21.
Sienna
Prettyboy was leering at me over Kat’s shoulder, waiting at the mouth of the forecourt’s mall exit for me to come to him, only a couple dozen paces away. The fact that he’d gotten this close was disquieting. The fact that he’d beaten us here from Tokyo?
Less than surprising. The fact that there were no cops waiting here for him said a few things about how effectively the police were investigating me, or how possibly how corrupt they were. I didn’t want to speculate on which it might be, but the fact that the yakuza had tracked me down before the cops said something.
“Look, dude,” I said, stepping out in front of Kat, “it’s kinda been a long night, and we’re heading into the time when I’d normally be sleeping, so can we put a pin in this ‘me killing you business’ for now? I’m not in the mood.” All true. I wasn’t a psycho, and I didn’t enjoy killing people, even those with a death wish.
“Our fates are tied together by the inescapable cords of destiny,” Prettyboy said with a smile. “You can no more untether them than I can separate myself from life without your help.”
I sighed. Full marks to Harry for diagnosing this guy’s desire for assisted suicide. “Have you tried just drowning yourself in hemlock or something?”
Prettyboy bowed his head to me, just slightly. “There is nothing I have not tried.”
“Oh, man,” I muttered, trying to decide how best to approach this. Admitting I didn’t want to kill him probably wasn’t going to make him happy, since he truly did want me to. Taking it easy on him wasn’t going to do me any favors, either, because he’d just keep coming at me harder and more threatening until I gave him what he wanted and actually did kill him—which I wasn’t entirely sure how to do, save for by draining his soul, which was probably not cool with him, since it didn’t result in actual death. Short of putting him in a different succubus and then somehow blowing that succubus’s brains out, I was at a bit of a loss. “This is a pretty unkind thing you’re asking of me. I mean, it’s a lot.”
“It is the simplest thing in the world,” he said, moving to a fighting stance and extending his hand to me. “You will kill me, or I will kill your friends.” I blanched, and he smiled wider, because he’d gone and stumbled on the magic formula for getting me to be a lot more serious about this.
“Now we’re getting down to the crux of things,” I said, glancing around. We were pretty close to the road where taxis were passing in front of us. They were moving slowly, in a very controlled manner, which didn’t do me any favors. I gave another quick glance at the arched covering above us. It was pretty high up there, and tossing my foe through it would probably just piss him off, given his power set.
No, I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: deliver an ass beating. But first …
“HOLY SHIT!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, letting my jaw drop and pointing a finger over Prettyboy’s shoulder, trying to emulate perfect disbelief out of absolutely nowhere. “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!”
The dumb sonofabitch actually looked. In fairness to him, I’d been as loud and shocked-sounding as possible, and after a nice lull from a conversation like we were having, you start to feel … complacent, maybe? Then your conversational partner goes and shouts about something behind you … Well, you’d just have to look, right?
And look he did. He said something in Japanese to the yakuza backing him, but I have no idea what it was and I don’t really care.
As soon as his back was turned, I was on him, grabbing him by the hair in a manner reminiscent of what I’d done to one of the Wolfe brothers once upon a time. I kicked him in the groin to get him off the ground and then slung him in a circle like an Olympic hammer thrower. His face was pure panic as I made the second loop, slinging him like I was a centrifuge.
“Nothing personal,” I said as we made the second orbit. His yakuza buddies were coming at me now, but Harry was on the case, jumping in front of me and dealing some serious beatdown, one-hit knocking guys out. “And I don’t mean to contribute to your depression, but I just don’t have time for your bullshit right now.”
Reaching the apogee of my next swing, I started to send Prettyboy flying. I had it all planned out. I was going to release him and let nature—and physics—take their sweet course. He’d come to rest in the middle of a street a few blocks away, and I’d have enough time to grab a cab to the docks without his invincible ass dogging my steps. I’d solve this time problem with Akiyama, and then I’d leave Japan and never see Prettyboy again, if the fates be kind.
The fates were not kind, though.
Time stuttered just as I started to release him. Not a full freeze like I’d grown used to, this one was a stop-start within a second, just long enough to throw me off my game, make me wonder why his hair was still touching my hand after I released him. I blinked, and accidentally hit him with my elbow on the inadvertent spin-around I did after release. It wasn’t intentional; I’d been spinning so fast to chuck him that I couldn’t just stop immediately, and he should have been clear of my elbow if not for the damned time stoppage.
My hit knocked his head aside, and time shot back into motion. Prettyboy’s momentum changed abruptly, his head snapping back like he was a baseball and I’d just knocked him out of the park, but instead of shooting out the front of the forecourt, he suddenly shot sideways as the strength of my elbow dinging him was magnified many times over by the time stoppage.
It took me a second to put all that together, much longer than it took him to crash into a shopfront to my left and then rise, fresh as a daisy, as though I hadn’t just tossed him like a garbage bag. His face was suffused with rage, though, and he wasn’t nearly as far away as I’d hoped he would be right now.
Damned time. Talk about inconvenient to my plans.
On the other hand, I’d just learned something interesting. Next time stoppage, all I needed to do was pound on him as hard as I could from the opposite direction to the way I wanted him to go, and I suspected he’d launch on his own accord. It all came back to physics; with time stopped, I could act on him with incredible force, stacking physical punishment upon him to the point where it functioned like a magnifying effect, the force of ten or a hundred blows being directed so tightly in time upon him it was like they were all landing within a millisecond of each other. If I’d just hit him with my elbow accidentally while time had been moving, it’d maybe have snapped his head back.
But hit him with a simple elbow motion while time was stopped, and it had whole different effect. It was as though I was hitting him at several thousand miles per hour due to our relative velocities. The math made my head hurt, but probably not as badly as his right now.
He screamed something unintelligible at me in Japanese and came charging out of the wrecked shop front, covered in shards of glass and little bits of drywall powder. I thought about hightailing it, but running wasn’t really my style, and Harry was still firmly ensconced in dealing with yakuza thugs. Two were down, four were still working on trying to land even a single blow on him, and meanwhile one had come around at Kat, which I suspected was about to be to be a major mistake. I had to focus on Prettyboy, but it would have been impossible to miss the hard crack of fist on bone from approximately where Kat was clashing with the guy. I had a feeling it wasn’t him that had scored the hit, either.
Dumbasses. Always underestimating the pretty blond girl to their eternal regret. Or at least as long as it’d take for an orthopedic surgeon to put their jaw together correctly again.
Prettyboy ranted at me in his native language as he tore up the ground between us in a flat-out bull run. He wasn’t a big guy, but he didn’t need to be with meta strength and invincible skin. He could just about run me over and it’d kill me plenty. As he got closer, I tensed slightly, readying my stance as well as I could.
He reached out as he got to within a few feet, plainly intending to make his attack so much worse by yanking me into it. It would have hurt me badly, no doubt, had he landed what he intended. We’re talking broken bones, pain, all that jazz. I’m not sure how it would have helped him get to his professed goal of me killing him, but, hey, when you’re pissed, logic kinda goes out the window.
Unfortunately for him, he was hardly the worst person I’d been bull-charged by, and even more unfortunate for him, acting stupidly in a fight not only doesn’t grant you any advantage, it usually nullifies any you might have. Like, say invincible skin and near invulnerability.
It was always the same with these assholes; give a man enough power and he neglected to upgrade his fighting skills, thinking he had it covered by strength alone.
But when it came to using someone’s strength against them, I had been trained by the best.
“Ever heard of aikido?” I asked as I swept a hand around Prettyboy’s arm and dropped, turning his momentum against him. His eyes went wide as I went into a roll. His forward momentum went sideways, and, using techniques my mother had taught me back when she had superpowers and I had none, I sent his ass sailing again, right into the shop on the opposite wall.
It was hardly world-ending for him, being about half as hurtful as the last impact he’d made, but it kept him from running me over. As he rose from the debris of his hard landing, though, his face showed that he’d upped his game to double-pissed, or maybe triple-pissed now. It wasn’t a great look, but hey, I was happier that he was all bellicose rather than coolly calculating how best to use his superpowers to my immediate detriment.
He came at me again, even less cautiously if that was possible, and this time he caught a face full of concrete as I tossed him even higher into the air, and he came crashing down on the concrete a dozen feet away.
I had my doubts about how long even pissed-off Prettyboy could continue to enjoy the insanity loop—doing the same thing and expecting different results—and sure enough, as he peeled himself off the broken pavement where he’d come to rest after landing, he did so a little more cautiously than the last two rounds.
“You …” he said, grunting, unsteady on his feet. I wasn’t sure if that was because I’d rung his bell or if he was feeling some other form of bodily discomfort. I suspected the former.
“Why does everybody always say, ‘You … ‘? when they’re looking at me and wondering how they got to be in such a state?” I asked, genuinely curious. “It’s like an insult no one can ever quite finish. Like ‘You bitch, I can’t believe you’re beating my dumb ass senseless’? Or ‘You heinous individual, how dare you violate my person in such a way, you’ve hurt my feelings!’ Hm? Whaddya think, Prettyboy?” I needed to goad him back into stupid action, if possible. I figured if he had any other easily exploitable flaws, one of them was probably failure to do cardio. Not that that’d be an immediate boon to me, because metas tended to be able to go longer than normal humans in almost every circumstance, but maybe over the long haul I could wear his ass out.
He rose back to his feet, breathing heavily but not nearly heavily enough. “You … will kill me … or I will kill your friends … and your family … and every one you love … until you give me … peace …”
“Man,” I said, staring at him as he started to walk, way too calmly, toward me, “seriously. This is way new for me. That last part makes a huge difference. No one’s ever really asked me for—well, okay, one guy kinda did, but—”
Prettyboy was just walking toward me, and then suddenly everything seemed to … blur.
Harry and Kat were fighting off to my right, doing their thing, taking out the other guys, and suddenly Harry and his nearest opponent launched into fast-motion speed. The guy came at Harry with a baton that blurred with speed and Harry dodged it perfectly. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head to look—
And suddenly Prettyboy was right there in front of me, and then I felt something unbelievably hard hit me in the midsection—then another something—then another, as though someone had positioned a construction piston of the sort they used to utterly destroy concrete right over my abdomen and switched it on hyperspeed.
Now it was my turn to fly through the air and catch a shopfront, shattering glass and smashing through shelving. I didn’t know how it had happened, but time had just turned on me, hard, snapping into high speed around me while I remained nearly still. Prettyboy had walked right up and beat the living snot out of me, and when time had resumed—
I’d gone flying. I lay in busted shelves, glass shards sticking out of my bleeding arms and back, and I stared up at the ceiling. Unlike Prettyboy, I didn’t have the advantage of invincible skin when I sailed through the plate glass window. I could feel pieces of it embedded in a few places along my back, and they all hurt, my life’s blood draining out into cardboard boxes that surrounded me.
Prettyboy loomed into my view and stared down at me, his rage replaced by a near-disgust, lower jaw jutting out. He made no threatening move toward me, but looked down at me as though I were unworthy of anything. Then he spit, right in my face.
“Baka ,” he said, his contempt obvious. “Now … I will kill your friends. And when next we meet … when you are healed … it will be upon the terms I dictate. You will give me what I want.”
And he started to walk away, back toward where Kat and Harry waited … and I knew, in my heart …
They didn’t stand a chance against him.