Boulder grabbed Leo by the neck and slammed him on the kitchen counter. The fat man took a nearby knife and went directly to stab the redhead through the eye socket of his mask.
In the last second, Leo grabbed a wooden cutting board just right next to him and blocked the attack. The blade sank and bent on the wood as the hero twisted the knife out of the thug with one hand and threw it with the cutting board across the room.
Two open-hand slaps struck the thug on the ears, discombobulating him and relaxing his grasp enough so Leo could get out of his hold. He quickly grabbed a shitty steel pan that was lying around the counter and smacked Boulder right in the face with it while the thug was still disoriented from the double clap.
CLANK
A few teeth flew across the room as the pan bent in half. "You fucking bastard!" Boulder yelled and then grabbed the pot with boiling water.
SPLASH
There was an instant before the pain hit, a moment where the nerves still needed to catch up with what just had happened as most of them were burned before sending an order. "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Nigredo and Leo yelled at the same time from sheer agony. The alien tried his best to cover his whole face as fast as possible, but the heat still struck him. Saving him from second-degree burns all over his face, just getting first-degree burns but red skin that hurt like a bitch was still a lot better than basically having his head turned into a massive blister.
The thug only waited for the steam to clear out before punching Leo right in the stomach. He bent from the sudden strike and then was grappled back into the stove by the head, those two muscular hands covered with calluses clamping around his skull and trying to shove his head right onto the stove still on the burner to make his hair catch on fire.
Instead of struggling and while still trying to recover from the burning pain on his face, Leo just turned off the burners before the fire tongues could lick his hair. A small victory that was followed by the thug grabbing the pot from the floor and starting to smash it on his head.
CLANK CLANK CLANK
Over and over, denting the metal around his face so much that the ballistic mask gave up, and with that, Leo's nose and some of his teeth.
The hero would die right now if he didn't do anything. So, a small tendril came out of the tips of his fingers and quickly grabbed a fork and put it in his hand.
("Quick! The fork to the neck!") Nigredo barked, seeing the victory right in their grasps.
He remembered. That summer, the blazing sun, the annoying humidity, the last time that he saw him . . . his body getting eaten by that wooden box, and then . . . he was gone. Layers upon layers of dirt separating both.
The first time that Leo was aware of death in the most mundane way possible.
The redhead's arm swung like a snake trying to catch a mouse, and the fork landed right in the left ear, creating a squirt of blood as the metal fangs bit the soft flesh.
"AHHHHHHHHH! My ear!" Boulder yelled in sheer pain and desperation, his balance fumbling for a second and the ruined pot dropping to the ground as he quickly went to tear the fork from his ear.
("Why?! You should have aimed for the neck!") The alien chastised him.
("I can't!") Leo barked back as his hands were trembling and his ears were ringing from the beating he just got.
With the bloody fork in his hand, Boulder went to stab Leo right in the eye; however, the lack of balance and the accumulated damage on the skull were making the thug more sluggish. Leo could see it: the sweat, the bloodshot eyes, the swelling starting to disfigure his face. The thug was as fucked as him.
He side-stepped out of the way, dodging just by an inch, and then, while on the fatso's side, the hero clenched his fist and put all his upper body strength into a single haymaker right into the bloody ear.
Boulder began to fall on the floor, his body tumbling down, but then, as Leo was trying to step out of the way, the fat man grabbed his ankle the second that his huge body crashed with the wooden floor.
"Not . . . yet . . ." Boulder mumbled, and just before Leo could step on the hand and break it, the thug yanked him to the floor with him, making the hero hit the back of his head against the ground, and then he felt them.
Boulder's hands coiled around his neck as he went straight for a strangulation, putting all his strength into squeezing the life out of Leo. ("How . . . is he . . . so strong . . .") Leo gurgled inside his mind, wondering how that broken hand could exert so much pressure as it was cutting the oxygen and blood flow toward his brain.
Lubbing his way out of this position was hard to impossible, at least with his hands focusing on his neck. Choking Boulder was also useless since the man had a thick neck; from this position, a chokehold was impossible while he was under him.
"Gggggggnnnnnnnnnnhhhh," Leo struggled and then began to wail on the man's head with his fists. Over and over with his bloody knuckles stabbing the left and right of Boulder's skull. What would give in first? The thick thug skull or the hero's neck?
("Don't worry, I got you!") Nigredo yelled inside Leo's head as she did her magic.
After all, the alien was all over his body, on the inside of his skull, in his blood, in his muscle fibers . . . she could also summon tentacles at will. So Nigredo made a little bypass between the rest of the body and Leo's head by slithering a brown tendril that was camouflaged with the dirty floor all the way from his shoulder toward his scalp.
Not enough oxygen and blood to make his neck obsolete, just enough to give him an extra edge for him to eventually, with his two hands joined together as a hammer, come down and crack the boulder.