The first vehicle didn't stop so much as arrive — nose-diving into a concrete pillar hard enough to crumple the pillar, not the car, which told Kazuki everything he needed to know about who was driving before the door even opened.
Titus Kaine stepped out like a man arriving at a restaurant he'd already decided he liked.
"Small world," he said. "Or small city, anyway. You should really stop bleeding in places with working cameras."
Kazuki felt the whole stairwell rearrange itself around a single, immediate priority: Darius couldn't run, Elena was unarmed, and Rina and Kenji were good but not built for absorbing kinetic energy back at someone whose entire power was kinetic energy. He did the math the way the suit had taught him to do it — not in seconds, in fractions of one.
"Rina. Get him to the far stairwell," he said, not looking away from Titus. "Kenji, go with them. Elena—"
"I'm not running," Elena said.
"That wasn't the plan I was building." He looked at her for exactly as long as it took to decide he believed her, which was less time than he expected it to take. "Then you're covering the door once they're through it."
Titus watched the whole exchange with the patient amusement of a man who'd already won this fight once and saw no reason the math would be different a second time.
"Same suit," he said. "Same arm, I bet, if I try. You didn't learn anything?"
"I learned not to hit you."
That got a flicker of something across Titus's face — not concern. Curiosity. He liked being hit. He'd built his entire war around it.
Kazuki didn't give him the chance to enjoy the wait.
He moved — not at Titus, past him, a blur that clipped the edge of the second vehicle's open door and sent it swinging shut on the arm of the operative still climbing out of it. The man went down with a sound that was mostly surprise. Not the fight Titus wanted. Kazuki intended to keep it that way.
"Coward's math," Titus said, and swung.
The punch didn't need to land to matter — Kazuki felt the pressure wave of it crack past his ear as he dropped and rolled under the follow-through, and even the near-miss made the air taste like ozone. Titus fed on impact. He didn't need to actually connect to remind everyone in the stairwell exactly how much he was carrying.
"Aeva. Now."
She was already moving, disc still in one hand, the other raised toward the concrete under Titus Kaine's boots.
The floor didn't crack. It just stopped being flat. A shallow, localized dip opened beneath him, no more than a few inches, and gravity did something it wasn't supposed to do in that six-foot circle, pulling harder, dragging his next step down half a second before his balance was ready for it.
Titus staggered. Not far. Far enough.
Kazuki closed the gap she'd bought him and didn't hit him. He grabbed the strap of Titus's vest and used every ounce of momentum the man had just lost to redirect him — face-first — into the pillar his own car had already cracked.
Concrete dust. A sound like a dropped piano. Titus didn't get up right away, which, for a man who fed on being struck, was its own kind of answer: there hadn't been an impact worth feeding on. Just physics, doing what physics did to a man whose balance had been stolen out from under him.
"That's cheating," he said, into the rubble, sounding almost delighted about it.
"Complain to a scientist." Kazuki was already backing toward the stairwell, watching the second operative recover his footing, watching Elena's silhouette in the doorway with something in her hand that hadn't been there a minute ago. "We're leaving. Tell Vane the math didn't work this time."
"He already knows it wouldn't. That's not why we're here." Titus pushed himself up on one arm, grinning through a split lip. "We're not here to win, kid. We're here to make you use everything you've got, in front of people who are very good at counting."
Kazuki went still for exactly one beat too long.
"Kazuki." Elena's voice, sharp. "Move."
He moved. They made the stairwell, sealed the door, and didn't stop until Neo-Tokyo's skyline had put three more blocks and a river between them and two wrecked cars nobody had bothered to chase them with.
It was only once they were clear — Darius stable, Rina counting heads, Kenji already scanning for a new safehouse — that the sentence caught up to Kazuki and sat down next to him like it intended to stay.
*We're here to make you use everything you've got, in front of people who are very good at counting.*
Not a fight. An audit.
Aeva found him staring at nothing and followed his eyes to the empty air where the thought was still sitting.
"What is it?"
"I think that wasn't Vane's plan at all," Kazuki said slowly. "I think it was Vaunt's."
[To Be Continued...]