33. Earthly Aggression #2
Every man in the group was looking at him.
Every single one. And the quality of their attention had changed—it had thickened, concentrated, become something that pressed against Cass’s skin like heat from an open oven.
He didn’t understand it. He just knew it was bad.
He knew it the way a rabbit knew when the shadow overhead was a hawk—not through understanding but through every nerve ending in his body screaming wrong, this is wrong, whatever this is it’s wrong.
And he felt a strange pressure in his hands, like he wanted to punch something, but that wasn’t right. He didn’t punch things.
“What would you do?” one of the Berserkers asked, watching Cass with an expression that had too many teeth in it. “If we borrowed you. What do you think we’d have you do?”
“I don’t—” Cass’s voice was shrinking. He could feel it getting smaller, pulling inward, the way he used to get small in the Elders’ hallways when the energy was disharmonious and the safest thing was to take up as little space as possible.
“I don’t know. Whatever you need, I suppose.
I just want to leave with Riot. Please. Whatever the toll is, I’ll do it, and then we’ll leave. ”
“Whatever the toll is,“ the younger one repeated. Something was wrong with his smile. Something was very wrong with all of their smiles.
Across the distance, Cass could almost feel through the asphalt, through the arm holding him, through the air itself, Riot practically vibrating.
“He doesn’t know.” Cole said it to his men. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. The voice of a man confirming something’s value. “He genuinely doesn’t know what we’re asking.”
“Please let me go,” Cass whispered. “I don’t understand what you want. I’ll do the toll—just tell me what it is and I’ll do it and we can leave—”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Riot said, and the man with the rifle shifted his weight because Riot’s stance had changed. “You are going to put my Omega down. You are going to step away from him. And then I am going to leave with him, and everyone here is going to live.”
My Omega. Again. The warmth bloomed again in the worst possible place at the worst possible time and Cass hated his body for its timing and its priorities.
Cole looked at Riot. Really looked—the claws, the stance, the vibrating stillness, the gold pressing at the mesh. He was doing the math. Five armed men versus one Endeavor Berserker with claw weapons. The math should have been obvious.
But something in Cole’s expression said the math wasn’t as simple as it looked.
“Look, you’re lucky you caught us on a day when we’re all pretty calm, but my boys and I run on expired suppressants and our hands for entertainment. We don’t want to keep him, we’re just going to borrow him,” Cole said with a shrug. “You’ll get him back. We—”
“Sage,” Riot was pressing the talk button on the walkie, his voice disturbingly calm, “green light.”
CRACK.
The rifleman’s shoulder jerked sideways. His hand spasmed. The rifle barrel swung wide, away from Riot’s chest, toward the sky, and before the echo of Sage’s shot finished bouncing between the overpasses, Riot was moving.
He did not go for Cole first.
He went for the man holding Cass.
The distance between them—fifty feet, maybe sixty—vanished.
Riot covered it in a dead sprint that accelerated past anything a normal human body could produce, each stride eating six feet of asphalt, and Cass had time to think oh and then the Berserker holding him must have realized what was coming and dropped him.
Cass hit the ground hard, landing on his hip and elbow as the asphalt punched the air out of him. He rolled, instinctively, away from the boots—from the impact he could feel building in the ground like a freight train arriving.
The Berserker who’d held him was big and looked like a man who’d survived years in the Static Zone through violence and size and the general disinclination of other people to fight him. Riot hit him like a wall falling.
The clawed tips of Riot’s gloves went into the man’s chest like a punch with extended fingers, sinking deep and then ripping sideways, and the sound was wet and structural.
Then the man was falling and Riot went with him, on top of him, the claws working, tearing, and the screaming stopped but the sounds didn’t because Riot was still—
He was still—
The man wasn’t moving anymore and Riot was still going.
His hands—the claws—punching into the body beneath him with a mechanical repetition that had nothing to do with fighting.
This wasn’t combat. This was obliteration.
A Berserker tearing apart the thing that had touched Cass, reducing it to something that could never touch anyone again, and the sounds were wet and final and Riot’s hands kept moving.
Cass scrambled backward on his hands and his heels. Three feet. Five feet. His back hit the sedan’s tire and he stopped because there was nowhere else to go. His eyes wouldn’t close. He wanted them to close. They wouldn’t.
Two of Cole’s men charged. One with a pipe, one with a machete. They came from opposite sides—coordinated, practiced—and Riot rose from the ruin of the first man and met them.
The pipe connected across Riot’s shoulders and Riot just took it. His body absorbed the impact the way a boulder absorbs rain—it happened, it didn’t matter. He turned into the swing and his hand caught the pipe-wielder’s arm at the elbow and the arm came apart.
Not cut. Not cleanly. The claws raked through muscle and caught bone and wrenched, and the joint separated with a sound like a branch being torn from a living tree, and the man fell and Riot dropped with him.
The claws kept working. Into the man’s shoulder, his chest, the throat—opening him in pieces, methodical and unhurried, like a thing that had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it.
The pipe-wielder was screaming and then he was gurgling and then he was silent and Riot’s hands were still moving, still tearing, and the machete-wielder was three feet away and swinging for Riot’s exposed back—
CRACK. From the overpass. The machete-wielder’s leg folded. He went down mid-swing, the blade clattering away, and Sage’s shot gave Riot the seconds he needed to finish what he was doing.
To finish.
Cass had his hand over his mouth. He didn’t remember putting it there.
His stomach was trying to evacuate through his throat.
He’d seen drawings of this—the Elders’ illustrations, the cautionary images from Earthly Aggression seminars.
Berserkers in a “red state”. The violence that didn’t stop.
The body that kept going after the threat was neutralized because the rage didn’t have an off switch, it just had fuel, and the fuel was everything.
The drawings had been sanitized. Neat pen strokes. Clinical angles. And Riot’s rage was gold.
They had not prepared him for what a person looked like after a Berserker was finished with them.
Riot rose. Turned. Found the machete-wielder trying to crawl away with a leg destroyed, trailing blood.
Riot walked to him the way you’d walk to a task you’d been putting off.
Unhurried. Inevitable. Cass pressed his face into his knees.
He couldn’t watch this one. He could hear it.
The sounds carried. Wet impacts and the tearing and a scream that scaled up and up and then cut off and the wet sounds continued after the screaming stopped.
A sound made him lift his head in time to see a fourth Berserker come around the sedan’s hood. Moving fast, knife out, heading for Riot’s exposed side, and Cass’s mouth opened and the sound that came out was—
“BEHIND YOU!”
Riot spun. The knife caught him across his ribs, opening his shirt and skin, blood immediate and vivid—and then the claws found the knife-wielder and this one—this one Cass watched because it happened right in front of him, ten feet away, close enough to feel the spray.
Riot caught the man’s knife arm. Wrenched it.
The elbow reversed with a sound like a wet stick breaking and the knife fell and the man’s scream hadn’t finished forming before Riot’s other hand took his face.
Literally took it—the claw tips sinking into the skin of his jaw, his cheek, and Riot pulled, and the man went down and Riot was on top of him.
CRACK.
Not from the overpass. Cole, with one arm having caught a hit from somewhere, aiming a pistol at the space between Riot and the sedan. The shot hit the asphalt near Riot’s knee. Not aiming to hit. Aiming to distract.
Riot’s head snapped up.
“I yield.” Cole’s voice was steady. The steadiness of a man who understood exactly what he was looking at and had made the calculation that pretending otherwise would kill him. He dropped the pistol, his remaining hand raised as he backed towards a vehicle. “I yield. It’s over.”
Riot’s body turned toward Cole. The claws flexed. One step—
And then a hand closed around Cass’s left arm from behind and dragged him backwards, underneath the car.
Cass’s body pivoted against the tire and his shoulder wrenched, the joint grinding against the frame of the car, bone against metal, and something POPPED. White-hot. A sound tore out of him that was more animal than human, ripped from somewhere below thought.
His right hand found broken glass on the asphalt.
His fingers closed. He drove the shard up and into the soft tissue of the man’s forearm—into the underside where the veins ran close—and the glass went in with a resistance that was nothing like cutting paper or fabric.
It gripped. It held. And then it gave, and the blood came.
The Berserker screamed and jerked backward, the glass embedded, blood sheeting down his arm.
Cass stared at his own hand, halfway beneath the car in shock. Blood on his fingers. Warm. Not his.
I did that. My hand did that without asking me first.
CRACK. From the overpass. Cass heard a body hit the ground.