Chapter 122 – Baba Yaga
John turned to leave.
"Hold on," Ethan said.
John stopped.
Ethan took a breath — the specific collecting breath of someone shifting from one mode of operation to another — and began.
He ran through every enhancement he had access to.
Word of Power: Fortitude. The invisible reinforcement settled across John's frame, strengthening the body's own resilience — the cellular equivalent of turning everything up a few degrees.
Power Word: Shield. A second layer, this one external — the specific Holy Light buffer that would absorb the first significant impact rather than letting it translate directly into damage.
Healing Spell. Continuous. Low output, background level. The kind of effect that would work without requiring Ethan's active attention, gradually maintaining the body's optimal state.
The three enhancements landed one after another, invisible and silent.
John would feel something — a slight warmth, a marginal steadiness he might or might not consciously register as unusual.
He said nothing about it. He would have no way of knowing what had just happened.
Ethan watched him go and allowed himself a moment of genuine professional disappointment.
He'd had an image in his mind — the specific scenario that existed at the intersection of World of Warcraft raid mechanics and what John Wick was about to do. Front-line melee doing catastrophic damage while the back-line healer tracked the health bar and kept it from bottoming out, restoring whatever got taken in the next second after it happened. The legendary unreasonableness of a team composition where the damage dealer was effectively unkillable.
It would have been, by any honest assessment, completely broken.
The only genuine logistical problem was ammunition weight. Getting shot wasn't the issue with adequate healing — but the bullets stayed inside the vest and the person, and a hundred rounds of accumulated metal was several pounds that compounded over time.
He filed this as a future engineering problem.
He suddenly remembered something. There was a skill he'd practiced exactly once as a child and had not touched since.
Mind's Eye View.
The description was precise: Allows the caster to observe through the target's perspective. Requires proximity and line-of-sight for initial casting.
He'd used it at age eleven. It had worked. He'd seen the world through his neighbor's eyes for slightly under three seconds, and then the skill had terminated without warning, and he'd had a headache for two full days afterward that had not responded to anything except time.
He'd categorized it as interesting but impractical and moved on.
He was considerably more capable now than he'd been at eleven.
He raised his hand and cast it on John before the door fully closed.
The room's light didn't change.
But a second field of vision opened in his mind — steady, present, operating in parallel with his own sight.
John's perspective.
The corridor materialized: wide field of view, depth perception immediately calibrated to the space. No unnecessary scanning. No hesitation in the movement. Every corner entered and exited without a pause that wasn't operationally justified.
Ethan's brain tried to track it and immediately discovered the problem.
John moved at a pace that wasn't designed for observation. The visual input was a sequence of confirmed locations rather than a tour — walls, doorways, corners, each one registered and dismissed and replaced by the next before Ethan's processing could catch up.
He felt slightly disoriented.
He had not, he realized, considered what it would feel like to observe the world through the eyes of someone operating at this tempo.
The side effects, though, were minimal. He was present. The second view held.
And then John walked into the concert area.
He brushed past a figure near the edge of the crowd.
The figure registered him — the specific second-look of someone who had processed a face before fully registering why it was familiar.
"John?"
John stopped. Turned. Recognized the face.
"Cassian."
Gianna's head of personal security. The name arrived in Ethan's awareness alongside the face — a man built with the specific quality of someone for whom physical capability was professional infrastructure rather than personal attribute. Composed. Experienced. The bearing of someone who had been in enough situations to have stopped reacting to them.
Cassian's eyes moved briefly below John's jacket line — the specific glance of someone checking for the print of a weapon through fabric.
"Working?" Cassian asked.
"Yes." John looked at him steadily. "You?"
"Yes." A pause. "Having a good night?"
"I'm afraid so."
Ethan, in the second perspective, heard this exchange and tried to parse it. The syntax was wrong for small talk. The phrasing had the specific quality of coded language — words that meant their surface content and something else simultaneously.
Having a good night — mission accomplished.
He'd barely arrived at this interpretation when both men moved.
Weapons out. Almost simultaneous. Cassian a fraction faster on the draw, John a fraction faster in his positioning.
Two shots. Close range.
The impacts hit both men in the chest — the specific hard arrest of kinetic energy meeting bulletproof material, the physics of being stopped rather than penetrated. Both men went backward. Both men came back up.
No follow-up shots.
John was already turning, already moving, heading for the corridor off the main space.
Cassian dropped to one knee, hand pressing his radio.
"Target confirmed."
A beat.
"John Wick." Another beat. "All units — lock down the building."
Responses immediately overlapped in the channel. Cassian did not follow John. He changed direction and moved toward the back of the venue — toward the bathroom.
In Ethan's second perspective, the corridor moved away from Cassian's direction.
Ethan switched his primary attention back to the room he was actually in.
He moved to the position John had occupied earlier — the shadow near the door.
Fade.
The Holy Light worked in a different direction than usual — rather than the warm, visible energy of healing, this was the specific quieting of presence, the effect that made the eye slide past rather than rest on. Not invisibility in any dramatic sense. Something more like the quality of uninteresting that rooms had when there was nothing worth looking at in them.
He stood very still.
The door opened.
Cassian came in.
He stopped in front of the pool.
The blue light. The water. The red diffusing through it. Gianna, still, against the pool's edge.
Cassian stood there for a long time. The room was quiet except for the distant, muffled continuation of the concert music — still running, above them, in the ancient arches, unaware.
He stood and looked.
Whatever happened in him during that time, it didn't express itself on his face.
He changed his magazine. He left.
The door closed.
Ethan let his breath out slowly.
He switched back to John's perspective.
John was running.
Corridors at speed — the specific controlled sprint of someone who had already mapped every available route and was executing a predetermined path rather than making decisions. Stairs. An emergency access stairwell. A door pushed through into the underground passage.
The damp stone air arrived in the second perspective as a textural change rather than a smell.
He was moving through the tunnel they'd come in on.
He came around a corner and stopped.
A woman. Standing in the passage — Santino's aide, the one who operated without words. Slender, relaxed posture, neither weapon raised nor threatening gesture made.
Both hands came up, palms out.
Just me, the gesture said. Alone.
John didn't lower his weapon.
He stood in the center of the passage and read the space.
From Ethan's second perspective, the tunnel looked empty. Walls, stone, shadow, the woman.
The woman's expression shifted — the micro-expression of someone whose patience had reached its limit.
She signed again: Only me.
John held the position.
The next second:
Four corners. Two pillars. The tunnel junction.
Figures came from all of them simultaneously.
Too many. Too spread. No single position to address all of them.
John turned and ran.
Ethan watched it happen through the borrowed perspective and found himself holding his breath in a room forty meters away.
The gunfire in the tunnels was a physical sound even at this distance — conducted through stone rather than air, arriving as vibration rather than noise. Above it, faint, the concert continued.
John moved through it.
The Power Word: Shield took one significant impact — Ethan felt it as a sudden draw on the Holy Light he'd invested, the buffer doing exactly what it existed to do. He immediately applied another, routing the energy through the active link. The Healing Spell worked steadily in the background, maintaining the baseline.
Through the perspective: John reached the AR-15 cache.
The rifle came up.
The rhythm of the tunnel changed completely.
What had been suppression became advance. Figures that had been pressing forward reversed direction and then stopped reversing direction. The gunfire from the pursuer side became fragmented, then intermittent, then absent.
Three magazines.
The passage was quiet.
John continued moving.
The Benelli M4 came off the wall cache. Its first shot in the narrow stone corridor produced a sound that arrived through the stone in Ethan's position as a percussive pressure change rather than an audible bang.
The second.
The third.
Then the passage was quiet again in a more complete way.
John reached the exit.
The perspective held for another few seconds — the night air of Rome arriving from some opening ahead, the specific quality of outside.
Then it disconnected.
Ethan came back to his own vision.
The bathroom. The blue light. The pool. Gianna, motionless.
He stood there for a moment with the specific disorientation of returning from a second perspective — the slight recalibration of having been in two places simultaneously and now being in only one.
He breathed out.
"He really is the Boogeyman," he said, quietly, to the room.
He pulled on fresh examination gloves.
He looked at Gianna in the pool.
"Alright," he said. "My turn."
He knelt beside the pool's edge.
The Resurrection Spell came up in his hands — the specific quality of Holy Light that was different from the Healing Spell, not the warm maintenance of life but the reaching, searching energy of something looking for what had been lost.
He let it extend outward.
He found what he was looking for almost immediately — the soul fragments still present in the space, still close to the body, not yet dispersed. She hadn't been dead long enough for the distance to become a problem.
He began drawing them back.
The water's surface didn't change.
The blue light continued from the dome.
Somewhere above them, the concert was still playing — the music moving through stone and centuries, indifferent to what was happening in the room below.
Ethan worked.
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