Messiahs by Matt Rogers (bookstand for reading txt) 📕

King heard footsteps behind him, so he spun and lashed out with a body kick that was guaranteed to hit the centre mass of a target he couldn’t yet see. The toe of his boot slammed home against the new arrival’s solar plexus, crumpling him, and King slammed a left hook into the side of his forehead as he bent over. He grabbed the collapsing body and drove it down into the bench, breaking a couple of limbs with the downward pressure.

Three down.

Eight up.

He left the two crippled followers there and dived back over the same table. The frantic move isolated two new disciples who’d tried the same flanking measure, to no avail. But they weren’t deterred in the slightest, and they charged. No matter how talented, he couldn’t defend two strikes at once. He didn’t exist in the Matrix.

He rolled away from one punch and caught another on the side of his neck.

It was a hard hit, rattling his skull. He felt no pain, but that’s a bad indicator of punishment absorbed in the heat of a fistfight. Adrenaline makes you largely immune to pain unless an injury impedes your movement, so a better test of whether you’ve got your wits about you is a quick equation, computed in milliseconds.

Seven times eight.

The answer came immediately: Fifty-six.

He was all there.

No need for a tactical retreat.

Retaliate.

He grabbed the guy who’d hit him by the collar with one hand and returned the favour with the other. Drilled a big right fist into his Adam’s apple, holding back so he didn’t destroy the guy’s windpipe and suffocate him. A breath exploded from the man’s lips and he dropped, but King had already let go of him and spun and swung an elbow with reckless abandon. The second guy had jerked sideways, though, so the point of King’s elbow hit him on the shoulder.

It still knocked him off his feet, sending him spilling onto one of the benches. He scrabbled upright and King kicked him in the face and sent his unconscious body sprawling under the accompanying table.

Five down.

Six up.

This was the part where everything usually changed. Realising they were dealing with a man far stronger, faster, and more precise than any adversary they’d faced before, most people would sense the tide shifting and run away.

Most people weren’t dosed with Bodhi, though.

All six of the remaining disciples came at him, practically frothing at the mouth.

Then two of them peeled off, ran down a parallel aisle, intent on cornering Violetta.

King saw flaming red.

Dived back across the table, abandoning all concern of differentiating between strikes to incapacitate and strikes to kill. That no longer mattered. Protecting his family was everything.

Family.

The word struck him.

Something he’d never considered.

He came down in a heap behind the two guys who’d peeled off, but they didn’t turn around or slow down. They were zoned in, their tunnel vision focused on Violetta hunched in the corner of the mess hall. She was trying to minimise her presence, make them focus on King, but it wasn’t working.

King sprinted after them, closed the distance with relentless athleticism, and seized one of the men around the waist from behind.

He weighed about one-sixty.

He might as well have weighed ten pounds.

King unleashed all his fast-twitch muscle fibres and picked the guy up and hurled him down into the closest bench. The guy landed on his upper back, taking most of the impact across his rear deltoids, stunning him into submission. The other guy finally wheeled around and King fired an uppercut into his stomach, tearing muscles, then grabbed him by the collar and jerked and brought him down on top of his comrade.

The pair clashed heads, stunning them both.

King grabbed the head of the man on top, lifted it up, and smashed it down like a bowling ball on the forehead of the guy underneath.

Two more immobilised.

Four up.

The last four had their sights set purely on King, the biggest threat, which was fine by him.

In fact, he relished it.

They scrabbled over tables, all four of them coming down in his aisle.

He went statuesque, planting his feet down, forming a human barricade between them and Violetta.

He lifted a hand and beckoned them toward him. ‘Have a go.’

They all came forward.

They had a go.

King’s muscles were flooded with lactic acid from dishing out so many devastating shots, but he gave thanks for all those gruelling combat simulations in training as his conditioning kicked in.

He figured he could go at this pace all day.

The most athletic of the four remaining disciples charged, all pent-up aggression fuelled by the substances in Bodhi. King diligently recognised the threat and brought his guard up, bringing a forearm vertical alongside each ear. He absorbed the guy’s first full-power punch on his forearms, dissipating the power through his muscle chain. The guy’s energy fizzled out as King nullified his first attack and he hovered in place for half a second, sucking up momentum for another swinging punch.

Half a second was all King needed.

His hands were already up in a boxing-style guard, so he lashed out with a one-two combination. His first punch was a jab, half-power, that landed square on the man’s unprotected face and broke his nose, which stunned him and froze him in place for just enough time. King followed through with the “two,” a brutal right hook, looping around his flabby arm and slamming his knuckles into the side of the guy’s skull.

Out.

King felt his heart pounding now, at his maximum heart rate, and he knew he was in the red zone. Fighting at this pace for much longer would gas him out, riddle him with fatigue, so he sped things up. You can use maximum effort or maximum time. If he slowed down and brought his heart rate down, he could dance with the final three disciples all day, but he didn’t want to do that.

He wanted this over.

The last three came in all at once and actually fared well.

Two of them shot for takedowns in