While Elisa was gathering the last bites on her plate, she pointed me out to Elena: "Look, my brother finally smiled!" and the two of them laughed together. And I tried to let myself go into this warm, ordinary moment, because this drunkenness of happiness relaxed me.
In the middle of our meal, shouting began to be heard from outside. At first we didn't pay attention — noise wasn't unusual in this part of the city; drunks, the sounds of shops closing, arguments breaking out now and then. But the sounds rose steadily, someone's scream was clearly heard, then the sound of something metal falling to the ground, then a woman's panicked, shrill voice.
Master Ren stood up and parted the curtain at the window slightly. The expression on his face changed all at once — that usual tired, calm expression turned into a sudden hardness in his eyes, his jaw locked.
"Stay here," he said, his voice the tone of a sharp order, closed to discussion.
But of course we didn't stay. I, Elena, even Elisa rushed out after him — all of us had already stood up at the same moment, knocking our chairs backward. The restaurant owner called out to us, "stop, don't go!" but we pretended not to hear.
In the street, a group of seven people, wearing black bandanas, with wooden clubs and metal pipes in their hands, were raiding a small market that was a family business. The market owner was lying on the ground, blood seeping from his face, and his wife was screaming and trying to protect him; their children — both small, maybe six or seven years old — were huddled together trembling in a corner, pure terror in their eyes.
"You were late with the money this month," one of the men in the group was saying, his voice full of a cold pleasure, waving his wooden club in front of the market owner. "You won't forget next time."
Master Ren lunged forward quickly, but before he could reach him he stopped as one of the group blocked his path; immediately after, two people latched onto him. Master Ren was normally very strong, I knew this from training. But at that moment he was both caught unawares and didn't see the weapon of the man coming from behind him. The last man, coming from behind while the others distracted him, brought his weapon down hard on Master Ren's head; it was something like a hammer, probably made of a durable metal. Master Ren dropped to his knees, and for a moment his eyes lost their focus — that's all. Thinking about it later, I would understand that even if he really had been stunned, that blow shouldn't have been enough to lay him out; but at that moment I was in no state to think about it.
I intervened by reflex too — just watching, looking at this sight and doing nothing, didn't fit at all with that new feeling growing inside me, perhaps empathy. It was as if my body had decided before I did. "Let him go," I said, and my voice sounded foreign even to my own ear, it was that serious, that sharp.
The gang leader turned to me, narrowed his eyes, then smiled, his teeth gleaming in the dark. He had a thick neck and an old scar splitting his left eyebrow in two. "Well, look at that, school kids," he said. "What a lucky night we're having."
Elena had already drawn her sword; her hands were trembling slightly but there was both fear and drive in her eyes. Elisa was standing behind me; I shouted "get back" to her but she didn't listen — she was gripping tightly the small wooden knife she always carried.
The fight started fast. The first attacker went straight for Elena, his club coming down in an arc through the air; Elena met it by cutting sideways, left the man two moves behind with her speed, and struck the back of his knee with the hilt of her sword. The man staggered and fell to the ground, but a second man took his place, this time more cautious, having concentrated his Chi in his arms, gripping the metal pipe in his hand with both hands.
I tried to deflect a man's metal pipe with my arm — it landed on my shoulder, and my shoulder muscle trembled with a sharp ache, but I clenched my teeth and stayed on my feet. Using my Control stat I predicted where the man's next move would come from, slid to the side and drove my elbow into his chest. The man leapt back out of breath, but a third came behind him, then a fourth; it was as if new ones kept emerging from the darkness.
One man swung the short knife in his hand at me; I bent backward by reflex, and the tip of the knife passed a few centimeters from my chest, slicing my shirt slightly. I concentrated my Chi in my feet and threw myself forward, brought the edge of my palm down hard on the man's wrist, and the knife flew out of his hand and fell to the ground. But at that exact moment a kick coming from behind landed on my waist; I fell to my knees, my breath cut off.
"Kai!" Elisa shouted, but Master Ren straightened up and ran toward her, pulled her back, and put himself as a shield between us.
Elisa, with her wooden knife, landed a hard blow on the leg of a man approaching her; the man staggered back shouting in pain — seeing that my sister had developed enough to defend herself by now lit a spark of pride inside me even in that moment of chaos. "Good hit!" I shouted at her, but at exactly that moment another man started approaching her, and I quickly cut in and blocked him.
The numerical superiority was obvious. There were more of them than us, and this was not an ordinary street gang. They used Chi; they were irregular, apparently they hadn't gone to any school, but they were dangerously strong; their stat points were close to ours and their numbers were greater. Techniques tested thousands of times in street fights, crude but effective. I neutralized one, cutting off his Chi flow with a hard blow to the inside of his wrist and making him drop the club in his hand; Elena wounded another, opening a deep cut on the man's arm with the tip of her sword.
But this wasn't enough for someone like us to do them damage. We began falling back fast, our backs against the market, against a wall. Meanwhile my eye slid to Master Ren, fighting the remaining four. His movements were clean, economical, he wasn't spending any extra force — but strangely, it was as if he were deliberately limiting his power. He was moving only enough to protect us, showing no more. At that moment I didn't understand why; maybe he didn't want to reveal his true strength in front of us, maybe there was another reason. It never even crossed the edge of my mind that the blow he had taken a short while ago might have been taken for the same reason.
One man tried to attack Master Ren from behind again, with a long knife in his hand; Master Ren, without turning at all, as if he had an eye in the back of his head, swung his elbow backward and landed it on the man's jaw, and the man collapsed to the ground instantly. That movement looked so fast, so natural, that no one watching could have noticed it wasn't an ordinary guard's movement — but I, at that moment, could sense the decades of experience behind it.
"Elisa, get behind me!" I shouted, while squeezing myself and my sister into a corner and at the same time deflecting a man's club with my arm; my arm had started going numb by now.
Elena, thanks to her speed, could almost fight a man on equal terms, but her breath was starting to give out, her movements were slowing, sweat was dripping from her forehead.
I heard Master Ren's voice — "Protect Elisa!" — and at exactly that moment I turned my head to the left to see Elisa's situation. And in that gap, a blow from the right side landed on my neck. The man coming from behind me, the one man I had missed, had brought his metal pipe down right below the nape of my neck.
Everything went dark before my eyes, my feet slid out from under me. The last thing I saw was Elisa's scream and Master Ren's hand trying to catch me — but it didn't reach. Then everything went black.
When I woke I was in a dark, damp room, my head throbbing, the taste of blood in my mouth. My hands were bound, my back leaning against a cold wall. Elena and Elisa were beside me, bound the same way; both of them were only just gathering their consciousness.
Master Ren wasn't there.
"Where are we?" I whispered; my throat was dry and in pain, and even speaking made my head ache.
"I don't know," said Elena, her voice trembling, her eyes wandering in the darkness as if searching for a way out. "But... Kai, I'm very frightened."
Elisa was crying, silently, trying to hold herself together, her shoulders shaking slightly. I was frightened too; however much I didn't want to admit it, there was a tightness in my chest, a trembling in my hands. But at the same time I was strangely calm — I knew Master Ren wouldn't abandon us, I knew it with a certainty I couldn't describe.