“That’s not gonna happen,” I said.
“Jace,” Rachel said, her voice tight with worry. “I can handle this.”
The fear in my friend’s words nearly pushed me over the edge. They were too close for us to risk a fight, though. I’d wait to see how this played out.
Both men stared at me for a long moment, as if trying to decide how much of a threat I was. The shorter of the pair stared the longest, his eyes like little chips of quartz stuck into the doughy rolls of his face. The other guy might’ve been bigger, but this one was the dangerous member of their duo. He liked to fight.
He liked to hurt people.
“You know why we’re here,” the tall guy said. “Time’s up. You got what we came for?”
“I thought it was tomorrow,” Rachel said. “I don’t have it with me. It’s in the school. If you can wait here—”
The big one was already shaking his head, and his little friend cracked his knuckles like he couldn’t wait to use his fists.
“We’re not stupid, Teach,” the shorter guy said. “If you go in that building, we’re coming with you.”
Rachel let out an exasperated sigh and gestured for them to follow her to the doorway. The bigger goon stared at me, then jerked his head toward the door. At least he was smart enough to know he didn’t want me behind him. I nodded and offered him a shark’s smile, then followed Rachel.
“What’s this all about?” I murmured.
“It’s a shakedown,” she replied. “Grimaldi’s organization thinks we’re loaded, so they want us to pay for the privilege of running a school here. They started in on us at the beginning of the summer.”
The urge to hammer the goons flat was harder to ignore with every passing second. They’d been pestering Rachel for months. They deserved a beating, at the very least. And now they’d get it. Jinsei flowed into my arms and legs, filling me with new strength.
“Today’s your lucky day, gentlemen,” I said as I turned to face them.
The smaller guy reached into his jacket pocket, while his larger companion crossed his arms over his massive chest.
“And why is that?” he asked me.
“You get to live,” I said.
A gun appeared in the little guy’s hand as if by magic. It was a big, ugly weapon with a bore that would’ve seemed more at home on a cannon. He was already taking the slack out of the trigger, his knuckles whitening as the pressure built. I had a half second, no more, before I got to see how much damage my disciple-level core could handle.
Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and kicked every muscle in my body into gear. My legs sent me rocketing toward the gunman’s unarmed side. My elbow lashed out and connected with the bigger man’s ribs as I passed. Serpents exploded from my aura, ratcheting into existence with a series of mechanical clicks and pops.
The gunman tried to track me with his weapon. He was too slow, and the angle across his own body was too awkward. His jaw dropped open to unleash a string of curses at me, and then he ran out of time.
I chopped down hard on his wrist with my left hand and knocked the gun out of his grip. My right leg swung around in a low sweeping kick that caught him just below his left knee. The powerful blow shattered the bones in his lower leg and shredded his knee’s cartilage. I followed up with a hammer fist strike that drove him to the ground.
The bigger man’s shadow fell across me before I could recover from the finishing blow. He moved with remarkable speed for a man of his size. His arms swept out wide as I turned to face him, and a wide grin split his face. My Vision of the Design technique ignited and showed me that his plan was to haul me into a bear hug and crush the life from my lungs. The strength aspects that flooded his aura were proof he might just be strong enough to do it, too.
I held my ground, activated my Thief’s Shield technique, and waited.
He slammed into me, and his freight-train momentum carried us both two more steps, and his arms wrapped around me like a vice.
But the strength left his legs, and his arms turned into noodles as my discipline stripped the strength and stamina aspects out of his aura and added them to my own. We hit the ground, hard, and tumbled across the dusty pavement. The thug groaned, and his arms flopped wide, releasing me.
The Eclipse Warrior inside me hungered for the man’s life. He’d scared one of my friends and endangered the annex. If I let him and his little partner live, they’d just come back when I wasn’t around. The only way to be sure they’d never harm Rachel again was to end them both.
I took a long, shaky breath and pushed that ugly thought far, far away. If I wanted the world to see me as anything other than a black-eyed monster, I couldn’t go around murdering people in the streets, even if they very much deserved it. Rather than snuffing out his core, I kneeled down a few feet from his flushed face and stared into his eyes through the folds of fat that surrounded them.
“Can you hear me?” I asked. “You’re too weak to talk or nod your head, so save your energy. Blink twice for yes. Three times for no.”
Blink. Blink.
His friend unleashed an ugly stream of curses, threatening me with a very painful and inventive number of deaths. For someone with no gun and a broken leg, he was quite the talker.
“Shut up, or I’ll break your other knee,” I told him and turned my attention back to his friend. “Your buddy over there will need the very best medical treatment, jinsei doctors, the works, or he’ll spend the rest of his life with a limp.
