She calls a wooden tiger-spirit out of a decorative bonsai tree to deal with one cluster of goons with particularly annoying guns - sprays an approaching cricket-bat-wielder with acid - the ash cloud from earlier fades, and she calls one down on top of some mages who are trying to fill up one of the dragon line diagrams -

- another guy with a cricket bat gets close enough to hit her, just a glancing blow but she roars and the inconspicuous little lines between her fingers erupt shining metal claws and she rips his throat into pieces, but it's thrown her off her rhythm, and more are getting closer -

Such a pain.

Fine, whatever. He shows up out of fucking nowhere with a well-placed open palm hit to someone's outstretched arm to break their elbow and a kick to break their kneecap, and someone else—oh, that's an ork, the fun thing about orks is that it's very easy to elbow their chin just right so they bite their tongues or just get those sharp tusks somewhere they shouldn't be. If you know what you're doing, at least. Which he does.

He isn't strong. He can't break a grown man's femur. Or, well, he can, but not by being strong. He does it by being smart and using leverage. But he's weak, and stick thin, and when someone's got him pinned he can't escape it. He can just say,

"Harder. I can barely feel it."

The man looks confused, but doesn't loosen his grip.

Not until a metal claw punches out through his face. Then he loosens everything.

"The enemy's gate is down, so lou!" Ariel cackles, turning to shoot some more acid. "Focus on the goalies so we can get out of here!"

Oh, alright, he can do that.

"Hey, boys, come here often?" he asks, sidling up to the group at the exit. He's wide open, not even watching his flank, but when someone tries to hit him with a bat he moves with it and pulls that person's arm to tip them out of balance and a knee to the solar plexus disables them for long enough that he can step on their neck and now they're out of commission. The next one comes at Jauhung with a knife, clearly preparing to feint, but Jauhung doesn't dodge them at all and instead tanks the (disappointingly shallow) cut so that he can get close enough to smash their nose into their brain. And the last one has a gun, but they also have more than five brain cells and have noticed that a gun in close combat isn't that much of an advantage especially when your opponent is using the (possibly dead?) body of your ex-comrade as a shield and has just shrugged off being stabbed with a knife, so they instead decide they are not being paid enough for this bullshit and run.

"Let's go," he calls from the now-empty door, somehow managing to drawl despite having to shout.

Ariel runs after him, flipping off some goons and dropping another ash cloud in her wake. She's bleeding from half a dozen places and her wrist is clearly broken, but she can run with the best of them.

"You motherfucker, you made me think you'd gone soft!" she laughs as they flee.

"Mm," he replies eloquently, and he can also run with her but he's clearly a lot more badly affected by the cuts and, apparently, one bullet wound? He didn't notice that one happening. It was just a graze, he supposes it barely counts as a wound, but still, he does not have enough blood in him to sustain a run for very long. "That didn't count. They sucked."

"Everybody sucks when you're the best... man, you really are treating yourself bad." She grabs his hand and shoves some energy into him, and he feels a little better. There's fewer holes in him, at least.

Oh that's nice. Okay, it's more sustainable to run like this. If he saves his breath. Despite the chain smoking he does kind of walk all over everywhere for hours every day so he's not bad at this running thing either.

...wait, should he be the one leading? Fuck, he should. "This way."

"I hope the old man's ready for me to eat six thousand nuyen worth of dim sum. Afternoon tea is not enough calories for firefight aftercare."

She follows.

He's not sure they're being pursued, but just in case they are, he disables his connection to the wireless matrix and then takes a circuitous route passing through some rather unsavoury alleys and hidden spots. Eventually they can probably stop running, and Jauhung can pull up a map on his image link—he's got it downloaded, so he doesn't need a connection just to look at it—so they can go to the specific address they're meant to go to. He doesn't know this part of the city that well.

"We should do something about the thing where we look fucked up," he observes, idly.

Ariel nods and takes out a makeup kit. Inside is a palette of various shades of freezedried blood, along with a long-handled wooden brush.

"Hold still," she says.

He blinks. "I was not talking about my complexion."

"You think this is about your complexion?" she snorts. She spits on one of the compartments and mixes it vigorously together. "Hold still."

With her disgusting watercolor, she traces a rune on his forehead, then another on each cheek. Then she does the same to herself, and sings a little ululating prayer-song.

The blood dissolves, leaving nothing behind.

They look exactly the same.

...well, the watercolour itself seems to be gone and he can see a faintly glowing red rune on her face but otherwise she still looks fucked up.

"I don't think it worked."

Well they're still in an alley somewhere so what he'll do instead is look for a—yep, there it is, a piece of broken glass, thank you scuzzy alleys in Hong Kong.

"I see." Well, he's fine with just looking less fucked up. He doesn't personally mind the blood and dirt and scuffedness, it's just that in his experience tearoom staff tends to frown upon walking in looking like they did. "Let's go, then, it's around that corner."

     "The Golden Flower, you mean."

There are three men and one woman at the entrance to the alleyway. One of the men is troll-sized, without horns, and carries a heavily modified sniper rifle; another is an elf in tactical body armor that looks like BDSM gear; another is probably the skinniest dwarf either of them has ever seen, looking like nothing so much as a middle-schooler with the face of a runway model. The woman is nondescript, suspiciously so, but a keen enough observer might discern the metallic glint of her cybernetic eyes.

The troll was the one to speak up. The elf is leering at Ariel, the woman is standing perfectly still, and the dwarf is... fidgeting.

"—yo, Ehonté, what's up with the welcoming committee?"

"We aren't going to kill you," the dwarf says. "We're a protection detail. Nightjar is just, ah... dramatic."

     Nightjar (apparently) grunts. "Sue me."

"Ah huh. What do we need protection from?"

"Mister Black didn't actually say. He's a very cagey man. We were supposed to meet you at the harbor... but someone decided to get every thug on the peninsula in the same building to murder you, and it was all we could do to keep the snipers off. We've been tailing you since."

     The elf grins. He's got orthodontically sharpened teeth. "It's been a fun job so far."

"Hmm. So is this the kind of protection where you'll stand guard outside the tearoom or is it the kind where we follow you to a secret, isolated location?"

     The chromed woman speaks up. "The isolated location is if things go badly south... once it's obvious that if we wanted you dead, we could just leave."

"Yes, Plastique, thank you for your brutal honesty," Ehonté says with mild exasperation.