"Hands where we can see them. Don't move!"
"Old Guo, put your hands up," Chen Zhen said quickly. "Those guns are real."
Bruce didn't need the reminder.
The body he was living in had grown up around American cops. British police or American police, they were cut from much the same cloth when weapons were involved.
Seeing both Bruce and Chen Zhen cooperate and raise their hands, the two officers relaxed a little.
"You too."
The tall, broad-shouldered man was still being covered by a gun, and under Old Master Hua's urging, he reluctantly raised his hands as well.
Now that the situation was under control, the younger of the two officers pulled out his radio and called for backup. The older one crouched beside the men lying on the floor and checked them one by one. Once he confirmed they were unconscious rather than dead, the tension in his face eased noticeably.
That much was universal.
If nobody was dead, it usually wasn't a major case.
"You're the ones who did this?"
The older officer lowered his gun and looked Bruce and Chen Zhen up and down, taking in the blood on their clothes.
"It was me. They're street thugs."
The big man stepped forward on his own, but his English was so rough, with Chinese mixed into every other sentence, that both officers looked completely lost.
"What?"
Seeing that, Chen Zhen stepped in at once.
"Officer, those men are local troublemakers. They came in while we were eating and tried to rob this father and son. We stepped in and fought back." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his student ID. "My name is Chen Zhen. I'm a law student at Oxford. This is Bruce Guo, a student from Stanford in the U.S."
Whether in China or elsewhere, education and background still mattered.
Just as a Tsinghua or Peking University graduate would immediately get a second look back home, Oxford and Cambridge carried that same weight in Britain.
After glancing at Chen Zhen's ID, the older officer's expression softened.
Bruce hadn't brought his Stanford ID, but he did have his passport on him. An American passport still carried weight in the U.K., and that was enough.
"You'll need to come back to the station and give statements."
After checking their documents, the officer was already mostly convinced.
Then he turned to the younger policeman.
"Barton, call an ambulance."
"Got it."
The young officer nodded and got back on the radio.
It didn't take long for the backup units and ambulance to arrive.
The men on the floor were loaded up and taken for treatment. Bruce and Chen Zhen were treated on site. Their injuries were all superficial, mostly cuts and bruises. Once the blood was cleaned off, antiseptic applied, and the wounds bandaged, that was about it. Chen Zhen looked worse than Bruce, but he didn't need a hospital either.
"Hey, mate, do you two actually know kung fu?"
Now that most of the scene had been handled, the younger officer, Barton, wandered over to Bruce and Chen Zhen. He bounced lightly on his feet and threw a couple of playful punches in the air, clearly fascinated.
Bruce shrugged.
"A little. Not enough to be proud of. Otherwise we wouldn't have gotten beaten up this badly."
While the two of them humored the young British cop's endless curiosity about Chinese martial arts, the rest of the officers kept working the scene.
Over by the counter, a female officer was trying to take statements from the Hua family, but after a while she gave up and turned helplessly toward her superior.
"Charles, I can't understand half of what they're saying."
Charles Lee looked at Bruce and Chen Zhen chatting with Barton, then at the father and son, who were relatively unhurt compared to the two younger men. After a brief pause, he shook his head.
"From the look of it, they're not central to this. No need to bring them in."
He already had the medical report. The gang members were unconscious, but beyond bruising and soft tissue injuries, nothing was too serious. That made this a robbery gone wrong that turned into a brawl, not something worth turning into a major incident.
And Charles had no desire to make it bigger than it needed to be.
Especially not with two students from world-class universities involved, and foreign nationals on top of that.
He looked around and made the call.
"All right. Wrap it up. Take these two back with us for now."
The moment he saw Bruce and Chen Zhen being led toward the police car, the big man who had stormed in to save them panicked.
"They didn't do it. I did. Arrest me instead."
His broken English didn't help. Most of the officers barely understood him, and aside from a few quick glances, none of them reacted much. Compared to Bruce and Chen Zhen, who were bloodied and bandaged, the man himself had almost no visible injuries. He was huge and clearly dangerous, but in Britain a big, muscular man wasn't enough by itself to prove anything.
"Can I talk to him for a second?" Bruce asked.
"Make it quick," Barton said.
He was clearly too impressed by Bruce now to be overly strict.
Bruce got out of the car and walked over.
"You're Ray, right?"
The big man nodded, gratitude written all over his face.
"You two already helped us enough. I can't let you get dragged into this too..."
Bruce cut him off.
"We're just going back for statements. Maybe we post bail, maybe not. It's not a big deal. But this place is a mess, and your father's shaken up badly. He needs someone with him. You should stay here."
Ray looked back at his father, whose face was still pale and whose eyes were full of fear.
He hesitated.
"But this is my trouble. I can't just let you two take the hit for it."
There was nothing fake about the guilt on his face.
Bruce shook his head.
"It's fine. We're all from the same place. Out here, that means something."
Whatever passport he carried now, the core of him was still the same man he had always been.
He gave Ray's arm a light pat.
"Go look after your father. I'll come back in a few days and try his cooking again."
Ray looked like he wanted to say more, but in the end he just nodded.
Bruce climbed back into the police car and sat down beside Chen Zhen.
"It's handled."
"Good. Damn, that hurts."
Now that the tension was gone, Chen Zhen started hissing through his teeth dramatically.
Once the scene was fully cleared, the police cars and ambulance pulled away from the Chinese neighborhood in East London.
At the station, Bruce and Chen Zhen were separated and questioned individually.
They had already synced their story in the car: they had acted in defense of others.
Add in the fact that all eight of the men had prior records for theft, assault, and related trouble, and that nobody had suffered serious injury, and the police had little appetite to dig too deeply.
Still, they couldn't just let them walk immediately.
"Don't worry," Chen Zhen said. "I already made a call. Someone will come bail us out soon."
Bruce nodded.
His phone had been smashed during the fight, and he'd later found the shattered pieces still back at the restaurant. Since he had no way to contact the only person he knew in Britain besides Christopher Ritt, they had to rely on Chen Zhen.
"You know," Chen Zhen said, looking at him with something between admiration and disbelief, "I didn't expect you to fight like that. If you hadn't been there, I think those bastards might've killed me."
"I trained in kickboxing a bit in middle school," Bruce said. "And I was a starting guard on the basketball team in college. But if we're talking about real monsters, that guy Ray is the one who's actually terrifying. I swear the whole thing was over in less than five seconds. Before I even processed what happened, all eight of them were on the floor."
That image was still burned into both their minds.
Chen Zhen nodded hard.
"Once I get out of here, I'm finding a real martial arts instructor."
Bruce didn't laugh.
Truthfully, he had been thinking the same thing.
Nothing made a person crave strength faster than being forced to feel their own weakness.
Then Chen Zhen suddenly grinned.
"You know, this is my first time in a cell. In Britain, no less."
Bruce looked at him in disbelief.
He couldn't decide whether the man was hopeless or just wired wrong.
Not long after, an officer came over.
"You two. Out. Your people are here."
Once they were brought out, Chen Zhen immediately lit up.
"Junzi, what took you so long?"
Bruce looked over.
A young man in a dark coat was standing there. He wore black-rimmed glasses and carried himself with a calm, steady seriousness.
"Knowing you'd complain, I should've called Zhou Ya and let her come bail you out instead."
The man adjusted his glasses and said it with maddening calm.
"Don't. If that loudmouth found out, I'd be dead the moment I got home."