Anthony instantly realized his mistake.
Perkins hadn't gone to the seventh floor. She had hit the button for the seventh floor and stepped out of the elevator on the sixth, taking the stairs the rest of the way. She had known she was being followed the entire time.
No wonder the hallway was empty.
Were High Table elites really this hyper-vigilant?
Anthony realized, with a cold sinking feeling, that he had been far too arrogant.
"Who the hell are you? And why are you following me?"
The moment Anthony dove through the splintered doorway into the apartment's front room, Perkins's voice echoed from the hallway behind him.
His Compensatory Perception pinpointed her exact location outside the door, but the Walther P99's 9mm rounds wouldn't reliably penetrate the reinforced concrete load-bearing wall separating them. He had lost the element of surprise, and he was cornered.
"You've got it all wrong, Miss," Anthony called out, gripping the Walther tightly with both hands, tracking the doorway. "I just wanted... to watch you bleed."
Three suppressed shots snapped through the doorway in response, forcing Anthony to duck behind a heavy oak bookshelf.
Perkins moved along the exterior wall like a ghost. When she finally hooked the corner to enter the apartment, Anthony fired a rapid three-round burst.
He missed. The bullets merely chipped two holes in the drywall, inches from her shoulder.
It was as if she had pre-calculated his exact firing angle. The moment Anthony extended his arm to shoot, a return volley of bullets grazed his sleeve, forcing him to violently yank his hand back behind cover.
Anthony gritted his teeth. The skill gap between a standard Bratva enforcer and a High Table elite was massive. He hadn't seriously expected his three shots to hit her; he was playing a different angle.
His third shot hadn't been aimed at Perkins. It had been aimed at the ceiling.
Specifically, the fire sprinkler head mounted above the living room.
Pshhhh!
A torrential downpour of chemical-smelling water erupted from the ceiling.
Even with her short hair, the sudden deluge plastered Perkins's blonde locks across her eyes, momentarily blinding her and ruining her sightlines.
Predictably, the moment the water hit her, she fired blindly into the room to lay down suppressive cover while she retreated.
Anthony wasn't about to give her the space to regroup. He fired two precise shots through the waterfall, forcing her backward.
One of the rounds grazed her left bicep.
"Fuck!" Perkins snarled, retreating rapidly into the adjacent kitchen.
She pressed her back against the cold tile of the kitchen wall, wincing at the sharp, burning pain in her arm and the rapidly spreading chill of her soaked clothes.
The fire sprinklers continued to hiss loudly, flooding the living room and masking the sound of footsteps.
"You broke the rules, Perkins," Anthony called out, his voice calm and carrying over the sound of the water, intentionally trying to psychologically unbalance her.
"The rules of the Continental are sacred. Yet you attempted to assassinate John Wick on neutral ground, and you murdered a fellow guild member who was playing by the rules."
"Winston sent you?" Perkins's voice echoed back, tight with sudden, genuine fear.
But a second later, she laughed—a cold, cruel sound. "No. If Winston sent you, you wouldn't have waited until I got home to make your move. And I certainly wouldn't have spotted your sloppy tail so easily."
She sounded entirely relieved.
Through the cascade of water, Anthony saw a dark object arc out from the kitchen doorway, bouncing across the hardwood floor toward his cover.
Flashbang!
Acting on pure instinct, Anthony grabbed a heavy wooden dining stool and hurled it at the tumbling cylinder, knocking the stun grenade to the far end of the living room.
It wasn't a frag grenade, but it was still lethal in close quarters.
Anthony spun around, pressed his back flat against the wall, clamped his hands tightly over his ears, opened his mouth to equalize the pressure, and squeezed his eyes shut.
BANG!
A blinding, magnesium-white flash, accompanied by a concussive roar loud enough to rupture unprotected eardrums, instantly engulfed the apartment.
Even with his immediate precautions, the sheer kinetic shockwave and the searing visual afterimages scrambling his retinas caused Anthony's mind to momentarily blank out. The world seemed to flip upside down, his equilibrium entirely shattered.
Perkins hadn't thrown the flashbang to blind him for a frontal assault. She used it as a distraction.
Instead of rushing out of the kitchen, she swiftly and silently vaulted through the kitchen window onto the exterior fire escape, flanking him from an incredibly tricky angle.
Her movements were terrifyingly fast. She clearly knew every inch of her safehouse's layout, and she was maneuvering to shoot Anthony in the back while he was deafened and disoriented.
Despite the intense ringing in his ears and the vertigo spinning the room, Anthony raised his pistol and fired a blind, suppressive burst toward the kitchen doorway.
He was fighting blind. His Compensatory Perception couldn't model the entire apartment while his primary senses were scrambled by the flashbang.
But he knew how assassins thought. After throwing a stun grenade, she absolutely wouldn't stay static in the kitchen, and she wouldn't push a fatal choke point like the front door.
The balcony!
Relying purely on spatial memory, Anthony pivoted and fired three rounds toward the living room's balcony window, then staggered backward, putting a load-bearing wall between himself and the glass.
Perkins was darting across the fire escape like a shadow, leaping from the kitchen exterior to the bedroom balcony in three silent bounds.
Anthony's body coiled like a taut spring. The exact millisecond Perkins shattered the bedroom window to breach inside, he twisted his torso violently to the side.
System. Allocate points!
In a fraction of a second, Anthony dumped all 23 of his hoarded attribute points directly into Compensatory Perception.
[Compensatory Perception: LV8 (12/100)]
The upgrade hit him like a lightning bolt.
Anthony's brain shifted into hyper-overdrive. "Rapid Computing" instantaneous modeling and "Compensatory Perception" trajectory deduction fused together in a frenzied, autonomous symphony of survival.
An ocean of sensory data flooded Anthony's consciousness.
Visual acquisition: The contraction rate of Perkins's right deltoid muscle fiber bundle is 12.3 cm/s. Scapula will fully retract for firing posture in exactly 0.5 seconds.
Auditory analysis: Respiratory rate 28 breaths/min. Lung lobe expansion is elevating her firing arm by an angle of 0.7 degrees.
Weapon parameters: Her barrel temperature is elevated. Rifling expansion has increased her bullet spread by 0.15 degrees.
Countless streams of raw data instantly converged into a glowing, golden trajectory matrix inside Anthony's mind. Subjective time slowed to an agonizing crawl.
Perkins pulling the trigger looked like a stuttering, frame-by-frame film reel.
Index finger flexor contraction: 0.17 seconds. Bullet muzzle velocity: 420 m/s. Required evasion reaction time: 1.04 seconds.
Gunfire roared deafeningly in the confined bedroom.
High-velocity rounds, trailing scorching currents of displaced air, crisscrossed the space between them.
The scarlet ballistic prediction lines burned themselves into Anthony's retinas.
Three blazing warheads hurtled toward his center mass.
Anthony snapped his head backward, buying himself 0.03 seconds. The first bullet carved a burning line of blood across his collarbone, missing his jugular by millimeters.
As he violently twisted his torso, the second bullet grazed his ribs, shredding his jacket. The third bullet punched cleanly through the meat of his left forearm.
The excruciating, tearing pain ripped an involuntary grunt from his throat.
If he hadn't been wearing the ultra-light Kevlar weave beneath his jacket, he would be a corpse on the floor right now.
Even with his newly upgraded, hyper-computing brain, his physical nervous system hadn't fully recovered from the flashbang's shockwave. His body simply couldn't move as fast as his brain was calculating.
And Perkins was genuinely, terrifyingly fast.
Perkins landed in the room, her eyes widening in momentary shock as she realized her guaranteed triple-tap had failed to kill the man in front of her.
Anthony didn't hesitate. He pulled the Walther's trigger, the muzzle flashing violently in the dim room.
A 9mm hollow-point drilled into the outside of Perkins's right thigh as she charged forward.
"Ugh!" Perkins let out a sharp, suppressed hiss of pain.
Her high-speed advance was brutally interrupted. Her leg buckled, and her immense forward momentum sent her staggering. She slammed heavily into a heavy wooden wardrobe with a sickening thud.
The impact knocked her pistol from her grip, sending it clattering under the bed.
Even disarmed and wounded, she didn't pause for a fraction of a second.
Anthony's Compensatory Perception screamed warnings of impending close-quarters lethality.
Perkins anticipated his follow-up shots. She pushed off the wardrobe, dodging Anthony's gunfire with erratic, serpentine movements, advancing with the feral speed of a cornered predator.
In two quick, desperate bounds, she closed the distance to within striking range.
As she moved, she swept her hand across a desk, slapping a heavy metal pen holder. The pens flew toward Anthony like a shotgun blast of shrapnel.
Anthony instinctively raised his wounded left arm to shield his face, a fresh spike of agony shooting up to his shoulder.
Hidden flawlessly amidst the flying pens was a sleek, three-inch stiletto dagger she had drawn from her sleeve.
If Anthony hadn't raised his arm to block the debris, that hidden blade would have buried itself directly in his left eye. Instead, it sank deeply into his forearm, the force of the throw driving it to the bone.
Anthony stumbled backward, gasping.
Through the pain, he could clearly see the cold, merciless light in Perkins's eyes—a pure, bloodthirsty madness.
She didn't stop. She lunged forward, her left hand snapping downward. A second hidden blade slid from a concealed sheath on her wrist, gripped tightly in her fist.
She thrust the dagger horizontally, aiming to open Anthony's throat from ear to ear.
Simultaneously, her right hand dove to the small of her back, drawing a miniaturized backup pistol.
A perfectly synchronized, lethal double-strike.
In the exact millisecond the dagger thrust toward his neck, Anthony stopped trying to dodge. He allowed his body to fall stiffly backward, letting gravity pull him away from the blade. His head slammed hard against the drywall behind him.
The cold steel of the dagger, carrying the absolute chill of death, grazed the tip of his nose, slicing a thin line across his skin.
Pinned against the wall, Anthony retracted his right arm, bringing the Walther P99 in tight against his ribs in the CAR stance.
At point-blank range, he pulled the trigger as fast as the sear would reset.
Bam-bam-bam-bam-bam!
A rapid string of scorching 9mm rounds hammered into Perkins's chest.
She was wearing a high-end Kevlar vest, but it couldn't absorb the kinetic energy of five rounds fired from less than twelve inches away. The blunt-force trauma alone shattered her ribs and collapsed her sternum.
Perkins's chest caved inward. Her eyes bulged impossibly wide. A geyser of dark arterial blood erupted from her mouth, splashing across Anthony's jacket.
Even as the life drained from her, those icy eyes remained locked onto Anthony, filled with incomprehensible, utter shock.
She stared at him, as if desperately trying to understand how this unknown, seemingly average man had systematically dismantled every single one of her lethal calculations.
A wet, gurgling sound rattled from her ruined throat.
Her right hand twitched violently, her dying nervous system still trying to raise the backup pistol to finish the job.
But her body was completely broken. Her legs gave out, and she collapsed heavily, her dead weight slumping directly onto Anthony's chest.
Anthony couldn't move. He was pinned against the wall, completely exhausted. He let his head slide down the drywall until he hit the floor, Perkins's corpse resting across his lap.
He dropped the empty pistol, spreading his hands flat against the floorboards. He gasped for air, his chest heaving as if he were trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room.
He sat there for three solid minutes, letting his heart rate drop from the stratosphere, before he finally mustered the strength to shove Perkins's heavy, blood-soaked body off his legs.
He slowly pushed himself backward, supporting his weight on his trembling arms, leaning his back against the wall. He was breathing rapidly, a mixture of cold sweat and warm blood sliding down his forehead and stinging his eyes.
Looking at the elite assassin's ruined body, a profound, chilling realization washed over him.
A High Table elite was a completely different species from a Force Recon Marine.
If he hadn't spent his entire military career obsessively training for CQB, and if he hadn't dumped every single point he owned into Compensatory Perception at the exact moment she breached the window... he would absolutely be a corpse right now.
Anthony fought through a wave of nauseating dizziness. He gritted his teeth, stood up on shaking legs, and ripped the stiletto dagger out of his forearm with a wet tearing sound. He tossed the bloody blade onto Perkins's chest.
A chime echoed in his mind.
[Elite Assassin Eliminated. Attribute Points +8.]
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