I controlled my breathing, building calm. “Do you think she’s alright?”
“She’s a hundred year old fugitive monarch.” Jacky stepped up to the building’s edge. “I think she’s fine.”
“Right.” Another breath. Cutter practically vibrated on my back, silent and ready as I adjusted his sheath harness. “Let’s go happen to someone.”
Chapter Nineteen
On difficult ground, move quickly. On encircling ground, seek opportunity. On desperate ground, fight!
Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
You can’t always pick the place, the time, or even how much bang you bring. If you’ve still got to fight, you fight to freaking win.
Atlas
* * *
Jacky swapped her shades for Ozma’s Anonymity Specs and disappeared into mist, reappeared below in the Golden Gai alley. Shell relayed the view from the camera in Jacky’s shades—compensating for the sideways view from where she had tucked them into the front of her costume coat.
Only a couple of people were using the alley, as expected since it wasn’t night yet, and nobody noticed the sudden appearance of a tall figure in a black swirling coat with holstered guns carrying a fish in a crystal sphere. (Really—that was the power of Anonymity Specs; I’d seen them work for Grendel in the middle of a Chicago restaurant, people bumping off of him and not noticing anything except how big he was.)
The view moved as Jacky headed up the alley, following the pointing fish. Halfway up, she stopped in front of the Hawaii-themed café and pushed through a tiki-torch framed door.
The tiny café consisted of a long bar with stools, shelves of bottles behind the scarred old bar. Hawaiian décor covering the walls—mostly posters, carved wood masks and woven mats and (of course) little jiggling grass-skirted figures of topless Hawaiian dancers. It was that kind of place.
“The fish is pointing upstairs. I’m going up.” Jacky hadn’t needed to whisper; the one employee behind the bar didn’t even look up. At the end of the long narrow room, stairs on the public side of the bar led up. The only other exit was the door into the kitchen behind the stairs.
I could feel my palms sweating. “Shell, this is a bad idea.”
“Got any less bad?”
“…no.”
Jacky didn’t draw her guns; the bar-guy watching her go up the stairs would ignore her as someone who belonged there—unless she did something overtly threatening; magic had limits.
She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Shell? Map?”
“Right.” Shell worked her own magic, a dance of data bases and video files. Everyone took pictures everywhere these days, and it was all in the cloud-realm of the internet. Shell sorted thousands of images of Golden Gai, hundreds of Aloha!’s alleyway, and dozens of Aloha!, and built a map of the tiny establishment; the room on the other side of the door had no public images, but it couldn’t be more than fifteen by twenty feet and Shell painted it in based on rooms from neighboring bars. Longer than wide, high ceiling.
Down the stairs, the bar-guy finished wiping the counter and went back into the kitchen. The image in my vision shifted as Jacky put away the specs and slipped on her shades, stuck a micro-camera on the wall beside the doorway, uncorked her bottle of wind, drew her guns, and went to mist.
Normally Jacky would have entered the room by flowing under the door. The “little wind” that danced with her now blew her right through it. “Go go go!” Shell crowed in my ear. Ozma sat in a chair in the center of the room, unharmed, the door blowing past her and into one of her six guards as Jacky shot through the room in a cloud and reformed opposite the doorway. I launched.
Shell cut the camera feed so I could see where I was going as I arced off the roof and down to punch feet first through the triangle-marked ceiling of our target. She shifted the triangle so that, aiming for it, I came down in the corner of the room in a rain of plaster and wood.
Drawing Cutter, I stepped towards Ozma as Jacky held her guns on the stunned guards and—
The world changed.
The room got a lot bigger.
The air filled with the smell of still water.
The walls turned unreal, the shadows of hills behind them.
And the guards weren’t stunned at all.
“Oh, shit!”
At least wherever we were, Shell was still with us.
* * *
In my months of training from Ajax, he had pounded one rule into me: forget about the movies, because in anything close to an equal fight the one who gets the first solid hit in wins. It doesn’t matter if the first hit is to the head, body, or limbs, because the shock of the hit breaks the target’s focus long enough for the one who scores the hit to get in the next hit, and then the next and so on.
And that’s just one-on-one; many-on-one makes the first hit equation so much worse. Why? Because if you’re one against many you can’t hit all of them first. You will get hit, and if they can take you, they will. So how do you win against multiple opponents? Winning was relative; in that situation Ajax defined winning as living to fight another day, and his preferred tactic was to run like hell.
The yakuza knew what we had done over China. They still thought they could take us. And wherever we were, running didn’t look like an option.
Ajax’ second choice was tactical movement: Move fast, keep moving, put your targets in vectors that blocked each other and only let them close with you singly.
I was moving before Shell finished swearing.
The natural move would be vertical, get above them, but I didn’t know what kind of shooters they had and so I just aimed for the biggest target—a massive man in a suit.
He moved too—faster than a normal man that big could—stepping aside to let Cutter slice air an inch from his shoulder but his move put him between me and the rest of them. Bringing Cutter up to the guard position I used with Malleus, I kept the point towards Mr. Big. He didn’t attack into my move—instead he grew.
Not like Grendel’s smooth all-over change; instead he burst his suit one sleeve at a time as his arms expanded and his shoulders widened. His head stayed the same size so that it looked cartoonishly small on his inflating body and he teetered while his legs caught up—I lunged without thinking when I saw the off-balance wobble.
He brushed Cutter aside and touched my shoulder as I passed. Touched, not hit, a feather-light contact I barely felt through the shoulder of my coat. The bones in my shoulder tried to explode.
“Hope!” I barely heard Shell through my scream. “He’s a ki-user! Don’t let him touch you!”
“Really?” Chi, ki, qi, focused life force however you spelled it, the go-to breakthrough power for eastern martial artist types.
I flew backward. Behind my ki-monster I could see Jacky flashing point-to-point, dancing in and out of mist to fire at her own targets—a dark-suited yakuza boy who split into multiple sword-wielding attackers, an equally sharp-dressed girl with knee length black hair who flickered in and out of sight in short jerking jumps as she tried to come to grips with Jacky…
…and a man-shaped weasel made of lightning? The hell?
“Left!” Shell yelled and I ducked left. The air beside me rippled and only my super-duper infrared vision told me what was there—someone flashing by me with wings that sliced the sleeve of my coat in passing. My vision started changing as Shell threw icons up on my shades: the flickering girl was Onryo (RED—don’t let her touch you), the humanoid lightning-weasel was Raiju (RED—don’t let him hit you), the near-invisible flyer was Ten (RED—don’t let her cut you). She labeled Mr. Big DON’T, dubbed the multiplying swordsman “Ninja Dude!” and gave the final guard, the older man standing beside Ozma, a question mark.
“Real helpful, Shell!”
“Sorry! My sources suck!”
I could practically hear Ajax yelling Move! Move! Move! in my head or maybe it was Shell as my world narrowed to Mr. Big. He smiled wide, ran a finger over the column of crossing scars marching down his exp
osed chest and tapped a smooth spot just above his navel. His kills and my waiting spot, obviously. Knowing that I knew, he went into defensive stance, arms raised to give me the universal Come and Get It wave. I moved.
I was a spear and Cutter the tip.
Mr. Big brushed Cutter aside again but the block didn’t slow me as I let Cutter spin away from my hand and turned my lunge into a punch—fist up to strike with the base of my palm—into his normal-sized head. He went down in an explosion of bone and blood that painted my fist and arm up to my elbow.
That was going to be nightmare-fuel. Recovering Cutter from where he’d stuck in the floor, I spun to try and find Ten.
“Dammit girl, what was that?” Cutter vibrated angrily in my sticky hand.
“Sacrifice move.”
“Okay then, but keep it intentional. You don’t drop your tools.”
“Sorry!” I was arguing with a sword—which was better than coming apart over what I’d just done since turning about wasn’t showing me Ten. Even with my super-duper vision she was nearly invisible unless she was right on top of me. Move!
I flew sideways through the center of things, ignoring the hard-faced older guard standing beside Ozma—if he could do something he’d already have joined in. Grabbing her up from where she still sat I placed her behind me as I skidded to a stop across the room. Cutter raised, I pulled her box from my sash and reached back to push it into her hands.
“Thank you.”
But I didn’t hear the familiar clicking of the box unfolding, didn’t hear her move behind me. Wait— Her transforming ring was still on her finger, invisible to anyone who didn’t know to look for it—so, why? Why hadn’t she changed when we’d arrived, brought out her wand and the Magic Belt?
“Ozma—”
And the world flared. Not Ozma—Raiju—his dance with Jacky ending where he took a wrong step and her shot caught him between leaping blasts of lightning-form. He fell to the half-real floor of the not-there room we fought in, the lightning that was part of him raging and growing to blinding incandescence—
“Hold!” Now the final guard moved, shouting at an empty corner of the room. “Onmiyoji!”
The other yakuza and even Jacky and I froze as the empty corner became occupied by a tall and skeletally thin man in a black kimono—their sorcerer—holding an origami paper fan, and Ozma, sitting bound in glowing paper strips beside him. The man waved the kanji-covered fan, and the ball of burning plasma Raiju had become went as transparent and ghostly as the walls before disappearing completely. Back into Golden Gai?
“Do not agree with the oyabun.” In the sudden silence, the still moment before anybody could think to move, the soft voice in my ear was utterly familiar and I spun to stare at Kitsune.
He—she—wore the face I’d seen once in an elevator; Rei Pascarella, Yoshi’s dead granddaughter. But in a touch of whimsy she had added thicker brows and a pencil-thin mustache with a brush of beard underlining her narrow jaw, all blond-white as her hair to show the pale fox peeking through the human face.
And the guard? “The—”
Kitsune nodded. The final, older guard who had stood and watched as I’d “freed” Ozma, was the yakuza clan’s boss—the oyabun.
I held out my hand for Ozma’s box, and she returned it with a wide smirk. Her “Do not,” was the ghost of a whisper, only for me.
Do not what? Do not agree with what? And why hadn’t the fight recommenced? Jacky stood, guns trained on creepily flickering Onryo, inside a wide circle of ninja swordsmen (not half as many as had started the fight). And nobody moved. I hadn’t moved except to turn around. I took a step to prove that I could.
The oyabun smiled. “There is no need to fight.”
“No, there’s not,” Jacky growled. Then she relaxed. It was like flipping a switch.
She’d agreed. I sucked in a breath as she lowered her guns, schooled my face to Boardroom Polite when the man looked back at me.
“And you, Hikari? Don’t you agree that enough blood has been shed?”
It took everything I had to keep from nodding, but I bit my tongue until I tasted blood. How had he overwhelmed Jacky? She was a vampire—contests of will were her specialty…
She hadn’t relaxed until she’d agreed. Could agreement—even unintentional agreement, be a force-multiplier? Her body-language told me she wasn’t even thinking about fighting anymore and that was so not-Jacky that it totally freaked me out.
“It’s just you and Ozma,” Shell whispered through my earbug, and I swallowed, nodding. If the yakuza oyabun had overcome her will then she wouldn’t be restrained.
“Good.” The man smiled and I blinked. What—oh. He’d mistaken my nod for agreement with him. I made myself straighten up, lower Cutter.
“We do need to talk.” My intention, not his.
“Yes, we do. Join me?” He grandly waved to the now-empty chair beside him. I stepped forward—not towards him, towards Ozma who happened to be in the opposite corner.
“Shell?” I swallowed again and subvocalized, keeping my lips as still as I could. “The sorcerer with Ozma? His fan?”
“If we’re in a magic version of the Littleton Pocket, the fan may be its anchor. Or it could just control a doorway.”
Okay. Flip a mental coin? If I guessed wrong would we be any worse off?
Probably not, and as soon as the boss realizes he doesn’t have you he can threaten you with Ozma and Jacky. I flexed my fingers on Cutter’s hilt, felt him twitch. “The fan, Cutter.” My words were a breath and he hummed in answer.
Five more steps and the oyabun frowned—I wasn’t that great an actor. “Stop—”
I threw Cutter, spinning him end over end and heart-stoppingly close to a calmly watching Ozma, and lunged for the oyabun. “No—” he got out before my hands closed on his tie and I lifted him off his feet. Spinning him in my grasp I kicked the light aluminum chair at spooky, flickering Onryo, and missed.
Cutter didn’t miss; a whirling blade, he visibly jinxed in air to both slice the paper wrapping Ozma and neatly bisect the paper fan in the Japanese sorcerer’s hand without drawing a drop of blood. The man standing over Ozma staggered back with a strangled cry as the destroyed fan fluttered to the floor in two equal pieces.
Keeping my grip on the oyabun, I tossed Ozma her folded box as she finally transformed into a magical-girl in black. Lowering him to the ground, I kept one hand on the tie knot and tugged the narrow end to tighten it against his Adam’s-apple.
“I am going to let you talk now.” My voice shook—cold and calm as Jacky would have been nice, but barely-under-control was a good threat too. “If you do anything but tell my friend she is free to fight, I will make sure you don’t breathe until I feel safe again. If you understand, tap my arm.”
The man went deathly pale, and it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t looking at me. When I turned to look over my shoulder the golden koi floating beside my head practically touched my nose.
You do not need to fear.
Chapter Twenty
Omega Class: definition; beyond Ultra Class. Omega Class breakthroughs shatter the accepted scale of powers. Omega Class breakthroughs are ultimate manifestations of their powers, beyond standard means of measurement and equally beyond the power of D, C, B, A, and even Ultra Class breakthroughs to effectively oppose. Omega Class breakthroughs are so rare that encounters with them are largely anecdotal, and most Omega Class breakthroughs appear to no longer be human.
Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Page 18
