"What the fuck, bro?" I muttered. "What is wrong with this neighborhood?"

We were essentially at the theater, just across the street from one of its side entrances, when the sounds of fighting and breaking of glass broke out from a nearby herbalist shop. I had thought that if we encountered more trouble, it would be on the way back home after dark, not at the edge of Harbor Hill and Sugar Forest, with a ton of people milling about. This was one of the nicest places in the entire neighborhood, mostly because it was basically Sugar Forest South. Realtors even listed properties around here under that name, hoping to gentrify some of their investment homes into making a profit.

"We could…save you a seat?" volunteered Aminah.

I squinted at the herbalist's window. It was hard to make out what was going on through the hanging plants, iron bars, and big, gold block lettering reading 'MUGISHA'S NATURAL REMEDIES'.

"Hang on. Wait here."

I entered the Happy Idiot, going straight into Innocuous Oaf, and watched as the girls' eyes glazed over and a pall of confusion fell over their faces. Trotting over to the store, I put my face up to the glass and peeked inside. There were four men of varying builds, but all with that telltale ex-military demeanor. It was all over them, from their cringe-worthy pouch-ridden utility belts and holstered pistols, to the way they cut their hair and tied their boots.

Also, one of them was wearing camo fatigues for pants, but I like to think I could have spotted them as former military regardless. That one had the shop owner, an elderly bald black man, by the lapel, and was angrily whispering something to him. I watched as he slapped him hard enough to hurt, but not enough to potentially knock him out.

I fast-walked back over to the girls, exiting the Stance; I wanted to be fully clear-headed for this. "It doesn't look like a robbery, but I still think I should get involved. Oh!" I snapped, having had a brilliant idea. "You know what would be both funny and responsible…"

I giggled to myself as I pulled out my phone and texted a number I'd never gotten around to deleting.

'I know I just called you a fancy whore, but theres 4 ex-military dudes beating up the old dude who runs Mogadishu's across from the theater.'

'Sorry, Mugisha's – the herbalists'

'I'm going in alone if you don't hit me back up'

It was possible that Maria was close enough that she could be here in under a minute on a bike, depending on her beat. Otherwise, I'd have gone in myself right away. "Let's get in line for tickets," I said. "I want to give her a chance to respond before I get involved."

She responded before we could even get to the door; I guess she never blocked me either.

'ETA 45secs'

'Meet in front of theater'

That was odd; I would have thought she'd tell me she had it handled.

I had a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. Maybe I was growing more paranoid with every encounter, or maybe I was finally adapting to the youxia lifestyle, but I swear I was beginning to be able to sense complications.

I walked Shania and Aminah up to the line, doing my due diligence of checking to make sure that Fate's bullshit was not going to come from inside the theater. It appeared as though it was a normal Friday night inside, with kids laughing, artificial butter smelling rich in the air, and arcade machines blaring.

"Okay." I pulled off my basketball jersey and handed it to Shania, along with some money. "Here, to save my seat," I lied. Those men were sure to have guns, and the jersey was one of the nicest pieces of clothing I owned. "Get us some snacks and sodas, too. Go crazy with it, I like to share and have a bit of each." That was also a lie; I didn't think they'd treat themselves without the excuse.

It took about a minute and a half from her text for Maria to skid to a halt in front of the theater. She was pissed and, miracle of miracles, not at me this time. The crowd parted around us, wanting nothing to do with the shirtless, heavily scarred man talking to the angry bike cop.

I restrained myself from making a quip or jab. An old man was currently being slapped around by four goons down the street. "What's up?"

Maria had the same idea, launching straight into business. "I radioed it in. Estimated response time is three hours."

"Three hours? Just come back tomorrow at that point, holy shit. I'm sure as hell not standing around for three hours, Maria. Why did you even make me wait for you to get here?"

"I've never made you do shit, James. And I'm not waiting three hours either. Here's how this is going to go down—"

"Pause." I held up a hand. "I get that we're on a time crunch, but come on, I'm not nearly as stupid as I'd love to be. Give me some context, please. Three hours is actually crazy; the BHPD is worthless, but that is next-level incompetence. What are we walking into?"

Maria pursed her lips and took a deep breath, weighing her options. Our breakup had not been amicable, but we'd dated for a long time, and I liked to think that I knew her better than she knew herself at one point. I could see all the little arguments playing out in her head, pride battling duty, ambition battling shame.

"I'm going to say this once, and I'm asking you nicely to not be an asshole about it, okay?" She exhaled and stared hard into my eyes. "A lot of your concerns about my career in the police force were," she scowled and continued through gritted teeth, "more or less correct."

"Yeah, no shit."

"James, what I did fucking say?"

"Sorry, go on."

"I'm not on great terms with my dad or my uncles…or my superiors, or my peers. Sometimes it feels like there's not a single good cop left in this city."

"Sometimes?" I said, mouth agape. Maria glared in response. "Sorry, sorry. I'm trying, I really am."

I did feel for the woman. Maria had always been a dreamer and an idealist; as a kid who'd pined after Hollywood stardom in the face of his mother's oppressive and frequent discouragement all his life, I'd loved her for that. In a different world, maybe we'd – well, it didn't matter now, anyway. The problem had always been her father and her extended cop family. Her dad was a great father by all accounts, and the family as a whole were good to those they were close to, but goddamn, if they weren't all terrible people. They were the sort of friends who'd kill for you, without being asked to. Maria wanted desperately to believe in them, in their version of history and the stories they told her about 'The Force', as they called it. She dreamed her whole life of joining the police with the same intensity that I'd dreamed of being a youxia and actor, cleaning up Black Harbor one bad guy at a time.

She sighed. "I need a win, James, bad. And," she grimaced, "I need your help, alright? I don't want to be a fucking bike cop for the next twenty years."

"Maria, it's a futile effort. It's always been a futile effort. There is not a future for a brave, good-hearted Maria Ramirez in the BHPD, there never has been!"

"Look—Actually, never mind. We don't have time to rehash this. Are you going to help or not?"

I threw my hands up in the air. "Jesus Christ. Of course, I am. I'm too goddamned stupid to walk away."

The faintest, smallest, hint of a smile touched her lips. "Thank you. There are only a few possibilities for why there would be a three-hour response time. Either those men are connected to organized crime and have asked for a window at this location for the night, or Mugisha's and its owners have pissed off someone with connections to organized crime, and there's a blanket stop-order at dispatch for the location. Regardless, now that I've called it in, I can't go inside alone without earning a reprimand and a write-up. But, if you start a loud enough commotion while I'm being a good little girl and waiting a safe distance away for backup, and then I move in to investigate and take down a few armed robbers, that would be a win for me, a big one."

My mouth was, once more, wide open. "Are you kidding me?"

"What?" She crossed her arms. "I figured you'd be all over a plan like that."

"Maria," I whisper yelled, "you broke up with me because I wanted to be a vigilante. You are asking me, to be, a vigilante."

"You broke up with me, asshole!"

"You said a cop could not be seen dating a proud criminal!"

"Well, we aren't dating, so it's not an issue, is it?!"

I paused. Damn, she kind of had me there. "Fuck, whatever. Do I have to worry about the legal fallout for this?"

"No, no shot, on my mother's grave. The BHPD has zero intentions of starting a conflict with a martial artist of your caliber. Anything you could do to make us move on you, would have already brought down the Feds well before we could even draft an APB."

"Fine, but this conversation isn't over."

The men had dropped the metal security blind over the front of the shop, covering its windows and door in roll-down steel. Any thoughts that I may have been too late and that they'd escaped were disillusioned by the muffled screams coming from inside. The sounds of torture, quiet or not, were gut-churning, and I very much wanted to charge in and help, but I was at an impasse. Frankly, I had no idea how these particular metal shutters worked. They had no visible lock from the outside, and I had a sneaking suspicion they were the type controlled via an app or a security platform online. There was a phone number on the side and a model designation, but I wasn't going to take the time to look them up.

Tearing through the steel was an option; it couldn't have been that thick when it still needed to retract and roll away. But I didn't know the character of these men beyond that they were willing to torture people and were thorough enough to at least try and hide the act. If I made too much noise in my entry, there was no guarantee that they didn't kill the shopkeeper and try to extract themselves. I could bet it all on the ability of the Innocuous Oaf to cover up my actions, but it wasn't my life on the line to bet. Nor was there a convenient side alley entrance I could find. I, personally, could go up and over the building and find the probably unmarked backdoor on the other side, but that would leave Maria to navigate the tangle of alleys to get to me – unless she just happened to have kept up her parkour training without me prodding her along.

Actually, that was worth taking the second to check. I shot Maria a text. She was following BHPD policy to the letter, meaning that she was the 'minimum safe distance' of three blocks away while she waited on backup.

'Could you get up the face of the building on your own? Guessing the fire escape is on the back. Flat roof.'

I got a simple, 'Yes,' in reply. It would have to do. I bounded up to the roof, enjoying the speed and the simple act of movement despite myself and the situation.

Since it was impossible to tell via text if Maria was blustering, once up there, I extended my Silk Steel Sash back down, making knots every few feet or so with telekinesis and tying it off to the top of the fire escape on the other side of the building. It required an improvised Qi maneuver to ensure there would be enough power left in the Sash to keep it extended when it wasn't in direct contact with me, but with my massive Aura, it was easy enough. There was length to spare if I wanted to keep it wrapped around my waist, but I thought it might overload my mental stack to have to worry about the Sash trailing behind me, noodling through multiple rooms and over an entire building during a fight.

I paused atop the roof for a few breaths and centered myself; it felt worth it in light of what was to come. This would be the first time I'd fought men with guns, and my first fight against a human opponent where I'd be going for the kill. If the opportunity presented itself to leave them alive, I'd take it, but I was outnumbered, outgunned, and there was both the shopkeeper and Maria to worry about. The steel security blind would protect passersby to an extent, but the right caliber bullet could punch through it relatively unimpeded, and not to mention the buildings on either side and the floors above the shop. There was only wood and plaster to protect them.

Wood and plaster – I wouldn't be able to rely on my fire techniques like I had against the Hungry Ghost either. I'd be about as unarmed as I could get, having left my nunchaku at home out of a desire to not jinx the date with the expectation of violence; probably not my brightest decision, that.

There was an itch, as always, at the back of my mind, reminding me that I could call the Bleached Bone Blade with just a thought. The Hakkotsu no Ha was as much in my hand at all times as it was back in my basement apartment. Just a thought, and it would come.

No, I don't think I will, actually.

I entered the Innocuous Oaf and dropped down into the alley, shedding my momentum and minimizing my sound as best I could with a cat pass, landing on feet and then hands. There was a group of teens in color-coded outfits playing dice nearby, but I paid them no mind; scattering them now might bring some hitters that would only further complicate things for Maria later.

There were tags all over and to the sides of the flat, metal, unmarked backdoor of Mugisha's Natural Remedies. Once, when I was a teenage hooligan, I could have told the tags apart and would have had a general idea of which were from graffiti gangs and which were from actual criminal gangs marking territory, but the culture on the street was measured in days, not years.

The door had two deadbolt locks and no door handle. The two locks were an older security measure popularized in Black Harbor some time in the sixties, according to my father. One of them would be fake, containing a key breaker to trap would-be thieves' lockpicks. The method grew out of use when people got tired of drunkenly ruining their own keys; it said something to see it still in use here.

Not that a deadbolt, fake or not, could stop me, of course. I placed my palm between the locks and extended my telekinetic reach to the other side, gently applying force counterclockwise until I heard the bolts flip, and slipped inside.

The backmost room of the shop was reserved for big box storage for ease of convenience and looked no more suspicious than any other store's. I found a small brick and propped the door open for Maria; without a handle, a key, or telekinesis, it wouldn't matter if it was locked or not for her as long as it was closed.

"Agh!" came a pained shout from the front of the store, followed by loud coughing and retching. "Why! I have told you the truth!"

There was at least one more door between me and the sounds. Again, I fought through the urge to rush forward, instead moving forward in a crouch, quick on my feet, but taking nothing for granted.

My wisdom paid off immediately.

Beyond the next door was a combined office and processing room with refrigerators and tables for both dried herbs and medicine grinding, as well as those for paperwork. I didn't have much time to take it in. At a desk pressed up against a wall in the middle of the room was a man I hadn't seen when I'd peaked through the window earlier, but was assuredly with the rest. He was shorter and skinnier than the others, though dressed similarly, and had a wire traveling from behind his ear that was plugged into the computer in front of him. His eyes were glazed over, clearly in the middle of some cyberpunk horse shit.

As fascinating as that was, the most important fact about the hacker was that his right arm was rigid despite the rest of his body being semi-limp, and was pointing a gun directly at me. Somehow, some combination of cybernetics had allowed him to penetrate the Innocuous Oaf. Maybe the implants interacted with his nervous system in some way I couldn't understand, but that was pure speculation.

Whatever tech he had was not without its weaknesses, though. Had this been a man, fully awake and genuinely aware of my presence, Initiative would have occurred after he had taken his first prepared shot; as it was, I had unknown seconds to act.

Time dilated in moments like these, but even still, I moved fast enough that it was over in a blink, faster than I had ever moved in my life. I beat the mercenary's Initiative; he was a trained and enhanced killer, but he was no elite martial artist, nor were his cybernetic enhancements enough to keep up. The world tunneled visioned momentarily, and then I was in front of him, my superhuman hamstrings carrying me there in an instant. My hand lashed out in the Eagle's Talon as the Dice of an Agility + Martial Arts clattered in the ethereal. Upgraded since my heart-to-heart with JingJing into its final form, it caught his wrist and traveled through the space where it had been unimpeded, rending flesh, bone, and small metal wires as though they were paper.

I hadn't the sense of mind to drop the Happy Idiot to double the Damage, having acted off of instinct alone. Luckily, the tech of this world, or at least that available to random mercenaries in Harbor Hill, was not that of the cyberpunk dystopic future. There had been no opposed defensive roll on his part; it was as if he was a simple machine, his arm a rigid turret, rather than a person.

And thus, he died like a machine. His body spasmed, eyes coming to focus just once to display fear before he started seizing and foaming at the mouth, short-circuiting both himself and the network he was connected to. The power cycled rapidly in the building before cutting out entirely, rendering the shop dark for a few seconds before a backup generator somewhere in the basement kicked on.

Stolen novel; please report.

> [Hidden Quest Complete!]

>

> Take a life in combat.

>

> Reward: 50XP

>

>

>

> [Hidden Quest Complete!]

>

> Kill someone with neuroelectric backlash.

>

> Reward: 20XP, +2 Hacking, +1 Electronics

>  

I froze, staring at the popups. Nothing, I felt nothing. They were there somewhere, the feelings, in the back of my consciousness, waiting for the appropriate, less life-threatening time to come to the forefront. But for now, I felt nothing.

"Grady! What the fuck was that!?" called a deep voice from the next room.

I stood up and left the Innocuous Oaf. I'd been crouching in a puddle of blood, I realized. The lyrics to the song I'd named the Stance after, Happy Idiot, by a band that did not exist in this universe, came unbidden to my mind. It would be a long time until I could hear it again.

I'm gonna bang my head to the wall/ 'Til I feel like nothing at all

I walked into the front room of Mugisha's, humming to myself, bloody hands in my pocket. The joggers were ruined anyway. It was a beautifully appointed shop with colored cloth strung from the ceiling and living plants a-plenty between the shelves of ceramic jars containing dried, fragrant herbs of a thousand varieties. A line of mirrors like tiles ran along the top of the walls, meant to carry the natural light from outside throughout the densely packed room. With the security shutter down, we had only the recessed lights in the ceiling and the various, red-and-blue LEDs dangling above the more sun-needy of the potted plants. It was an absolute goddamn shame what was about to happen to this place.

I squinted around at the room, ignoring the armed men, including the one not five feet away who had been in the middle of checking on his now-dead colleague.

"Hey," I said, "this isn't the bathroom."

The man closest to me took a half-step back and reached for his gun. "Jesus—"

"Stop!" commanded the one in the middle of the room, the same that had been slapping the shopkeeper around when I'd first passed by. The counter was in the way, but I assumed he was standing over said shopkeeper now.

With hands still in my pockets, I slipped around the man in front of me, putting my back to him to stand between him, the leader, and another mercenary to my right. The last was at the very front of the shop, hand on his holstered pistol.

I nodded at the elderly man they, I could see now, had been in the middle of kicking the hell out of. "Oh shit, you guys doing a shiatsu massage? I think you're supposed to be barefoot for it to properly strike the acupuncture points. But hey, what would I know?"

"James Li," said the leader. He was a tall, bald, otherwise unassuming black man with cold, dark-brown eyes. "I assume Grady is dead."

"Roboman? He regrettably glitched out." I gestured with a bloody thumb to the room I'd just walked out of. "I've got no idea what happened there. Weird guy."

There was a noticeable lack of reaction from the room. These were not sentimental men, it turned out.

"Ah. That's a setback for certain." He licked his lips and shook his head slightly, flicking a gaze at the man to the right of me, who had started to shift his hand behind him. "I'll be honest, Li, I'd be holed up if I had a bounty on my head as large as yours. Didn't anticipate meeting you here."

"The Tigers put out a bounty? Hm, do I escalate from here?" I scratched my chin. "How much is it?"

"Six hundred thousand for your head."

I laughed. "Bro, they are scamming you. You should be able to retire if you kill me. If you split six hundred four ways, you can't even buy a one-bedroom apartment."

I started filling the room with my Qi, hungry for flammable sources of fuel. It found the dried herbs, of course, but shining like a three-dimensional star map in my head were the tightly packed pockets of gunpowder tucked away within all of their stupid little belt pouches and cargo pants.

"It's twice that if your head is attached to your body when it's delivered to Chinatown."

The air in the room shifted at those words; apparently, that was a big enough number to get the other three men interested. Their leader, however, gave another minuscule shake of his head.

I withdrew my Qi; so long as the shopkeeper was in the room, I wasn't going to ignite several hundred small bombs around him. In general, there would be no fire techniques unless I could take the fight outside, or if Maria could somehow evacuate the nearby buildings and the rooms above. No, I'd released the Qi not to find the bullets, but to see if any of the mercenaries would react, and they had not.

I shook my head. "Still a scam, my man. The Tigers picked a number to lure out individual talents, not hit squads. Trying to keep the escalation manageable, I presume. Regardless, it wouldn't matter. You don't have what it takes. The only person who reacted to me nearly lighting you all on fire was Mugisha. Don't worry, old man, this place is too nice to burn down."

"You'd be amazed what a mix of modern technology and ancient chemistry can do, Li. I've seen shit you wouldn't believe. But you're right, it doesn't matter. We're here putting together a much larger score," he emphasized the last part as much for me as his goons, reminding them not to get greedy. "One that you might have an interest in, as a long-time resident of the city."

"Go on."

"Robert here," he kicked the man on the ground lightly, "bought a shipment of stolen root powder that was meant to be delivered to me. I don't know what your relation to him is, or if you were just bored enough to get involved, but I'm willing to let his debt to me slide if you sign on. We won't need our combat stims with your firepower on the team, or a hacker as expensive as Grady either. You can take his cut, and I'll use some of my discretionary funds to find a cheaper replacement for him."

"I don't even know your name, man. You're also holding my friend hostage, which, got to say, isn't working for me. It really isn't."

He nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off of me, and took a step back from Robert, who hobbled to his feet. "I'm Alpine. This is my crew. They can introduce themselves in their own time."

"Big skier?"

"Avid."

I turned to the man behind me, a large redheaded fellow. "Hey, Cross-country, let Bobby in the backroom. And find me a spare pair of pants back there, Bob. Ooh. Spare pair of pants, that's fun. Say that five times fast, eh. Spare pair of pants. Spare—"

"I don't like this," said the man to the right of me.

"Do it," said Alpine, nodding to Cross-country behind me. Robert limped past him as fast as he could manage.

"Hang on, let's not ignore Nordic Combined's concerns," I said, rapidly growing on the naming schema. I loved the Winter Olympics. "You got a problem with me, NC?"

Nordic Combined's hand started slowly reaching behind him, to the consternation of his leader. "He's a black box, Alpine. Let's not bullshit ourselves; if I can't read him, you can't read him. Why are we fucking around? Let's bag his bounty and use it to buy another shipment of stims. Fuck Mugisha, I didn't want the smoke with the Vodun in the first place."

You do a lot of peripheral vision training in traditional Kung Fu. In most schools, that means tracking your finger without moving your head; at my house, it meant that Ma would swing a heavy metal ball tied to a string around you and occasionally clip you in the temple if you didn't duck fast enough. If you ducked too fast, though, you had to eat a chili as a forfeit.

My eyes moved from Alpine and the other man at the far front of the store, who I decided looked like a Freestyle guy, but my focus was on the run of mirror tiles at the top of the wall. There, I watched as Nordic Combined pulled out a quick injector EpiPen-esque device from a pouch on his belt, and as Cross-Country silently unholstered his pistol behind me.

Seeing Cross-Country draw his gun, I decided to take a few seconds to Upgrade one of my Starting Feats. I had wanted to use the base version at least once in a fight before spending more Experience on it, but it felt extremely relevant right now. With 25XP, I took Slippery Target up from a Minor to a Major Feat. Formerly, it would only work once per round, which was not ideal when surrounded.

> [Major Feat] Slippery Target

>

> Once per turn, when someone misses you with an attack, you may force them to attack someone else in range using their same roll. You may choose how to spend their additional successes should there be any.

Alpine was a difficult man to read; his face was placid as a lake, but there was a touch of frustration in his voice. "We can trust him to work in his best interests. There's twelve million dollars in this for you, Li, and you get to take out a leech that's been feeding on this city since the Eighties."

I verified in a mirror tile that Robert had made it into the backroom and shrugged, taking both hands out of my pockets now. "That would be a winning pitch for me, brother. But there's this one small problem: the genre divide. You see, you're doing some Shadowrun-style shit with a voodoo gang that ends in guaranteed tragedy, and I'm on my action-adventure vibe. Your mistakes end in you guys dying, and my mistakes end in me having sex with my ex-girlfriend despite both of our better judgments. Oh, also, I just noticed this shop has a sprinkler system."

"Kill him."

Unfortunately for me, Alpine's squad had those annoying Team Feats that exist exclusively to torture Players because only NPCs ever have the foresight and coordination to get them. That, and if you and another character ever take a Team Feat in a game, it only guarantees that one of you will die and the other will have wasted a level up. Something, perhaps, that Alpine and his men should have considered.

Because of their situational Team Feats for outnumbering and surrounding an opponent, they had huge bonuses to Initiative, Attacks, and completely ignored penalties to calling their shots. Unfortunately for the surprisingly competent mercenaries, golly, if all of those things didn't help me more than it did them.

Before Alpine could finish issuing his decree, Cross-country lifted his already drawn pistol and aimed it for the square of my back while still making sure that none of his allies were in the direct trajectory of the bullet – rather predictably, if I said so myself.

Slippery Target was more of an active ability than its rules text implied; it required setup on my part, but it likewise ensured I was capable of said setup. I spun, rolling my attempt to Dodge as he made his Attack, and caught his wrist with my elbow, directing his aim toward Nordic Combined. The mercenary would have hit most mortals, I would think, but I was of a different class. What that meant instead was that in the split second of Cross-Country firing, his steady wrist and years' trained aim were all pointed at his ally for just long enough for the bullet to leave the barrel.

Guns had insane Base Damage in the system. They had their downsides as well, of course; they needed ammo, special Feats to do anything cool, were bulky, etc., but at the end of the day, getting shot even once was a very, very bad time.

The bullet emptied NC's skull, painting the contents across a rack of herbs behind him. I was barely cognizant of that, however, since my focus was occupied entirely with Freestyle, whose quickdraw Feat had allowed him to raise his own pistol with remarkable speed. Since Cross-country was directly behind me, he had only a narrow area he could target, my left shoulder, without, in his mind, a risk of hitting his ally.

During the same spin that had seen my right elbow collide with Cross-country's wrist, my left hand was snapping up, filling that narrow region where I assumed, correctly, that Freestyle would call his shot. He was a phenomenal killer, but with the Happy Idiot, I was a better dodger. The mercenary fired, placing the shot in the exact, two-centimeter diameter circle that it needed to be in order to do the most Damage to me and not risk hitting his ally. Using my Force Armor, the battle-hardened bones of my Eagle's Talon, and pure, superhuman martial prowess, I snapped my wrist back just in time to clip that near-perfect, deadeye shot, counting on the man not to miss. In my periphery, I watched as Cross-country took the bullet in his arm. He dropped his gun, but the man was big, hardy, and still very much in this fight.

"No guns!" shouted Alpine, jabbing himself with his own quick injector. At least, that's what I thought he said. My ears were ringing loudly.

Damn, and here I'd been hoping to use the big man behind me to soak up another round of fire. Fine, it was time to test out the building's sprinkler system then.

I held my arms out wide, recalled the star map of gunpowder in the room, exuded my Qi, and clapped my hands, rolling an explosive Aura + Elemental Control. The last time I'd done this, there had been an essentially unlimited amount of fuel from the vats of moonshine all around me. That was far from the case in the herbalist's, but I still had a lot to work with. Alpine had forty-nine bullets, the corpse of Nordic Combined had forty-eight, as did Cross-Country behind me, and Freestyle had, frankly, too many bullets, at least two hundred distributed across his utility belt and cargo pants. When I included the dried herbs, I had 8 additional Dice available to me.

Okay, Maria, you asked for a commotion.

I used all 8 Dice, igniting every speck of gunpowder in this room in a wave that exploded outward at the same speed as the sound from my clap. Immediately, my arms and wrists erupted into flames, but it was mostly cosmetic this time; I was still under the safe limit for Fire-Proof. I did, however, almost immediately after that, take five Murderous Damage from the shrapnel, even after taking Blissful Assassin, Force Armor, etc., into account, as all of the several hundred ceramic pots the herbs had been in were turned into makeshift frag grenades.

I could not hear, and I could barely see when I opened my eyes. Beyond just the mass of smoke and dust in the air, the sprinkler system had also activated, dropping a sheet of black, awful-smelling, rust-filled water onto my head, blinding me further. But I could feel him.

Either Cross-country and Freestyle were dead, or they had, all at once, decided that they had no desire to kill me at all. But there, in the center of the room, was an event horizon of hatred and warped, corrupted Qi. I watched through the smoke as Alpine began to stir, picking himself from the ground, and decided that I was not above putting down an injured opponent while he was still stunned.

I dashed forward with a single lunge, choosing to break the Happy Idiot to double any potential Damage, and slammed my heel down where his neck was. My foot passed straight through, feeling only the floor despite it appearing as if it had hit Alpine dead on.

I had just long enough to think, An afterimage?, before I was charge tackled from behind hard enough to smash the glass door of the shop off the frame and leave a vague James-shaped dent in the steel roller blind. Instincts saved me from the worst of the Damage, but I was still pushed past an Injury Threshold, my ribs crying out for rest. Spinning around, I focused the might of my telekinesis into my Force Armor just in time to take another furious body slam from the battle-mad mercenary. This one hit hard enough to break the steel blinds free from one of their rails, thankfully providing me with some clean air and light.

Alpine stood over me, panting, his eyes so bloodshot they may as well have been a demon's. His veins pulsed and squirmed under his skin, rebelling against the stimulants pumping through them. I don't know how much he had taken, but I didn't need to roll a Medicine to know that he would die from it. Death was written all over him, most so in his smile, the only emotion I'd seen the man display thus far. Peace would be his soon, and in the meantime, he got to enjoy beating the hell out of James Li, the man who had taken everything from him.

I used the fresh air to use a charge of Circular Breathing and got ready to tank another blow from the merc. But my preparations were for naught. The cavalry had arrived – my eardrums healed just in time to hear the bark of a police pistol. Alpine hit the ground, lifeless, with a dull thud and wet splat of bloody flesh, a smoking hole in the back of his skull.

> [Encounter Complete]

>

> Defeated Alpine and his crew of mercenaries.

>

> Reward: 12 x 5 = 60XP

Maria coughed, holding a rag over her face as she made her way to me. "You good?" she choked out.

I held up a shaky thumbs up. "I'm chilling."