The silence of the room thickened again, cut only by the static hiss of the television casting flickering lights on the wall.
Michael remained standing in the center of the room, but his attention drifted away from the unconscious body on the floor. Slowly, he raised his right hand to chest height and stared at his own palm. For a fraction of a second, the faint light seemed to waver: the clear, flawless skin of his fingers appeared covered by a thick, red, viscous fluid slowly dripping down the folds of his hand. Michael blinked once. In the next millisecond, the illusion dissolved, revealing clean skin, without any trace of blood.
Without showing any shock, he took a step forward and knelt beside Luiz Voolper. With a quick, surgical movement, devoid of hesitation, he wrapped his hands around the unconscious man's chin and the base of his skull. A dry crack echoed through the room. Voolper's heavy breathing ceased instantly, sealing the target's end.
Raniel remained seated in the armchair, watching every gesture in silence. There was no irony on his face this time; only an attentive gaze that captured the mechanical precision of the act.
Michael rose slowly. As he adjusted the cuff of his jacket, his mind submerged into a dense flow of thoughts:
Why continue? If the finish line offers neither absolution nor relief, what is the nature of the next step? He is right. The absence of an answer is not a justification, it is an escape. And each life ended is nothing more than a futile effort to fill a gap that logic cannot catalog.
His expression shifted subtly. It was not an expression of sadness or remorse, nor of satisfaction or relief; it was the complex weight of someone facing an uncomfortable truth, a distant gaze searching for meaning amidst his own emptiness.
— It's done — Michael said, his voice coming out low, but firm. — Let's get out of here.
— Finally — Raniel replied, getting up from the armchair and stretching his arms. — If I spent five more minutes in this place with the smell of stale beer, I'd ask you to break my neck myself.
They left the residence in silence, crossing the dark alleys of the neighborhood. During the walk, Michael's mind remained trapped on Raniel's words about Foxy and about the invisible cell he himself had built. Raniel, noticing his companion's introspection, broke the silence when he spotted a flickering blue neon sign on the next corner.
— There — Raniel pointed with his chin. — We need a neutral place. And I need a glass of anything that isn't tap water.
They entered the bar. The atmosphere was stuffy, impregnated with the smell of barley and cigarette smoke. At the counter and at the tables around, about twelve men of intimidating physical build, covered in tattoos and wearing leather jackets, were watching with absolute attention the broadcast of a decisive American football game on a suspended television.
Michael and Raniel took a corner table. Michael sat facing the entrance, maintaining an upright posture and his gaze fixed on the glass of drink the waiter had served, still immersed in the internal monologue that was eroding his certainties. Raniel, in turn, ordered a beer and began watching the screen with an amused smile.
In the last second of the game, the home team's quarterback threw an incomplete pass, decreeing the immediate defeat and elimination from the championship.
Raniel's reaction was instant. He let out a loud, mocking laugh that resonated throughout the establishment:
— What a ridiculous play! The guy managed to lose the game all by himself!
Silence fell like a blade over the bar. The sound of the broadcast was drowned out by the general discontent, and, one by one, all twelve tattooed men slowly turned their heads toward the corner table, fixing gazes loaded with hostility and violence on Raniel.
The twelve men remained staring at the table, hostility accumulating in the air in a palpable way. While the tension rose around them, Michael's gaze wandered again to his own hands resting on the wooden table.
For a second, reality around him distorted. Thick, dark blood began to pour from his palms, dripping onto the tabletop. In the blink of an eye, the entire bar plunged into absolute darkness; the screams of dying people echoed from all directions, a muffled chorus of suffering that seemed to emanate from inside his own mind.
A shrill crash — the fist of one of the customers slamming violently against the counter — shattered the hallucination, bringing Michael back to the real world in a fraction of a second. He blinked, his cold eyes refocusing on the yellowish, fetid lighting of the bar.
Raniel, oblivious or simply indifferent to the imminent danger, opened an even wider smile and unleashed a series of foul insults directed at the crowd and the collective intelligence of those present, crowning the speech with an acid joke about the fragile masculinity of the local fans.
The men's patience snapped.
The biggest of them, a brute with arms covered in tribal tattoos, pushed his chair back and marched with heavy steps to the corner table, stopping centimeters from Raniel, who remained seated, leaning back with a mocking smile on his face.
— Repeat what you said, you shit — the man growled, the vein in his forehead bulging.
— I said even a dog with no legs would play better than your team of useless idiots — Raniel provoked, tilting his chin.
The man threw a brutal punch toward Raniel's face. Without even getting up from his chair, Raniel tilted his torso millimeters to the side, letting the blow pass into the void, and delivered a dry, fast, surgical strike with his fingertips straight into the aggressor's trachea. The man choked instantly, his eyes rolling back before collapsing to the floor without air.
The whole bar turned into hell.
The other eleven men stood up in unison, grabbing broken glass bottles, wooden chairs, and improvised iron bars.
The brawl began.
Raniel jumped from his chair, turning the narrow space into a private war zone. Bottles flew and chairs shattered against the walls, but none of them found their target. With frightening fluidity, mixing martial arts and pure instinctive brutality, Raniel dodged, counterattacked, and knocked down the opponents one by one with spinning kicks, elbow strikes, and precise sweeps.
In less than two minutes, the bar floor was full of bodies groaning in pain, fallen among shards of glass and broken wood. Raniel adjusted the collar of his jacket, without even having his breathing rhythm altered or a single drop of sweat on his face.
While the carnage unfolded around him, Michael continued sitting in the same place, oblivious to the chaos, his eyes fixed on the wooden table and his mind still echoing the words that defined his invisible prison.