The air warped with blistering heat. Twin beams of concentrated thermal energy tore through the night, aimed dead center at the disguised Director's chest.
Davis didn't have time to swing the massive ice sledgehammer. He dropped it, raising his left hand instead. The water pooled on the asphalt surged upward, forming a thick, crystalline wall of ice. The lasers struck the barrier, instantly flash-boiling the frozen water into a blinding cloud of superheated steam.
It saved his life, but it cost him his advantage.
Through the dense vapor, a massive, vein-roped hand lunged forward. It wasn't a punch. Asad didn't want to strike; he wanted to break. The giant courier's fingers clamped around Davis's torso like the jaws of a hydraulic press.
Davis grunted, his ribs groaning under the immense pressure. He immediately pulled the ambient moisture from the steam cloud, wrapping the water tightly around Asad's massive forearms and chest.
'Freeze.'
The water crystallized instantly, locking Asad in a jagged tomb of high-density ice. For a fraction of a second, the giant froze like a statue.
Then, Asad's chemically enhanced muscles flexed.
The ice didn't just crack; it exploded. Shards of frozen shrapnel sprayed across the street as Asad shattered the restraint through sheer, drug-fueled brute force. The courier roared, lifting Davis clean off the ground and slamming him brutally into the cratered concrete.
The impact was catastrophic. A normal man would have been reduced to liquid. The man in the corporate suit survived only because of the unnatural molecular density of his own flesh, but the kinetic shockwave ravaged his tech.
The holographic disguise of "Director Davis" shrieked in a burst of digital static. The generic, middle-management face glitched and fractured wildly, but by some miracle, the failing disguise held on by a thread.
The disguised infiltrator stared up at the giant from the crater. He felt his chest throbbing where the giant had squeezed. 'Taking this guy alive isn't going to happen.'
Before Davis could roll to his feet, Asad grabbed him by the lapels of his ruined corporate suit, spun in a massive, violent circle, and hurled him down the avenue.
Davis launched through the air with terrifying velocity, a human projectile fired down the canyon of the Financial Quarter. The wind screamed in his ears. Below him, the street blurred.
He didn't panic. His right hand snapped out, fingers curling inward.
Water from the ruptured street hydrants and shattered office mains surged after him, trailing through the air like a liquid comet. The water wrapped around Davis mid-flight, spinning and layering over itself until it formed a dense, pressurized liquid cocoon.
He hit the corner of a corporate high-rise. The water cocoon absorbed the lethal kinetic force as he smashed straight through the steel scaffolding and exterior glass of the third floor. He burst out the other side in a shower of debris and liquid, skipping across the asphalt of the next block before launching back into the air.
Behind him, the ground shuddered.
Asad was giving chase. The giant bounded down the avenue in massive, street-cratering leaps, his red eyes burning through the smog as he tracked the infiltrator's trajectory.
Davis crashed through the awning of a closed café, the water cocoon taking the brunt of the damage, before finally skipping across the coastal edge of the district. The cocoon dissolved just as Davis slammed into the surface of Victoria Harbour.
He didn't sink.
The seawater beneath his corporate dress shoes instantly hardened, increasing its surface tension. Davis slid across the dark waves for thirty yards before digging his heels in, coming to a smooth, upright halt on the water's surface.
He cracked his neck, his disguised eyes fixed on the shoreline. He tapped his comms.
"Jasmine," Davis said, his voice flat and echoing over the sound of the waves. "Get Sho out of there."
Back at the ruined commercial building, Sho lay pinned under a heavy concrete slab in the lobby.
A jagged streak of emerald lightning fractured the darkness.
Jasmine sprinted across the vertical face of the lobby wall, her hair a glowing, vivid neon green. She dropped to the floor, her hands gripping the slab pinning Sho. Before she could lift it, the air to her left warped with heat.
Snake Eyes had tracked her. His grotesque, bug-like eyes pulsed, prepping a point-blank thermal beam to cut her in half.
Jasmine didn't even look up. She manipulated her own friction, dropping to her knees and sliding backward at impossible speeds just as the laser seared the air where her head had been a microsecond prior.
"Eyes up, freak," a soft, monotone voice echoed from above.
Snake Eyes snapped his horrifying gaze upward.
Standing on the edge of the second-floor balcony was Rose. Her reddish-pink ponytail whipped in the thermal updraft. Her dead, red eyes stared down at the courier without a shred of emotion. She reached into the shimmering, jellyfish-like tendrils of her pocket dimension and pulled out an absolutely massive M134 Minigun.
The barrels spun.
*BRRRRRRRRRRRT.*
A relentless torrent of high-caliber armor-piercing rounds rained down from the balcony, ripping the lobby to shreds.
Snake Eyes flinched, but he didn't die. A figure blurred into the space directly in front of him.
It was the short Asian brawler. He slammed his hands onto the marble floor, activating his payload. A visible, geometric barrier—a shimmering, hexagonal Zone—snapped into existence over them both.
The minigun rounds slammed into the barrier like a heavy rainstorm hitting a tin roof. The bullets flattened and ricocheted wildly, tearing apart the marble walls, shattering the remaining security desks, and reducing the lobby pillars to dust. The barrier groaned and sparked under the sheer kinetic punishment, but it held.
The Asian brawler gritted his teeth, looking back at the furious, bleeding Snake Eyes.
"We lost the case, boss," the brawler shouted over the deafening roar of the gunfire. "The NCC is enroute and the giant is gone! We need to ghost, now!"
Snake Eyes' mutated eyes burned with pure, unadulterated hatred as he looked up at Rose's relentless suppressing fire. His jaw tightened.
"Fall back," Snake Eyes hissed.
The brawler slammed a small, cylindrical device onto the floor. A blinding flash of white light and dense smoke erupted inside the barrier.
Rose kept firing for three more seconds, the heavy bullets chewing through the floorboards, before the barrels slowly spun to a halt. The smoke cleared.
The barrier was gone. Snake Eyes and the brawler had vanished.
"Targets have fled," Rose stated into her comms, her voice perfectly calm as she hoisted the smoking minigun over her shoulder.
"Got him!" Jasmine's voice chimed in. Green lightning flashed out of the lobby, carrying a groaning Sho into the safety of the alleys.
Out on the dark, freezing waters of the harbor, the man disguised as Davis stood alone. The ocean swelled beneath his feet, reacting to his pulse. He stared out at the city skyline, watching the massive, hulking silhouette of Asad leaping relentlessly across the rooftops of the Financial Quarter. The giant was closing the distance quickly, his drug-fueled bounds bringing him closer to the water's edge with every second.
As he waited on the frozen waves, the kinetic damage finally caught up to the infiltrator's tech.
The holographic disguise of "Director Davis" shrieked in a burst of digital static. Slowly, the generic, middle-management face and cheap corporate suit began to fade. The illusion glitched, fractured, and steadily broke apart into the freezing night air, revealing the man underneath piece by piece.
'Just you and me now,' he whispered to the waves.
---
To Be Continued