"wind boy versus bronze fist" - chapter three of a novel

The force of his punch knocks me flying across the parking lot. Definitely not human. I take a moment, maybe a third of a second, there in midair, to enjoy the simplicity of sensation in flying free for a change. Then I take the pain and feed it into my Power.

A sharp backward flip and I drop straight down, just to show him I can. I can see the indecision behind his eyes, as he tries to figure out whether or not he’s bitten off more than he can chew. I don’t give him the time.

Calling up the winds around me, I charge directly at him. He’s got good reflexes, but he doesn’t really have much of a fighting style – it’s almost exactly the same punch as before. I let the winds skid me to his left, and his fist shoots wide over my shoulder. This time I notice bronze on his knuckles, and what looks like skin scraped off around it.

My knee comes up into his groin, and I’m going easily twenty five miles per hour by that point. But he doesn’t fall. Definitely not human.

The impact wrenches me off balance, and the winds under my other leg push it right out from under me. I try to roll with the fall, to not let it leave me gasping for breath.

His left hand grabs my leg just below the knee, and forcibly shifts my momentum almost completely to the horizontal. I'm lucky just to keep from hitting headfirst into the gravel of the parking lot.

Instead I land on my left shoulder, and scrape a path four or five yards long across the gravel. There's blood in my eye when I pull my head back up, and I think my jaw’s gotten cracked. My arms and hips are on fire from braking all that speed for the rest of me.

Fortunately, the same Master who showed me the secrets of the Wind also taught me how to Heal. Even more fortunately, running isn't a trick at my opponent's disposal. I get to my feet before he's halfway to me, and that's when I realize that I've got a weapon here.

It's just cosmetic damage really, but the gravel ripped me up enough that a small child could follow my bloodtrail if I tried to run away. With any luck, my opponent has the makings of a trail I can follow back to something vital.

Ignoring the swelling in my shoulder, I try to make myself look intimidating. The blood all over my face probably helps. "Clear the area!” I scream. The crowd takes me seriously, and now I have enough room to work.

I need a full geometric spread, a mandala, of cyclones. All around this robot or whatever he is. Whipping up the gravel, and sending it at him from every side.

The car alarms going off tell me I've got plenty of momentum going there. More than enough to rip his fake skin from his body. The real skin too.

Now we're both bleeding, and it gives me a roadmap of his organic parts. As an added bonus, he's got a hell of a lot of dust in his eyes. I wait for the maelstrom to die down, and use the time to Heal my legs. My right arm's in good enough shape for what I need.

I'm running again, and he starts to throw the same damned punch for a third time. This time I duck clear under it, and fishtail at the parked cars. I grab one of the long, narrow shards of glass, and bring up a little too much wind when I push back off the car to head back to him.

To the bronze man's credit, he tries to hit me with both arms for a change. But that just makes it easier for me. Eight feet in front of him, I take to the air, spinning high overhead like an Olympic diver. I'm counting on his reactions to be too slow to stop me once I get behind him.

The glass slides in right under his raised shoulder blade, and scrapes down across whatever he's got that passes for a rib. Then it finds a hole big enough, and bites deep before shattering.

I take four steps back in the time it takes him to turn around, and even without any Power I can see in his eyes that my plan worked. I found a pretty major artery with one of those pieces of glass, and he knows he's dying. He makes a few futile, sputtering motions, but there's no threat here anymore. Too much blood pouring out through the external wound. Just another empty statistic in a battle roster.

I close my eyes, and take the time to rest, to Heal, and to muster what respect I can to listen to the Wind as it drains out of what passes for the bronze man's lungs. At exactly the same instant he breathes his last, a familiar voice calls my name, bringing my attention back to material matters.

"Donald. Lucky thing you were here. Otherwise my friend might have fallen prey to that abomination."

I open my eyes and turn back to the entrance of the strip club. Two of the girls are walking out in their street clothes. The blonde I've never seen before, but the one with the pink dye job snaps all my mental defenses back to high alert.

"Eliana. What did you just set me up to kill for you?"