Restart Again: Volume 2 by Adam Scott (hardest books to read txt) 📕

background music cut out and was replaced with cries of alarm from the stage. The two men who had greeted Palo jumped out of their booth and rushed across the room towards us. The remaining patrons seemed generally unphased by the commotion, although their attentions had all turned in our direction. Somewhere at the back of the bar, Louis let out timid, half-hearted yells advising everybody to settle down. Val kicked out from the table and stood with her fists raised in a defensive boxer’s stance, but she remained in place and watched the action play out before us.

The closest man of Palo’s entourage lunged out towards Lia in an attempt to grab her by her hair. With a lithe slide, she ducked under his outstretched arm and landed a devastating punch in the man’s gut, which sent him to his knees to wretch. The second man followed close behind, but was unprepared as Lia jumped off the back of the man vomiting on the floor and flew at him with a brutal haymaker aimed directly at his face. His body went limp as the blow knocked him out cold, and he collapsed into a pile as his legs gave out.

Lia spun to face the two remaining combatants as they charged towards her. As the first of the pair rounded the final table, she hooked her foot around the leg of her chair and flung it at him. It connected with his shins and sent him to the floor in a flailing tangle of limbs. The second man had just enough time to leap over his companion and throw his momentum into a heavy right hook aimed at Lia’s head. She redirected it with ease, then countered with a quick jab up towards his nose. There was an audible crack as he recoiled and attempted to hold in the blood that gushed from the injury, to no avail.

Palo finally managed to climb to his feet, his face now covered in the remnants of Lia’s beer and a multitude of bloody cuts from the shattered tankard. As he attempted to sneak up behind her while she engaged the two men that remained standing, he reached down to his boot and withdrew a small dirk. At the sight of the weapon Val rushed ahead to intercept him, but the action proved unnecessary; I had already grabbed her empty stein and hurled it at the back of Palo’s head. The tough clay shattered on impact, and the man fell to the floor for a second time.

It didn’t take long for Lia to end the fight. She kicked the man she had tripped with the chair before he could regain his footing and left him sprawled out on the floor in a daze. The man with the broken nose was still recoiling in pain when she chased after him and landed a solid kick on his groin. He let out a high pitched yelp and sank to his knees, where he curled into the fetal position and rocked back and forth pitifully.

After a quick glance around the room to confirm that all of her assailants were down, Lia returned to our table and pulled up a new chair. She scanned the table and, realizing my tankard was the only one left, casually stretched her arm out to grab it. I looped my hand through the tankard’s handle and pulled it just out of reach of her grasping fingers. “I’m not sure you need any more of this,” I said with a wry grin.

“Well, he ruined my other one!” she shot back playfully, pointing over her shoulder to where Palo still laid motionless on the floor.

“That’s true, although I think you may have also had something to do with that,” I laughed. After a moment’s thought, I slid the half-full drink back towards her. “I’m going to help our new friends find their way outside, so you can finish mine. But that’s all you get for the rest of the night!”

She let out a giddy laugh as she snatched the tankard, nearly spilling its contents in the process. “Deal!”

I stood and motioned towards the men collapsed on the floor. “Could you give me a hand, Val?”

“Of course,” she nodded. I moved around the table to grab Palo and the next closest man by their collars, and Val did the same with the two closest to her. There was a moment of confusion when we failed to find the final thug, but I spotted him engaged in a full army crawl a few rows away.

“Hey, you,” I called out to him as we began to drag the bodies towards the door, “I recommend you get out of here before I decide to help you along.” The man sprung to life upon being discovered and half ran, half stumbled his way out of the room. As we approached the bar, Louis looked back and forth between Val, myself, and the men we dragged across his inn with an awestruck expression. “Louis, I could go for another beer, if you wouldn’t mind.”

He blinked at me with glassy eyes a few times without response, then suddenly shook his head and nodded. “A drink, right. I can do that. A beer? You said beer, didn’t you? Yes, you did.” He shuffled away as he continued to mutter quietly to himself.

A combination of the conversation and the forced movement brought Palo back to consciousness. “I’m...hey, where am...uhm, wait, let me—” His confused rambling was interrupted as I tossed him out the door of the inn and into the dirt at the base of the stairs. The remaining three men joined him on the ground soon after, but his party remained incomplete as the man who had run away earlier was nowhere to be seen.

“Let me give you a suggestion,” I hollered down to him from the porch. “Head back to whatever farm you were stealing from and stay there. I don’t want to see you again, and you’d be wise to