The bar now consists of one part rubble and two parts fuck you. With the control unit for the subsonic paralyzers destroyed, the customers of Jack’s bar are no longer restrained by the confusion of their own muscles. Now, they’re reacquainting themselves with freedom of movement, and it appears that they’re intent on exercising that freedom on Jack … violently.

Chairs are tossed aside and tables flip as the mob swarms the bar. The scene is an angry, heavily armed version of a pack of hungry three-year-olds descending on a lone cookie.

After the briefest of pauses in a shock-induced paralysis of their own, Jack and Zeke bolt in opposite directions. Zeke leaps back to the ceiling trusses and Jack rolls backward to the space behind the bar.

He lands on his knees and keeps low while searching underneath the bar top. Jack’s goal is mounted right there: Plan B. That’s what the old man had engraved on the stock of his double-barrel break-action shotgun. It’s almost completely useless.

The barrel and firing mechanism are in perfect working order, but that’s not much help without ammo. Filling shells takes time. The luxury of time isn’t something Jack’s had since the old man tapped out. However, that solid walnut stock is still a remarkably effective cudgel, especially if anyone attacking doesn’t know how ineffective it is as a gun.

Crouched behind the bar, Jack pauses a beat and takes a breath. He closes his eyes and preps himself for what will likely be the shortest fight of his life, and probably the last. If he’s lucky, maybe he’ll get killed before they start tearing off his arms and legs as personal trophies.

He shakes the image from his mind and opens his eyes. Those thoughts don’t help no one.

He looks down at the beat-up break-action shotgun in his lap, his index finger tapping the aged trigger guard. Probably too late for bluffing. Clinching Plan B’s barrel like a club, Jack pops up from his stoop behind the bar and swings wildly, hoping for the off-chance that he’ll hit one or more of his former customers as they attempt to climb over.

Whiff! Nothing.

Jack stands, perplexed. Moments ago he was absolutely sure that he was going to be literally torn apart and shown his own entrails by a vengeful mob of former customers. Now all of them—nearly a dozen capable and formidable mercenaries and fighters—lie strewn about the room like bloody, discarded laundry.

How long was I behind the bar? Couldn’ta been more than a few seconds. Jack scowls, confused by the carnage that’s gifted him with a few more minutes of breathing time.

“Where is she?”

The low, grumbling voice is unsettling. It’s as if the sputtering thuds of a heavy motorcycle engine had passed through a sausage grinder and got covered in tar. Jack blinks as he turns toward the voice. Holy hell, this guy has a tiny head.

It’s a strange thought for someone so close to being killed, but it can’t be helped. The guy does have a tiny head—well, relative to the rest of him. Emerging through the detritus of the bar’s newly created side entrance, this is quite possibly the largest merc to ever enter Jack’s bar. Tall. Broad. And that weird thickness where you can’t tell if it’s muscle or fat. But despite the sheer mass of the guy, his head is strangely disproportionate, like an unshelled peanut stuck to the top of a combat-ready grapefruit.

And this guy—this peanut-domed merc—is most certainly combat-ready. His body features all manner of tune-ups and augmentations in addition to his personal arsenal of weaponry. Both his right arm and leg appear to have been bionically replaced, and he’s got a chembraid woven throughout his left side, serving his body with an on-demand menu of steroids, hormones, and other “better living through chemistry” cocktails. Combine that with shoulder- and wrist-mounted cannons and blades, and Jack decides this is not someone he wants to screw around with. He’s big, destructive, and worst of all, his gear probably makes him very fast despite his size.

Furthermore, the guy isn’t alone. Three other mercs stalk the interior of the bar. They have more reasonable proportions, but appear no less formidable. In fact, based on where they’re positioned, it’s apparent that these three are the ones responsible for laying out everyone in the bar.

“Where?” Peanut repeats, impatience brimming.

“Where what?” Jack furrows his brow, genuinely confused.

“The girl. Where is she?”

Girl? Here? It’s not that Jack’s bar never has female patrons. Hell, nearly half of his customer base consists of women, but those grizzled messes aren’t exactly the sort of ladies he’d call “girls;” he’d barely call them ladies. And as merc women, it’s likely that anyone in their presence who happens to utter the word “girl” is going to get a knife through the neck. This is Bule. It’s not exactly the kind of place where a girl—

Ohhhhh! Jack smiles at his sudden realization. He might not get killed today after all.

“You’re in the wrong place to find a girl, sir. Maddy Shard’s Red Light is on the lower side of town.”

“You think you’re funny?”

Oh damn. Wrong answer.

“Don’t fuck with me, boy! I’m not looking for a lay, I want the bitch I just punched through the—”

The angry verbal assault on Jack’s horribly wrong conclusion is interrupted by a bottle of bourbon smashing against the wall just behind Peanut, only just missing his tiny head.

Dammit, Zeke, you little jerk. Jack snaps a glare to his right. You’re gonna get us both killed.

Only, that’s not Zeke. He’d be smart enough to choose something cheaper to throw. Instead, standing among the rubble that used to be the far end of the bar, there’s a woman—no, a girl; she can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen years old. She’s also quite a bit more attractive than the cows that typically china-shop his bar. A trickle of blood oozes from somewhere behind her hairline. Her hair itself is a dark, matted mess, knotted and choked into dreadlocks of sweat and dust with streaks of red running throughout. A tattered, dark red cloak is clasped about her neck. Its folds drape over her right shoulder and arm as she reaches for the wall, steadying herself.

For the briefest of seconds, Jack catches a flash in her eyes, like sparks from flint struck by an emerald. Though her body language says she’s recovering from being knocked through a wall, her eyes betray that she’s surveying the space and planning her next move.

There’s barely enough time to process what happens next. She starts in a low sprint with her left hand over her hood’s clasp, charging at the nearest of the three mercs in Peanut’s crew, a muscle-bound thug with cybernetic eye replacements and a mean-looking rifle. In no time at all, she’s up near his face, practically nose-to-nose. Her cloak flutters behind her, still catching up. Before the cloak loses momentum, she lowers her head and releases the cloak’s clasp.

In that motion, the cloak’s hood flips forward and over the merc’s head, obscuring his vision as she escapes from underneath. Not stopping, she grabs the back of his head with one hand and pulls it forward into her other arm’s elbow. There’s a muffled crackle in the folds of the cloak. Something in the merc’s face—probably one of his amped-up eyes—shatters under the hood. He slumps forward a bit, but there’s no time to recover. The other side of his face meets the girl’s knee. Likely unconscious, possibly worse, the merc flops to his back when she releases his head.

Her eyes flit down to a discarded knife. It looks like the blade Shooter was using before all this chaos started. Dropping to a crouch to pick up the weapon, she launches herself at the next merc. This one’s a rough-looking woman with more scar tissue on her face and arms than skin. An array of organic hoses connect a fluid pouch in her back to couplings on her forearms.

Jack cringes. This is going to get expensive.

He’s seen that kind of bio-rig tune-up before. Those couplings route to nozzles between the thumb and forefinger of each of the merc’s hands. By flexing the muscle tissue grafted to the pouch in her back, she can pressurize the flammable fluid and direct it out of the nozzles embedded in her hands. With a flick of the strikers fused with her fingertips, this woman can instantly become a human flamethrower and lay waste to everything around her. A literal Hot Mess.

However, the fire-wielding merc never gets the chance. The brutal young girl is on Hot Mess in an instant, delivering a stiff shoulder-check. Hot Mess reels backward and the girl drops to a crouch. She spins with a leg extended, sweeping the fire merc’s feet out from beneath her. Hot Mess falls and the girl stands up, raising her knife. The flamethrower merc gets a long gash through most of her left side, severing a large number of the organic hoses to her left arm.

Jack exhales, relieved that the fight with Hot Mess hasn’t resulted in his bar going up in flames.

Not waiting to be put on the defensive, Peanut’s third subordinate launches an attack of his own. This merc appears to be more lightly armed than his counterparts. He has a pair of pistols strapped to his back, but otherwise his only other weapons are a pair of batons, each roughly an arm’s length long and as thick as a chair leg. They have a kind of shiny finish that makes them look out of place. High gloss isn’t something a merc usually wants on their weapons. The merc comes in low, attempting to scissor the girl’s legs with his batons. She avoids his attack with a light hop. Her descent, however, is anything but light. Instead of fully leaping clear, she stays within arm’s-reach—in fact, exactly arm’s reach—and drops her feet together on one of his wrists.

Blam! A small explosion erupts from where his baton hits the ground. The wooden floor is singed black.

Shit. That shiny finish on the batons isn’t some fancy liquid veneer. It’s a percussive gel. That stuff detonates with any kind of sharp force. The young ball of dreadlocked violence apparently already knows this from whatever fighting they did prior to entering the bar. She seizes the merc’s free arm and swings it—and the baton he’s still holding—to the ground near the still-recovering Hot Mess. The baton strikes the ground and the burst from the gel ignites the pool of fluid from her severed hoses.

FWOOM!

The explosion rips a hole to the bar’s basement. Jack barely has enough time to duck back behind the bar and avoid the force of the blast.

Who the hell is this chick? What do they want with her? And why can’t they do this shit somewhere besides my friggin’ bar? Jack’s mind spins with so many questions, it’s difficult to tell if that’s what’s throwing off his equilibrium, or if it’s the ringing in his ears from the blast.

He scrambles over the bar, Plan B still in hand, and stumbles over to the cavernous new hole in his floor. Holding his breath, he peeks over the edge to see the extent of the damage.

Crap. This is going to take forever to fix.

Jack raises his head from looking down the hole. Peanut and all three of his underlings lie around the perimeter, immobile, unconscious, possibly worse than that. Well, maybe “worse” isn’t so bad in this case. Jack swivels around, still looking. Where did she—

The thought is cut short by a loud creak and a sudden crash as the flooring under Jack gives way, dropping him into the bar’s basement.