Chapter 29 - 28 — Back Where We Started II
This time I did not try to manage the whole street.
The bruiser stepped in with a combination, and he was confident about it, because he had now put me on the ground twice.
Jab first.
I felt the shoulder go and knocked it outward with the left gauntlet.
The hook came behind it exactly where it was always going to come, and instead of giving ground I dropped under it and stepped between his feet, and I put a burst through my heel to add to a plain body shot.
Not fire into him. Fire behind me, into the punch.
He folded far enough to bring his head down to my level.
I got the back of his neck in one gauntlet.
I could have burned through it. He was inside my reach, he had no barrier, and I had enough output in that hand to go through a Myrmekes shell.
I turned him instead and drove him face-first across the hood of the overturned vehicle.
He still tried to push himself up off it.
So I put one glowing fist flat against the middle of his back and let out one short contact burst, the smallest thing I have ever deliberately made Aten do, and all the air and all the fight went out of him at once.
He stayed down.
> **[Androphagos Duration: 00:15.]**
The barrier user was already on his knees with two officers on him, because a man whose construct dies every time he builds it is just a man kneeling in a road.
The telekinetic ran for the car.
I went after him, and I did not have to finish it, because the police finally had the angle.
A disruption round went past close enough to break whatever he was holding, and a slab of pavement that had been coming toward my head dropped out of the air and cracked on the road.
I caught him three steps from the open door, hooked an arm across his shoulder from behind, and put him down onto the asphalt on his front.
He did not fight it. Once his concentration went and his feet came off the ground, he was an ordinary man in a mask, and an ordinary man in a mask does not need to be hit.
That left one.
---
The vibration user was the only one of them still on his feet.
He looked at the bruiser draped over a police car. At the barrier user on his knees. At his telekinetic face down in the road with my knee in his back.
Then at the rifles, which had nothing in front of them any more.
Then at the crowd.
His escape had gone, and he knew it, and I watched him decide to stop escaping.
His hand started down toward the road, and the asphalt around his shoes began to shiver before he had released anything at all.
The police could not fire. I was in the line, and past me were four hundred people who could not move.
> **[Androphagos Duration: 00:07.]**
I felt it before he did it. The shoulder, then the elbow, then the wrist, in that order, all of it arriving in my head while his palm was still travelling.
I did not wait to see the Ability.
> **[Additional Mana consumed: 14.]**
>
> **[Mana: 154/210 → 140/210.]**
One burst through both heels and I crossed the last eight metres.
His hand came down.
I caught the wrist about four inches above the road.
It discharged anyway. It had nowhere to go, so instead of running out through the asphalt the whole of it went into my gauntlet and up through both arms.
My hands went dead instantly. Something hit both elbows from the inside, and my vision went white at the edges.
> **[Health: 191/320 → 166/320.]**
I held on.
I twisted the arm away from the ground, stepped in past his stance, and put my other gauntlet into his solar plexus.
Not the output I had. One compact contact burst, the same as the last man.
He folded around my fist and went down.
> **[Ability Deactivated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Androphagos Duration: 00:02.]**
I stood over him with both arms shaking and smoke coming off the plating, and for the first time since the doors came down, nothing was attacking anything.
> **[Androphagos ended.]**
>
> **[Cooldown initiated: 05:00.]**
Six reserve bags lay scattered down the middle of the road.
Four masked Players were on the ground. The escape vehicle was still sitting at the junction with both doors open and nobody in it.
Then everything moved at once.
Officers went in on the four of them with restraints. More came past me toward the barricade to pull people back off the broken rails. Medics pushed through the gap with a stretcher already unfolded.
I turned toward the crowd.
The woman who had gone down was sitting up. Somebody had an arm around her shoulders, and she was talking, which meant she was fine.
Then one person started clapping.
Just one, somewhere in the middle. A few more picked it up around him.
Somebody shouted that I had saved them.
It never turned into the thing you see on a broadcast. Plenty of them were clapping with anti-Player signs still up in the other hand.
Plenty of others were not clapping at all, and were looking at the burned trench down the middle of their street and the twenty metres of barricade lying in pieces.
One man lowered his sign against his leg and did not put it down and did not raise it again.
I did not get to look at any of it for long.
Metal clicked behind me.
Then more of it, in a run, the sound of a lot of weapons being brought up at once.
I know what a disruption rifle sounds like when it comes off a shoulder rest. Everybody does.
I turned around.
They were pointed at me.
Not past me. Not at the four men on the ground with officers kneeling on them. At me, from about nine positions, in a loose arc across the road.
I looked from one muzzle to the next, and then down at my own hands, which were still smoking.
"Do not reactivate your Ability." The commander’s voice came from behind the line. "Keep your hands where I can see them."
I put them out where he could see them.
I did not say anything.
There is nothing to say into nine anti-Player rifles that does not make the situation worse, and every single word available to me was worse. *I just saved these people.* *Do you know who my father is.* *Look behind you.*
An officer came forward with restraints on his belt.
"You’re being detained pending investigation into offensive Ability use during an active police operation in a civilian zone."
I looked past him.
Four men, face down, being cuffed. Six bags of Concord notes on the road. A barricade line still standing between the crowd and the street because I had caught the piece that came out of it.
My jaw locked, and I let that be the whole of it.
I held my hands out, and I let them take the gauntlets off me one at a time, and I walked where they told me to walk.
Behind the rails, the argument started without me.
"He saved us!"
"He still used an Ability in the street, in front of everyone—"
"What was he supposed to do, stand there?"
"That’s not the point, the point is nobody *asked* him to—"
"He caught the barrier. I was under it. He caught it."
"And who stops him next time?"
Four hundred people, and not one agreed with the person next to them.
---
There was an old man near the front who did not join in.
He was old enough that forty years ago was not a Chapter in a schoolbook to him. He had been alive for it, and probably young during it, and whatever he saw then he had brought here today on a piece of card.
He was not looking at me.
He had been staring at the rifles since the moment they came up.
At the stance the officers had taken, and the arc they had formed, and the fact that every muzzle in it was pointed at one young Player standing in a wrecked civilian street.
Something went out of his face while he looked at it.
His sign came down slowly against his leg.
He watched them walk me toward the armoured vehicle, and the people around him were still shouting at each other, and he waited until I was almost level with him.
Then he spoke, quietly enough that the two nearest him had to stop arguing to catch it.
"Forty years," he said, still looking at the rifles rather than at me. "And we’re back where we started."