Chapter 20: You Should Believe It. Because I Really Mean It.
Hammerhead had built his reputation on being the first person in any given room to resort to violence. What he had not built any capability for was someone coming at him with words at that speed and volume without pausing for breath. Matthew's verbal dismantling of his entire position had left him momentarily without a response.
He got over it quickly. If he couldn't think of a comeback, he would skip that step.
"Matthew. I gave you a chance."
"You chose not to take it. Die here, then." He raised the weapon.
"Die here? Me?" Matthew's expression did not carry anything resembling fear. What it carried was something considerably colder. "I don't think so."
He had barely finished saying it when the street detonated.
Something came off the rooftop to the right without any warning. The word "figure" did not quite cover it. It was more accurate to say that a mass approximately the size of a small vehicle arrived at ground level at speed, landing directly in the densest cluster of Magia Gang members, and the results were immediate and extensive.
"What — is that an earthquake?!"
"My legs! My backside! I can't feel my backside!"
"Your ass is on my face! Get it off! Get it off!"
"What is that thing?! What is that?!"
"Don't come closer! Don't—"
Dozens of weapons opened up simultaneously. The muzzle flashes strobed through the debris cloud, giving brief and unwelcome glimpses of something still moving through the crowd. The gang members had firearms and they were using all of them. Against what was moving through them, the result was approximately what would happen if children threw toys at a structural wall.
A spray of blood launched from the cloud.
A head followed immediately after it, still attached to a neck and a significant portion of a torso, traveling fast in the direction of the group that had been moving to flank Matthew from behind. It connected. Several people were knocked off their feet by the impact. Bones contributed sound to the overall acoustic environment. Those who had not been knocked down immediately raised weapons and attempted to engage the thing in the smoke.
From the shadows on both sides of the street, more shapes emerged.
They moved low and fast, with the particular quality of things that had been built specifically for the purpose of moving toward prey rather than away from it. Scales, wet and reflecting the streetlight. Claws at the ends of their fingers that made the question of whether they could tear through a human body purely rhetorical. The aggregate atmosphere of their presence was something that registered in the nervous system before the eyes had fully processed what they were seeing.
"What the — what ARE those things?!"
"Lizard people?"
"Incorrect," Matthew said.
His voice came through the chaos without strain. "They're called Hunters. Mass-produced B.O.W.s. Biological weapons, if you prefer the full term."
He checked to see if anyone was still in a position to receive this explanation.
Where the people who had been asking the question were standing, there was now pink water and various things floating in it.
"Matthew Lawrence!"
Hammerhead came out of the smoke at an undignified pace, considerably less composed than he had entered the street. His Thompson's barrel had been bent into a shape that made it nonfunctional. His blue suit was heavily decorated with other people's blood. The oil-slicked hair had been thoroughly rearranged. One of his eyes was no longer working.
He looked at Matthew with the expression of a man who needed someone to be responsible for what had just happened.
"I run the security division," Matthew said, with the mild tone of someone stating something self-evident. "Having a few capable bodyguards is reasonable."
"Bodyguards?! You're calling those things bodyguards?!"
"I can call a steamroller a bodyguard if I feel like it."
Hammerhead had no useful response to this.
The gunfire was winding down. The number of people capable of producing gunfire had dropped significantly.
A large hand passed through the smoke and dispersed it.
The T-103 Tyrant stepped into the open. It moved with the mechanical, purposeless quality of something that had been built for a function and was executing that function, each footstep landing with a weight that felt physical even at a distance. It was roughly the height and width of a black iron support column, and it looked at things the way a piece of infrastructure looks at things: without opinion.
This was the Pass reward Matthew had received for preventing the Raccoon City disaster. The Beta Hunters were as well, though the Magia Gang had not provided enough resistance to require more than a fraction of what was available.
Behind the Tyrant, the evidence of recent activity was distributed across a wide area. Some of it was identifiable as having previously been people. Some of it required context clues. The blood-to-everything-else ratio was distinctly weighted toward blood.
The Tyrant's dead grey eyes found Hammerhead, who was missing an eye and covered in his employees' remains. It began to move.
Matthew raised one hand and stopped it.
"Hammerhead," he said, in a different tone than before. Almost conversational.
"I hear your head is particularly hard." A pause. "Funny thing. Mine isn't exactly soft either."
He made a come-here gesture.
Hammerhead looked at the Tyrant. He looked at the Hunters, who were watching him with the patient attention of something that had not been told to stop yet and was waiting. He weighed his options.
Then something in his expression made a decision.
He was not going to beg.
He charged.
His approach was simple. He had one reliable technique and it had served him well for years. The headbutt was not a complicated maneuver, but with a vibranium plate it did not need to be. At full speed he could stop a moving vehicle with his skull. Against a human being the structural damage was comprehensive and fast.
Matthew pulled the Glock.
Two rounds into the kneecaps, back-to-back, while Hammerhead was still moving.
Hammerhead hit the ground face-first with a sound that summarized the situation clearly.
Two more rounds took out the arms. One more addressed the remaining leg.
By the time it was over, Hammerhead had one functional body part above the shoulders.
"You're not fighting fair!" he managed, from the ground. The outrage in his voice was genuine. "You said your head was hard too! Why didn't you use it? And if you were going to use the gun, why didn't you aim for my head even once?! You hit everything except my head!"
"A martial arts grandmaster who doesn't use the weapon in his hand?" Matthew holstered the Glock. "That's not how you get to be a grandmaster." He looked down at Hammerhead. "Also, you actually believed what I said? You just took it at face value?"
He tilted his head slightly.
"In that case. Earlier, when I said I'd plant you in the ground and have you cosplay as a root vegetable. Do you believe that?"
Hammerhead thought about this for a moment.
"...No."
Matthew smiled. It was the specific kind of smile that made people wish he had not.
"You should. I genuinely meant it."
The Umbrella vehicles arrived shortly after. The crew that got out of them had clearly done this kind of work before. They removed the necessary equipment, worked through the site methodically, and were finished in a timeframe that compared favorably to a professional cleaning service. Hammerhead went into one of the vehicles. Nikki went into another.
By the time police sirens became audible in the distance, the street looked like a street.
Under a lamp post, in a puddle, Officer Walrus had been playing unconscious for the past several minutes. He had made the executive decision, upon regaining his senses partway through the previous sequence of events, that the optimal personal survival strategy was to remain horizontal and uninteresting until whatever was happening finished happening.
The sirens were getting closer. Walrus decided it was probably safe now. He climbed carefully to his feet, dripping, and began silently formulating a personal vow to remove tonight from his memory entirely.
A voice spoke from approximately one meter away.
"Walrus. That took real nerve tonight. I mean that."
Walrus's entire body responded before his brain did.
"I'm looking for security staff. Interested?" A brief pause. "Annual salary: two hundred thousand."
[System: "Walrus" has been genuinely moved by your sincerity. He intends to serve you for the rest of his life.]