Force of ten sledgehammers slammed to the side of my jaw, snapping my head ninety degrees and sending minor hairline fractures across my skull. Through the bullet hole in the window, my gaze locked on the second assassin.

On a five-storey building six blocks from me, the wind whipped the knee long beard and brown jacket of a man holding a silenced sniper rifle. He was a gentleman of advanced years, wearing a top-hat and faded elegance as if he were the Lord of Beggars.

He looked past me, saluting at the dead grandma assassin, and hopping on a mobility scooter with which he began to roll away from the roof’s edge, likely retreating to attack me at a later time.

This, I would not allow.

I sprang into a full-speed chase, running across the streets slightly slower than an Olympic athlete due to my injury collection.

Distance to him was 1.4 kilometers and a sidewalk. It would take me roughly 3 minutes 35 seconds. If the elevator took 1 minute 30 seconds, the assassin would still have a generous head-start over me. More than enough to disappear, presuming he was an expert in concealing his tracks, which I had to assume he was.

I could always go faster and accumulate internal damage.

I could always let him go and be ready next time.

So I chose the detour C, took a sharp right, and vaulted over an alley fence. By treating a set of thin balcony railings as exercise bars, I performed basic Chad gymnastics cultivation reps, back flipping my way up to the roof.

Careful to not topple rooftop garderubns or ruin drying laundry, I weaved my way across the roof while gathering speed as I approached the edge. I leapt the gap, grabbed a railing, and made my way up and across leaping rooftops.

Just as the sniper rolled out of the building, I landed on the ledge above him. He took off his top-hat, mouthed ‘later’, and clicked a button. The man shot off, swerving between two former gangsters' vehicles and racing off with a turbo-charged mobility scooter. Startled by this, one of the cars crashed into a brick-wall.

I rushed down the side of the building and ran to the other car. Bouquets and houseplants filled the backseat of a luxury ride repainted brighter as a parade van. A former gangster now dressed in bright flower patterns stared at me, his eyes wide.

“T-t-titan? Can I help?”

“I need to borrow a car.”

After two seconds, the man and his flowers were all on the sidewalk and I turned the key in the ignition. Click. Radio turned on. I pressed the gas down with a Happyland indoor slipper.

Wrumm.

Rubber smoked as wheels turned. Static crackled.

WRUMM.

“Deja vu!” shouted the radio.

I released the handbrake and shot off after the fast distancing mobility scooter, dodging toppled trash-containers, furniture, and other junk that the apocalypse had filled the streets with.

“I've just been in this time before~”

The assassin took one sidelong glance at me before training a silenced pistol in my direction. Wobbling, the barrel locked onto my forehead. Shots rang in the air, scaring off a flight of pigeons.

Right, left, right. My hands danced on the steering wheel. Bullets cracked the windshield and tore through the headrest, inches from my head.

Tophat assassin scoffed, shot a glass door, and drove into a mall. A second later, I joined him. Dark abandoned shops came alive like ghosts in my car’s searchlights. Two red dots taunted me up ahead, right beside muted flashes of gunfire.

Left front wheel popped, and my car lurched. The distance he gained was enough to let the assassin drive into an elevator. A downward arrow flashed. I slowed to a halt, meeting the assassin’s gaze through the elevator’s thick glass.

Song in the radio intensified with the second chorus as I scanned the surroundings.

There! Fifty meters behind me, a set of escalator stairs.

WRUMM.

I reversed at full speed, then turned the wheel sharply and locked the wheels with a brake. After 180 spin, I put it on forward and pressed gas. The car took to air, flying several meters. “...Higher on the beat~” Metal whined and crunched when it landed on the rubber railings. They buckled under the vehicle’s weight, but held long enough to land me in the underground parking garage.

Plastic and cushioning tore off from the passenger side door and the window shattered as bullets rained through. Hot pain stabbed my thigh. A cut slashed across my brow.

He brought the mobility scooter right beside me for a better shot. Keeping one hand on the wheel, I raised a fist full of pebbles at the assassin and returned fire.

Engines revved.

Wheels burned in the empty parking lot.

Sounds of pebbles and gunfire echoed from concrete walls.

Muzzle flashes illuminated a grin underneath a grimy tophat.

His scooter gained dents.

New holes appeared in my ride. Engine coughed. I heard fluids running.

If the last assassin was a 4d chess battle, this was uno with guns for cards and we were both playing with hands full of pick-fours. Despite the risk of becoming a smooth-brain from the damage, I clenched my head muscles and tapped into Big Brain mode for a fraction of a second.

Tang of copper coated my gums. My vision reddened. I knew what to do.

While rapid-firing the pebbles, I slammed the car into his mobility scooter, pinning it to the side. He pressed a button, deploying wheel-spikes. The moment he came within reach, I kicked my door off its hinges, staggering the assassin for long enough to reach over, snap the spike, and jam it in his wheel.

Crunch.

While going 55km/h, the mobility scooter toppled forward. Its passenger had neither a seat belt nor helmet. Elderly bones made contact with asphalt at an unfortunate angle. A blink later, a two hundred kilogram mobility scooter rolled over him.

What remained was brown, red, and dead.

I shifted gears and drove the sputtering car out of the parking lot and back into the blinding sun, pondering how to repay the gangster turned florist for borrowing his vehicle.

***

Numbers flashed across a red-tinted display. Two crosshairs circled one another, homing in on the jittery image of an unnaturally masculine man sitting in a wartorn car. Crosshairs intersected.

“Hasta la vista~” whispered a boulderlike man in his senior years and pulled the trigger of an RPG launcher.

Nothing happened.

Then, faint pain. The man leaned back from his high-tech scope and looked at his bleeding hand, which had previously had an extra finger.

“Heh,” chuckled the man, rumbling. “Decided to take the job after all, did you?”

There was no answer. Wind tugged at the man’s tuft-hat and gray moustache. His lips twitched with a lop-sided grin, and the man lowered his RPG launcher.

“Thought I’d ask whether you’ve gone soft or senile, but you always were the silent type. Figure age won’t change that bit.”

From the corner of his eye, the man spied the faintest of silhouettes behind a flapping piece of white laundry. His eyes narrowed. His shovel-like hand wrapped around the handle of an enormous combat-knife.

“Always felt it should end like this. Tricks and Hats might’ve been fine doing their own thing, letting the old corpses rest in their closets. Living on like chums again. Complacent. Waiting for death.” The man snorted, slowly walking, eyes scanning the flapping fabrics. “Not like you and me.”

He spotted movement and painted cuts through a sheet. A gust blew the shreds away, revealing empty nothingness on the other side.

“Rraaaah!” the man bellowed, eyes jumping frantically to scan his surroundings. “I get it. He saved your granddaughter, and that’s all you have left. But the reward is cultivation. Real chinamagic. Potential centuries of extended lifespan. Healthy bones. Unfogged mind. Clear vision. Energy of youth.”

Nostalgia filled his smile and voice. “We could be young again, Tibs. Pick up where we left things. Run away from everything. Live like normal people in a cabin far, far away from here.”

He heard a crisp slash and felt a foreign object pierce his chest, ruining his heart.

“Guh!” Ground trembled as the massive assassin fell on his knees, blood pouring from the open wound, pooling in his throat.

“Heh. Never was able to bluff you, Tibs. Say hi to your little girl for me, will ya? Don’t think this uncle Deck will make it to the Christmas party this year.” He hacked blood as the man’s world began to blacken around the edges. “Guess that’s that. T’was a good run, wasn’t it Tibs?”

Thump.

The man lay as still as the concrete beneath him.

A hunched old woman with squinted eyes cleaned a simple blade with shivering hands, then sat next to the corpse of her old best friend and thought about life.

***

I didn’t return to my room in Happyland until well after the stars had twinkled across the dark tapestry above.

For letting me borrow his car, I gave the florist a turbo-charged mobility scooter and a mobile shoppe wagon I’d crafted from remnants of his car. With them, he could ride around and sell his flowers wherever he pleased.

I used the assassins’ guns to purchase two bouquets of funeral flowers and hauled the bodies all the way back to the asylum. Tibby, Nelly, and several others stood outside with the veiled body of an enormous man resting beside them.

We buried all three assassins to honor grandma Tibby’s old friends. I split the two bouquets into three, and Tibby lit candles by the graves. Despite being amoral no-goods who killed for money, they’d all still touched a few souls, and left behind a dash of good with all the bad.

While a forlorn mood hung over Nelly and Tibby, the rest of the asylum took a breath of relief. Doctors assured me that my hounds, Grog, and the alpha squirrel and his tree were all grievously wounded, but would make a full recovery if given time.

My own wounds, however, were not so simple.

A good chunk of my intestines had clogged up into a knot of mince-meat. It might heal, but never regain its full function again, picking away at my life-force. I’d also ruptured sensitive tissues in my brain, giving myself yet another wound that would never heal naturally.

Doctors and I gave myself a rough estimate of four months.

Four months, until I would die from complications from the accumulated damage to my internals.

Four months to finish Muscle-on-Muscle, Big-Brain, and Chadorgan stages.

Four months to finish the realm of Outer Chad.

I grinned when I went to bed that night, thankful to the assassins for igniting a fire under me, for Chads work best when under pressure.