FULL GEAR — Chapter 21: "Brute"
The events leading up to the punch, in order:
He had woken up that morning in Room 304 with the paper cranes turning. He had eaten whatever Dean made. He had walked across North Valor for two and a half hours because Lyra had taken the car. He had climbed fourteen flights of stairs in a condemned building with a phone flashlight. He had found the package.
He had grabbed someone's hair.
The girl had hit him through a wall.
These were the facts of his evening as Herro Touya currently understood them, lying in the debris of a partition wall on the fourteenth floor of an abandoned high-rise in the North Terra Urban District, looking at a water stain on the ceiling that was shaped like something he still couldn't identify.
(Okay,) he thought. (Okay. The girl hit me.)
He didn't have much more time to think about it.
Footsteps. Close. Getting closer on the other side of the debris field he was lying in, and underneath the footsteps a different sound — the specific creak of someone shifting their weight forward, the preparation that preceded something coming down.
He looked up.
A boot.
Herro threw himself backward into a backflip, the motion pulling his body off the floor a half second before the sole of a combat boot came down on the space his chest had just occupied. The impact cratered the floor tile. He landed in a low crouch six feet back, both hands catching the ground, and looked up.
The girl was already turning toward him.
She flipped her hair — a single practiced motion, the bob settling back into place — and fixed him with amber eyes that had moved past fury and arrived somewhere considerably more focused. Her posture was forward. Her hands were loose at her sides in the specific way hands were loose when they were about to stop being loose.
"Who are you," she said.
"I'm—" He straightened. "My name is—"
"My name is—" she repeated, in a pitch approximately three notes higher than his, her expression arranged into something between mockery and contempt.
He stared at her.
"I was trying to answer."
"I was trying to answer," she said, same pitch, same expression.
A beat.
"I'm Herro Touya," he said, carefully. "I'm a member of a Family Unit. We were sent here to retrieve a package from this floor and I reached for what I thought was the package and I—"
"I'm Herro Touya," she said. "I'm a member of a Family Unit. We were sent here to retrieve a package from this floor and I reached for what I thought was the package—"
"Are you going to do that every time I speak."
"Are you going to do that every time I speak."
He took a breath.
"Okay," he said. "My unit is called Ironhide. We're based in North Valor. This is a sanctioned retrieval mission and I have documentation if you—"
The punch came before the sentence finished.
He moved. Barely. The fist passed his jaw close enough that he felt the wind displacement, and he backed up three steps and put a toppled desk between them.
"What is wrong with you—"
"I have never heard of a Family Unit called Ironhide," she said. Not shouting now. Just flat. Certain. "Which means you made that up."
"I didn't make it up."
"Second." She held up a finger. Her nail polish was chipped at the tip, he noticed, which seemed like an odd detail to register given the circumstances. "There is no way your name is Herro. That sounds like something someone made up when asked to name a hero on the spot."
"It's my actual name—"
"It sounds lame as hell."
"It's a real name—"
"Third." Another finger. "The package on this floor is my mission. Which means you are either a Jackal who found our mission brief or the worst liar I've encountered this month." She tilted her head. "Both options end the same way."
Herro stood behind the desk and thought about the situation.
She was furious. She had been furious since the moment the lights came on and possibly before that, which suggested the ahoge situation had accelerated something that was already at temperature rather than created it from nothing. She moved like someone for whom violence was the first language and everything else was translation. She reminded him of something.
(She's like a Terran badger,) he thought. (Just angry and belligerent and completely committed to the direction she's already moving.)
(She actually reminds me of Hilda.)
This thought was immediately followed by the awareness that thinking this was probably not going to help him.
"I'm Miyu Yamashita," she said. "And you are on my mission."
Herro heard the name.
His brain did something specific with it — a slow, low-grade activation, the way names sometimes worked when they were filed somewhere that wasn't immediate memory. Yamashita. He knew that name. He'd heard it somewhere. Not recently. Before Ironhide, before North Valor, before the detention center—
(Yamashita.)
He looked at her.
(Yamashita.)
He looked at her more carefully.
The golden hair. The amber eyes. The choker. The posture that was forward and aggressive but also — and this registered only now that he had the name to attach it to — carried something underneath it that was very specific to people who had spent years being told how to stand.
(Holy—)
(She's a princess.)
The Yamashita line. The White Lion Royal Family. The dominant hereditary monarchy of Terra, the decisive military power of the First Terran War, the institution that had built the Empire from the wreckage of everything that came before it. King Lionel Yamashita. The royal bloodline.
He was standing in an abandoned building on the fourteenth floor of a condemned high-rise in the North Terra Urban District, having been launched through a wall by a princess of Terra.
He had grabbed her hair.
"Are you a Jackal?"
The question pulled him back. Miyu was watching him with the expression she'd had since the lights came on — amber eyes sharp, head slightly tilted, reading him the way someone read a situation they hadn't fully categorized yet.
"No," he said. "I'm not a Jackal."
Her gaze moved down and then back up. The specific assessment of someone taking inventory.
"You look," she said, "exactly like what I expected. Someone from the Jackals would have terrible fashion."
Herro looked down at himself. Jersey. Long-sleeve undershirt. Cargo pants. Sneakers. Cap.
He looked back at her.
He grabbed the front of his jersey.
"My clothes are fine," he said.
"They're not." She said it with the absolute certainty of someone who had never once doubted their taste. "That jersey is cheap. You can tell from the stitching. And you're wearing it over a long-sleeve shirt in this weather?"
"It's night. It's cold."
She clicked her tongue.
"Poverty," she said simply.
Silence.
Not a long silence. Just the specific three-second silence of a person processing that they had been told something to their face with complete sincerity.
"Okay," Herro said.
(What is happening,) he thought. (What is this conversation. I was just sent to pick up a box.)
He reached for his phone. He needed to text Hilda. He needed to explain that there was someone else in the building, that the mission had a complication, that a princess had just called his jersey cheap and he needed an adult—
Miyu grabbed his wrist.
The grip was immediate and complete and she was already moving before he registered what she'd done — rotating, dropping her hip, and throwing him sideways in a motion that had no hesitation in it. He hit the floor, rolled, came up, and looked back at her.
She had his phone in her other hand.
She threw it.
Not at him. Away from him. Sideways, across the floor, into the darkness of the adjacent section of the fourteenth floor where it clattered against something and went still.
"You're calling backup," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I was texting my teammate—"
"Jackal backup," she said.
"I don't have Jackal backup—"
He moved toward where his phone had landed. Miyu's hand closed around his ankle and she threw him into an abandoned desk. The desk was wood and it lost the argument immediately — he went through it, the legs splintering outward, and came to rest in the wreckage of what had probably been someone's workspace fifteen years ago.
He got up.
"Would you calm down—"
The punch caught his jaw.
WHAM.
Then his gut.
WHAM.
Then her forehead came forward and the headbutt landed flush and his vision strobed white for a half second and he went down to one knee, both hands catching the floor.
She feinted right.
His arms came up for the block.
Her knee drove into his stomach from the left.
The air left his body in a way that was not voluntary and had no timeline for returning, and he was suddenly very aware of the floor tile against his palms and the dust from the destroyed desk settling around him and the sound of Miyu Yamashita's boots on the concrete as she repositioned.
(She's fast,) he thought, through the specific fog of someone who had just been kneed in the stomach on top of being hit twice and headbutted. (She's really fast. And she hits—)
He became aware that the force behind those hits was not normal. Was not the force of a 5'7" girl in a leather jacket who was angry about her hair. The math didn't add up. The physics of what those strikes felt like did not correspond to the size of the person who had delivered them.
(What is her Gear,) he thought.
He didn't have an answer.
He didn't have his phone either.
He was on one knee in the ruins of someone's desk on the fourteenth floor of a condemned building, and Miyu Yamashita was standing six feet away looking at him with amber eyes that had not calmed down at all.
He took stock of the situation from one knee.
She was radiating three things with equal intensity: privilege, belligerence, and a particular species of ignorance that had clearly never been inconvenienced enough to develop self-awareness. The leather jacket. The chipped nail polish. The way she'd said poverty like it was a weather report. The absolute certainty with which she'd dismissed his name, his unit, his clothes, and his existence as a Jackal without asking a single follow-up question.
(I wonder,) he thought, (if her Gear is just enhanced ignorance. If Terra looked at this girl and said yes, this one, give her the ability to be completely wrong with increasing physical force.)
He didn't have more time to think about it because her fist came down and he threw himself sideways and the floor tile cracked where his head had been.
He came up moving.
(Okay. Think. She asked if I was a Jackal.) He ducked under a straight right. (Which means she's not a Jackal. People don't ask if you're something they also are.) He circled left, keeping distance. (She mentioned a mission. Which means she's operational. Which means Family Unit.)
The follow-up punch came high. He got his forearm up and absorbed it.
(So she's a Family Unit member on the same retrieval job we were sent on. Which is a documentation problem and not a fight problem, except that she has decided it's a fight problem, and—)
She threw again. He blocked again.
(Why is a princess here. Why is a Yamashita — a member of the actual royal bloodline of the White Lion Empire — in a condemned building in the North Terra Urban District on a Family Unit retrieval mission. That's not how royalty operates. That's not how any of this is supposed to work.)
She grabbed his shirt.
Both hands, collar grip, and she drove him backward into the wall with enough force to knock the breath from him and crack the plaster behind his shoulders. Her amber eyes were right in front of his face, furious and certain, and she was pulling back for a follow-up that was going to go somewhere he wasn't going to enjoy.
(I'm going to have to actually hit her.)
He didn't want to hit her. He'd been trying very hard not to hit her in the way he hit things, which was the way that sent things through walls. She was a person. She was a girl. She was also a princess who had put him through a desk and a wall and kneeed him in the stomach, but those were separate considerations.
The follow-up was coming.
Herro uppercut her.
The fist came up from low, under her grip, catching her chin — not full force, controlled, the kind of hit designed to create space rather than end something. She released his collar. He stepped forward and jabbed twice — once to the body, once to the shoulder, redirecting her momentum sideways.
She swung.
He ducked under it.
His right hand came around and hit her twice more — measured, precise, fighting like a person trying to establish a pause rather than a person trying to win.
She backhanded him.
The backhand came fast and horizontal and he got his wrist up to intercept it — the bones complained about this decision — and he brought his hand back and hit her full on in the face.
Clean. Committed. The kind of punch that should have produced a moment of stillness.
She smiled.
Not the smile of someone who was okay. Not the smile of someone who had absorbed a hit and was processing it. The smile of someone who had been given something they were looking for.
She hit him back.
CRACK.
He left the floor again. Not through a wall this time — just backward, airborne, covering distance he hadn't chosen to cover before coming down and skidding across the tile in a controlled sprawl that cost him three feet of floor and most of his composure.
He lay there for a moment.
That had been stronger.
Not marginally. Not the incremental increase of someone finding their rhythm. The punch that had just sent him sliding across the fourteenth floor of an abandoned high-rise had been measurably, categorically stronger than the punch that had sent him through the wall ten minutes ago.
He pushed himself upright and ran the math.
First punch: through a wall. Second sequence: blocked hits, returned hits. Third punch: stronger than the first.
(She hit me and got stronger.)
He looked at her.
She was standing in the center of the floor in the fluorescent light, jacket slightly open, not breathing particularly hard, amber eyes on him with an expression that contained something that wasn't quite satisfaction but lived next door to it.
(Does she get stronger from taking hits? Is that — is that her Gear? She absorbs damage and it feeds back into output?)
"You're going to have to try harder," she said.
She said it simply. Not taunting — just informational, the way you told someone their approach wasn't working.
"Because right now?" She rolled one shoulder. "I am putting belt to ass."
Herro paused.
He looked at her.
"Belt to ass," he said.
"Yes."
A beat.
"What does that mean."
Miyu opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at him with the expression of someone who had said a thing and was now being asked to explain the thing, which was an indignity she had not budgeted for.
"I," she said, "am the belt." She pointed at herself. "You," she pointed at him, "are the ass." She gestured between them. "Belt to ass. The belt is beating the ass. I am beating you."
Herro nodded slowly.
"Okay," he said.
Miyu stared at him.
Something shifted in her face — the specific movement of someone who had just been forced to explain their own trash talk in clinical terms and had felt something die inside them while doing it. The amber eyes darkened at the edges. The already-present color in her cheeks deepened.
"The facr you made me explain that," she said, very quietly, "is unforgivable."
The Terran Energy that rolled off her in the next half second was not subtle. It wasn't the controlled, channeled output of someone who managed their power — it was the surge of someone whose emotional state had just spiked past a threshold and was pulling everything available upward with it. The air in the immediate radius did something, a pressure shift, the fluorescent lights flickering once in response to the draw.
She was already moving when the lights steadied.
Herro got his arms up.
The first punch hit his guard and drove him back a full step despite the block. The second came from the other side before he'd recovered the step. The third came low and he caught it on his forearm and the forearm informed him loudly that this was not a sustainable arrangement.
She was stronger than she'd been thirty seconds ago.
And thirty seconds ago she'd been stronger than she'd been thirty seconds before that.
(This is a problem,) he thought, retreating under the pressure of the fourth punch, and the fifth. (This is a significant problem.)