I shout past Nohra, breaking the stalemate before it even begins.
“How long are you going to stand back there and let someone else do your posturing for you, Voss?”
The old Adept has a knife to Carra’s neck and is jerking him out of my reach before I finish the question. I could care less how she threatens him. In the moment, all my focus is on the four warriors behind her, who show no surprise at being discovered. If they expected to catch me in a trap, they’ll have to try a little harder.
I shift my feet sideways and open the floodgates of my ki, purging the night in a stutter-flash of white flame. Superheated kinetic fury evaporates the storm and fills the atmosphere with steam that my aura sweeps away like chaff. Every beat of my heart pushes the aura out a little further, a little brighter, peeling away the last of the artificial shadows surrounding the fake Adepts. I would search for the shadow Elemental responsible, but I don’t have to look far. The ninth-ranked archer Keri lurks at the end of the lineup behind Etelos and his serpentine chainblade. Both of the major-league Assassins in one place. Interesting. Haughty Atela flanks them, needle-rapier holstered casually at her left hip.
Leading the pack is the Ace of the major league himself, empowered by a Shifter’s enhanced form. Shimmering layers of purple and indigo color enhance his features and weapons; two tonfa blades that stretch down the lengths of his heavy forearms. Some hybrid offense-defense exchange. He’s taller than I. Unquestionably stronger. A blacksmith’s brutal build and a giant’s bones, undercut by a face that could have been called gentle before it earned its scars. The Shifter’s form multiplies all that power like a brute-force steroid. Powerful, invisible winds, the outward sign of the strain it takes to maintain the form, rustles through his hair.
They brought a war party. Are they really that scared of me? Or just making certain of their victory?
My eyes search the distant warehouse roofs half a block away. Voss isn’t stupid. He’ll have more reinforcements, like the Psi who camouflaged their mental imprints. I don’t waste another thought on the unknowns. Mori and Jolie will handle them. Volt bristles beside me as he unslings his own weapon, that stripped-down marksman rifle chambered with man-eating rounds the size of my forearm.
I cock my head at Nohra, who stands between our two parties. “Your first mistake was trusting someone else to do your dirty work, Voss.”
The old Adept shifts her small blade until it pricks Carra’s neck, releasing a tiny rivulet of blood. He doesn’t even react. Just keeps up that amused, sadistically calm smirk. Like he’s about to watch two wild animals fight and couldn’t care less which wins, only if blood is drawn.
“I am sorry, Mars,” Nohra says. “I had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice. You made yours by listening to him.” I nod at Voss.
“He comes on the champion’s orders, and I am sworn to obey. Carra Kyriaku committed the cardinal sin, and his punishment was set in stone. He cannot be released.” Her grey head shakes slowly, hair soaked through from the storm. Wet strands cling to her age-lined cheeks. “My champion may favor you like a second son, but that does not make your word his. Not yet.”
I shift to Voss. Crimson hair whips around my shoulders like a flag in the battling winds between us. Billowing lengths cross over my face. I blink through them and focus on the Shifting titan of the major league. “Something you seem to have forgotten, too.”
Voss doesn’t bother with banter. He came with his own agenda.
“Ground the ship,” he grates.
Immediately, the other major leaguers flare out from his side, spreading out into a wide net formation. No two close enough to be caught in the same attack. Keri nocks two arrows into her bow and envelops herself in darkness, disappearing from sight. Without looking, I track her through my sixth sense for life energy as she adopts a flanking position meters away from the others. Completely invisible. Etelos sheds his disguise for his all-encompassing white cloak and unfurls his chain blade. Only the diamond-shaped tip is sharpened to a lethal point. The segmented, bludgeoning lengths clatter wickedly, drifting along the ground like a lazy scorpion’s tail. Intelligent eyes shine behind his three-pointed mask, sizing up my prowess in person. Like the others, he’s never fought me before- only seen my flair on the streams. Whether or not he’ll make the same mistake as the minor league and dismiss my skill as showboating is up to him.
I whirl around when an explosive rumble slaps out of the distant warehouses, painting the metal field in electric-blue light. An ion beam the size of a tree trunk lances across the open plane straight at the idling gunship. It disperses into a million-pointed fractal when it hits a sheet of solid ice that solidifies out of the storm the moment before impact. Another charge builds in the distance, the unseen ion cannon whining with a storm-piercing shriek.
Engines flare as the gunship takes flight. Kicking up and back in an evasive twist, moving as agilely as a human under my sister’s touch. Soaring over our heads as it passes. A second figure with glowing, angelic wings bursts from the same warehouse to give chase. Then a second ion beam cuts the sky in half, blocked by another sheet of instantly-formed ice that cascades out from the fleeing gunship. The beam is only good for disabling electronics; no kinetic power. But it forces the others to flee, leaving Volt and I surrounded by four of the twenty most dangerous fighters in the Section.
My eyes flick to Carra. Make that five.
Raw static pounds into my ear, feeding there from my JOY. We’re being jammed. I understand the message, though. I don’t need words to communicate with my twin. Just knowing she’s trying to reach out is enough. I only have to hold on until she returns.
My focus darts back to the battlefield when Voss finally deigns to move. He swings one thick hand out to one side, easing a rugged cloak to the ground. “This will be your only chance to surrender,” he says, eyeing Volt and I. “You have a long and bright future ahead, Mars. It need not end tonight over gloryhounding petulance. Work with your peers and your reputation can remain intact, as the champion’s does. Do not mistake courage for ability by choosing a fight you cannot win.”
“We wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake tonight,” Volt replies in a professional flatline. “Not that I particularly care for the old tyrant, but this is treason against the Champion.”
“Bold words from a dog wearing the mantle of a Dynasty killer.” Voss’ fingers curl around the perpendicular grips of his tonfa blades. “The only treason here is against the people of our city. Fang conspired to send emissaries to Olympus to seize more power, more control for himself. Tonight marks him a tyrant, not a champion. He has abandoned his duty to the hierarchy of our land. Favoring his own replacement, rejecting the will of the leagues and the voices of those he has sworn to represent.” Heavy eyes settle on me. “…though that is only one way tonight’s story has to be told.”
Atela slinks out from behind his shoulder, angling closer to Carra. I’m not sure what her plan is, but it worries me. Her nearly-untouched record of victories against martial artists has only been broken by two people in her career. To stop her in her tracks, I flip the game on its head.
One warning step carries me towards them. Totally surrounded now, but I couldn’t give a damn. My foot splashes hard against the metal, shattering an upside-down reflection of the capital. Hands loose at my side, fingers tightened halfway between fist and blade. The reaction when these warriors see my complete lack of fear is all adrenaline. My confidence is alien to them. They’ve held their seats so long surrounded by the same fights, the same faces, that when a threat arrives that could shatter their high tower arrives and refuses to bow its head, they’ve forgotten how to respond. They’ve forgotten the frozen grip of sudden fear. That cold heartbeat of dread that pulses loudest when you no longer know how a fight will play out.
Five years they’ve called me a flash in the fire while watching the flames roar closer. Five years the Section’s been wondering if I can ever be made to stop. If I’ll shatter the stalemate beneath the champion and give him a successor he sees the future in, not the past.
“I’ll pitch you another story,” I say.
Another step. Lethally quiet, padding through the aura-evaporated steam.
“Once, there was an old man, the strongest in the land, who told a young man to bow. ‘The way of the world is not set by good men’, he said in his wisdom. ‘It is set by the great’.”
The sparks and feral flames of ki gather near my palms. Burning harder, easing in and out of a compressed point.
“I told that old man to go hell and made my own path anyways,” I say. I cock my head to the side and dare the Ace of my Section in the universal language of our world: one raised hand and two fingers curling inwards. “I never bowed to Ajax. I never bowed to the corporations. I wouldn’t bow to the champion himself. And when you think you’re just as right as they did, what ever made you think I would bow to you?”
There is only one rule in my world. What often goes unsaid is the implication it carries. Only the strongest shall rule, and the strongest never let a challenge pass uncontested. Forfeiting might as well be a public admittance to the superiority of the challenger for all the social stigma it carries. No one lets a fight go. And when you throw down the challenge of a fight, you’d better do it prepared to face every last consequence.
I trap Voss and his pride in one simple motion. He can’t afford to back down in front of the league; not when he’s the face of their insurrection. So he takes the only choice I left him.
“Apprehend them,” he snarls.
It happens silently. The unity of the major leaguers dissolves as they take their own initiative. They are experts of single combat, not crowdfighting. Allies of circumstance only. Wet, slapping footsteps echo through the rain as they dive towards my light in staccato disharmony. The only sound the metallic shiver of blades unfurling, the creak of a bowstring tightening. Hissing downpour flashing into steam.
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Etelos is first to strike, chain blade undulating through the air like a sine wave as it flashes towards me. Voss charges from the front like an accelerating iceberg. I leap back to dodge both men and Etelos whips his weapon mid-strike, anticipating the evasive maneuver. Golden chains slither into a noose around my arm even as I try to jerk away.
“A good speech,” the assassin says, pivoting to reverse his momentum. His arms tense. “You’ve got spirit. If only you’d come to me before Voss did.”
He tears the chain to the side, aiming to rip my arm out of its socket. All he catches is a grunt as I let the flow of his swing take me with it instead. The riptide motion flings me to a tumbling stop between Atela and Voss just as the Duelist pounces. I whirl through a three-quarter flip right and Atela’s needle breezes past my back, my aura feeling the attack coming a fraction of a second before impact.
Her jaw drops at the instant reversal, blade already jerking back while I’m still finishing the flip. My elbow transfers all the momentum of my spin into her skull. She gets the needle up to block in time; reflexes even faster than mine. But it can’t stifle the sheer physics of the impact, and it does nothing at all to save her from the one-handed ki blast I follow through with, propelling her across the metal like a ragdoll. She tumbles to the lip of the prison entrance with scorched ozone pouring from her side.
I finish my spin and land on one foot. Eyes closed. One massive life signature charging from behind Volt dancing in locked combat with Etelos. The distant archer lining up her shot on me, struggling to aim around Voss. He’s almost on me. Splashes of thunderous light and explosive reports crash across the plane. Lightning cracks through the clouds overhead. My eyes open and violence thunders back into reality.
I lunge straight into the Ace of the major league and crash into him with everything I had. Throwing myself at a concrete wall would do more damage than I do. He sneers and those tonfa blades sweep in a tandem low-high strike.I deflect the upper tonfa blade with an open palm and snap a vicious kick into the opposite forearm at the exact same moment. The blade lets out a metal shriek as it carves into the steel field instead of flesh. He strikes back with his right hand instantly, cleaving across my chest in a diagonal line. I twist out of the blade itself, but even just his fist is like being punched by a jackhammer. The force of his Shifter’s form flips me head over heels back towards Etelos and Volt.
My hand touches the ground mid-tumble. One surge of strength springs me back to my feet as my shoes kill the last of the slide, smoking to a stop. I whip upright with a whirlwind of ki flowing into my palms. One thought sends it leaping out to strike Etelos in the shoulder and deflect an attack on Volt while also forcing Atela to scramble back like a spider. I’m holding the line on three different fronts at once. But Voss is almost on me already
Our chances of escaping plummet by the second. This fight was almost impossible from the start. One on one, I might take any of them. I need reorient the battlefield somehow. Change the situation. I’m not enough on my own.
But I am not on my own, either.
Glowing streams of full-auto gunfire carve through the sky overhead as the gunship roars back. Smoke and cinders pour from wounds across her flank and wings. Jolie’s piloting talent can only take the lumbering transport so far. And the harrying angel pursuing her is an airborne warrior of the highest caliber, nipping and crippling with pinpoint precision. It almost looks like she’s heading for a death spiral when the gunship’s side doors suddenly split open for a brief moment before a fresh burn accelerates her back into the cover of the industrial sector. A tiny silhouette plunges from the open hold and drops into the storm, disappearing into the dark.
I don’t have to wonder what fell. I feel her before I ever see her, crazy and dangerous as the day I met her as she dives headfirst into battle. Her memento for the city that scorned her snaps into her right hand. The six-shot cylinder spins like spurs before snapping into place.
Crackling lightning courses over Mori’s body as she flashes through the raindrops like a bolt of Zeusian lightning. Her hair flies wild and free behind her. The storm freezes in her irrepressible grasp, every drop slowing until they float in zero gravity. All but me look up on instinct.
Two thunderclaps shatter the stillness. Twinned electrolytic rounds bisect the arrows Keri the archer sends flying at me the moment before I clash again with Voss. Then Mori is landing on my shoulders. One hand possessively brushes my hair before her heels dig deep and she springboards off in a high acrobatic flip. Two more rounds punch into Voss shoulder. The final pair of bullets force Etelos into a backpedal, relieving the pressure on Volt.
She reloads before she touches the ground and slams her back against mine, cape whipping in the current of my aura. Smirking just like I am. She was right. Back to back, minds aligned, there’s nothing that can touch us.
Her elbow jabs into my side. “Make a mess, flyboy.”
Then she’s diving away with a finger heavy on the trigger, shoulder ramming into Keri right as the archer nocks another arrow. Close quarters erases the difference in their ranks as Mori starts slam-firing from the hip and I jerk back to my moment, twisting past three tonfa strikes from Voss while blocking two more and smashing away the limb delivering a sixth. I switch from defense to offense on a dime and throw a mass-driver kick square into his chest, driving him back two small steps. Halting his charge before he can set into his inescapable net of attack.
Another snarl tells me just how much my absurd aggression is upending his expectations. He thought I’d be patient, knowing the difference in our ranks. But I don’t owe him the respect so many of his peers do. He singled me out to win. I singled him out to make a point.
I’m a brick-gym gloryhound going toe to toe major league’s top dog, and I fight wild. I weave Ajax’s finesse with my heart and my wife’s gunslinging flair into a showstopping ensemble of attacks that seize on Voss’ moment of surprise and never let go. I lean into a crowd that isn’t even there. One-two jab to force him back and leap to follow with what he thinks will be a body-breaking knee slam, only to instead jab him in the face with the lightest two-finger brush.
He roars in rage at the sheer disrespect of the powerless attack, realizing I’m just playing with my food. The cockiness infuriates him like nothing else. Twin tonfas sweep to clear me away, but I’m already gone, dancing out of his range. Even with a Shifter’s speed, my fists are equal to his blades. My aura of ki a mirror match for the enhanced form that irons his skin. I feel his concentration narrowing onto my shoulders as I force him to devote his full attention to my threat. Chaos raging on every side all the while.
Seizing on an explosive interruption in the sky, Voss tears himself away from my relentless ferocity, regrouping with Atela near the prison entrance. My hands curl into fists as I reset my stance to a neutral balance, one fist at the belt and another high at the chest. Hips sideways. Ankles loose. Aura raging like a flash furnace now, ready to spring back into offensive form at the slightest impulse.
Voss charges first. Atela follows with a lunge from the left. Thirty meters away, Etelos fights to peel Mori away from Keri, harried by a flurry of stiletto stabs and fingertip thunderbolts from Volt. And in that moment, my attention splits even further as a pair of pale, manacled hands jerk once, just as they did to show off the bonds when I first arrived. But there’s no click of metal and chains this time.
Only a blur of black as Carra Kyriaku escapes his bonds and moves for the first time in five years.
Fluid does not describe what I barely manage to see in the corner of my vision. Fluid is the rain, the storm; predictable in its liquidity and natural in its flow. He moves like mercury. Lazily hydrophobic as he catches the still-sealed, now-empty manacles and sweeps them into the path of Atela’s passing strike, trapping her blade in the links. One twist of his wrist disarms her of the needle.
He’s already moving. A spray of blood in the air as old Nohra’s knife saws through a quarter of his throat. I watched Ajax cut more, once upon a time. It didn’t slow him then. And it doesn’t slow him now as he catches the needle by its omnidirectional blade and backhand whips it through the air so fast it beams straight through the storm and with a meaty thud buries itself hilt-deep in Voss’ forehead like a sword of Arthurian legend.
It happens so fast.
The purple hue to the man drains away. He wobbles in place, eyes finding me through the battle. A discomprehending fugue steals over his eyes. His jaw opens. Not even accusing. Just a glazed-over confusion aimed at me, asking how I could be responsible for this. Then lethal momentum catches up. And the second most powerful man in the Section crashes to the ground, dead before impact.
I stagger. Atela gapes. Nohra roars and swings her tower shield around to beat Carra into paste. He blocks it with just his forearm, letting the bone snap in three places without a JOY’s protection. His reply is instant. The most human person on the killing field in the moment, he might as well be wearing his old Mecha skin as he makes a blade of his hand and drives it straight into the gap in the plating under Nohra’s arm, punching through the old Adept’s chest with nothing but apathy on his face.
His hand rips out sheathed in red. Nohra staggers back to the prison’s entrance pit. Eyes widened by shock. He shoves her off his impaling forearm and she falls, disappearing over the edge without a sound while Carra flicks away the gore that paints his hand.
“Never did like that one,” he sighs. His hand belatedly cups the ragged wound on his neck. “Though she never liked me either.”
The instantaneous violence shocks us all to a standstill. It’s broken just as quickly when a spray of high-caliber gunfire from above hacks through the metal between me and Atela, forcing us apart. Huge engines overpower the sound of my aura with an avalanche roar as the gunship coasts down, shaking the entire city with a subtended rumble while it hovers. Its landing gear is shredded. The hull pierced and pocked, side doors shredded like raw flesh, rear ramp a wrecked husk that’s locked in the open position. But it’s still flying. Some technological wizardry of my sister keeps it hovering ten feet from the ground, waiting on a pindrop balance to take off.
Her virtual voice finally cracks through the jamming. “Everyone on! Leave the leaguers, Mars- we’re out of time.”
Mori’s elemental control weaves a foot-thick sheet of water around Carra and I, which shifts from translucent to opaque as it solidifies into pure ice. I glance back to see Winter hanging from the aircraft’s wrecked rear. Her wide eyes linger on Carra’s bloody hands, and her face stills as she sees Voss motionless. Someone shouts something lost to the roaring engines. Volt and Mori race into the shadow of the gunship and sling up into the bay with autocables.
I’m left alone with Carra in the final seconds. Crimson hair cocooning my head as I turn to see him raise his face to the night, bathing in the gunship’s spotlight, savoring the sting of heavy rain against his pale skin. One half-lidded eye examines me all the while, wondering how truly desperate I must be to come to him for aid.
This is the monster I brought up from hell. A single dark thought pulses through my mind. The difference between us is so vast in this moment. He, powerless, yet imbued with such dangerous skill. I with all the power in the world at my fingertips. If I ended him now, the world would be a better place. But it might not stay that way for long. Letting him live isn’t good. It’s dipping myself in evil to save the world from something worse. A line so dangerously thin is all that stands between me and repeating Fang’s mistakes.
The thought that I might be already repeating them lingers even as we race into the night, fleeing the rising sun. I lean against the bruised walls of the hold and stare out over the city. Mori’s arms around my waist, her cheek pressed against my back. Slag, char, smoke, and ash from Zona A obscure the city blocks we wing over. Flash-fried ozone heavy in the air. A murderer freed. The flames of open treason stoked by my hand. The world balances on a knife’s edge under the threat of a king over all, and I’m fleeing my home on the brink of an insurrection.
But I can’t stay here. I have my mission. I have to keep going and trust in the choices that have brought me here. Trust in the friends I’m taking with me to keep me on the right path. And hope, against all my better judgment, that this deal with the devil will cost as little as the last I made.