Street Cultivation, page 21
Emily either felt his preparation or coincidentally looked, because she made eye contact at that moment. Understanding what he meant to do, she started to shake her head, but it was too late. Rick gathered all the strength he could, extended it around his allies, and activated another Bunyan's Step.
All three of them flashed across the arena, nearly colliding with her. Rick started to drop, having overdrawn himself - the technique wasn't meant to carry people along with him. Henry helped prop him up, leaving the three of them unsteady.
"Fine," Emily said, glaring over the three of them. "Let's just get out of here."
They pushed through the doors, rushing through a poorly-lit corridor. Henry managed to run on his own, though he stumbled, while Rick had to support Tom, who had clearly taken a serious beating in addition to his broken leg. Despite the circumstances, Rick glanced to the taller man to interrogate him.
"You have no idea who the gunman is?"
"Never seen him before." Tom winced in pain as they had to take a sharp corner, Emily leading them into the back rooms. "He could have killed me, but he shot my arm instead."
"Why exactly did you tell us to come? You had to know something like this would happen."
"I had no idea it would be anything like this. I just thought Alger was going to force me into some sort of special match. Which he did, but..."
Rick wasn't sure he completely believed that explanation, but there was little time. He trusted that Emily knew the back routes well enough to get them out, but they weren't making good time given their injuries. They burst through another door and for a moment he thought they'd hit a dead end, then he realized that there was an elevator at the end of the hall.
Well, not exactly an elevator. Instead of an entrance, there was just a small platform without sides, attached to an automated pulley system. It looked like it went into a shaft overhead, so small that at best two people could fit through. More like a dumbwaiter than an elevator, so he wasn't sure it would be strong enough.
"It can carry people," Emily said, almost as if she'd read his thoughts. "But not all of us at once. You, go first, since you seem to be the target."
She jabbed a finger at Tom, so Rick helped him approach the platform. Before he could get far, Henry stopped him. "Let me go first, man. I'll owe you one, but I have to get out of here."
Rick frowned at him, getting Tom onto the platform. "You still have the demonic bond to protect you. If I get shot by that guy..."
"No, I don't." Henry grimaced for a moment, the veins in his face turning a dark yellow, and Rick realized that his coworker was pale and sweating. "I've drawn the max from the bond and I'm paying for it. I can barely stay on my feet. I have to get out."
"Dammit, just decide!" Emily glared at them, her eyes briefly flicking to the door behind them.
Realizing that time was essential, Rick let Henry take over helping Tom. The two of them got positioned on the small platform - there wasn't much space due to Tom's muscular body - and then pulled a lever. The platform rose smoothly, taking them into the shaft above.
Which left Rick on the ground with Emily. He knew it couldn't be long before the platform came back down, but he found himself glancing nervously back. They hadn't been closely trailed by anyone, and if he was an optimistic person, he might have hoped that they had lost their pursuers.
Rick was not an optimistic person. He took a deep breath and prepared himself to fight again.
"What's this stupid brawl between you and Mike?" Emily's body was tense and her aura burned tightly, but that didn't stop her from glancing over at him with a scornful look. Rick sighed.
"He came into the gym where I work looking for a fight. I let him beat the crap out of me, but I wasn't subservient enough. Damaged something his father gave him, got him in trouble, and now he has it out for me."
"Huh. I can buy that, I guess." After considering that for a moment, Emily gave him a skeptical glance. "You really work at one of those human practice dummy gyms? I can't imagine anything more degrading."
Irritated, Rick glanced back at the elevator. The pulleys had stopped moving, but they hadn't begun coming back down yet, so he was stuck with her. "Look, it was one of the only jobs available to me, okay? It's not like it was my lifelong dream to work there."
"But you did make that decision, one way or another. You don't end up at one of those places if you've made good choices in life."
"That's rich, coming from you. You said you were an engineer? That means you can pretty much do whatever you want - you don't have to make hard choices."
Emily folded her arms and frowned at him. "I didn't just stumble into my work. I analyzed all my career opportunities and chose one I knew had good prospects. Anything else would have been wasting my life."
"Right, wasting your life." Rick shot her a bitter glance. "That's easy to say when your parents set you on the right path, paid for your education, and-"
"My parents didn't leave me a damn thing." She sounded surprisingly bitter, cutting into his anger, but at that moment there was a creaking sound.
When he looked up, he saw that the elevator was finally moving back down toward them. Just as he breathed a sigh of relief, he heard a second creaking.
The door behind them opened and the hitman stepped into the room, gun raised.
Chapter 28: Aftermath Coffee
Emily moved faster than he could, an aura sword blazing from her left arm, but she barely managed to raise it before the hitman turned his gun on her. She froze immediately and for a moment Rick was sure things would go poorly.
Then, to his surprise, the hitman spoke for the first time. "I have no interest in either of you. All I want is the exit route." As he spoke, the elevator finally began to come back down, not that it did them any good.
Instead of responding, Emily just kept moving her sword slowly, extended in front of her. She couldn't block bullets, could she? Aura might have no limitations to movement speed, but human reaction times simply weren't that fast. The biological limits could be changed with lucrim, but Emily had a generation rate of 85,000, not the hundreds of thousands that required.
"Stalling me is an aggressive act." The hitman raised his other hand to brace his gun and it looked like he might really fire it, so Rick spoke up quickly. He wasn't sure if there was any plan at all, but delaying him until others could arrive might be their only chance.
"We're not going to surrender when you're just going to go kill Tom."
"I don't need to do anything else to the target." The hitman finally gave him the slightest glance, as if Rick was beneath his notice. "But I don't have any instruction to leave you alive."
"How can we trust anything you say?"
"You're stalling." The hitman's eyes narrowed and his hand tensed as he pulled the trigger.
Before he could, Emily's sword went through his arm. She hadn't moved, still standing in position, but the aura blade had sliced through the gun and most of the hitman's arm. He hadn't even seen it move - did it have a ranged form?
There was no time to consider that, because the hitman only winced for a moment at the loss of his arm. He simply reached into his pocket with his remaining hand and drew a second gun.
Before he could get it into position, Rick leapt across the space between them and tackled him. Or at least he tried. Running into the hitman's waist was like colliding with a pillar of concrete and Rick immediately knew he couldn't drop him. But though his opponent burned with intense lucrim, he wasn't so powerful that he could just ignore a tackle.
Barreling forward, Rick pushed his opponent back against the wall and rammed his shoulder into the man's stomach. A moment later the hitman brought an elbow down on his back.
The force of the blow flattened Rick to the floor instantly and pain screamed through his back. Though he forced himself to move, he wasn't fast enough - the hitman was raising the small pistol directly at him.
Abruptly his arm blurred into a different position. In a flash of movement Rick couldn't follow, a blade of purple aura was embedded in the wall beside them. Yet though the aura blade had moved almost instantly, the hitman had pulled his hand out of the way. His arm was raised in a defensive position now, but it was only a matter of time before he aimed again, this time at Emily.
But that was enough time for Rick. He braced his hands on the floor and spun, driving a kick into his opponent's legs. It only staggered the hitman for a moment and he glanced down with a look of scorn...
Then there was an aura blade through his chest.
Emily tore it out through the side, leaving the hitman to collapse in a bloody mess. Some of it hit Rick, forcing him to collapse backward away from it. He hit the ground painfully, his strength spent in that attack. At least the hitman was finally dead, his aura flickering out.
But Emily stood over him, aura blade crackling as she stared down at him with a cold expression. "You saw my trick."
"Wait." Rick raised his arms peacefully, forcing himself to maintain eye contact. "Whatever you did with your sword, I won't breathe a word of it. Just letting me go would be much simpler than risking an investigation, especially because Tom and Henry knew you were with m-"
"Jesus Christ." Emily rubbed her eyes with her free hand. After that she gave him a wry look that made her seem much more human. "I was pissed that you saw the secret, not thinking of killing you. What kind of monster do you think I am?"
Shrugging, Rick nodded in the direction of the hitman's body. "I mean, thank you for saving me."
"No, I'd have had a difficult time without you. And you did a good job of playing support instead of uselessly throwing yourself against someone much stronger than you." Emily regarded him coolly for a moment, then lifted him up with one hand. "Come on, let's get out of here."
"Do we want to leave the body for security to find?" He went along with her to the elevator platform, though he looked over his shoulder uncertainly.
"Security in this place can be a bit indiscriminate and I don't trust Alger in the slightest. No, we need to get out."
She stepped up onto the platform and grabbed the central cable. Without very much space, it was going to be a bit awkward, but since their lives were at stake Rick just pushed through it, stepping on across from her and grabbing the same cable. Emily reached down to pull the lever and they started to rise.
The platform moved slowly and he was afraid that Mike would barge in to attack, but the room remained silent. Going through the shaft in the ceiling, they'd need to push together a bit, which might be awkward. Especially because he could imagine Emily scowling at him the entire time. To try to avoid the uncomfortableness, he decided to head it off.
"That sword technique is a good one. Nonlethal at low intensity, but it uses the same skills for lethal fighting. And not many would expect a melee weapon to be able to double as a ranged attack. You probably could have taken him off guard even without me, just because he was underestimating you."
"Oh, so you were playing dumb before." Emily averted her eyes, seeming more uncomfortable about his comments then the fact that they were brushing up against each other. "It takes too much time to generate a new blade, though, and that always gives warning that I'm preparing to attack."
"Still, those are skill and power problems you can solve. The design is good."
"Thanks." They passed into the ceiling, the world around them growing dark. While they were still passing through, Emily spoke more quietly. "It's my design, actually."
Rick's eyebrows rose and he was glad the darkness hid his surprise. She seemed to respect him a tiny bit more than before, so he didn't want to ruin that by acting like a fool. Designing new lucrim techniques was crazy to him, but he supposed not for her. "Huh, then you're a lucrim engineer?"
"Not as my main job." They reached the top, the elevator coming out in a slot in what appeared to be a small abandoned shed. The doorway lay open, letting in lights from the street outside. Emily quickly moved away from him toward it, though she kept speaking. "It's not like I created it from scratch. There are a lot of open source fundamentals to build on, and I have some proprietary designs from work."
"That just makes sense. Why reinvent the wheel?"
Originally his only objective had been to make Emily favorably inclined toward him so that she wouldn't kill him or otherwise turn on him. Now he hoped she wouldn't leave, both because she might be able to help and because it might be interesting to see what she was like when she wasn't hostile.
They headed out into the street and he felt like it was finally over. Yes, Mike could still show up and attack him, but he couldn't hear any sounds of the fight going on in the Underground. Based on the tunnels they'd passed through and the height of the elevator, they were quite some distance from the arena. Hopefully clear of the aftermath, though Emily set off down the street at a purposeful stride.
"I don't want to stalk you," Rick said, "but I'm not exactly relaxed after all that."
"No kidding." Emily rubbed her left wrist slowly. "That was... only the third person I've killed. The world of lucrim is vicious, but you don't get used to it."
All he could do was nod. "I've never killed anyone." They continued to walk in silence for a time before he decided to speak up. "Is it okay if I ask you some questions?"
"I suppose there's no harm. We're technically on the same team, or at least we will be."
"You mean Granny Whitney?" That was just a guess based on her previous comment, but judging from the way she looked at him, he'd been right. After a sharp stare, Emily turned sharply down another street and gestured for him to follow.
"This way. We need to get to a secure location first."
Security turned out to be a run-down diner on the next street, its neon sign buzzing obnoxiously overhead. Even at this time of night it had a decent number of people inside and in the parking lot. Perhaps being in public mattered more than any direct defenses.
They slipped into a corner booth where they could watch the nearby area carefully. When the waitress came Emily ordered two coffees without asking him. As soon as the waitress was gone, she turned her cool gaze to him.
"Whitney wants to recruit you as her featherweight, doesn't she?"
Rick nodded. "Yeah, she already did."
"You shouldn't trust her. She might seem kind on the surface, but-"
"The same day we met, she killed someone in front of me, then used it for blackmail."
Emily responded with a wry smile that transformed her face. "Then I see my warning is entirely wasted on you."
They were interrupted when the waitress returned with their coffee. She tried to get them to order dessert rather aggressively, but Emily glared her away. When she turned back, the smile was gone, but her coolness no longer seemed so hostile. Both of them took a sip of coffee, Rick wondering who was going to pay. Most likely she didn't even think about such things, not with an engineer's salary. Eventually he realized that he was going to need to keep the conversation moving.
"I'm guessing that Whitney didn't blackmail you?"
"No, just bribery." Emily sighed and sat back, holding her cup in one hand. "I'm not really into fights like these, but I needed to test myself in a real fight. Whitney decided to recruit me, so she offered me something valuable to be her middleweight."
Though Rick wanted to ask what it was she needed, he suspected that Emily wouldn't appreciate him prying. Better to take a different tack. "So that's what you meant about us being on the same team. Do you know any of the other three people?"
"I've met the welterweight - that's the tier between us - and he's an asshole. The top two, I have little idea. Whitney never said anything about the cruiserweight class and she hinted that everybody is going to bring in a ringer for their heavyweight."
"Everybody? Implying that she's competing against other known people in the Underground putting together their own teams?"
"So I presume. That's about all I know." Emily took another sip of coffee and regarded him thoughtfully. "I apologize for insulting you. You're obviously talented and you're smarter than I thought. What I can't figure out is how someone as smart as you ended up doing so little with his life."
Rick frowned, doing his best to hold back his irritation. "That's a crappy apology."
Emily just shrugged. "Sorry. I'm not good at dealing with people and I don't care to be. But I mean it: your generation rate is 25,000 lucrim - tops - and your effective strength is less considering the aura leeches. That's not great."
"The world isn't a level playing field." He saw that her eyes were still skeptical and so he pushed forward. "You said your parents never gave you anything. I wasn't so lucky - mine gave me those aura leeches."
"Ah." Emily nodded as if she understood and drank her coffee, though she still didn't understand.
Still not sure what to think of her, Rick drank his own coffee. She clearly wasn't someone who had just been handed a powerful Birthright Core, but that didn't mean she really understood. While she must have worked hard to reach her position and it took real talent to be an engineer, that didn't mean she understood his life and he didn't know how to explain.
"Okay, I don't think we were followed." Emily drained the rest of her cup and stood up. "Thanks for the help, but I need to get home and take care of some things. I suppose we'll see each other later."
"Uh... aren't we worried about the authorities? What's going to happen after all this?"
"Alger will make sure it gets covered up. Don't worry about it." She headed out, paying on the way before he could object and leaving him sitting there alone.
Only after she was gone did it really get through to him that he had nearly died. His hands trembled with an emotion he couldn't describe, somewhere between fear and excitement, making it difficult to drink his coffee.
It was almost like the old days, when those with power had done whatever they wanted and fights to death in the street had been common. In the modern era the law might look the other way when it came to normal fights, but people didn't just kill each other. Except, apparently, they did.
