Under A Winter Sun by Johan Dahlgren (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

She's not bragging. The poor girl thinks she can beat me. Oh, dear. I have no wish to ruin that face.

“I see. You wanted me for yourself.” I sneer. “I'm flattered. Is that why you shot that guy when he pulled a gun on me?”

I nod at the corpse on the floor. There's a hole in his forehead. A trail of inky spatter leads out into the shadows behind him, like the gruesome minute hand of an ancient mechanical watch.

“No. A gun was not part of the plan. That was him … improvising.” She waves a hand in the air. “Nasty things happen when people improvise.”

“You know what they say, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Maybe he was showing initiative? That's a valued trait for many employers.”

“He knew the plan, and he knew we don't encourage critical thinking. And you were right. I want you for myself.”

“As I said, I'm flattered.”

I am. She's lean, muscular, with an ass to die for in that tight combat suit. The fact she wears the suit zipped open to show a tight, greasy white top that leaves her toned belly bare doesn't hurt. She hasn't even broken a sweat yet. There's something special about girls who can handle themselves in a fight. I smile.

When she strikes, she moves at the speed of darkness.

What? Never heard of the speed of darkness? No matter how swift the light moves, the darkness is always there to poke it in the eye when it arrives.

I've seen no one move like this. She crosses the circle and attacks me in the single moment it takes a human being to blink. Only my augmented reflexes save me from taking a fist in the face.

She rains punches and kicks over me and it's all I can do to fend her off. The accuracy of her blows is terrifying, but what's even worse is the fury with which she delivers them. This girl wants to hurt me. Bad.

We dance around the warehouse, trading punches and kicks in and out of the pool of light.

She catches me on the nose with a lucky punch and blood spurts everywhere. She is pissing me off. “Ouch. You fight like a girl, Soledad, and normally, I don't fight girls. But for you, I might have to make an exception.” I snort and swallow a fair amount of blood mixed with snot. Whoever called unarmed combat an art, was a wanker.

I aim a kick at her knee, but she dances out of reach.

“You need to be quicker than that to beat me, old man,” she says.

She throws another fist to my face and I block it high, opening up her midsection to attack. I see my chance.

She delivers a quick knee to my balls, and I go down.

She follows up with a lightning-swift boot in my face and my vision explodes into a galaxy of pulsating stars. I fail to roll away, and she drops on top of me. She pins me to the floor by pressing my arms down my sides with her finely toned legs. She's strong. Impossibly strong. Her combat suit creaks as she squeezes her legs around me.

“Fuck, that hurt.”

I try to clear my head, but everything is still blurry. Her thighs smell of dust and hi-tech fibres. To gain time to let my vision clear, I keep talking.

“Look, Soledad. We both know you will not kill me before you've told me what this crap is all about. Why not tell me your grand plan and get it over? I hear you criminal masterminds love the sound of your own voice even more than you enjoy hurting people.”

“Who said I was the criminal mastermind?”

She punches me in the face. Hard. And then again, and again. There is no way I can fight her off or get away. My head cracks against the concrete floor and something breaks in my cheek under her fist. Ouch.

Something colossal shifts deep in my mind, like a deep-sea leviathan rolling over in its sleep, close to waking up. Not now. Not yet. I need her alive to find out who is behind all this.

“Stop. Don't do this.” Don't feed the monster.

Not the best thing to say to an obvious sadist. The fervour of her attacks increases and with every punch she brings the thing inside me closer to the surface.

Punch. Closer.

Punch. Closer.

Punch.

The thing snaps free from its chains at the murky bottom of my consciousness and comes rushing to the surface. My mind does the all too familiar somersault and my body goes light like I'm floating in water. Everything slows to a crawl and I can't control my body anymore.

The Dread General is in the house.

“Unknown entity detected.”

“I know, Aeryn. Sit back and enjoy the show.” It's all we can do.

“You're not so cocky now, are you, Perez?”

The mystery woman named Soledad keeps pounding away, lost in the moment. “The great Asher Perez. Not so invincible now.”

The pain is dull and far away, but my mind remains crystal clear. Asher Perez no longer feels the pain.

Unfortunately for Soledad, she's not fighting Asher Perez anymore.

General Meridian, the World Burner, does not enjoy being hurt.

He smashes his bloodied and broken forehead into Soledad's face with enough force to throw her over. Her nose explodes into a slow-motion shower of blood as her head arcs over backwards. She sprawls on her ass and clutches her nose. Meridian gets up and launches a kick to her face. She doesn't even see it coming for all the blood, and the heavy boot impacts the side of her head. The kick caves in her temple and snaps her neck like a dry twig, and she goes down. Hard.

The fight is over.

But then the woman pushes up from the floor on shaking arms. She is not dead, even though her neck remains at an odd angle. One of her hands twitches, but she should not be able to move at all. She should be dead or paralysed from the shoulders down.