Aaron’s legs carried him towards the gryphon. They were in no particular hurry. Even if the gryphon didn’t come to him, he’d be within reach soon enough. That was his greatest limiting factor — the length of his arms. At the end of them were where his hands were and those were his weapons.

The gryphon must have sensed something had changed, because he started taking cautious swipes with his wings and claws. He didn’t keep enough distance, though, because Aaron’s legs carried him into and past the blows. Some landed, but they did no real damage and Aaron wouldn’t have noticed if they had.

When Aaron was uncomfortably close, the gryphon decided he didn’t want to share his personal space. He folded his wings around himself, bunched up his legs, and tried to leap backwards. It was too little, too late.

A hand shot out, latched onto the gryphon’s throat, and began to squeeze.

The gryphon raked his talons along Aaron’s forearm as hard as he could. It did little more than the last attempt, leaving the thin white lines of a minor scrape behind. The talons didn’t even draw blood. He spread his wings and pumped them fruitlessly, trying to yank free of Aaron’s grasp.

Placing one taloned foot on Aaron’s thigh, the gryphon stepped up and swung his other leg over Aaron’s shoulder. As soon as he was up, the feathered man followed with his other leg, wrapping both around Aaron’s head. A mixed martial arts enthusiast might have been impressed by the swift and precise execution of a hanging triple armbar. For about a second.

A second is about how long it would take to notice that Aaron’s arm remained fixed in place, held straight in front of him. It didn’t dip in the slightest, even supporting the gryphon’s entire weight. His arm had twisted at the elbow to maintain the choke, but little more.

No matter how the gryphon strived or moved to get leverage, he couldn’t extricate himself from Aaron’s steely grip. His struggles were ineffective, little more than an annoyance to the urges propelling Aaron’s body.

Years of action movies, professional wrestling, and footage of police brutality might lead people to think choking someone into unconsciousness takes a while. In truth, ten to fifteen seconds are all that’s needed if the carotid is properly blocked. The gryphon was made of sterner stuff than a human, but he was on the wrong side of half a minute without oxygen to the brain.

Still, it was longer than the primal drive at the helm of Aaron’s actions was willing to oblige. Aaron’s legs spread into a wider stance and his body bent slightly at the waist. Slowly, almost casually, he turned, pulling the gryphon farther from the hard cement. Then he snapped back around, driving the beast into the unyielding ground with tremendous force.

The gryphon knew to tuck his chin and roll his back to protect his head, but it could only delay the inevitable a few seconds. It helped the first few times he hit the pavement, each impact producing a muffled thump as his back absorbed and dispersed most of the force.

Aaron knew what was coming next, even as far from his own body as his thoughts were at that moment.

With unnatural strength, Aaron adjusted his arm and changed the angle of descent with relative ease. The next impact of the gryphon’s head on the ground didn’t produce a thump, but a resounding thock!

After the back of his skull kissed the cement a few times, he was well and truly dazed. His limbs released from around Aaron’s arm and neck, flailing limply around his body. He tried to scoot away on the ground, but the gryphon’s body was following conscious direction about as well as Aaron’s.

Instead of slamming the gryphon again, Aaron left him on the ground and dropped to his knees, straddling the birdman’s chest without releasing his neck. A cloud of white electricity burst into being, spreading like the roots of a tree made of light, and washed over the gryphon’s face. The stink of singed hair and flesh filled the placid air of the parking structure.

Although it was little consolation to losing control of his own actions, Aaron still cheered that he’d somehow managed to use the wand. He wondered if he’d be able to replicate the feat when he was fully back in control of his own faculties.

Not that this murderous freak isn’t me, which is exactly why I don’t get into fights anymore, he mused.

Whatever Aaron’s concerns over his propensity for horrific brutality, his instinctive drive for unfettered violence was effective. The gryphon wasn’t dead, but he sure as hell wasn’t in a position to be a threat anymore, either. His eyes were unfocused and his head was lolling on his neck but there were no spasms, which Aaron took as a good sign.

Aaron lifted the gryphon slightly and hit him again.

The worst part of coming back to himself, just as it had been before, was the realization that he hadn’t lost control, not really. It wasn’t a berserk rage where he was wildly, recklessly out of control. It was a methodical coldness that was both alien and familiar, a part of himself Aaron knew was there but couldn’t really connect with. As he stood up, the gray haze around the edges of his vision dissipated and the sensation that he was looking at the world through a tunnel faded.

His jaw hurt, his stomach was cramping, and his eyes burned and itched with the spectre of tears. That was another thing he hated about losing control like that, how it left him reeling from his emotions. Even if he shrugged off a dozen blows to the head or made a demonstration of terrible strength, in the aftermath he risked advertising weakness and vulnerability.

Aaron balled his hands tightly into fists, swallowed hard, and blinked the tears away, forcing his emotions back under his control. When he had a slightly better handle on himself, he looked around to get the measure of the others.

The cowboy was still on the ground, head laying about a foot from his rapidly cooling body. The woman in the breastplate also remained laying on the ground and, though her wounds had largely disappeared, she was still extremely pale.

Maybe healing potions don’t help with blood loss? Aaron thought. Or maybe they will but only if you drink them?

Griffin and the ogre were locked in a brutal game of mercy. Their hands were clasped together, fingers interlocked, and each was trying to overpower the other. The ogre’s size should have been an advantage, but drakus strength was bullshit and Griffin had bent the ogre’s massive hands back almost completely.

Unlike the schoolyard game Aaron was familiar with, their version of mercy had no apparent rules. Griffin and the ogre were headbutting, kneeing, kicking, and trying to toss each other. None of this was going the ogre’s way, but it kept Griffin from helping the others.

That was unfortunate for the drakus, because the fight with the catwoman wasn’t going nearly as well.

Kiara was crouched in the cramped space between a large pickup truck and a wall. The catwoman had just taken a swipe at her from the roof of the cabin and leapt away. Albert was sliding across the roof of the car next to the truck, but arrived too late to take a stab at the cat. All three of them were notably more mussed and disheveled than they had been when Aaron checked a few seconds earlier, but there were no major injuries as far as he could tell.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Aaron dashed across the lane, angling to intercept the leaping catwoman. Two years of high school tackling drills paid off and he crashed into her side at full tilt. He was able to pin the arm with the smallsword against her torso when he barrelled into her. As they crashed to the pavement, his hand scrabbled around until he was able to latch onto the wrist of that arm.

Their contact was very brief. The catwoman tried bashing Aaron with her shield to no effect then, living up to her namesake, writhed and twisted until she slipped free of Aaron’s tackle. She even managed to pull her wrist free thanks to the sleek fur under her clothes. She rolled to her feet in a defensive stance, sword at the ready, and took a measuring look around.

Three-on-one odds were not to the catwoman’s liking, apparently.

She pushed her sword into what was likely a dimensional storage and bounded away on all fours. Kiara fired a couple shots from her wands after her, but the cat was nimble as a, well, as a cat and dodged them all.

With the catwoman gone, the fight was effectively over. Aaron took stock of the situation, hopefully for the last time.

Griffin was struggling for a decisive end to his battle with the ogre, but was otherwise in control of that situation. The gryphon lay on the ground, occasionally groaning and rolling on his back. The woman in the breastplate was immobilized and hadn’t regained any color from her loss of blood. The cowboy, having been beheaded, remained dead.

Albert and Kiara approached the two downed combatants, each taking a small swig of red fluid from a vial — healing potions to help with their minor injuries, no doubt.

Aaron noted that they didn’t drink the entire vial, even though each was no bigger than a small bottle of aspirin, so the magic was likely strong enough it could be rationed based on the severity of injury.

Each of the guardians produced a long length of thin, silvery chain. They wrapped these around the wrists of each incapacitated opponent, then looped it around their necks. Though the chain looked like it was loose enough to slip out of, Aaron suspected there was more magic than metal involved.

“Give Al a hand with these goons,” Kiara said. “I’ll get the ogre sorted.”

“Take the gryphon,” Albert said as Kiara strode off towards Griffin’s struggle with the ogre.

The hand Albert needed was with looting their downed foes. He stripped the woman of her breastplate, a graceful short sword with a leaf-style blade, and a red potion.

The gryphon was recovering from the beating Aaron had inflicted on him and remained disoriented, so he offered no resistance. A quick pat down revealed nothing of any real interest — a burner cell phone, a MetroCard, a small revolver. The guy didn’t even have keys on him.

“I’ll drag these two,” Albert said, kneeling beside their two incapacitated foes. “Can you haul Louis the Sixteenth L’Amour?”

Aaron looked down at the headless cowboy and swallowed hard. Albert only got a couple steps dragging the other two before he stopped.

“Ah, yeah, sorry,” he said. “You’re probably not used to dealing with decapitated bodies. I’ll take the urban cowboy, you haul these other mooks.”

Albert hoisted the cowboy’s body over one shoulder and tucked the head under the other arm. Aaron followed him back to the maintenance closet, dragging the other two by their collars as Albert had started to. With Aaron’s new strength, they seemed to weigh almost nothing.

At the smaller man’s direction, Aaron set his two captives against the rear wall of the maintenance room. Albert set the cowboy and his head down in front of a car parked beside the door, then picked up a small stack of orange hazard cones from the closet.

“Keep an eye on them for a sec,” he said.

After dropping the cones along the floor to block their lane from incoming traffic, Albert returned to the maintenance room.

“No fancy illusions?” Aaron asked.

Albert smirked. “Why bother when a few cones will do the trick?”

Kiara and Griffin joined them outside a few seconds later.

“The biggun settled down when Kiara stuck a wand in her ear and said she’d scramble her thoughts into an omelette if she didn’t ease up,” Griffin said.

“Okay, but… rude,” Albert remarked with a smirk.

“She’s cooling her heels — back to fun size — on the trunk of an old sedan,” Kiara said, gesturing to her left.

Aaron glanced that way. The ogre — or ogress — was a normal-looking woman sitting on the rear end of a boxy white car. She didn’t look particularly put out by losing the fight or being threatened with lobotomy by magic; in fact, she looked bored.

“That was a woman?” Aaron asked.

Griffin shrugged. “Only way to tell with ogres is when they’re in human form.”

“Or having sex with you,” Albert added.

“Don’t listen to these goobers,” Kiara sighed. “Ogres are naturally hermaphroditic, that’s why they only have distinctive sex characteristics in their human form.”

“Neat. Okay, next question — why did that woman almost bleed out when Albert’s blades cauterize the wounds they make?”

“Her magic armor is bullshit,” Albert said, clearly annoyed. “Stopped the blades before they got far and protected her from the enchanted heat to boot. Pretty decent artifact, actually.”

“It worked out in the end,” Kiara said. “I’m pretty sure her and the cowboy are magi and the other three are hired goons.”

Griffin grunted. “Of course the finger wigglers are farming out to mythics for muscle.”

“Whatever the case, we’ve got captives we can interrogate. We’ll need to arrange transport, though; I don’t want to sit here longer than I have to on the off chance they sent word back to their bosses,” Kiara said.

“I sent word to Barrett as soon as our large friend settled down,” Griffin said. “An extraction team is en route.”

“What will happen to the others?” Aaron asked.

He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer.

As far as Aaron could see, the optimal course of action in this situation was to kill everyone then dispose of the bodies in a way they’d be unlikely to be recovered. Or maybe make it look like they’d run afoul of some other, unrelated problem if they could pull it off. Either would reduce the number of enemy combatants their enemies had access to and deny them useful intelligence.

The idea of being party to cold-blooded murder didn’t exactly thrill Aaron, no matter how practical it might be. It would also radically change his opinion of the Drakon.

If he understood things correctly — and that was a big ‘if’ — the dragons were closer to an independent nation than a gang or criminal organization, but there was a massive difference between killing an enemy soldier in the heat of battle and executing a prisoner of war.

Being part of an organization that went that far that easily would be hard enough, but if he was supposed to be the leader of that organization? Even with the nominal power of a figurehead, Aaron didn’t know how he could adjust to that. So he found himself holding his breath when Kiara answered.

“Our people will talk with them to see if they’re willing to flip on whoever hired them, then they’ll most likely be let go,” she said, then lowered her voice. Aaron noticed she had pulled out her small illusory conversation cube again. “Besides, it’ll help with the disinformation about you and us. They’ll ask all their usual intrigue questions and try to bribe them, but they’ll also slip in a lot of questions about why so much effort was put into attacking delvers who aren’t involved in eidolon politics.”

“We have a few minutes,” Albert said, cracking his knuckles. “We could ask a few questions of our own.”

Griffin chuckled and it was somehow ominous. “Yeah, I’d like that. I’d like that very much.”

“Okay,” Kiara said. “Let’s see if we can get some answers of our own.”