39.
A ripple ran through the room as Prettyboy started toward me, and things seemed to freeze, just for a second, time distorting around him as he leaned forward to charge me. Then he broke through and came at me, one of his yakuza buddies’ discarded clubs clenched in his fist.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” I shouted as he came at me, time stuttering once more as he drew close. It was trippy, seeing him pause, lurch back a step in time, as though someone had hit rewind, then shoot into action again, forcing me to dive to the side to avoid his sudden, high-speed landing.
“Get him out of here!” Akiyama shouted behind me. “He will ruin everything!” I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded like he was taking this all so super well, emotions threatening to blow out in every direction like gaskets.
“I think everything is already heading to hell in a handbasket, Shin’ichi,” I snapped back, rising as Prettyboy struck at me with a martial arts-inspired punch that I had to parry, “but I appreciate the fact you think it’s still somehow all under control.”
Prettyboy zipped backward again, his arm returning to his side as he rechambered his punch, then loosed it on me again in high speed. I doubted he had any idea what was going on, time have completely lost its freaking mind or grip on reality or something. I started to get the feeling that Akiyama hadn’t been entirely right in explaining what would happen if we brought Kat into this room. Then again, the way Prettyboy was zipping around, caught in the flows of time just at the edge of the birth/death scene, maybe he wasn’t too far off.
“I’m really coming to hate this guy,” I said, catching Prettyboy’s punch the next time he threw it. I had a plan, and it involved sending him airborne, preferably through the nearest wall, where he would plummet out into the water below and have to climb his way back up the tower again to go another round. If I did that to him twenty, maybe thirty times—maybe a thousand, I dunno—perhaps eventually he’d lose interest. Besides, I could rest between rounds while he pounded up the stairs again. And these super tough guys? They always neglected their cardio. He’d probably take forever to climb back up after a couple toss-outs.
My fingers brushed Prettyboy’s arm where his sleeve was torn, presumably from an underwater boulder ripping it as it fell off or something. Time froze, then sped up, and suddenly my skin burned all along my digits and my palm. I gasped, and time spun again—
I was standing with Prettyboy on the edge of a cliff at sunset, fiery orange sphere dropping into mountains ahead as we looked out over a green valley and boxy Japanese city. Prettyboy was younger, and crying, tears running down his cheeks. He stepped up to the edge of a several hundred foot drop, put out one foot, and started to tip over—
Another flash, and I was in a tiny bedroom, city view of Tokyo, so massive, shining, behind him. He had a bottle of pills in hand, and was taking them one by one, swallowing them down with a bottle of sake—
Light blazed, and then I was under the water, somewhere, darkness overhead, and Prettyboy was drowning. It wasn’t just now, when I’d drowned him, it was another time, and he thrashed madly against death that wouldn’t come—
And in a forest, where he was hanging from a noose—
In his yakuza suit, gun pressed to his temple—
I jerked away from him as time stuttered back into motion and I gasped, the horror of seeing so damned many suicide attempts all condensed down into one explosive payload of emotion like a blast that leveled me with feelz. “Aughhh,” I said, hitting the wall and making a dent in it.
Prettyboy was partially hunched over, bent at the waist, staring at the ground. “What … was that …?” And he rose, flipped the dark hair out of his eyes, and looked at me. The manic grin was gone.
“Shit is getting real around here, Prettyboy,” I said, pushing off the wall and watching him warily. I saw Akiyama, lurking between us and his family, doing a little hunching himself. He looked about two seconds shy of taking a knee, as though something were straining him. Or maybe he was just finally losing his grip on time. “I don’t have an abundance of patience to deal with your angst just now. Any chance we could reschedule for later?”
“I don’t think so,” Prettyboy hissed, brandishing the club. “You … will not escape this fate. You must help me … to end this.”
“I’m not really into assisted suicide,” I said, taking a ragged breath. “I’m not gonna say ‘You have so much to live for,’ because I’m not a damned liar, but—seriously, if I can’t work with this other guy to resolve his problem, we’re all going to get stuck in the end of time.”
“End?” Prettyboy asked, and the grin started to return.
“I shouldn’t have said it quite like that,” I tried to correct. “If time ends, it’s really more of a freeze, which means you will be stuck feeling like this foreve—”
I didn’t even get it out before he jumped at me. He hit a time stutter and sped up, and socked me in the head with the club. I saw stars, like they’d come streaking down out of the sky to wipe me out, and I hit the ground. A strong hand gripped at me, hauling me up. The disorientation of being blasted at high speed upside the head skewed my sense of balance, and I couldn’t tell which direction was up until I was hanging there, in Prettyboy’s grasp as he held the club high, threatening me. “I will let time end, and it will end me with it,” Prettyboy said, and I couldn’t quite form the words to tell him he was oh so wrong.
“Akiyama,” I slurred out instead, looking over Prettyboy’s shoulder to see Shin’ichi, now down on one knee, still between us and his family, “I hope you didn’t lie to me. Much.”
Prettyboy cocked his head at me, about to ask what the hell I meant, but I landed a foot on his chest and shoved as hard as I could while simultaneously reaching down and twisting his arm, then shredding the front of my shirt to escape his grasp. It wasn’t tough; I wasn’t light, and he was hanging onto clothes not meant to support that much weight. Amateur move, really.
My shove with my foot managed to send Prettyboy back a few steps, and as I landed, I exploded off my feet as quickly as I could. I hit Prettyboy in a football tackle, my shoulder to his gut, which was like sledging my shoulder into a garbage truck. The difference being Prettyboy didn’t have nearly the mass of a garbage truck, and so when my feet got traction, I was able to rip him off the ground and carry him forward in my charge.
“No!” Akiyama shouted, but I was already committed. Prettyboy, clenched in my arms, got plowed forward toward the time freeze around Akiyama’s family. He jerked and stuttered, but didn’t really do anything because I realized, when I was about two feet from colliding with Akiyama and seven or so from plowing into one of the nurses next to the bed …
Prettyboy was frozen in time.
I let him loose, and he just hung there, mouth slightly open, limbs askew from where I’d yanked him off his feet. I took a step back, rolled my neck around, popped my joints a few times, cracked my knuckles—
“What are you doing?” Akiyama asked, and he was sweating furiously, now down on his haunches. I didn’t think he was going to last much longer in holding on to all the shit going on in his bubble.
“Achilles are supposed to be invincible, right?” I asked. “Iron skin? But I have theory about this, see—I think they’re invulnerable up to a point. I’ve dropped garbage trucks on someone with that power, and it hasn’t really hurt them, per se—but there’s got to be a logical limit to that. Meaning, they can take, say, a 747 crashing into one of them full force, but could they survive being thrown into the heart of black hole? I think not.”
“… What?” Akiyama was seriously showing the strain, sweat beads popping on his forehead.
“If Prettyboy is frozen to me,” I said, putting up my fists, “every hit I land is magnified in its strength, because my speed and momentum are off the charts relative to his complete lack of both. It’s going to be like delivering a freight train to him every time I land one.” I punched the air a couple times experimentally. “So … let’s see how much he can take, shall we?”
“Wh—” Akiyama started to say, but didn’t get it out.
I went to work on Prettyboy like he was the heaviest heavybag I’d ever practiced on. Each punch felt like I was hitting concrete. My knuckles were bleeding in seconds, but I didn’t care. I’d burst through concrete block before, pounded hard enough to bend steel, punched sandbags built to withstand my fury—
Hitting a semi-solid substance like Prettyboy? Hell, the biggest challenge was that every time I struck him, he moved a little and I had to keep up.
Akiyama was speaking, but I couldn’t hear him over my breathing and the flurry of punches I was throwing, adding the occasional kick just to spice things up. I imagined Rose’s face over Prettyboy’s, imagined long red hair instead of black, thought about everything she’d taken from me, everything she’d done to me. I poured all my hate, all my anger, all that pent-up frustration and fury—
The press hated me.
The world hated me.
Every government on the planet was after me for crimes I didn’t commit.
I let it all out in the hardest workout session I’d had in years, my knuckles busted wide open as I lit into the near-motionless Prettyboy while he hung there and took every hit. I gave him so much juice I thought if time snapped back into motion he might hit orbit when all the momentum and force I’d directed his way came crashing in at once. To counter that, I circled him, trying to stick and move so that he’d feel it all over his entire body when he came back to normal time.
I didn’t know if I was doing any good, if I had the ability to even really hurt him, but I gave it all I had anyway. And when I’d finally had enough, I collapsed, my breath coming in hard gasps, my hands a bloody pulp, soaked in crimson up to the elbows. Prettyboy’s clothes were covered with a thousand bloody knuckle prints.
“Do you … feel better now?” Akiyama gasped from behind me.
“A little,” I conceded, falling over onto my back, staring at the ceiling above. “I don’t know if that did any good, but it sure felt good.”
“I think … you will find out … in a moment …” Akiyama said weakly, and I turned my head to look.
He was on the ground like I was, like he was about to kiss the floor.
A grunting squeal came from in front of me, and I lifted my head to see Prettyboy hit the ground, landing on his feet. His face was curiously pinched, and I stared at him. He did not seem to register me.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but didn’t get anything out. It stayed open for a moment, then flapped once—
Then blood spurted out in great red sprays, running down his lips and chin, soaking into that already coating his drenched white shirt.
He keeled forward motionless, thumping down next to my knees. I didn’t waste a lot of time; I sat up and plunged fingers into his neck, trying to do the wise thing and assess the status of my quarry while simultaneously getting my only effective weapon remaining—my touch—queued up and ready to go.
I didn’t need it, as it turned out.
There was no pulse, and Prettyboy was leaking gallons of blood out of his mouth, his nose, his ears, his eyes, his fingernails … he was crying blood, and he was not taking so much as a breath. There wasn’t even a weak pulse.
I kept my fingers on his skin for a few more seconds, but there was nothing going on there.
“I give you … peace,” I said, and collapsed myself.
Sienna: 3, Achilles-types: 0.
Bow to the champ, bitchez.