I stuffed down my fear as I fumbled for the reserve magazine and let the spent one clank to the ground with the press of a button.

  There was another whistle of the blade, another splash of blood, and another body that hit the ground. My arms were shaking too much to click the magazine into place in a single motion. That cost me a couple of precious seconds, enough time for the mule-turned-murder-machine to come into focus.

  He was bleeding in multiple places, but the biggest wound by far was a shot to the left pectoral, where there was an actual hole. I could just barely make out a glimpse of grisly stuff and twitching muscle. It wasn’t subdermal that stopped Jason’s shot, it was muscle.

  Synth muscle. It had to be. Nothing else would make sense, but the realization only drove a new wave of despair into my heart. What was someone who could afford those kinds of enhancements doing with a gang like the Reapers?

  Still, the key to this fight was Jason. His chrome monstrosity hadn’t done much, but it had done something.

  Jason fired and almost clipped Hein while missing the mule by a mile. Worse, he let out a high-pitched squeal when the retort of the shooter grew almost too much for him. The chrome monstrosity wasn’t lacking in kill capacity, that much was apparent.

  No, the issue is that the little shit couldn’t even handle the shooter he decided to tote around. What good is the highest caliber weapon in the world if it breaks your wrist like a twig when you shoot it?

  The mule made short work of Jason’s gang. Even Kaze, one of the rare exotics unfortunate enough to share our social station, was a pile of purple flesh. His half karu heritage of formidable muscle and ridged, stone-like skin had served him as badly as our human bodies were serving us. The only one left was Hein, who was furiously backpedaling.

  That left just me and Jason still in the fight. He was fumbling with his shooter, desperation in his eyes. I wasn’t any better. Even as I finally managed to click the half-full magazine into place, I could barely bring myself to use the Cadmus. The mule’s eyes swept past me like a predator, and some primitive part of me simply froze up.

  Never before in my life had I seen death draw so close to me. Even when I’d been forced to use my gun before, it was to fend off the desperate who backed off after a shot or two. None of them compared to what I now knew had to be a professional killer through and through.

  Then the murder machine finally took his eyes away from us to spin around, and the sound of two blades clashing rang out in the alley.

  I could just make out the fact that someone had snuck up on the mule, and that the two were now exchanging blows with the speed and alacrity that didn’t seem quite possible to match within human standards.

  Jason, for all that I thought him an idiot, proved he didn’t lack courage when he raised his shooter and fired one more time. He dropped the weapon right after with a whimper, but the bullet hit the mark and buried itself into our attacker’s back, which gave the mystery fighter enough of an opening to send a spray of blood splashing onto the grimy floor of the alley.

  Neither attack proved to be lethal, but they did make the mule suddenly back off in a surprising burst of speed.

  “Who are you?” the mule growled before his voice relaxed. “If someone paid you to mess with my delivery, my boss will double the creds.”

  The mystery man didn’t reply immediately. Instead, with what I was fairly certain was a bored expression on his face, he surged forward. His own weapon, almost identical to the mule’s, lashed out and extracted another spray of blood.

  My heart all but climbed out of my chest when I realized his target was Hein and not the mule. For this botched job, Jason’s faithful follower had been rewarded with death instead of a shooter.

  The mule stood in a ready position as he backed up a couple steps more. “Even without witnesses, my boss will find you. I’m not sure you want the kind of heat that this brings.”

  “Idiot,” the mystery man cursed. “I’m not here because I want to. I’m just cleaning up after a brat who should know better.”

  The man’s eyes were fixed on Jason with a glower, and if looks could kill, the former gang leader would’ve painted the walls of the alley red. Instead, Jason just stared as he gripped his wrist with his shooter sprawled on the ground.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “So you’re telling me that you’re babysitting some random brat? Here? In the outskirt slums? The same brat who decided to fuck with people he shouldn’t?” I couldn’t blame the mule for the disbelief in his voice. The way I was staring at Jason myself shifted at the implication. He wasn’t supposed to be worth that much, not from what I had seen.

  “What can I say? He’s apparently still blood. You served, right? Gonna be a damn shame.”

  “You’re here to protect the boy,” the mule argued. “I’ll head my way, we don’t have to do this.”

  The man paused as he considered the suggestion. He looked… well, unkempt. His hair was long and oily, his clothes tattered and dirty, and the less said about the thing he called a beard the better, because something must have crawled in there and died.

  “No. Sorry, can’t do that. Too many variables that can go wrong. It’s my head if you decide you want revenge.”

  “Fuck,” the mule cursed. “I fucking told them to give me more men, more weapons, more something, but no, they wanted it all hush hush. Fuck, I hate this city.”

  “That’s life away from the front,” Jason’s bodyguard quipped.

  The mule took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and exchanged nods with the bodyguard.

  What followed was quite unlike anything else I’d experienced. There was a… shift, in the way they carried themselves, and I felt the air be driven from my lungs as a wave of pressure washed over me. Then they were moving, and it was at speeds that were definitely inhuman. Compared to their earlier fight, this was on a different level. This was something I had never seen before. It shouldn’t have been possible for humans to move this fast.

  I’d collapsed to my knees at some point, and Jason was no better. In spite of that, the look on the little shit’s face was excited. With the stranger’s revelation, it was like all fear had fled from him, and he was now almost buzzing in place. Really, if he broke into excited cheering for his guardian angel, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  I didn’t have such luxuries. Instead, I slowly began to drag myself forward with my eyes half-fixed on the battle. After what felt like an eternity, my fingers bumped up against something hard and cold.

  Jason’s bodyguard was winning. The mule was good, but as soon as the clash resumed, the bodyguard flicked his formerly plain left hand and released a second blade to pair with the one he was pressing against the mule already. In theory, at the speeds that they were moving at, it shouldn’t have mattered if there was one or two blades in play.

  But it did.

  With two blades, the bodyguard was drawing scores of blood on the other man’s body, steadily pressing him through the garbage and trying to distance the fight from Jason. The mule wasn’t having it, and took several punishing blows that sparked through his skin just to stay within striking range of Jason.

  That was what decided the battle, in the end.

  The mule pushed back the bodyguard and raised his right hand directly at Jason. In less than a second, the limb split apart, revealing a hollow chamber hidden in the man’s wrist that began to spark.

  The bodyguard all but teleported between the two and even struck the arm aside, but the shot still rang out and tore right through the bodyguard’s left shoulder. The mule had likely counted on that to give him an opening. But Jason’s bodyguard seemed entirely unfazed that he was missing an entire shoulder. With a flick of his right wrist, the bodyguard shoved his weapon up through the mule’s jaw. Disbelief filled the mule’s eyes before they ever so slowly flickered out.

  The bodyguard sighed in a way that suggested annoyance rather than pain as he started to turn, eyes already searching for Jason.

  My turn.

  I raised the oversized shooter I had snuck over to, fixed it on my target with both hands, and fired.

  I can’t rightly attribute the shot that hit the bodyguard square in the face to skill. Part of it came down to the fact that we were less than five steps apart and my eyes were still relatively good at that distance. Part of it was likely down to him relaxing when the obvious threat was out of the picture. However, it was most probably luck that guided my aim that day.

  It was also luck that Jason’s chrome shooter was powerful enough to blow through a man who, moments prior, had shown superhuman abilities and held my destiny in his grasp.

  “That fuck did you do? THE FUCK DID YOU DO?!” Jason was screaming his lungs out and already trying to scramble towards me, but I simply reoriented the shooter with trembling hands. I recognized the exact moment he realized he was far too close to me and entirely unarmed. “Wai-”

  The shooter screamed again, and it made a sizable hole straight through the idiot who got us all into this mess to begin with. I wasn’t a great shot by any means, but at that distance, even I could guarantee a headshot.

  Then, just to prove that I was an idiot, I stared.

  I didn’t like him. I couldn’t even stand him. Yet, the sight of Jason’s utterly ruined face almost made me throw up. It probably would have, had this been the first time I killed. Unfortunately, that distinction went to something far more mundane.

  Instead, I numbly stumbled over the bodies and ignored the likely priceless augments that were just waiting to be scavenged. I would have killed for Jason’s eyes just a moment ago. Now, I knew that they were too hot for someone like me to touch. Jason’s family would be on the lookout and might have put tracking implants in them.

  All I could do was grab their credit chips. No way to reliably track those, at least as far as I knew, and I just threw them into my pockets without bothering to check what they were worth.

  No, my real target was something else. It took everything I had to drag my tired body forward. The dead bodies seemed to track my progress over to the first mule dead at the entrance to the alley.

  Two bags. Two shots.

  This has to be worth it. It must be.

  If it wasn’t, the best I could do was add my corpse to the collection cooling in the alley and be done with it all.