Qiang released Jun, leaving him to fall several feet to the floor, where he gathered himself to his knees, gasping for breath. The young man’s attention stayed fixed, eyes trained on the seemingly unremarkable sight of the dark entrance to the gym.

  “That was fast. Wonder if they’ve got a chip in me or something. I’ll have to dig that- Oh! Oh, nice!” Qiang clapped, chuckling. “They’re bringing helicopters.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” Jun rasped. Qiang waved the question away just as Jun began to pick out the distant drone of approaching aircraft. Lights were strobing now, too, through the windows, growing brighter and busier. Somewhere, faintly, he heard a walkie-talkie chirp.

  “You should probably hide somewhere. If this is anything like the last few times, they’re gonna be shooting pretty much wherever they want. They’re not very careful with people. You should- Oh! You should hide in the bathroom.”

  The world blurred and lurched suddenly, and Jun found himself bowled directly into the unisex bathroom, a room that had, until a fraction of a second ago, been one story up, by the running track encircling the gym. Qiang tossed him casually into the room and half-closed the door.

  “Here. You’ll probably be safe.” Qiang fiddled with the door, trying to leave a slight gap. “You should watch through here, though! Believe me, fighter to fighter, you won’t want to miss it. You’ll definitely-”

  Qiang was cut off by a sudden clamor from below, a shatter-boom of windows and doors explosively caving in. Qiang looked lazily over his shoulder at the gas grenades and black-clad strike team streaming through the entrances, and as he turned back to continue his lunatic commentary, a parcel of his face the size of Jun’s fist exploded, misting him with blood.

  “Gah. Dey ahway go fo da mouf.” Qiang rolled his eyes. The flesh hanging from his destroyed jaw was twitching in the air, tendrils of muscle reaching for each other and joining, reminding Jun of footage he’d seen in a nature doc once, time-lapses of plants and anemones growing. “Hewe we go!”

  Qiang was gone, leaving Jun to scramble away from the bathroom door, narrowly missed by another spray of bullets. He slammed the door shut, chest heaving. Outside, muffled, the running ambience of gunfire was punctuated by titanic impacts and muffled cries of agony.

  Jun felt dreamily absent from himself now. He traced his finger in the blood spattering his chest. He rubbed the gristle between his fingers, and the texture of it woke him up a little.

  He backed away from the door and the hellish cacophony streaming in from just behind it, until he bumped into the back wall and - oh! - a window. The bathroom had a window.

  His mind cleared further. A plan, nascent and simple but leagues better than “wait here to die,” formed in his brain. Jun fiddled with the latch, fingers slippery, and threw the window open. More screams and blasts filtered in from outside, as well as a bracing waft of night air. Jun peered down at the alley six meters below, and tried to make out any route he could use to climb down.

  There was another thunderclap, a brief roar, and then the door to the bathroom exploded, the entire wall buckling inward to reveal the flaming remains of an armored truck that had been somehow propelled through the gym and up onto the second floor.

  Jun decided then to just jump.

  He dangled from the window, fell, fast and hard, and felt something crackle and implode in his ankle on impact. He gasped, winded from the pain, but the screams were so loud and close now, the gunfire so deafening, that he found the strength to limp, then jog, then run.

  He made it a block. Then, descending like a whirring, roaring meteor, a helicopter crashed into the street before him and erupted into a fireball. Jun was thrown backward, face blast-burned by a wave of hot air. His head swam for a moment, and by the time his vision cleared he was able to make out a figure lurching in the blazing inferno before him.

  Qiang tore his arms free from the front of the downed chopper, where he’d embedded both of them elbow-deep into the engine block. He hopped down from the hunk of groaning metal, pausing when a soldier came crawling, half-burned, from the wreckage. Qiang cackled, wound back, and kicked the man in the torso, sending him screaming into the air and through the side of a building, four stories up.

  The young man was covered in burns and gaping wounds, yawning patches of viscera and dead flesh that pulsated and radiated and puckered as they grew together, knitting neatly back into shape. Flames licked at his skin, danced in his hair. His jumpsuit was now almost entirely gone, reduced to dangling ribbons.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  His eyes, one clear, the other punctured through by a dagger of shrapnel, swiveled and landed on Jun.

  “How’d you end up out here?” Qiang called, yelling to be heard over the roar of flames and crumbling architecture. “Don’t tell me you got yourself hurt.”

  Jun found himself unable to talk. Looking at the shambling, burning cadaver smiling down at him, he decided resolutely that he was probably having a nightmare.

  Qiang frowned, then darted to his side, materializing instantly, accompanied shortly after by a whiff of dead and burning flesh that made Jun’s stomach lurch.

  “Ooh, yeah, landed bad on your leg.” Qiang said, studying him. “Well, that’s okay. That shouldn’t affect your end of the deal.”

  Jun looked over his shoulder, waiting to be shot from behind or clipped by another explosion. Qiang followed his gaze. “Oh, don’t worry, they’re all dead. Just you and me now, bro.”

  He hoisted Jun to his feet, steadied him.

  “You remember the deal?” Qiang thumbed at Jun’s face, wiping a smear of dust from his cheek. “From a minute ago?”

  “I… You want…” Jun was well beyond making conversation now. He watched as the force of Qiang’s quickly regenerating eyeball shunted the shard of metal from his eye socket. It ejected from his face with an audible pop and clanged to the ground.

  “You still need to hit me.” Qiang said. “As hard as you can. One time.”

  Jun nodded, uncomprehending.

  “Hey, Jun, buddy, you still with me? You understand?”

  “Hit you,” Jun breathed. “Want me to hit you.”

  “Yeah.” Qiang tilted his head, offering his chin as a target. Then he spasmed, stepped back. “Wait, I forgot to say. Do you know why I want you to hit me?”

  “Strong. You think I’m strong, you said.”

  Qiang waved his words away, like they were a cloud of gnats. “Yeah, phh, yeah, I said that. That’s only half of it though.”

  Qiang closed the distance again. The shriveled young man loomed over the cringing, musclebound athlete, face darkening. “I know you don’t remember me. It’s okay, don’t be embarrassed, but you don’t. That’s fine. But I remember you. I remember I loved you. Not- Ha! Not in a weird way. But I was so obsessed with you. How strong you were, when you’d crack my head against the wall and take my shit. Bow! And you, only a little bigger than me! I’d think to myself, you must be the strongest guy in the world. You ever think that?”

  This was just a nightmare, Jun reminded himself. “Sometimes.”

  “Well, I did. And, man, I loved you, but I was so scared of you.” Qiang’s pupil shivered and danced as his eye finished healing. There was blood on his breath. Had he bitten someone? “Did you know, even when the government was doing their worst, most evil monster tests on me, my bad dreams were still mostly about you? I’d have nightmares that you were under my cot.”

  Jun just nodded. “That’s sad.”

  “It’s weird. It doesn’t make sense. So this, you hitting me, it’s part of my big master plan, to make it make sense.” Qiang straightened. “I was so scared, for my whole life. And then the craziest thing: all those things I was scared of? They happened to me. And I lived. Every time. And when that happens enough, it’s like, your brain goes, ‘all done! Don’t need to be afraid of that anymore. The government, the White Room, the dark water, Mr. Zhao, the needles. All done with those.’ But, the thing is, I can’t just work that out myself. Those things, they have to try to hurt me, for real, and fail, for my dumb little brain to get the picture. So that’s why-”

  Spurred by a sudden, desperate impulse, Jun lunged forward and threw his punch. Decades of muscle memory, pounds of honed muscle, and a flood of adrenaline coalesced into what had to have been one of the most beautiful, explosive haymakers the athlete had ever thrown. Jun put everything he had into the blow, and he felt its rightness with a honed instinct, felt it so strongly that a small part of him glimmered with hope, with the faint expectation that it would work, that the force of this perfect punch would kill the shambling nightmare whispering blood-stink into his face.

  It didn’t. Two bones in Jun’s fist shattered on impact, and he fell backward, against the wall of the alley, breathless and blind with pain.

  Qiang smiled, a wide, relaxed, relieved grin, upturned and grateful. He breathed deeply for a few moments, leaving Jun to gasp and whimper.

  “Thank you, Jun,” Qiang said. “I really needed that. I needed to see for myself that you weren’t anything to be afraid of.”

  The rotting man paced closer to Jun, a few errant flames still gnawing on his orange jumpsuit, hanging from his hair, which shuddered and jumped as it grew back and wormed its way through his scalp.

  “My turn now, you beautiful piece of shit.”

  When Qiang’s fist made contact with Jun’s head, the resulting shockwave broke every window for two miles around.