Someone stepped into the hall’s archway.

“Bruce!” Justine gasped.

The Starflyer assassin raised his arm.

Justine wailed in terror, hands instinctively clutching at her belly, protecting the unborn.

The corridor’s ceiling ruptured in a cloud of dust and concrete fragments as it was hit by a powerful focused disruptor field. Gore Burnelli dropped through the rent to land lightly between Justine and Bruce. He looked very dapper in a perfectly tailored tuxedo. “Hey, pal,” he said to Bruce, “want to try picking on someone your own size for a change?”

Both of Bruce’s arms were raised. A near-solid torrent of plasma bolts struck Gore, cocooning him in an incandescent nimbus. His tuxedo burst into flames. The floor and walls around him started to blacken. Justine shielded her face from the fearsome light.

Bruce lowered his arms. Gore stood in a circle of scorched concrete that was edged in flame, the last ashes of his ruined clothes dropping from him. His naked body was completely gold, reflecting the flames in little orange ripples. He smiled waspishly. “My turn.” He started walking toward Bruce. A focused disrupter pulse slammed out from him, filling the corridor’s smoky air with a ghost-green phosphorescence. Bruce’s force field flashed purple as he staggered backward from the blow. He struggled to stand upright. Gore fired another pulse that knocked the assassin off his feet and sent him skidding back across the hall’s polished parquet flooring, arms and legs waving like an upturned turtle. He rolled himself onto his front, and scurried away.

“Come back and play, motherfucker,” Gore called. He sped along the corridor and into the living room after Bruce. Plasma bolts, maser beams, and ion bolts hit him as soon as he was through the open doorway. Wild ribbons of energy exploded around him as his integral force field deflected the assault, sending them lashing into the building’s structure. The strength of the attack started to push him back as if a watercannon was striking him head-on. He expanded the force field behind him, pressing it up against the wall to hold himself against the power of the assassin’s weapons. His feet halted their backward slide as the wall cracked and bent inward. Another focused disruptor shot at Bruce’s legs sent the assassin tumbling over again. The assassin hit the wall beside the balcony doors as the glass shattered across him. He rebounded and assumed a wrestler’s crouch. Gore jumped.

The two of them collided in a maelstrom of whirling energy streamers and disintegrating furniture. Gore’s nerves were saturated with accelerants, speeding up his reflexes as he chopped at the assassin with a series of karate blows that would have sliced an unprotected body into pieces. The impacts couldn’t quite reach through Bruce’s force field, though Gore saw the telltale scarlet flicker of an approaching overload each time he connected. He was managing to inflict a degree of harm on the body it enveloped, though it was hardly debilitating. Bruce’s face grimaced silently in the bursts of red light. His own nervous system was accelerated, but not as fast as Gore’s. He never quite managed to block the chops. As the force field weakened, it left his clothes exposed. Cloth either tore as Gore’s hand ripped across it or singed from the residue of weapons fire. Then Bruce twisted around, and managed to kick Gore’s legs with a savage judo lunge.

Gore let the momentum carry him, and then amplified the movement, somersaulting backward to land on his feet like some gymnast coming off the bars. He immediately advanced again, unleashing a barrage of focused disruptor shots.

Bruce had flipped the other way, recovering gracefully. As he straightened up, ragged clothes flapping against him, he was standing directly in front of the shattered balcony window. The disruptor field punched him back. He extended his force field wide, producing an angel wing configuration to try to secure himself to the walls framing the balcony door. Gore fired plasma bolts into the scorched plaster and concrete, blasting the solid material from either side of the assassin. Bruce answered with his own focused distortion field. They leaned in toward each other, as if shoving their way through a hurricane. The apartment began to break up around them as the focused disruptor fields clashed. Deep fissures snapped through the walls. Whole sections of the floor shifted like tectonic faults. Plaster, concrete, wood, and carbon-wrapped steel reinforcement strands rained down from the ceiling.

Gore crouched down, and sprang with the full power of his boosted muscles, amplified by a perfectly timed expansion of his force field. He flew through the air like a golden missile, outstretched fists ramming into Bruce’s chest. The assassin left the ground, flailing backward. His back hit the stone balcony rail, which buckled badly. Gargoyle heads shifted around as the stonework juddered.

Bruce looked at Gore for a moment, then vaulted over the rail. Gore never even hesitated: he leaped after his opponent.

It was completely silent in the air forty floors above Park Avenue. Gore heard nothing as he fell. His full-spectrum senses locked on to Bruce’s plummeting body below him; shrouded in its cloak of energy it shone like a star in his virtual vision target grid. He fired several plasma bolts down, but his own plunge was too unstable to provide him any reasonable accuracy. Explosions blossomed on the street below, orange and violet flames flowering up and outward to welcome both of them.

The few cars and taxis using the road emergency-braked, their headlights skewing across the street as they skidded to a halt. Passengers pressed their faces to the windows to see what was happening.

Gore stretched out his arms and legs like a skydiver, then expanded his force field into a wide lens-shaped bubble. Air rushed against it, braking his speed sharply. When it reached twenty meters across he was barely moving. He rotated to an upright position. The force field’s lower section touched the sidewalk, and folded carefully back against him, lowering him onto the ground. He stood motionless for a moment, hands resting on his hips as he watched Bruce.

The assassin’s impact had left a human-shaped indentation in the Park Avenue tarmac close to the smoldering craters of the plasma bolts. There was a lot of blood in and around it. Bruce was staggering away across the road, weaving unsteadily around the stationary cars. Blood soaked the charred, tattered rags that he wore, splattering a wide trail behind him. Each step produced a strange crackling sound. It came from the spikes of bone sticking through his shins that were grinding against each other at every motion. The integral force field was holding his legs together, which was the only reason he was lurching forward; even so the jerky movement was that of a late-night drunk.

Gore grinned in satisfaction, and jumped. He soared effortlessly over the cars to drop in front of Bruce. As he landed, he bent forward and kicked back in one smooth motion, his heel smashing into Bruce’s chest. The assassin was flung backward as his force field cloaked him in a pale crimson light; he rolled over and over until he thudded into the front fender of a yellow taxi, denting the bodywork. One shin was bent at a right angle. The force field strengthened around it, trying to straighten it again. It emitted a loud squelching sound as the mangled flesh was further abused.

Bruce’s head was shaking as he tried to look around at Gore; dark blood gurgled out of his mouth. He raised an arm and fired a plasma bolt at the nude golden human. The intense globe of energized atoms simply splashed off Gore’s metallic skin without even straining his force field. The taxi’s terrified passengers were yelling frantically; they ducked down below the windows.

“This is not a good day for you, is it?” Gore sneered. “First Illuminatus, now here. How many of these corrupted humans have you got left? I wonder.”