The Assassin's Blade

by H J Peterson

  Showtime.

  With a shout, she aimed her pistol at the Archangel and began shooting.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Her first two shots didn’t take, but the third did. It took him right in the shoulder. The very shoulder that the butt of his rifle was pressed into.

  She grinned as he cursed and grabbed at his new bullet wound. She had to admit: seeing him in pain energized her. It served to remind her that the man wasn’t nearly as invincible as he would like to lead people to believe.

  Hiro ducked and rolled as she hit the roof, wincing at the force that rattled through her bones. Her world spun around her, but she didn’t care: she fired more shots, hoping that she would be able to catch him off guard, again.

  Each shot hit: one in the stomach, one in the thigh, one in the side. For any other human being, the shots would’ve been enough to keep them down.

  However, the Archangel was no ordinary human being: he simply chuckled as he strode forward, barely even limping.

  Hiro came to a stop, kneeling down on one knee, aiming her gun right at the Archangel. She forced herself to breathe, to focus on what she needed to do.

  “Well, what a surprise,” the Archangel said, holding his arms out. It was almost as if he were daring her to take another shot. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here-“

  Hiro took the dare: she fired one more time, emptying her pistol.

  The Archangel cursed as a bullet took him in the chest, a few inches to the right of his heart. He stumbled back a little and pressed a hand to the wound, but otherwise, he seemed just fine.

  Hiro’s grip on the pistol tightened. What the hell was wrong with this guy? That should’ve killed any human being, even a Doc like him.

  “Don’t start with me, you bastard,” Hiro warned as he inspected his now bloodied hand with disinterest. “Don’t you dare start with me!”

  The Archangel looked back up at her. Granted she, couldn’t exactly see the look on his face, but she guessed that he was really, really pissed.

  “Oh, Miss Ikeda,” he sighed, as if he were disappointed in her. “I rather thought that your little tough cop act was adorable, before: you’ve become a nuisance, now.”

  Hiro felt the Archangel’s Doc Grip tighten around her like a vice.

  She yelped, dropping her gun.

  “You bastard!” Hiro wheezed. “You aren’t going to get away with this!”

  The Archangel chuckled as he shook his head, walking towards her. His bullet wounds were all healed up, at that point: they weren’t bleeding, anymore, the only sign that they’d been there in the first place the bloodstained parts of his tunic.

  “I’ve heard that plenty of times, Miss Ikeda, and you know what happened every time?” he asked. “The inspector ended up dead. Let’s face it: ‘you aren’t going to get away with this’ is just something people say when they know they’re beat and just want to sound brave before the end.”

  The Grip tightened, again.

  Hiro cursed.

  He stopped walking once he was standing right next to her, close enough that she could touch him.

  Close enough to touch…

  Hiro carefully allowed the knife she kept up her sleeve to slide into the palm of her hand.

  The truth was, the Archangel’s Grip didn’t affect her, at all: she was a cyborg, and they were impervious to Docs. All she felt was a dull pressure around her limbs, one that lessened and increased with the Archangel’s will, but by no means was she under his control.

  Of course, though, he didn’t know that: very few people did. As far as he thought, she was just like any other person, one that he could control like some sort of rag doll.

  The tables had turned. The tables had turned, and the bastard didn’t even know it, yet.

  The Archangel didn’t look back at her: he continued to stare off into the distance, his hands clasped behind his back. He still didn’t seem to realize what was going on.

  “Tell me, Miss Ikeda,” he said as he pulled his pistol out from the holster on his belt, cocking the hammer back with a loud click. “Do you have any other brave words to tell me before I kill you? Perhaps a last confession?”

  “I do have a little confession to make, actually.”

  Hiro’s grip on the knife tightened, and she turned and slashed at the Archangel’s head with her knife.

  The Archangel cursed, dropping his gun and putting a hand to his face as the mask fell.

  Hiro used the moment to her advantage: she grabbed his gun from the ground and backed away, taking aim.

  “I’m a cyborg, courtesy of our last meeting,” Hiro growled, her finger slipping behind the trigger. “Your little parlor tricks have no affect on me, now.”

  She couldn’t help but smirk. It had taken months of blood, sweat, and tears, but she’d finally done it: she’d caught the Archangel.

  Hiro got into a more proper shooting stance. The very one they’d taught her back at the police academy. “Now, turn around and put your hands where I can see them!”

  The Archangel obliged. He stood up right and turned around….

  Hiro lowered her gun slightly as her blood began to run ice cold in her veins.

  It was Brooks.

  That couldn’t be right. That… that couldn’t be right…

  The Archangel–Brooks–smiled when he saw the look on her face, putting his hands in the air. If that face hadn’t been a friend, once, she probably would’ve gone ahead and blown it away.

  “Why?” It was the only thing she could think of saying in that moment as her world fell apart around her.

  Brooks’ face lit up in mock surprise. “Oh, right! I still look like that bloody inspector, don’t I? Mind if I change into something a little more comfortable?”

  And then, almost as if that were some sort of cue, his face began to morph. His face got older and paler, his eyes and hair changed color: his entire body changed, until he was an entirely different person. The man that stood in front of her was no longer Brooks: it was an older man, with neat hair that was nearly white, gray eyes, and a slimy smile.

  It was a face she recognized from the newspapers, back when this man terrorized the city as the head of Königstadt’s most infamous Gelynian gangs, the Know Nothings. The very one Brooks had helped take down five years earlier.

  “Ta da!” Two-Face Maloye, the infamous mobster, said, holding out his hands like some sort of street magician. “Like some sort of penny magazine, eh? The mobster coming back from the dead, scaring the piss out of the hero–erm, Hiro, I guess.”

  Hiro’s focus returned. She held the pistol right back up, white-hot anger surging through her veins like fire. “What the hell did you do to Brooks?”

  “Your little inspector friend?” Maloye asked. “I killed him. About five years ago.”

  “That’s impossible,” Hiro said. “I just saw him today!”

  “You saw me today, sweetheart,” Maloye said. “Brooks has been dead for five years.”

  Everything clicked, and a horrible realization dawned on her. Two-Face Maloye had, supposedly, been killed in a horrendous car accident, one that had left three people dead and Maloye’s body so horribly disfigured that the only reason they knew it was him was because the people who’d witnessed the crashed identified him as the driver. Meanwhile, some other officers had found Brooks, who’d been missing for a few days, beaten senseless in a cellar that the Know Nothings used for smuggling. Brooks was given various honors, and was a celebrity in Königstadt nearly overnight. Maloye, meanwhile, had been buried in a plot in the prison cemetery with just a plain slab of stone to mark where he was.

  Maloye wasn’t the one that died in that accident: it had been Brooks. The real Brooks, not the one she knew. Maloye had taken his spot.

  “You bastard,” Hiro whispered. She could feel herself starting to shake.

  “You see, I’ve wanted to get rid of these bastards for awhile,” Maloye said, hooking his thumbs onto his belt loops. “I thought of a way to do it: from the inside.�
�

  “You bastard,” Hiro repeated, a little louder.

  “And for the record, I was the one to shoot your friend. That Zanetti kid,” Maloye continued. “You want to know how he went? All the little whelp did was blubber on and on about his nonni.”

  Something inside her snapped.

  “YOU BASTARD!”

  She emptied that pistol into Maloye’s stomach within a few seconds-

  And took a shot to the shoulder, herself.

  Hiro yelped, grabbing her shoulder.

  “That’s quite enough o’ that shite,” Klara’s voice came from behind her.

  She looked up at them. At Maloye and Klara. Both of them glared at her, looks to kill in their eyes.

  They’re going to kill me, Hiro kept thinking. They’re going to kill me, just like they killed Brooks and Zanetti.

  “Now, for once in your life, you’re going to listen,” Maloye said. “You’re going to put that gun down, nice and easy. And then you’re going to stand up and put your hands by your head. You know: kind of like how you told me to a couple o’ minutes ago.”

  “I think backin’ your little self up to that ledge would be a nice touch, too,” Klara added.

  Hiro complied. She put the gun down, stood up, and put her hands up, backing up to the ledge.

  The second Klara mentioned that ledge, though, an idea started to form in her mind. An idea that was crazy enough that it just might work.

  And terrible enough that it just might kill her.

  “Any last words?” Maloye asked.

  Hiro’s heels hit the ledge of the roof. It was time.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a few,” Hiro growled. “I’ll see both of you in hell!”

  She leaned back, allowing herself to fall off the roof of the building.

  LXIV. FRIEDRICH

  Friedrich’s heart just about leaped out of his chest when he saw Hiro fall from the roof.

  The three of them–himself, Maddox, and Katalin–had been in the middle of keeping the rebels away from them and attempting to protect a small number of minor nobles that had made their way to the stage in a terrified huddle. Maddox and Katalin fought like terrors, Maddox swinging around his cutlass and shooting his pistol at any rebels that got near him, while Katalin used her rifle to pick off the ones that were trying to kill the officers as they attempted to get control of the situation.

  And what was Friedrich’s job? Well, it was… much less glamorous.

  He was just supposed to keep the nobles on the stage from getting in Maddox’s or Katalin’s respective ways. And to keep them from panicking too much.

  That second job was very, very tough for him. Mostly because he was on the verge of panicking, himself.

  He wasn’t allowed to show any of his own panic, though. He just kind of had to swing his saber around and attempt to talk in a commanding voice. For the most part, it seemed to work. It was kind of amazing: just a day before this, many of the men that were now cowering behind him would join right in with men like his father in making fun of him relentlessly. They questioned his manhood almost constantly, and now what were they doing? Hiding behind his sword…

  He saw something out of the corner of his eyes.

  He could feel the blood drain from his face as he watched Hiro fall from the roof. The very roof Maddox had launched her to in order for her to face the Archangel.

  Luckily for Hiro, he wasn’t the only one that had seen her fall. The second Katalin saw her falling, she shouted and pushed her hand out towards Hiro.

  That did the trick. Hiro landed on the wall on her back, cursing.

  “Friedrich, cover me!” Katalin ordered.

  He had just enough time to look over at her before Hiro came off the wall and hurdling towards them.

  Friedrich cursed, doing what he could to make sure that nobody came towards either of them.

  Those few seconds before Katalin caught Hiro out of the air were tense as Friedrich watched rebel thugs coming closer and closer. He swung his sword wildly, hoping–praying–that he would hold out long enough-

  He felt something smack against the back of his knee, hard.

  Friedrich cursed as he fell to the ground. There was a rebel standing right above him, a rifle in hand. All the nobles that had been hiding around him had dispersed; he was on his own.

  The rebel held the butt of the rifle up, ready to bash Friedrich’s head in.

  He didn’t know how he managed to do it, but Friedrich rolled to the side just as the butt of the gun came down. It hit the stage right where his head had been just moments before, cracking and splintering the wood.

  With a shout, Friedrich lashed out with his sword.

  The rebel cursed, grabbing at his stomach as he fell to the ground.

  Friedrich could hardly believe it as he stood up, wincing at the sharp pain in his knee. He’d actually done it: he’d actually managed to win in a fight! He wasn’t so helpless, anymore.

  He froze as he realized exactly what he’d done

  The rebel would probably die: he was bleeding too much for him to live. In that moment, Friedrich’s body couldn’t even manage to pass out: all he could do was stare as the shock of killing a man rolled over him.

  Bile rose up in his throat.

  “Heaven, forgive me,” he whispered, tears brewing up in his eyes.

  Katalin slung her gun over her shoulder and caught an apparently injured Hiro.

  Friedrich’s attention immediately turned to Hiro. Heavens, she looked terrible: she was bleeding quite a bit from her shoulder, which she was squeezing onto as hard as she could, from the look of it. Her face was screwed up in pain.

  “Please, tell me one of you guys has some morphine!” She groaned.

  “I don’t think that’s what we need to focus on, right now,” Katalin said calmly as she set her down on the stage. She took a knife and began to cut off some of her stockings, and despite himself, Friedrich found himself blushing and looking away. “Let’s get that bleeding stopped, alright? Then, I bet Maddox will let you have some of his whiskey.”

  Maddox glanced over his shoulder at them. “Not a chance in hell-“

  He cursed as another gunshot went off, grabbing as his arm.

  Friedrich paled, until he realized that it had just grazed his forearm. He would be fine.

  “Let’s get this party off of this stage, shall we?” Maddox said. “Katalin, if you see any roof tops that aren’t crowded with rebels, I suggest that the three of you get yourselves up there.”

  Katalin nodded as she began to look around.

  “Grab on,” Katalin finally ordered Friedrich as she picked Hiro up, again.

  Friedrich did as she asked. He was fairly certain he knew where this was headed.

  The second he did, the two of them were flying through the air, towards one of the shorter buildings that lined the square.

  He closed his eyes and held on as tightly as he could. Don’t look down; don’t look down-

  The three of them landed in a heap on the roof.

  Hiro cursed, grabbing at her shoulder, again.

  Katalin came over and held the piece of her stocking against Hiro’s shoulder a little harder. “I’m sorry: are you alright?”

  “Other than the fact that I’ve just been shot and now know that Inspector Brooks was replaced by a mobster five years ago, I feel just fine” Hiro groaned.

  Katalin began to wrap up her shoulder in order to stem the bleeding. Luckily for them, that didn’t seem to be much of a problem: for one reason or another, Hiro wasn’t bleeding all that much…

  Wait: what was that about Brooks?

  “Friedrich, can you tell me what’s going on down there?” Katalin asked as she finished wrapping up Hiro’s shoulder and Maddox launched himself in the air, following them up to that roof.

  Friedrich poked his head over the ledge of the building and looked around.

  Quite frankly, he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. The main thing he noticed was the fa
ct that the rebels were absolutely massacring the nobility. The rebels had a pretty distinct advantage: though there were plenty of nobles that were Shapers, the rebels knew exactly how to use their abilities to fight. The majority of nobles hardly ever used their Shaper abilities in their everyday lives. The rebels, on the other hand, didn’t have a choice. The difference in skill was obvious.

  One fight in particular drew his eye. It was between two Alchemists, one of which was getting pounded. In fact, that Alchemist that was getting pummeled kind of looked like-

  Friedrich looked back at Katalin, Hiro, and Maddox. “Adelric’s in a lot of trouble.”

  Maddox looked over Friedrich’s shoulder and cursed. “That he is: the bastard’s going to get himself killed.” He looked back at the others. “Anybody want to come with me to help him?”

  Hiro slowly sat up, holding her shoulder. “I’ll come.”

  “Hiro, I don’t think that’s a good idea-” Katalin began.

  “I’ll be fine,” Hiro said bluntly. “And we’ll need you to keep your husband from getting himself killed.”

  Friedrich thought about protesting, but he didn’t: frankly, Hiro had a point on that one.

  Katalin sighed. “Alright. Just be careful, alright?”

  “Will do, mom,” Maddox said as Hiro held on to him. Katalin gave him a look, but didn’t say anything. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

  With that, he jumped from the roof, heading straight for Adelric.

  Friedrich really, really hoped they’d be able to help him: poor Adelric was going to need it.

  LXV. ADELRIC

  Adelric gasped as he was thrown against the wall of the building, the shock ringing through him. Every part of him hurt. He wasn’t doing well in this fight: even against people that knew how to fight, Aki would’ve given them a run for their money. Adelric, however, was absolutely helpless. He was getting beaten around like a rag doll, and even Aki seemed to be getting bored of it.

  “This is sad,” Aki said, hooking his thumbs through his belt loop. “Really: you’ve somehow managed to act like you’re putting up the fight of your life without doing much fighting. Were you an actor? Because you’re very good at it.”