Chapter Three

N.M.H.

Happily, Nils learned he didn't have to go far to find another group of UAA thugs. He only had to follow a passing nondescript sedan to a nearby warehouse and Bob's your uncle, there they were. Out of breath, he explained the situation, and in short order he and about ten or so besuited professionals were back to the bar at a brisk jog, guns and pipes drawn. "Holy shit..." one of the smaller guys, Gomez, whistled while he looked over the remains of the front door. "Yo, Nils. Touchdown do this shit?"

"Nah, man," Nils wheezed. "It was some other guy. Cyborg. White hair. Hawaiian shirt."

"Well, shit," Jake said, with the sort of chuckle that came with completely failing to grasp the situation. "Now I've heard everything."

Nils stooped over for a second to catch his breath, unaware of the sound of sneakers scuffing along behind him.

Petey the Perch did what Petey the Perch always does in these kinds of situations; he tried to take charge. "All right, guys. We do this clean and quick. Rush the place, find this guy, and hit 'em 'til he stops twtiching. Gomez, Rick, get those safeties off."

Gomez laughed, pointing his gun at everybody's face with lazy swings of the arm. "Like I ever had it on?"

Nils's pulse finally started to cease it's pounding in his ears, which meant he could finally hear that weird, insistent electric buzzing that was slowly getting louder. That sound, he thought to himself, where have I heard that noise before?

Petey, meanwhile, continued rattling off useless orders. "Jake and I'll hit the guy. Nils? You try and get around him. We'll try and keep a shot clear for Rick and Gomez, and..." And then, suddenly, the group heard something from Petey they never really had a chance to hear. They heard him stop, bemused.

"What's up?" Nils asked, thinking that Petey was staring at him with that look of "Oh, shit..." When he was able to put it together that that wasn't the case, he finally realized that the buzzing noise and the footsteps were right behind him. He turned around.

Nils recognized a lot of things on the man who stared up at him. He recognized the shitty red jacket. He recognized the gelled up, spiky black hair. He recognized the throwback eighties shades, the torn up jeans, the black shirt with the words "Bad Girl" stenciled on like it meant something. The man stared, seemingly beyond Nils, with the sort of look Nils had only seen on angry assassins leaning on people for the money they were owed.

"Hey, guys," he said, with clearly manufactured casualness. "There a party going on, over here?"

Nils began to shout "It's fucking Touchdown!" Unfortunately for him, he only managed to get about four and a half syllables in before a blue light cut from left to right in front of him, taking with it the top part of his head. The man apparently known as Touchdown rested the filament of his glowing blue beam katana against his shoulder, taking in his view of the rest of the UAA thugs as Nils' heavy body sank to the concrete in a heap.

Gomez had bullets out in the air before he even really bothered trying to aim the damn gun. Touchdown managed to get his sword up in time, feeling the impact as the bullets mostly evaporated on contact with super heated photon energy (or plasma, or unobtanium or whatever the fuck made his katana so hot) and deflected off the rest. Jake jumped in with his laser brass knuckles, swinging hard for those faux-retro shades. Touchdown caught the attack with his sword and, through a sheer display of force, pushed the attack back, throwing Rick off balance. A swipe from right to left greeted him as he caught his footing, so deep that it caught under both his and Rick's necks, taking their heads.

And then Touchdown was on the move. Petey could hardly get his cheap, mall brand katana up before Touchdown was tearing into him with a left swipe, a diagonal right swipe, and then the sort of vaulting overhead chop that, unlike certain pipe wielding assassins, this guy had the raw physicality to pull off with enough strength to leave Petey clean in halves.

And with that, Gomez was left. Touchdown pulled himself up from his carnage, took one look at the door, and then to the now terrified assassin. "One of you guys did this?"

"N-n-no, sir, Mr. Crownless King, sir," Gomez warbled, holding his gun up with zero regard for where his finger was on the trigger. "Nils said it was some cyborg."

"Cyborg?"

"Yeah. Said he busted in and started cutting up the place."

Touchdown pursed his lips, stared off to the side, rocked back on his feet in barely contained frustration, and then with a mighty "Fuck!" cut Gomez from navel to neck, walking past the spray of blood to storm into the bar. "Fuck," he repeated, and then many times in sequence as he stepped over bodies, one for every stomping, petulant step onto the blood-soaked carpets. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... fucking fuck!"

He saw a door, cut to splinters, and immediately began to barrel through it. "Preacher! Preacher, you'd better not be dead. Do you hear me?"

Nick and Dick, meanwhile, stood guard by the old dance floor further into the club. In a manner of speaking, they were standing guard. The fact is, they were both just a little bit tipsy on designer drinks and weren't really all that suited to the whole guard thing, the way they kept their backs to the only entrance to the room and spent most of their time shooting the shit.

"Hey, Dick," said Nick.

"Yeah, Nick," said Dick.

"Did you hear something?"

"What? Like what?"

"I dunno, like the sound of all our friends being brutally murdered in the next room."

"Man, you're hearing things." Dick went behind the bar and started futzing around with bottles of expensive liquor. "The only guy we're expecting to come in is Touchdown, and we'd have heard him coming a county away."

"Yeah, but... shouldn't we, you know, go see if everyone's all right?"

It was around this time that a red katana lanced through Nick from above, attached to the foot of the cyborg. Dick didn't hear, as he pulled up some French sounding vodka, which seemed to him to be a hilarious contradiction of terms and the definition of irony, insofar as he understood what irony was. "You know, you worry too much." As he poured himself a glass, he didn't hear the horrible sounds of Nick being lifted into the air and mercilessly being torn apart by the lightning fast slashes of a killer ninja cyborg. He didn't even notice the splashback when body parts started littering the bar behind him. "What, you think we're under attack by ninjas, or something? Lemme tell you something. I've been doing this thug thing for six months, now. I've seen everything there is to see." He took a pull of the vodka, finding it ironically delicious, so much so, he failed to notice the cyborg clambering over the bar towards him with murder in his cybernetic eyes. "And there ain't nothing that I can't handle, okay?" He laughed, a very ironic laugh.

And that was when he noticed the katana sticking out of his chest. As it pulled out of him, and he dropped to his knees, mere moments before he was hacked uncerimoniously to ribbons, he remembered thinking to himself you know, there's a word that describes this very situation I'm in, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it is.

Raiden wiped more blood from his sword, as he looked around the dance floor. "Preacher?" he called out. "Preacher, come out here!"

A voice called out from the stairs leading up to the DJ booth, deep and brassy. "That... ain't the voice I was expectin' to hear today." A man lumbered down the stairs, awkward as though he wasn't fully used to the way legs worked. He was a black man, slightly older than the crowd of men Raiden had just gotten done with, with his hands in his pocket and his face mostly obscured by the hood of his purple sweater. "So, what do you want? I take it you ain't here sight-seein' in that getup."