35.
Sienna
“I need this shit right now like I need another hole in my head,” I said, casting my eyes toward the heavens.
Prettyboy had come to this island. Had called my name. Had threatened death for me and mine, even though Harry and Kat were already at some conjoined version of death’s door, linked together through his seizure and her use of powers to try and bring him back. Both were unconscious on the floor around me, and here I was, sitting on my haunches, Akiyama only a step away …
Like I didn’t have e-friggin’-nough to deal with given his ass was about to end time somehow. Now I had this crap to sort through? Some death-wish yakuza nutbag chasing me all the way from Tokyo to an abandoned island outside Nagasaki?
“Who is that?” Akiyama asked, lurking right over my shoulder like a mystified, protective parent asking about the latest trend. Tide Pods, maybe, I dunno. I wished Prettyboy would go eat a case and thus remove himself from my “To Kill” list. Though that probably wouldn’t work, unlike with normal morons.
“Some dickhead yakuza Achilles-type with a death wish,” I said, getting to my feet. It wasn’t likely Prettyboy was going to just go away because I wished real hard that he would, which meant I had to deal with his dumb ass in order to keep him from coming to find Kat and Harry and killing them just to spite me.
“An Achilles?” Akiyama asked, rising as I got to my feet. “With the yakuza?”
“Yep,” I said, trying to decide the smartest path out to him. I didn’t want Prettyboy realizing which building I was in, in case he got past me. The last thing I needed was him tracing me back to here and slaughtering my friend and my boyfriend while I was stuck in a time freeze or something.
“Madness,” Akiyama said, as if trying to figure out why an Achilles would go to work for organized crime. I didn’t feel like spelling out for him the appeal to a psychopath of working for a criminal group, so I just stalked off and opened the doors to the hospital waiting area with its frozen fifties décor quietly, taking the route out of here that I’d taken to get in.
“What do you intend to do?” Akiyama called after me, and I looked back to find him following, catching me just as I hit the door to the outside—again, quietly, intending to shut it so that no one would know by the sound of a door closing where I was coming from. Besides, going into a fight with an invincible meta, I needed all the element of surprise I could muster.
I took my voice meta-low and said, “Beat his ass into the ground and kill him if possible. Why?”
Akiyama evinced the hint of a frown. “He is an Achilles.”
I shrugged. “I’ve killed them before.” I felt a hard pang; Scotland. Again. Would the damned reminders never cease?
That sent Akiyama’s eyebrows up. “You have … killed Achilles?”
“A couple,” I said. “They’re not actually invincible, you know.”
“Hm,” Akiyama said, thinking deeply on this. I didn’t have time to indulge in thought when asses waited to be kicked, though, so I started back down the path toward the shore. I could hear some yakuza thugs talking down that way. “You must be truly great,” Akiyama said as I walked away, “to have beaten so tremendous a foe.”
Something about what he said sent a little tickle down my spine; in our first meeting, he’d called me, “The great Sienna Nealon.” Not the sort of thing you forget as a perpetually under-appreciated eighteen year-old.
“If only everyone saw me that way,” I said, turning around to show him a tight, humorless smile. Then I was back off to the races. The races, in this case, being a battle with several yakuza and a seemingly invincible man.
There wasn’t any way to approach Prettyboy other than straight on down the dock road, so that was what I did, just headed downhill. I saw his little group coming when the road curved and I was about a hundred feet down while he was about a hundred feet off the dock. Past him, I could see a boat at the dock—the same one that had ferried us out here only a little earlier. The captain was sitting at the wheel, a little slick of blood running down his eye, a lone yakuza in a black suit left to guard him. Poor guy.
Nine yakuza in black suits with white shirts waited for me, with their left hands in various states of disrepair. I doubted they had three whole pinkies between them, which suggested to me that either someone hadn’t wanted to send the A team out to face me, or else these guys were just a big human sacrifice, meant to prime me for the main event. Because right in the middle of them was Prettyboy.
I looked over the odds. I’d faced worse. If it was just these guys, with their assorted traditional, mostly thug weapons—a couple knives, some clubs—I’d rip through them like a bean burrito through a weak intestinal tract.
Unfortunately, they had an Achilles in their midst. Also unfortunately, none of them had a katana. Because I was better with a katana than probably any of them ever would be. Alas, another disappointment among so many in my life, one that rated just above finding out that Big Bird was just a guy in a suit but below the discovery that being an adult wasn’t all sunshine and kittens.
“If you value your lives, get the hell off this island,” I said, stalking down toward the motley assortment of idiots in front of me. I didn’t expect Prettyboy to turn back, but if I could get a few yakuza out of my way, it’d save me thirty seconds, and right now, every second counted. “I will not be pulling my punches; any of you who come at me will die. I am fresh out of patience, mercy, and anything else good.”
“Excellent,” Prettyboy said, grinning. Not a happy grin. A psychotic one. Of course.
“Not really,” I said, trying to keep my footing as I made my way down the hill without stopping. I was just taking things at a steady walk, and they’d stopped, clearly in anticipation of me charging their formation, which I was doing, albeit slowly. It didn’t make sense to just stand back. I needed to get this over with, and it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference if I waited for them to come to me, given that the odds here were terrible for me.
The road was bordered on each side by a little block wall about knee to waist high, and to my left it ran uphill into the base of the hospital building. To my right it dropped off in a steep slope down to the shoreline, which was a rocky mess, as I knew from our earlier landing. No beach here, just a twenty-foot drop to pain and agony. My current plan was to send as many yakuza over it as I could manage, not really caring whether they died, so long as they got out of my way for at least a few minutes. And it’d probably be longer than that, given that even if they managed to survive the fall, they’d have to swim back to the dock and climb the damned hill again to get back to me.
The nearest yakuza was a young guy already missing a finger and a half, and with a club in his hand. He had a smile on, too, though his was not nearly as crazy as Prettyboy’s. I was unsurprised to see that someone so dumb as to fail badly enough to be forced to cut off that many knuckles before the age of thirty was going to be the first to pay the Sienna price. He started toward me, breaking their calcified little formation, and as I got close. I darted in under his attempted swing of his club, ripped it out of his hand—easier because he was lacking those fingers—elbowed him so hard in the nose that it probably killed him on impact, then kicked him over the embankment and into the water below. A pronounced crack made its way to me a second later, telling me I’d managed to score a hole in one on my first try. Or a corpse-on-rock. Whatever.
“Come one, come all,” I said, gritting my teeth as the yakuza came at me in a rush. One came at me from behind, approaching from the water side. He probably thought he was safe, because he wasn’t directly between me and where I’d just thrown his buddy overboard; he had a good twenty foot margin behind him before the embankment tumbled off.
I slammed him in the belly with a blurry-fast sidekick, and it was like I’d shot him in the gut with a cannon. He launched off the ground and flew through the air, and if the stomach trauma didn’t kill him and the fall didn’t, then with any luck he’d just drown and spare me any more trouble.
While I was kicking him overboard, another guy came charging in close. I whipped a punch at him that caught him in the eye and caused the usual level of damage. He howled, tissue bulging and wrecked goo hanging out of his closed lids as he screamed. Did no one warn these idiots what happened when you fought metahumans? They make pamphlets for asbestos exposure; I felt like they should start printing them, in every language, for “What Happens to Your Body When You Cross Sienna Nealon.” Forewarned is forearmed, after all. Or at least you have a chance to not lose your forearm, because my next move was to grab him by his, yank him close, and traumatize his wrist with that club so hard that the radius jutted out of his skin. Then I flung him overboard and listened to him splash below. Missed the rocks that time. Bummer.
Three of them got the wise idea to charge me at once, either by plan or by stupid timing. The first to arrive got my purloined club thrown right in his face. It lodged in the place where his nose had been before it was replaced by hardened wood, and he keeled over, dead or close to death. The other two kept coming, apparently failing to realize that every one of their friends who had come at me had died or been horribly injured thus far. Or maybe they thought they’d be the first to win, I dunno.
Both of these guys had knives, but were slow as frozen shit, so I grabbed the first one by his knife hand, which he led with in a blind, stupid charge—and I fell back into a roll, catching myself on my ass and then onto my back and shoulders. I put one foot in his groin, which took all the starch out of his shorts, put the other in his belly, and launched him after breaking his hand and making him give up the knife, which I caught with my other. He soared into the stratosphere, or at least over the embankment, and I was rewarded for my efforts with both a crunch and splash, leading me to believe that he’d either wrecked his whole rib cage or ended up landing on his head. Either way, he wasn’t coming back from that anytime soon.
I rolled back to my feet in time to counterattack the last of this trio of morons, and I wasted no time in opening his throat. In fact, I cut his neck so hard that my stolen knife ran hard against his spine, my hand deep in the gore of his neck. I could feel the tension in my face, my anger coming out as I showed these bastards what the great-granddaughter of Death himself and the granddaughter of the original Valkyrie could do; this was my family trade, after all. Ignoring the shocked, gasping face, I finished taking the bastard’s head clean off and headbutted it, launching it into the gut of a guy charging up behind my victim. He let out a gasp as it took the wind out of him. A follow-up kick sent the headless corpse into him, knocking him over and down, pinned beneath the dead weight of a dead guy.
Now I was hitting my stride, and with only three more yakuza to go. Prettyboy was just watching, that sick grin on his face, like he was imagining himself being next and relishing the thought. I was just about to the point of agreeing with him, my patience all spent with people threatening my friends, especially since I felt like I’d lost plenty enough of those lately. The last two standing yakuza came at me in tandem, and I didn’t waste a lot of time with them.
One had a club, one had a knife, and I used my superior speed to dart between them as they charged me. From that point, I used my own blade to open up the guts of the guy with the knife, blocked his clumsy thrust, dodged the overhead clubbing attempt of the other, watching it sail home to graze his compadre against the side of the face. I redirected the blade of the yakuza who I’d just gutted, twisting it right into the heart of the guy with the club. He looked shocked, just shocked, that his buddy’s weapon had been turned against him to his own fatal detriment.
“Enough of this shit,” I said. I elbowed the club guy while kicking the knife guy, and they both went flying from me in opposite directions. The knife guy just about ripped in half where I’d cut him open, his lower body hanging onto his upper body by a thin thread, the smell of guts and no glory filling the air as he smacked against the uphill embankment and came to rest on the wall over the road, head and legs facing in the same direction. He was screaming, crying, in a crazy amount of pain, no doubt, from being nearly bisected, but no one paid him much attention.
The club guy went overboard like the others and was greeted with a sploosh! as he hit the water below. Too bad he had a hole of several inches in his heart; the landing sounded like it had been survivable, but unfortunately for him, he’d likely drown before he bled out. Tough way to go.
Prettyboy was the last one standing, and he started to clap, tossing back his black hair as he grinned, applauding my vicious performance.
“I’ve never seen anyone so happy to watch their friends die and know they’re next,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the last surviving, relatively unwounded yakuza struggling to get out from underneath the decapitated corpse of one of his compatriots, really putting some effort into it. He’d probably be free in a few seconds, I judged, so I tossed the knife into his head and listened to it make a satisfying THUNK! as it penetrated his skull and lodged there.
He remained upright for maybe a second more, then went limp, thudding to the stone road. That was the last of the yakuza, save for the guard on the boat and Prettyboy, who regarded me with some surprise. “You … threw away your weapon?” he asked in that high voice of his.
“Knives don’t do shit to your skin,” I said, flexing my fingers and then matching his grin. “But I do. Come and play, little boy. I’m going to make your soul and your powers the cornerstone of my new collection, dickweed.”
The grin evaporated from Prettyboy’s face. “I will not be made a prisoner of a soul-eater.”
“Did you not realize the stakes when you started pissing me off?” I asked, and my face was flaming because I’d just massacred nine hardened, if somewhat stupid, criminals that he’d led here to be slaughtered as his warm-up act. “Did you think—as an Achilles—that coming after a succubus was going to result in a clean death?” I laughed, cackled, even, pouring every ounce of anger I had into my performance. “Dipshit, I’m going to eat you alive and then use your bones as fodder to kill every meta who gives me crap from here on out.” I was probably lying about that. As much as I would have liked invulnerability, I wanted this lunatic in my head about as much as I wanted to put a knife in my shoe and run a marathon. He made Wolfe and Bjorn look stable by comparison, because at least they weren’t perpetually warring with a death wish.
All of Prettyboy’s amusement had dried up. “No. You will kill me cleanly.”
I laughed again, salting this wound. “It’s cute that you think you get to decide the manner of your death. I’m not Gozer, moron. If you come to me for death, I’ll decide the manner of it, and using my skin?” I held up a bare hand. “Just seems the easiest way.”
Prettyboy screamed with inarticulate rage and charged at me, surprising me a little. He’d gone from mild simmer to boiling over pretty swiftly, and while I certainly had that effect on some people—okay, lots of people—it usually didn’t happen this quickly.
I used an aikido twist against his arm, turning his momentum against him. I tried to force him into a joint lock, but that didn’t work. He just let out a furious scream and twisted out of it, joint clearly invulnerable to the pain a normal person or meta would be feeling at having their arm bent at a terrible angle. I didn’t fight against it, letting him swing his other fist at me and then catching that, falling back this time into a whole-body roll.
He couldn’t really fight against this move; he’d thrown all his weight behind his punch, and when I yanked him down along with me, he got dragged along because he’d overextended himself and didn’t have the balance to stop our fall. Pivoting mid-roll, I put a foot in his belly and started to toss him like I had his fellow yakuza.
This, he didn’t cooperate with. He rolled off my foot before I could effectively punt him, landing on his back and shoulders awkwardly about two inches from my head. The hard landing would have hurt or stunned a normal person, but not an Achilles.
Prettyboy swiped at me, but I was already moving away from him, rolling sideways. He came after me, coming to all fours, thrusting out a hand at me like a dog pawing at something.
I got back to my feet and assumed a defensive stance as Prettyboy sprung at me. He gave it his all, and I was out of ground, my calves just inches from the wall bordering the road.
He caught me in the gut, and I didn’t have a lot of choices. Instinct drove my response, which was to roll, so roll I did.
Right into the wall behind me.
The block wall hit my calves right in the middle, my backward momentum driving me onto the slight embankment behind me. There was maybe five feet of ragged grass before the ground became cliff, and I took advantage of every inch of it, rolling and twisting.
Then I was airborne, Prettyboy beneath me, clutched in my grip, my fingers tight on his lapels—
And down we plunged, toward the rocks and water below.