The silence that followed the one-sided melee was profound, broken only by the mournful sigh of the wind through the pines and the pained, ragged breathing of the fallen. Michael stood amidst the scattered, groaning bodies, a slight figure haloed by the garish, dying glow of the fallen motorcycles' under-lighting. He hadn't uttered a threat. He hadn't contorted his face into a fearsome mask. The power thrumming through his veins—a cocktail of his own unnaturally enhanced physiology and the stolen, vibrating energy of the Cat's Gracescroll—felt clean, cold, and absolute. It wasn't rage; it was capability. He was a scalpel, and the world had just presented him with a festering boil.
He simply moved.
Tiger, the fire-haired ringleader, was the first to shake off the stunning totality of their defeat. Pushing himself up on elbows scraped raw by the gravel, he stared at the standing figure, then at his scattered, whimpering crew. Something primal—ego, shame, the dregs of cheap liquor—reasserted itself. "Get up, you useless gits!" he snarled, his voice cracking. "He's one bloke! One! Get him!"
The command, fueled by a desperate, herd-animal courage, stirred the others. They clambered to their feet, retrieving dropped chains and pipes, their faces masks of confusion and burgeoning fear. Tiger snatched up his baseball bat, its aluminum barrel now dented from its encounter with Michael's van. With a wordless roar that was more terror than fury, he led the charge, a dozen young men flowing behind him in a ragged, screaming wave.
What followed wasn't a fight. It was a physics demonstration.
Tiger swung first, a wild, overhand arc aimed at Michael's head. Michael didn't dodge. He turned his head slightly, accepting the blow. The crackof aluminum on skull was a sickening, definitive sound in the clearing. The girls, huddled together, screamed. Tiger's triumphant grin lasted a nanosecond.
Michael blinked. He slowly, deliberately, shook his head, as if dislodging a troublesome fly. His hair, ruffled by the impact, settled back into place. He looked at Tiger, and in that look was an infinite, chilling patience. His hand shot out, a blur in the strobing light. He didn't grab Tiger's wrist; he simply plucked the bat from his grasp, the transfer of force so complete it was as if Tiger had handed it over.
The bat felt like a toy in Michael's hands. He looked at it, then at Tiger's wide, disbelieving eyes. For a heartbeat, a dark, Wasteland-born impulse flared—to swing back, to reduce the arrogant, sneering face to pulp. The image was clear, satisfying. But another layer of his mind, the one that paid taxes and feared traffic police, screamed a warning. Consequences. Mortgages. Due process.
With a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of two worlds, he brought his hands to the middle of the bat. His knuckles whitened. There was a sharp, metallic TWANGof protesting alloy, and the bat bent, then folded neatly in half, the severed ends pointing uselessly at the sky.
The sight was a bucket of ice water on the remaining embers of their courage. The charge died mid-step. The followers behind Tiger froze, their weapons held slack. The reality of what they were facing—not a tough guy, but something other—crashed down on them.
What happened next was a lesson in efficient, humiliating pacification. Michael moved into them. He wasn't brawling; he was correcting postures. A shin met a knee with a precise pop. A wrist was twisted, a pipe clattering away. A shoulder was nudged, sending its owner spinning into two others. It was over in less than thirty seconds. Half the boys were back on the ground, clutching various limbs and moaning. The other half broke. The fight was gone, replaced by pure, animal panic. They turned and ran for their bikes, the girls forgotten.
They didn't get far. A piece of the folded baseball bat, thrown with the casual accuracy of a skipping stone, took the lead runner in the back of the head. He went down like a sack of wet sand. The others skidded to a halt, the sight of their fallen comrade a more effective barrier than any wall.
A new silence descended, thicker and more terrible than the last. Michael pointed a finger at the patch of weathered asphalt at the road's edge. "Kneel," he said, the word soft, almost conversational. "All of you. Hands at your sides. Look at me."
They obeyed. There was no discussion, no bravado left. They shuffled into a ragged line, their knees pressing into the cold grit, their heads bowed, then reluctantly raised to meet his gaze. The girls, sobbing quietly, were herded to the side and made to squat, pinching their own earlobes—a bizarre, infantilizing posture Michael had seen in old schoolyard punishment tales. In the flickering, dying light of the bikes, it looked like a scene from some deranged, roadside tribunal.
Thus began the court of Harry Potter Michael, Lord of Cinder Town, and part-time moralist of Shizhu Mountain. He kicked off his left shoe, a worn, mud-caked sneaker, and hobbled over to the line of penitents. The one-shoed walk added a layer of surreal menace to the proceedings.
He stopped before Tiger. "Tiger, is it?" Michael mused, his voice deceptively light. "And you lot… Leopard? Wolf? Such fierce names. Such mighty riders." He leaned closer, the smell of cheap spirits and fear thick in the air. "If you're so mighty, why are you on the ground? If you're so fast, why aren't you flying?" He gestured vaguely at the sky. "What if there'd been a child on this road? A family in a car? Your little light-show and your noise… it's not impressive. It's pathetic."
The first blow was a flat, hard smackof rubber sole on cheekbone. Tiger's head snapped to the side. He whimpered, a hand starting to rise to his face.
"Ah-ah," Michael chided softly, and the hand froze, then slowly lowered. The message was clear: the punishment would be endured. It was part of the lesson.
Michael moved down the line. Smack."Speed kills." Smack."Your parents must be so proud." Smack."Is that a piercing or a door-knocker?" Each statement was punctuated by the wet, ugly sound of shoe-leather meeting young flesh. He walked the line, a limping schoolmaster doling out corporal enlightenment. The boys took it, tears of pain and humiliation cutting tracks through the dust and grime on their faces. They felt, in that moment, profoundly sorry for themselves. They were just kids! This wasn't fair!
He reached the end, turned, and started back. The sobs grew louder. Just as he reached Tiger again, the dam broke. The ringleader, his face already swelling, snot and tears mingling on his chin, let out a wail that seemed to tear itself from the very bottom of his soul.
"Uncle! Stop! Please, Uncle, I'm sorry! I won't do it again!"
The word—Uncle—hung in the cold air. It was a plea for mercy, for the indulgence due to a wayward nephew. It was also, to Michael's ringing ears, a horrifying indicator of perceived age difference.
He stopped. For a second, Tiger dared to hope the nightmare was over.
Then the shoe came down again, harder, a rapid series of blows that were no longer pedagogical but personally offended. "Uncle?" Michael hissed, his calm evaporating. "Who are you calling 'Uncle,' you little shit? Do I look like your bloody uncle? 'Brother'? I wouldn't claim you lot if you were the last siblings on earth!"
The beating continued for another minute, a final, furious coda. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Michael stepped back, breathing heavily, the strange energy of the scroll finally ebbing, leaving him hollow and tired. He was, he reminded himself, a citizen of a lawful society. Rehabilitation, not mutilation, was the goal.
He pointed a thumb at his van, a monument to fresh dents, shattered mirrors, and deep scratches. "Right. My property. Damaged. How are we resolving this?"
Hope, bright and desperate, flared in Tiger's swollen eyes. "Money! We'll pay! A new van! I can transfer it now! WeChat! Alipay! Name it!"
Michael shook his head slowly. "Cash. Only cash. I'm not adding you lot on socials. And I'm certainly not giving you my number so you can send your cousins round for a rematch next week."
The hope died, replaced by a fresh wave of despair. Tiger wept openly now, the sheer logistical impossibility of the demand crushing him. He turned to his kneeling crew, his voice a broken whisper. "Cash. Anyone. Please."
A pathetic inventory began. Wallets were produced, pockets turned out. Girls contributed glittery clutches. The harvest of a subculture that lived on digital transfers was meager. When the last crumpled note was placed in Michael's outstretched palm, the total was thirty-two yuan and fifteen jiao. The insult of the amount was almost worse than the beating.
Michael looked at the pitiful sum, then at the wrecked line of humanity before him. He sighed, a long, weary exhalation. He pocketed the coins and notes.
"Get out of my sight," he said, his voice flat. "Before I decide the lesson needs a second chapter."
They didn't need telling twice. They scrambled, a tangle of limbs and choked sobs, righting bikes, helping the dazed, fleeing into the retreating night without a backward glance. The roar of their engines was subdued, hurried, devoid of all its earlier bravado.
Watching the last taillight vanish around the bend, Michael felt a flicker of something that wasn't quite satisfaction. Perhaps, he thought, the shock of the real world—of consequences that hit back—would steer one or two of them straight. A small, bitter social service, rendered with a sneaker.
He got back into his wounded van, the cold wind biting through the empty windshield frame. The sky was beginning to pale in the east. He had a delivery to make.
Hours later, the transaction with the bewildered but accommodating Mr. Liu complete, Michael stood by his freshly loaded Wuling. Two tons of "approaching best-by" rice, a king's ransom in grain, filled the back. The money from Wang Jianshe and the pathetic scrap from the bikers had made the upgrade possible. Harry Potter Michael does not serve maggot-riddled rice when he can afford better, he thought with a grim sense of nobility.
As he prepared to leave, the adjacent wholesale clothing mart rolled up its security shutters with a rattling shriek. Morning light glinted on racks of garments visible through the open door. His eyes, scanning the dull, practical uniforms within, snagged on a flash of something else—a bin of brightly colored, cheaply printed t-shirts. One in particular, garish and cartoonish, seemed to shout at him from the gloom. A ridiculous idea, born of exhaustion and the lingering absurdity of the night, took root. He found his feet carrying him across the narrow alley, away from the tonnage of sustenance, towards the gaudy, impractical world of fabric and thread.