Page 74 of Ghost’s Awakening

Trenza and Mateo had a man each.

The two enforcers who'd come over the ropes when I grabbed the mic had split, one on her, one on him, and past them two more were coming over the top rope. I did the math without deciding to. Four of them, three of us. Bad numbers.

"What the fuck did you DO?!" The scream came in over the ropes with the man making it. He planted a hand on the top rope, vaulted it whole, and landed heavy on the mat, and I knew him before his boots stopped moving. The flat dark eyes. The dense build, my height and an inch under. The parking structure at UMC, three bikes circling me slow, and this one swinging off the lead bike to hand me two weeks and a threat. His hair hung loose tonight, long, falling off one side of his skull and curtaining half his face.

"Deadlock, what do we do?!" The man facing Trenza threw it over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her, both hands up, feet stuttering. Scared. Whatever tonight was supposed to be, this wasn't on the card. And now the messenger had a name, and the others looked to him when the walls shook. That put him up the ladder, close enough to the top that Gravedigger let him carry words to hospitals.

"The fuck do you think?!" He never looked at the man. "Take them down, they're Steel Phoenixes!" Then the finger came up, one straight line across the ring at my chest, and the half of his mouth I could see under the hair pulled sideways. "And you. I told you the boss doesn't take another no. I have his permission to kill you myself if you say it." His voice had changed since the hospital. That night it had come out flat and bored, a man passing along somebody else's message. This was lower, dragged across gravel, and it was hungry. I knew that hunger. I'd spent twenty years keeping mine chained, and his was loose, let out whenever he wanted it out. He'd been waiting all night for a reason.

I set my right foot back. My hands opened at my sides, fingers loose, and the stance settled over me, and I made myself grin at him, because an angry man hunts one target and I wanted every ounce of his heat pointed at me and away from Trenza and Mateo.

"That's if you can, Dreadlock." I tipped my chin at the curtain of hair as I gave him the name, and his eyes went wide, white all around the dark, and the scream that came out of him had nothing human left in it. Then he charged.

I tried him first. A front kick, right leg, low and short at his lead knee as he came in, kept down where no hand could catch it, a jab with the foot to read what he did with his weight. He'd already slowed. He read the kick before it was half out, and his leg swept in from the outside, a low roundhouse that met my shin mid-air and slapped the whole kick aside. The hit rang up my whole leg, bone-deep. I hopped once on the standing foot, and in the same half second his right arm speared out at me, hand turned edge-first, and the line of it ended at my throat.

Both my arms came up from underneath, hard, forearms crashing into his and throwing the spear over my shoulder while my upper body snapped back out of the way. My left forearm lit up where Renzo's shin had swollen it ten minutes ago. There was no time to hear it. Deadlock's boot was already driving at my left knee, a stomping kick, straight in, the sort that snaps a knee backward and puts a man on a cane for the rest of his life.

"Stand still!" It came through his teeth as I snatched the leg back, riding the hit instead of eating it, and the sole still caught my knee hard enough to buzz the bone.

He fought in boots, and I was barefoot on my own mat, and every trade we made was going to cost me double.

Frustration was building and I put my breathing on it. In through the nose, four. He'd gone for my throat, then for my knee. He hadn't thrown one single thing that scores a point in any gym on earth, because nothing he did came from a gym that kept score. Whatever ended a man fastest, that was the whole system. Krav Maga. The military one, built for soldiers, no referees, no tapping out, one job, and the job was wrecking whatever stood in front of it as fast as a body allowed. Blade's voice came up out of a week of pad work. A trained man hunts your rhythm, so don't have one. He'd spent a week getting me ready for a man whose name he'd never heard.

I planted the left foot I'd pulled back. The knee complained and took the weight anyway, nothing broken in it, and I used that planted leg to throw everything I had backward. My body went over, a full flip, and my right leg whipped up through the top of the arc with my hips behind it, and halfway through the flip the top of my foot met something that crunched.

My palms found the mat. I finished the flip, came up facing him, and looked at what the kick had done.

Deadlock stood two steps back with his nose bleeding, long strands of hair plastered wet and wild across his face from the whip of the kick. He put two fingers to the blood, slow, and studied what came away on them.

"You fucking spinning yoyo." Around us the shrieking had thinned to almost nothing, the last of the crowd squeezing out the doors, and his voice landed clear in the emptying dark. He smiled through the red. "You're full of surprises. I'm going to enjoy this."

I looked right. Half a second, all I could afford.

Trenza was yelling her way through a high kick, black hair flying loose around her, and the heel of her boot met her man's face flush. His head snapped straight back. He dropped where he stood, and I knew from the fall that he wasn't getting up, and then my stomach dropped with him, because behind her another man was already coming through the ropes on her side, and her face had taken damage while my eyes were full of Deadlock. Her right eye was swelling toward shut. Along that cheekbone the skin had gone dark over a cut, the mark a hook leaves, blood tracking a thin line to her jaw. She glanced at me, once, then at Mateo's corner, a fighter counting her exits, and there weren't any.

I looked left, and the fear got there before my eyes did.

Mateo was pinned between two of them. A boxer worked him in bursts, combinations rolling in behind a high guard, and beside the boxer a taller man was throwing kicks I knew in my bones, because they were mine. Taekwondo, round kicks chambered clean and snapped off the hip, and the kid was eating my own art from the wrong side of it. A kick came in at his ribs and Mateo jammed his left arm down to catch it, and the crack of shin on forearm carried across the ring.

"Agh—" It tore out of him and he folded over the arm, and the boxer's voice came in right behind it, flat with boredom. "Stay down, kid. Nobody's paying you enough for this."

Then Mateo moved, and he did it right. No warning went through his shoulders. Nothing telegraphed. He shot forward under the next kick, wrapped both arms behind the kicker's knees, and stood up through the man exactly the way Ghost had stood up through him on the compound mats five days ago. The kicker went over Mateo's shoulder, all of him, boots over head, and the top rope caught him across the back and dumped him out of the ring. Ghost had told the kid he had five days to stop announcing that move. He'd spent all five.

He staggered coming out of it and caught himself on the ropes, and I saw the damage. His lip was split and his eyebrow was bleeding the way eyebrows bleed, too much for the size of the cut. Bruises rose dark even against the deep brown of his skin, and the arm that had saved his ribs hung off his shoulder at half power, swinging, done. Nineteen years old, and he was at the end of what he had.

"Eyes here, beyblade!"

I got half a heartbeat. Deadlock was in the air.

He'd covered the distance while my eyes were on the kid, and he came down at me out of a jump, a beast in the air, too close and too fast to stop. I let myself fall. Straight back, my hands reaching for his weight, feet coming up, one chance to plant them in his hips and throw him over me and off this ring.

His elbow got there first.

The crook of it met my throat on the way down, the inside of his elbow, his whole falling weight stacked behind the bone, and then the rest of him landed on top of that. The mat boomed. The crash punched every scrap of air out of my lungs, and above the emptiness my windpipe was crushed nearly flat. I gagged around it, got nothing.

He moved before I could. Fast, terribly fast for a man his size, hauling me half up by the head and sliding in behind me, and the elbow never left my throat. It rode the turn all the way around, and when his back hit the mat with me on top of him, the inside of that arm was clamped across my neck, and both his legs came over mine and pinned them wide, and then he began to squeeze.

Deadlock.