“Tango down,” came the reply through my earpiece.
“Game on,” I said and leapt into the air. I felt in my mind for Gavrikov and switched off the gravity as I did. My leap became an upward jump of superhuman proportions that carried me skyward three hundred yards. I let myself reach an apex and paused there, for just a second, while I checked my targets.
All five of the mercs in my sight were right there, huddled together, two of them holding back their fellows. The other looked like he was playing mediator, and it was as good a point to interrupt them as I’d get.
I shot down out of the sky at top speed, banking hard and feeling the grass blades run across my face as I almost blew the turn. I made it, though, and spun around to come at them in a blur of speed, inches off the ground.
I hit one of the guys holding back a fighter first, and my kick landed on the back of his knee. He lost his footing in a big way, and my momentum carried me through the next guy, the one he was holding back from fighting. He got his legs kicked out from under him, too.
I was going so fast I wasn’t sure if I was even visible to the guys I was attacking; I hoped not, for my sake. I swept past the mediator and swung an arm out to knock him over. I could hear the cartilage in his knee rip as I took him down.
I crashed feet-first into the last two. They were in a similar posture to the first two, with one of them holding the other back from fighting, except this time they were facing me. I went for knees, but by this point I was out of control. I’d already slammed into two guys, but only the first was a well-placed kick. The second was just collateral damage from my impact into the first.
I spun and slammed into the last two, only one foot making contact with one of them, solidly in his femur. It broke, which was something I’d never pulled off before (the femur is a damned strong bone) and he started to scream. I tumbled into him, knocking him and the other guy backward in a jumble from which I was the first to recover. I realized I was lying atop them both and quickly jabbed out with a hand that crushed the windpipe of the guy on top.
He made a choked noise, and then I pushed his head to the side and delivered another blow just like it to the second guy. I knew I’d hit him right when I crushed his throat. There was not much chance of mistaking that sickening sound.
I rolled to the side to disentangle myself from those two and saw the mediator going for the walkie-talkie at his hip. He had gotten to all fours, so I rolled toward him, coming to my knees and planting an elbow right in the back of his neck. It snapped, and he dropped. Three down.
Of the last two, I saw movement, one trying to shove the other off of him. One had managed to get a scream out, and it was loud enough that I was sorry I hadn’t cruised into his neck first. I’d never make that mistake again. I sprang up and leapt in a giant, belly-flop style move like something out of pro wrestling and came down on the back of the top guy. I heard his spine snap near the waist, heard him issue a muffled cry of pain.
That was all the time I could spare for him, though, and I threw his body to the side in order to deal with the last of them.
I needn’t have bothered.
This guy was already near death, panicked out of his mind. Looking down, I saw the answer in a half-second. When I’d smashed into him, I’d hit him so hard that his tibia and fibula (never can remember which is which) had shredded his calves. That had opened up both arteries in his legs, and he was bleeding to death, flailing around in a hot panic, but his breath was already going shallow as his mind caught up to what his body was telling it and started to put him into shock.
I wasn’t much for slow death, so I just reached down and broke his neck in one motion. I felt bad for it in that space of a second.
“Clear,” I uttered as I pulled back from the corpse I had just made. I stared down at the man, his eyes glassy, looking into my face.
“No, you’re not, Sienna!” Reed’s voice came back. “Get the guy with—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Another voice broke in, strong, scared, near panicked, and I turned to see the guy whose back I had just broken lying flat on the grass, his walkie-talkie in his hand. “Perimeter breach!” he shouted. “We’re—”
I kicked him in the head so hard it killed him, but it was too late. I could hear movement in the distance, the sound of men springing into action. The guard force preparing for our arrival.
And somewhere behind them, I knew, were the remnants of a group of one hundred metahumans who wanted me dead.
Chapter 45
Rome
281 A.D.
It was a hell of a throne room for not being a throne room. They may have been far from Palatine Hill, but this place was palatial nonetheless, all the glory of a winter or summer palace for the Emperor, all the splendor. Grandiosity was on full display and in full measure.