Stan’s mind worked at high speed. ’They said ’livestock.’ They said ’not a True Human.’ They know what a True Human is. They know the taxonomy of the old world. Then they should be of the old world.’ He looked around the circle.
The bodies. The speed. The bare chests in sub-zero air. The casual predator’s confidence.
’What are they? Vampires? Werewolves? Or demihumans? Or something from the same era? They didn’t vanish. Or at least, not all of them did. They’ve come back.’
’They can’t be Werewolves or demi humans, if not there should obvious features on their bodies... That leaves the last option, are they Vampires?’
He was just speculating, he can’t say for sure if his guesses were right or wrong... He kept his face composed.
’They were attracted here by my plane. Or by the noise. Or by both. If I hadn’t stored the aircraft when I did, they would have destroyed it themselves before I ever reached the pool. And me with it. I don’t know why I feel this way, but why do I feel like they can handle the plane’s explosion with relative ease.’
’They are here to guard the Spirit Pool. Or to claim it. Or both.’
’They are, individually, almost certainly stronger than I am.’
He assessed himself against them with cold, honest precision.
His current strength baseline was extraordinary by ordinary human standards. He could lift objects that no ordinary human could lift. He could take impacts that would kill an ordinary human. He was, by every measure of the modern era, an outlier.
But he was not, he realized instantly, at their level.
They were operating in a different physiological register entirely. Their speed alone had been beyond anything he could match.
Their bodies were putting out more raw kinetic capability than his own by a margin he could visibly see. His current strength probably placed him at somewhere between a quarter and a half of any one of theirs. And there were four of them.
The odds were not good. The odds were, in fact, terrible.
The four of them held their positions in the circle for a long, silent second. Stan stood in the center, his backpack still on his shoulders, his coat still zipped against the polar wind, his hands loose and empty at his sides.
The standoff lasted exactly one second longer. Then the lead man moved. And the other three moved with him.
They came at Stan from four directions simultaneously, at speeds that no ordinary eye could have tracked, closing the ten-meter gap with the fluid, coordinated economy of predators executing a killing formation they had performed a thousand times before.
Stan’s body, wired for combat by the martial arts mastery he had installed less than a day earlier, responded instantly.
He moved. The four of them moved as well...
They moved the way weather moved. The way tidal waves moved. The way things moved when the laws of nature had temporarily agreed to look the other way.
Stan’s body responded before his mind did.
The martial mastery installed in his consciousness took over the moment the first strike came. His feet shifted. His weight dropped. His right arm rose in a hard, angled block that intercepted a fist the size of his own head at a speed he could not have tracked without his current dilated perception after tempering...
The impact cracked through his forearm like a truck slamming into a wall.
He was already turning. His left leg swept back, his hip rotating, his body threading between the two other strikes that were closing on him from behind. He caught the third fist on the back of his elbow. He redirected the fourth strike into empty air with the smallest, most efficient parry his mastery could produce.
Four attacks in the span of one heartbeat.
He had survived them. Barely.
Not daring to waste time, He counterattacked.
His right fist rocketed toward the lead man’s chin. Straight, focused, backed by the full weight of his tempered skeleton and every ounce of enhanced strength his body could produce. It was a strike that would have shattered concrete. It was a strike that would have killed an ordinary human instantly.
The lead man tilted his head three centimeters to the left.
Stan’s fist tore through empty air. The lead man smiled. Then he moved.
The next fifteen seconds happened at a speed that Stan’s mind could not fully process.
They were everywhere.
The four of them attacked from four angles simultaneously, their bodies phasing in and out of his peripheral vision as blurs of motion, dark hair, bare torsos, the flash of eyes catching the polar light.
Every strike was aimed at a vital point. The temples. The throat. The heart. The base of the spine. His liver. His kidney. His diaphragm.
His body defended itself.
His forearms rose. His elbows tucked. His knees lifted to intercept the low kicks aimed at his hamstrings.
His head turned by microscopic increments to slip strikes that would have crushed his skull. His mastery was reading every attack a fraction of a second before it arrived, and his tempered body was executing the defensive movements with the effortless precision of a discipline he should have spent decades acquiring.
He blocked one strike. He blocked another. He blocked seven more.
He caught the eighth on his shoulder and it drove him backward two meters through the compacted snow.
He blocked the ninth. He blocked the tenth. He blocked the eleventh. The twelfth caught him on the ribs.
Something inside his chest made a small, terrible sound.
He staggered. But he kept blocking. He couldn’t afford to slack, any mistake meant death...
Fists met forearms in a rolling, thundering cascade that produced its own weather system around them. The ice at their feet fractured outward in spider-web patterns.
The wind was displaced by the shockwaves of their exchanges, small vortices of polar air spinning off in tight, angry spirals. The steam of the bare-chested men’s body heat swirled around Stan as he moved between them.
They were smiling. All four of them.
They wore the small, delighted expressions of predators who had been given something interesting to play with, the specific, insulting smile of hunters who had discovered that their prey had teeth, and were amusing themselves by finding out how long the teeth could last.