Both the human shield and the bat-wielder flopped lifeless to the ground, leaving only Sigurd and Daekwon alive. Sigurd turned around slowly, breathing heavily from the ferocious physical exertion of the last twenty seconds, and he locked a devilish glare into Daekwon’s dark eyes. The young man, mottled as his skin was with vitiligo, looked like a cornered jaguar in the dusky gloom; in his eyes there burned the primal aggression of an apex predator; cornered, wounded and desperate … with nothing left to lose.
‘Don’t move, bitch,’ Daekwon growled, his Glock aimed squarely at Sigurd’s face. ‘I got you now, I f-, fuckin’ got you. You may be fast, but you ain’t faster ‘n’ a b-, bullet.’
Sigurd chuckled slowly and deeply, keeping his ice-blue eyes locked into Daekwon’s. He curled his lips up into an evil smile.
‘That’s a Glock Seventeen you’re carrying, my friend,’ Sigurd rumbled in his booming, guttural voice.
‘That’s right asshole, an’ it’s g-, gon’ take yo’ damn head off a’ your shoulders!’
Sigurd’s eyes crackled with phosphoric fire, and he stared with a smirk on his face that suggested that the pistol aimed at his head might as well have been a rubber prop.
‘The thing is, my young friend,’ he growled, ‘the Glock Seventeen has a magazine capacity of ten rounds. Guess how many rounds you just fired into the body of your comrade over there? Were you counting? Were you? I was.’
Sigurd’s grin broadened as he saw doubt creeping its clammy serpent slither across Daekwon’s countenance.
‘You wan’ t-, take that chance, bitch?’ Daekwon stammered, suddenly unsure of himself. ‘You really wan’ test your m-, m-, math skills, motherfucker?’
‘Boo!’
Sigurd lunged suddenly forward in a mocking half-step, and Daekwon squeezed the trigger … but nothing happened. A lash of panic rippled across his features like a sail in a squall, and he squeezed the trigger again and again. Nothing, however, but a series of impotent clicks emerged from the pistol.
‘Hahahaha!’ Sigurd bellowed, his sonorous laughter rocking the blood-spattered walls of the room. Then, abruptly, he ceased his cackling and snarled at Daekwon. ‘Now you die, like the rest of them,’ he growled, advancing with slow menace on him.
Daekwon, however, was not ready to give up just like that. He dropped the gun and balled his fists, stepping into a boxer’s stance.
‘Drop the blades, you s-, sonummabitch,’ he snarled. ‘Let’s go toe to toe! I’m a Golden Gloves b-, boxer! I’ll b-, break you in half!’
Sigurd stopped in his tracks, and with a savage grin he slackened the grip on his trench knives, uncurling his fists and letting both of the weapons drop to the floor with a metallic clatter.
‘A champion boxer, are you?’ he sneered. ‘Well, well, well, this will be fun.’
Sigurd prepared to brawl, grinning fiendishly and bobbing swaying with a hyperbolic gait, mocking his opponent, whose stance was steady and firmly planted.
‘Come on asshole,’ Daekwon growled, ‘come on!’
Sigurd darted in, keeping his guard up, and lashed out a quick right jab at Daekwon’s jutting jaw. Daekwon flicked his head back, evading the punch with ease, and glided in with liquid speed to unleash a furious flurry of combo blows. His moves were flawless, and the power behind each punch was whopping; years of skill-honing and thousands of hours spent hammering both a heavy bag and opponents in the ring had committed all of his movements to muscle memory … yet somehow this huge warrior was dodging, ducking, bobbing and weaving with superhuman speed, and Daekwon’s vicious yet precise strikes and combos were hitting nothing but air. Every jab, hook, cross, body shot and uppercut slashed through empty space as Sigurd chuckled and dodged, seeming somehow to know where every punch was going before it was even thrown, and soon an acerbic mixture of frustration, anger, fear and growing exhaustion was bubbling and frothing in Daekwon’s guts.
‘Come on, champ!’ Sigurd roared as he evaded punch after punch, ‘Hit me! Come on and hit me!’
With a growl Daekwon surged forward, swinging and jabbing with a fresh, turbocharged fury, and he finally began driving Sigurd back. Now Sigurd was having to block the blows as well as dodge them; it seemed as if Daekwon was about to make a breakthrough. Thoughts of Paola blasted through the corridors of his memory with every punch he hurled at Sigurd, and the searing pain of her loss injected boost after boost of speed and power into every punch he threw.
‘Yes, that’s it, that’s it!’ Sigurd roared. ‘Harness your rage, harness your hatred, focus all of your strength and will on destroying me, boy! Do it, kill me, tear me apart with your bare hands!’
And then, finally, it happened. A ferociously swung right cross broke through Sigurd’s guard and landed with a wall-shuddering crunch on his jaw. Daekwon had thrown every one of his one-hundred-and-ten kilograms of brute power into the blow; it would have killed most men and certainly would have knocked even seasoned professional fighters out cold upon impact.
Sigurd, however, was no ordinary man. The force of the punch whipped his head to the side and caused him to stumble back slightly, but as Daekwon was about to follow up with another combo, wrath blazed with signal-flare intensity in Sigurd’s pale eyes. With a burst of preternatural speed and goliath power he catapulted a counterpunch straight through Daekwon’s defences. The blow, a savage straight punch, smashed with terrible force into Daekwon’s nose, shattering the cartilage and blasting a bright light behind his eyes, and it sent him reeling back with shock.
Sigurd coolly watched the young man stumble back and spit a mouthful of blood onto the floor. He stared for a while at the slick of bodily fluid on the floor, thick with streaks of red, glistening gruesomely in the dim light.
‘If only you could fathom the immensity of the power that dwells
