearly expensive car. It was also only when the two men from before jumped right after me only to dogpile right on top when the car suddenly revved its engine before almost jumping out from where it was parked, the acceleration so sudden it forced the doors to swing and close…
And forced me to realize that there were no handles on the inner side of this car's doors!
My world spun around as the drug started to reach my head.
'FUCK NO!'
I wasn't going to give up that easily!
Sure, it would be easy to just give in to the sudden and overwhelming sleepiness, to just let the events play out and try to explain things once I would go back to my senses…
But just like I continued to stubbornly smash my fists against the wooden target for two years longer than anyone of the era would take to get promoted from the institution away, I wasn't the fan of taking the easy way out!
"FUCK YOU!"
Shouting the obscenity to aid my strength, I tensed all my muscles… And for but a fleeting moment, I manage to chase the sense of numbness away.
Strangely enough, it didn't seem to affect me as strongly as I thought, simply robbing me of just enough strength to throw my movements off. Robbing me of the strength… That I never before knew I had in me!
All that was left, was just the power I've cultivated over the long years of failing to enter the meditative state. And as I committed myself to using it in the best way possible, the familiar feeling from before returned.
The feeling when some strange force pushed my hands around. The feeling when the same force manipulated my mouth and vocal cords to utter words I couldn't even fully understand myself.
Now, however, the same force aided me in my bid to raise up, ignoring the weight of the two huge men pilling down on me from above!
In the tight confinement of the car's back, I couldn't throw a proper punch. So, putting all honor and courtesy aside, I just did everything else I could think of.
A jab into the soft tissue right below the ribs. A twist and turn of the nipple that strayed dangerously close to my hands. A jerk of my hips powerful enough to make the two men slam into the car's roof, giving me just enough time to twist over onto my back and then throw a powerful jab right into the abdomen of the man below the other, jab powerful and precise enough for the man's face to bloat as he attempted to hold back the content of his stomach from spilling out.
"SIT STILL OR I WILL SHOOT YOU!" a man sitting in the front of the car pulled out a gun while screaming in panic… While his hands moved perfectly smoothly only to arrive at their destination and stay locked right on my forehead without as much as a twitch.
And as I looked down inside the barrel…
Something at the very bottom of my soul just…
Something snapped.
A strange fire erupted from my groin and surged upward, suppressing the sense of overwhelming coldness and numbness that continued to fight for supremacy over my body with every passing moment. But for just this instant, it became nothing more but a laughable tingle when compared to the fire that exploded from within me, threatening to spill all over.
And just like back when I could merely observe what I would be crafting with my meditation guiding my hands, the sense of fury, danger, humiliation, and refusal… All of them mixed into a drink that set off this sea of emotions ablaze.
The force that merely aided my desperate movements before now grew strong enough to ascertain its authority over my flesh.
Which proved to be completely unnecessary, when a whisk of this strange, burning energy simply…
Under the guidance of what had to be my Qi, my hand just… flew forward.
It was no hasty move aimed at disarming the gunman. It was way too casual, too… simple of a thing.
The very moment the tips of my hand touched just the very front of the barrel, a part of the burning energy within my soul suddenly got sucked away… only for the gun to suddenly fall apart right within its holder's hand, falling down to the bottom of the car as a mere pile of tiny parts it was originally made up with.
Even its frame, which should be just a solid block of precisely shaped metal, turned into just a bunch of scrapped shards of materials, ready to be reused in another project.
Then, the whisk of power returned to me, seemingly unchanged by the work it just did.
"Wha…?!"
Everything was happening so fast, that my assailants only managed to utter a word when some sort of crazy, impossible idea exploded in my head.
'If I can dismantle the gun away…'
It was crazy, impossible, and outright stupid. Thankfully, though, with the fire of my soul threatening to burn me from within, all three of those words have all but lost their meaning.
Deprived of his gun, the man in the front passenger's seat attempted to smash his head into my face, resorting to much simpler and less sophisticated methods of ascertaining domination over someone else…
But by now, it was too late.
With a single glance, I saw the driver trying to split his focus between steering the rapidly accelerating car and pulling out his own gun on me…
But again, it was all too little and too late.
Because while my assailants were either trying to smash me unconscious or pull their guns on me…
I simply reached out and pulled this burning energy of mine on them. And as my hand found its target long before actually touching it, the heat in my eyes exploded again, only for all of this overwhelming force within my soul to all get sucked as it rushed to fulfill the task I prescribed it with.