Chapter Four

Punch-drunk Preacherman

Raiden reached up to remove his dumb shades, keeping a trained eye on the man who just stepped down the last step to the dance floor. "Jerry Preacher?" he asked, "fiftieth ranked assassin of the United Assassin's Association?"

"You got it." Jerry lifted his head just a little bit; Raiden could swear he saw a faint glimmer of something metallic catch the light from under the man's hood for just a second. "And who are you? Sorry, but I was expecting someone else."

"Someone else?" Raiden placed the glasses on the bar and reached for a towel, which thankfully had been spared the rain of viscera from Nick and Dick. As the cyborg moved to wipe the zinc from his nose, he decided to take an educated guess on something. "Touchdown?"

"Don't play dumb." There was venom in the man's voice. Hatred. The kind of thing that probably would have been perfectly reasonable coming from a professional killer, but which nonetheless made Raiden pay just a little bit more attention. "I should've figured he'd send someone out to do his dirty work. What's wrong, his brother or his ninja girlfriend too busy for me?"

"Hate to break it to you..." Raiden put on a show of being casual, even as his eyes worked to get a complete view of the field and of the assassin's stance. "...but nobody sent me."

"Right, sure. So, what? Does that make you number fifty-two, then?"

"I'm not with the UAA, either. Call me a... free agent." Raiden pointed his sword in Jerry's direction with patently unecessary theatrics. "Your organization has something they shouldn't. Something I intend to get back."

"And what would that be?" Jerry asked, with a tone that suggested he really didn't give a shit.

"Don't play dumb!" Now it was Raiden's turn to adopt a bit of angry gravel in his voice. "Tell me what the UAA is planning on doing with the program!"

Jerry began to laugh. It was a cold, but hearty laugh. He pulled a steel fist out of his pocket and pulled back his hood, revealing a face half covered in chrome and circuitry. "You wanna know what the Association's doing? Shit like this; that's what they're doing."

Raiden grunted. "CNT muscle fiber... you're a cyborg?"

"Nah," Jerry replied. "Not like you are, anyways. This is just prosthesis. Got 'em over... I think the doctor said like forty percent of my body." He pulled the other hand out of his pocket, also robotic, and folded his arms over his head in clearly manufactured casualness. "Didn't bother askin' why they had this kind of hardware floatin' around their office. I just heard they'd be willin' to give it to me, for a price."

"And why would you sign up with assassins for some prosthetics?" Raiden asked.

"For a chance at the bastard that cut up my shit in the first place."

Raiden decided to take another stab in the dark. "Touchdown."

Jerry dropped his arms, reached for the small of his back, and produced a sub-machine gun, which he pointed in the cyborg's direction. "Let's get something straight here, Uncle Robo. I'm only here for that guy. If I gotta kill some punk-ass intruding 'free agent' to get my shot with that psycho, then that's what I'm gonna do."

Raiden rolled the kinks out of his shoulder, even though CNT fiber doesn't kink, per se, and it was really more of an unecessary reflex. "Then it seems we're agreed. I want your bosses, so it looks like I've gotta go through you."

Jerry spread himself to a stance more conducive to combat, pulling a little remote from his pocket with his free hand and pointing it towards the DJ booth. There was a mechanical thunk as a face mask sprouted from both sides of Raiden's face, slamming together to cover him forehead to upper lip in an opaque shield. They both stood, taking each other's measure.

And then the music started.

Raiden immediately jumped left, at the same instant Jerry pulled the trigger. He swung his katana in circles around his body, feeling the vibrations as bullets pinged off the blade and went flying in chaotic ricochets around him. He ran around the outside edge of the dance floor, waiting for the tell-tale click of a gun out of bullets, before he cut across and ran towards the assassin. He got about halfway before he saw something flying in from the corner of his eye. Somebody hidden away had tossed Jerry an identical second gun. Raiden just barely managed to get his sword swinging around again fast enough to block the next hail of bullets that came immediately once Jerry had caught it.

Forced back for a moment, Raiden decided to spend the next breather period between the assassin running out of bullets and yet another identical sub-machine gun getting himself back to the bar. He vaulted over, and proceeded to grab bottles and chuck them. He managed to get three or so out before bullets started flying again. As he would have expected from a cyborg, Jerry wasn't terribly impressed by a bunch of awkward lobbed projectiles and dodged them without incident. Raiden didn't much care, as he reached into his little storage area for something. He just wanted the assassin to be expecting something thrown and easily dodged.

Sure enough, when the cyborg got back up and started lobbing things again, Jerry didn't pay it much mind. He took one step to the side, let the projectile sail harmlessly past, and snatched the gun out from out of the air. It was while all this was happening, though, that he recognized that the thing he dodged wasn't a bottle, but instead some round metallic ball. A ball that looked kind of like a grenade. And as he realized his mistake, the grenade went off. He half expected to be blown to bits, but instead he suddenly felt like his arms, parts of his face... actually, about forty percent of his body... all suddenly felt like it weighed a million pounds, forcing him nearly to his knees. When Jerry managed to finally get control of his body back, feeling his cybernetics lumber back to life, he turned and saw that his opponent had decided to cut the counter that his machine gun toting partner had been hiding behind in half. Oh, and he also cut his partner in half, along with it.

Jerry didn't even bother to grab the gun on the floor, knowing that by the time he'd be halfaway to trying, the cyborg would be on him. Instead, he decided to put his new military hardware to good use. He swung, sending a glorious shower of sparks flying off of the blade Raiden threw up in defense. He swung again, watching Raiden buckle slightly under the force of his blows, but knowing that he wasn't going to get anywhere just hitting the flat of a sword. So, on the follow-through, Jerry decided to just reach out, grab the flinching cyborg by the collar of his Hawaiian shirt, and toss him right into the closest wall.

Raiden busted through the cheap, not-up-to-code mortar with hardly any resistance. He found himself in the little dead space underneath the DJ's booth. He considered his options. Staying in here was a poor move, tactically speaking. It was dark, it was cramped, it smelled like cheap mortar and sheetrock dust. Still, if he could lure Jerry in here... wait, where was Jerry going? And that was when Raiden noticed Jerry had the dropped gun in his hand; he cursed his inattention as bullets bounced off his body with stinging force.

The message recieved, Raiden was back out onto the dance floor proper. He charged, his sword clashing against Jerry's raised forearm with a solid clanking of metal. He pulled back and swung again, and then again, each time being swatted aside by a powerful backhand. Jerry managed to get a swing in, himself, which Raiden managed to block.

Raiden saw the hand coming, this time. He hopped to one side, letting the grab go sailing past, and by pure reflex also managed to get a slash in, as well, which Jerry wasn't quite in a position to block. Jerry was sent reeling; the next punch he sent was so easy to see, Raiden managed to completely break his stance with a particularly hard parry. And then, all it took was one kick to the solar plexus, boosted a bit by the little jet propulsion units in his legs, for Jerry to take a turn tumbling into the dead space under the DJ booth.

And it was at that point that that split second Raiden spent trying to strategize bore fruit.

He jumped up, very high up, nearly to the window of the DJ booth, and he began to cut. Somewhere, there had to be studs that held the booth up, and if they were as poorly constructed as the rest of this building's structures... fortunately for him, he didn't really need to seek the wooden beams out; being a man who could cut multiple times a second meant he could just hack and hack until the thing fell down. And fall down it did, dropping wood, mortar, and number one jams directly on top of the assassin, who had been in the process of trying to escape, before the sheer weight of shoddy building pinned him to the floor.

Raiden landed in front of his trapped opponent, pointing his sword in the man's face in an effort to discourage him from moving. "I won't ask again," Raiden said, his voice harsh and cold. "Where are your bosses? Why are they trying to revive the Sons of the Patriots program?"

Jerry coughed, spitting out sheetrock as he tried to keep his lungs from being squeezed too hard. "Fool," he chuckled. "You think they tell me shit? All they said was to sit around this club and wait for the number fifty-one to come in. I don't know any more about the UAA than you do."

"What?" Raiden pushed his sword a milimeter closer. "You have to know something! Who gives you the orders? Who...?"

A sound caught Raiden's attention, something of an electric hum. Instinctively, he hopped to the side and rolled, just in time to see some man in jeans and a jacket come vaulting over where he had been standing, glowing blue sword raised, and plunge it directly into the back of the pinned assassin. Jerry stared up at the man, his eyes wide with surprise, pain, and anger. "Y...you!"

Unfortunately for him, the last noise he made was a spray of blood as his killer swiped upwards.

With that out of the way, Travis Touchdown turned to Raiden. "So... you're the one who decided to steal my fight."