Ch.19
Gaining access to the Panda Palace’s wi-fi network had been ridiculously easy. When you only needed to hit a DC of 15, and your Computer Programming skill was at +16, +20 with the new tools I’d put together in the last few hours, I could not only do that kind of thing blindfolded, but I could also do it in such a way as it would be REALLY hard for someone to catch me at it...
It took me about ten minutes to hack into their security cameras and get an idea of what I was dealing with. I turned off the motion sensors and door swing sensors, and while I was at it, I told the cameras to stop recording.
I was amazed at what I saw through the cameras, though.
Really? They’re just sitting there, playing poker in the upstairs room, smoking cigars, and drinking? While watching sports? Like, could they try to shove themselves into the gangster stereotype any harder?
I even had the time to pull up their criminal backgrounds from the police files, after running their faces through some facial recognition hardware I’d downloaded and then altered for my needs. Frankly, it was sort of scary how easy it was to do this stuff. It was SO easy, in fact, there was just no way the government and basically every decent sized corporation couldn’t do it even more quickly than I could!
Every single one of them had a laundry list of convictions and indictments for assault and battery, drug charges, attempted murder, manslaughter, and even murder! All but one of them had done time in prison.
Terrifyingly, those were actually the LESS dirty ones. Several of them had done time for... well, sexual crimes. I’ll leave it at that. The fact that they ALL had dozens of charges filed against them and so few convictions was in and of itself a crime against all human decency!
These guys were beyond scum... maybe beneath it? I quickly changed my mind about how I planned to handle them. These weren’t men at all! Every single one of them were violent repeat offenders, saved from a lifetime of prison due to the fact that they worked for someone so violent, so dangerous, and so ruthless in Vlad Federov that even the U.S. government hadn’t been able to imprison him! Not from lack of evidence, but purely from the fact that the man killed anyone who got in his way! Their friends and families, too!
No one would testify against the Federovs. On the rare occasion that the government found someone brave enough to do so, jury and witness tampering destroyed any attempts at prosecution!
One of the men in the upstairs room of the Panda Palace was a familiar face, too. It was the only guy that hadn’t actually fought me that day at the dojo. His police file said his name was Georgy Woznyuk, and he was the only guy out of the eight here that hadn’t done jail time... but he had indictments for a boatload of felonies, he’d just either had all of the charges dropped, dismissed, or he’d been found innocent. Reading up on the cases in the news quickly, it sounded like witness intimidation and even elimination had more to do with his lack of time in the slammer than innocence did.
In other words, they were all terrible, awful individuals that probably didn’t deserve to be called human beings.
The sun had gone down about thirty minutes ago, so the plan was a go. I disconnected from their wi-fi, doing my best to remove all my electronic fingerprints. If anyone checked, it would look like the security system changes had been made from the manager’s desktop PC and I was confident there was no way they could find out that it was done remotely.
I’d parked my Blazer a couple of miles away and had Stealthed into range of Panda Palace’s wi-fi on foot before sundown, camping out on the roof of a nearby building, the tallest building in the mall area. Unless someone was using drones or happened to fly by on a helicopter, no one should have seen me up there.
I stashed my laptop in my backpack, left it hidden on the roof of the building I’d done my hacking from, then just strolled up to the remotely unlocked back door of Panda Palace and let myself in.
The back door had an electronic lock connected to the security system and unlocking it while I was in the system earlier had been as simple as a mouse-click.
It’s a bit disturbing how easy it is to deal with a wi-fi based security system. Disable Device and Computer Programming combine to make this feel like a joke. It sure makes all of that grinding for Feats to boost my skills feel more worthwhile. Maybe what I can do isn’t a fair comparison, but this has been almost too easy...
Sneaking up the stairs? Another complete joke. They had some sporting event on in the room where they were playing poker, it was a boxing match, I think, and it was loud enough that I could clearly hear it out here, despite a closed door between the room and me.
I was laughing to myself as to how easy this was going to be, when, four steps from the top of the stairs, one of the rickety, wooden steps creaked.
It wasn’t a little creak, either, dammit! That damned step deserved a starring role in a goddamn slasher flick!
And THAT, sir, is what you get for being cocky! I thought to myself, horrified that I’d missed something so basic!
All my pretenses of trying to sneak disappeared. A hopping front kick smashed the front door off its hinges and presented me with a room that had decorations just as much from the last century as the restaurant downstairs. The only part even relatively new was the 72” big screen TV mounted on the wall.
There was still a total of eight people in the room, not counting me.
The first three, the group the furthest from the door, were sitting in front of the TV.
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The next dirtbag was on the opposite side of the room from the TV behind a pretty nice mini bar, watching the boxing match... well, now he was looking at me like everyone else in the room.
In the center of the room was a cheap folding table, big enough for four seats around it and poker chips, beers, a couple of ashtrays, and the cards on top of it. There was someone in each of those seats, though they were all staring at me, too.
Everyone in the room started to move, all of them going for their guns. They were quick and obviously all had some training.
I still moved faster than they did. MUCH faster!
The four at the table were the nearest, so I went after them first. The moment my foot touched the floor from my leaping kick to open the door, I began closing the distance between the nearest of them and me in an explosive, leaping dash forward.
I connected easily with a straight right cross, my punch collapsing the side of the mook’s face and head, pretty obviously killing him, giving me my Cleave.
The Cleave hit the poker player next to him, a hopping front kick collapsing his rib cage and sending him flying backwards.
Cleaving Finish then went off, my front kick retracting and being turned into an elevated roundhouse kick from my other leg. He fell awkwardly, too, and it looked like he was done, too.
All three of the attacks were one continuous combo of strikes, all three of them took under two seconds, all told.
Three down, five to go!
-----------------
Georgy sighed and tried to relax, taking another sip from his beer. Last night had sucked. His nerves were still on edge.
He still wasn’t sure why he’d run the instant he’d heard noises from the back room of the warehouse. He’d only paused long enough to drag the guy nearest him out the front door with him while everyone else went to investigate... and he’d only done that because he knew it would help him get out of trouble.
He’d somehow just KNOWN the jig was up, so to speak.
I sure as hell am glad I did, though. Fuck! Dimi, Brucie, Tark, those poor bastards. Sure, they were assholes, but damn! Did the guy bring a fucking chainsaw mounted on a goddamned Thunder Hammer or something? The pictures we got from our guys inside the local PD... that shit looked like a goddamn Saw movie! How the hell is some of that shit even possible? Like how do you blow a six-inch-wide hole all the way THROUGH someone’s chest and spine?!
When he’d talked to Maxie last night, no one had known what had happened, yet. He’d told Maxie that he’d decided to go grab a couple of six packs of beer for him and the guys and let it go at that.
Gotta keep that shit simple, after all. The more you talk, the more you risk making people suspicious. Like my dear ma always said, ‘K.I.S.S. Keep it simple, stupid!’
He’d felt nervous ever since just after sundown. He’d felt like he was being watched, but there was no one around other than the guys in the room that all worked for Vlad. He just couldn’t pin down WHY he felt that way.
This shit is starting to make me a little crazy.
He was telling himself for the ninth or tenth time in the last half hour that he was just still freaked out by last night, when the creaky step outside the door to the second-floor room announced clearly that someone was out there.
“Someone else supposed to be coming over?” someone asked.
Georgy had been feeling damned paranoid today. “Nope. I got a bad feeling about...”
Georgy was interrupted by the door being smashed open, literally kicked off of its hinges! Some lunatic in all black sprinted through. Wait – how!? Georgy thought even as he was standing and trying to pull his pistol.
The guy was FAST. Like, Georgy could barely follow his movements he was so fast.
He reached the poker table in less than a heartbeat. The Man in Black’s hands and feet seemed to blur out in punches and kicks, and three Federov hard cases went down in barely more than a second!
Georgy was pretty sure they were dead, too.
Why, you ask?
That was simple! Each impact was accompanied by bones audibly crunching, a body flying, and faces and chests collapsing at the points of impact!
He was starting to have doubts about whether or not this guy was actually human.
The last guy that had been playing poker was pulling a knife in his free hand, a Kabar, and slashed out with it in the same motion as he unsheathed it. The MiB?
He just grabbed the arm as it came in and hip tossed him, face first, into the floor, then stomped on his back. Georgy could see the man’s spine deforming unnaturally under the force of the blow.
He and the other three Federov soldiers in the room opened fire again, now that that allies weren’t blocking the line of fire anymore. Georgy actually managed to land a shot, center mass!
Hah! Got ya now, bitch!
The guy looked right at Georgy and smiled. Georgy almost shit himself.
What? That’s fucking impossible! Why isn’t he going down!
The only thing that Georgy could think of was that he was wearing body armor, as despite the fact that there was blood splatter from where the MiB was shot, the guy seemed almost completely unperturbed.
What, is this guy cranked out on PCP or something?
If he was high on Crack or PCP or something else crazy, that might be an explanation. People that got wound up on that kind of stuff could sometimes just ignore bullet wounds unless you shot them in the head or the heart or something. Georgy started to shift his aim to go for a kill shot instead of a center mass hit.
Then Georgy realized that it wasn’t going to matter, as the MiB crossed the room in what looked like a single step, then threw some kind of fancy looking kick right at him.
Georgy felt his ribs break under the impact even as he staggered back from the single hardest hit he’d ever taken in a lifetime of thuggery and kneecapping!
It felt like he’d just been hit by a truck! Only the fact that the couch was right behind him prevented him from going flying! Instead, he was slammed down onto it, the soft, padded landing probably saved his life... for now.
The two other men who’d been on the couch next to him fell to the floor from a single blow, each, and quit moving. One of them had the side of his head caved in, and the other one had a hole punched clear through his chest just like some of the pictures from last night!
What? No fucking way! This guy just punched a hole through Takerov’s chest with his goddamned bare hands! Georgy just couldn’t believe what he was seeing...
Some part of Georgy started to realize that he should have listened to his mother when she warned him that being a made man only ever ended up one way.
Somehow, though, he was still getting back up! Still able to move. He wasn’t sure how; he only knew that he wanted to LIVE! He took a staggering step up off the couch and sideways, trying to make distance even as he brought his pistol up and opened fire again, and was shocked to find that even at point blank range he’d missed! The Man in Black almost instantly turned Georgy’s effort to move and reorient his body toward the MiB into a vicious leg sweep followed by a brutal kick to his ribs.
Shit! That was more ribs breaking! How am I still conscious? Georgy thought as he struggled to move again so he could defend himself. It felt like he had multiple ribs on both sides of his chest broken, now.
Even as he began to try to move so he could get another shot off, the Man in Black was sliding over the bar and smashing their volunteer bartender for the night in his face with a knee strike as the bartender tried to aim the shotgun kept back there at the MiB.
The knee strike dropped him instantly. A moment later, he and the one other, still functional Federov soldier opened fire again... and both of them missed this time.
The Man in Black killed the last poker player, who had somehow survived the first hit despite part of his chest being visibly collapsed inward at least four inches, and then landed a thunderous kick to a different place in Georgy’s ribs, breaking even more of them... this time he knew the damage was far worse, though.
Is this what dying feels like? He asked himself even as he realized he was looking down at his own body and the world around him appeared... gray. Washed out, maybe? Then a video game style pop-up window appeared in front him.
You are dead.
You have 5 Hero Points available. You may spend 2 of them to Cheat Death.
Do you wish to Cheat Death? (Yes/No)