Chapter 372: Round 2

Elena opened the back doors and stepped out first.

Liam followed her into the afternoon and felt the specific quality of Ashford Ground on a day when something was going to happen on it. Wrath was already there near the cage. He was not doing anything.

Just standing with his hands behind his back looking at Liam the way he looked at things he had prepared for and was ready to see play out.

Wrath pressed the card to the reader without being told to.

*Grwmmmm*

*Doom*

Liam watched the front wall lower and settle flat on the grass and looked at what was inside.

Same straitjacket.

Same chains running from different points of the man’s body to the cage wall. Same man sitting against the far wall with his head down and the specific stillness of something that had been in one position long enough to stop resisting it.

Wrath worked through the fastenings in sequence. Chains came away one at a time and the man absorbed each release incrementally, his body receiving back degrees of itself as each restraint fell.

Last chain dropped.

Man sat still.

Then stood.

Liam settled his weight.

He activated Silent Stride.

Sound left him completely. Footsteps gone. Breathing gone. Everything that announced his presence in a space went with it and he stood in the afternoon making nothing.

Then Pulse Bound Might.

He felt it arrive through his arms and legs and hands, the warmth of it building under his skin, and he stood with it and looked at the man coming out of the cage.

Same wrong movement. Each step landing with the placement of something navigating private geography. Joints rotating past their natural range without the man noticing or caring. He came out into the light and stopped and his head came up.

He looked directly at Liam.

Then the man blinked and was not in front of him anymore just like the last time.

He was to the left, already mid-swing, his arm coming around in an arc at Liam’s head from a position he should not have been able to reach from the previous one.

Liam moved as well this time around like he knew that it was coming, he was behind him before the arm completed its arc, the entry and exit running together the way they had run together for fourteen days, and he drove the trained punch toward the center of the man’s back.

The man had twisted on some instinct that had nothing to do with hearing or seeing, and the punch caught the shoulder, but it connected and Liam felt it land with the specific quality of the trained punch, the force going through rather than stopping at the surface.

Man stumbled forward.

He caught himself.

He turned and looked at Liam and for the first time the unfocused quality in his eyes changed into something that was paying attention.

He moved again and a web came from his right hand, fast and flat, aimed at Liam’s wrist. Liam stepped into the movement rather than back from it and the web passed his forearm and found nothing.

He came forward with a feint left and the trained punch right, aimed at the chest.

It landed.

He felt it go through and the sound that came from the impact was the sound of it and the man went back three steps and put his hand to his chest.

Liam circled.

The man watched him with the new attention still in his eyes.

Then he smiled.

It was the first intentional expression the man had produced and it sat wrong on his face, like a thing that had learned smiling from watching it rather than feeling it.

He dropped his hand and sent a web at ankle height, low and fast, and Liam jumped it but going up was going into the man’s plan and the man was already moving for the landing point with the no-transition movement, crossing the ground while Liam was in the air.

He caught Liam’s ankle on the way down.

Pulled.

Liam hit the grass hard on his back and air left him in one hard exit and he lay there for one second looking at the sky.

’Get up,’ he thought. ’Right now.’

He activated Flash Step from the ground, rolling the movement sideways, and the web that came down for him hit the grass where he had been and he came out eight meters left already moving.

He stood and breathed and looked at the man standing in the middle of Ashford Ground looking back at him.

They both knew what had just happened.

Liam had taken the ground twice. Web from the hand. The ankle. Both of them things he now knew existed. He was not going to take either of them again.

He ran at him.

No Flash Step. Just running with Pulse Bound Might fully active and the trained punch chambered and the specific decision of someone who had decided that distance was not going to win this.

Man raised his hand for the web.

Liam dropped his shoulder and went under it and came up inside the man’s reach where there was no angle for a web and drove the trained punch into the center of his chest with everything he had.

Everything meant fourteen days. Every morning and every bag and every time Wrath had said again. The punch that went through rather than stopping at it, the force traveling inward after the hand had already made contact.

It landed exactly the way it was supposed to land.

He felt it in his fist and his wrist and his forearm and he knew.

A sound came from the man’s chest that was internal and deep, the sound of something receiving a force it could not redirect.

Man stood still.

One second.

Two.

Then his mouth opened.

Not to speak.

Something came from it that was not a sound and was not language, a web firing from his throat, and it hit Liam across the chest at point blank range before Liam had processed that his mouth could do that, and it bonded immediately and the man pulled with everything he had left.

Liam went off his feet again.

He went up this time, higher than the first time, and swung in an arc, the web pulling him sideways and up and across and then he was dropping and the ground came back and he hit it on his side and something in that side registered a loud complaint.

He lay there.

Man was already dragging himself toward him, the punch having taken something significant from him, his movement compromised, each step costing more than the one before it, but he was still moving and his hand was coming up for the next web.

’Mouth,’ Liam thought, lying on the grass with his side screaming. ’He can web from his mouth. He waited until I was close enough that it would matter. He saved it.’ He pushed himself up with the arm that did not hurt. ’He’s smarter than he looks.’

He got up.

Man stopped.

They looked at each other across eight meters of Ashford Ground, both of them damaged, both of them breathing, the afternoon sitting around them entirely unbothered by any of it.

Liam activated Flash Step.

Not sideways. Not back. Forward.

He covered the eight meters before the man’s hand had finished coming up and he drove the trained punch into exactly the same spot on the man’s chest that he had hit the first time, the precise same location, because the first hit had already opened something there and the second hit had somewhere to go.

He put everything into it.

Every piece of Pulse Bound Might. Every morning of the two weeks. The bear in the forest and the tree and Wrath saying again.

Impact.

Sound from the man’s chest that went down into the grass beneath them.

Man went down.

Knees first. Then forward. He hit Ashford Ground and the ground received him and he stayed there, his chest moving with breathing that was working hard to remain breathing, but breathing.

Liam stood over him with his side aching and his chest aching from the mouth web and his ankle aching from being dragged by it.

He looked down at the man.

He looked at Elena.

She was standing where she had been standing since the beginning of it. Her arms were at her sides. Her expression had stopped being composed somewhere in the middle of the fight and had not fully reassembled itself yet.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

Neither of them said anything.

Behind him he heard Wrath coming across the grass.

He stepped aside and let him work and stood with the ache in his side and watched Wrath begin the process of securing what was on the ground, methodical and practiced, and thought about the web from the mouth and the specific way the man had saved it and used it at exactly the right moment.

’He was waiting for me to come close,’ he thought. ’He took two hits and let me think I was winning and waited until I was inside the range where it would actually do damage. That is not instinct. That is strategy.’

He looked at his right hand.

Opened it. Closed it.

Whatever was coming next in that arena was going to need everything that had been built and then something more besides.

He already knew that.

But he also knew something he had not known two weeks ago.

He could land the punch.