"Clang."
The heavy rolling shutter slammed into the ground, its inner bolt locking shut.
Yang Ming stood in the mud outside 22 Lake Street. Rain hammered his black trench coat.
At both ends of the alley, more than twenty dark figures blocked every way out. Lightning split the night sky, illuminating the Thompson submachine guns in their hands and a few rugged Remington military shotguns.
"That's him! The back-alley doctor!"
Someone in the crowd roared.
No negotiations. No wasted words. Gang shootouts in Gotham's East End never bothered with opening remarks.
"Open fire! Turn him into hamburger!" Fiss, the Rat Gang's boss, stood behind the crowd, wiped rain from his bald head, and bellowed like a madman.
More than twenty barrels spat blinding tongues of dark red flame at once.
"Ratatatat-!"
A dense barrage of brass bullets tore through the curtain of rain like a metal storm. Chips flew from the redbrick walls on either side of the alley. Trash cans ripped apart like paper, sending sheet metal flying.
Overwhelming suppressive fire. Never mind a man-even an elephant standing there would have been shredded in a tenth of a second.
But the bullets passed through nothing but air.
One and a half seconds before they opened fire.
Yang Ming turned his wrist. He yanked the [Optical Camouflage Medical Blanket] out of system space and threw it over his head.
The instant the thin silver blanket touched the rain, light refracted in a deeply unnatural way. Yang Ming's tall, lean body and black trench coat vanished as though erased by an invisible eraser. He took half a step back and pressed his back against the cold brick wall.
He blended perfectly into the night.
Bullets skimmed past the tip of his nose, their scorching slipstreams stirring the loose hair over his forehead.
The first volley ended.
The gunfire cut off abruptly. Only spent casings remained scattered across the flooded ground, hissing as white steam rose from them.
"Where'd he go?!" Fiss shoved aside the thug in front of him and strode into the mouth of the alley.
The alley was empty. Apart from the trash cans riddled with holes and the broken bricks scattered everywhere, there wasn't even a drop of blood.
"What the hell... Boss, that guy vanished into thin air!" A thug held his gun, his teeth chattering.
"Search! He can't have gone far! Dig up the whole damn place if you have to, but find him!" The corner of Fiss's eye twitched violently, making the scar running through his rat tattoo look even more vicious.
Guns raised, the thugs spread into a fan and advanced deeper into the alley. Their combat boots splashed through puddles.
The killing began without a sound.
Yang Ming hugged the wall like a ghost drifting through the rainy night. He slowed his breathing to a bare minimum. His master-level combat instincts kept his muscles utterly relaxed, yet ready to unleash terrifying power at any moment.
On his left hand, an ultrathin black Kevlar cut-resistant glove.
In his right hand, an Oscorp high-carbon titanium-alloy blade.
A thug bringing up the rear clutched his gun nervously and looked around. He swallowed, about to turn and speak to his companion.
A black-gloved hand reached out of thin air and clamped tightly over his mouth and nose.
The thug's eyes flew wide. Instinctively, he tried to pull the trigger.
Too late.
The dark gray titanium-alloy blade slipped in just below his ear at an exceptionally precise angle.
The carotid sinus. It was packed with nerve endings. The instant the blade opened the blood vessel, his blood pressure plummeted, plunging his brain into severe oxygen deprivation.
No scream. No struggle.
The thug went limp as though his bones had been pulled out. Yang Ming caught him beneath the arms and silently lowered his still-twitching body into the water.
Blood poured out, only to be washed clean away by the downpour.
The first.
Yang Ming stepped over the corpse, his footfalls as light as a cat's, and fixed his sights on two targets to the left.
The first rule of surgery: avoid hard bone and seek out the most vulnerable gaps between tissues.
He dropped low and slid closer.
The blade flashed once in the rainy night.
"Shhk!"
The thug on the left had his hamstring tendon severed in an instant. With his knee no longer able to support him, he screamed and dropped to one knee.
Before he could react, the blade plunged straight into the hollow above his collarbone.
His subclavian artery ruptured.
A high-pressure jet of blood shot more than two meters, splashing all over the head and face of the companion beside him.
"Aaaah! He's here! Open fire!" The blood-spattered thug broke down completely, squeezing the trigger wildly with his eyes shut.
"Ratatat-!"
The Thompson submachine gun sprayed bullets wildly. But the moment Yang Ming severed the artery, he had already used the motion to propel himself into a sideways flip and vanished into the shadows on the other side.
The bullets missed Yang Ming, but mowed down several Rat Gang members opposite him.
"Cease fire! You idiot! You're hitting our own men!"
The alley descended into utter chaos.
Fear of the unknown was more terrifying than death. They couldn't see their enemy. They could only watch their companions fall in bizarre ways. Some had their wrist tendons severed; others had the backs of their necks sliced open. Every collapse came with an exquisitely precise fatal wound.
This wasn't a gang shootout at all.
It was a one-sided massacre. A vivisection performed in the pouring rain.
Just three minutes.
Half the Rat Gang's force of more than twenty men was already down. The dozen or so left broke completely. They began firing blindly through the rain, even shoving one another as they tried to escape the cursed alley.
"Hold your fucking ground!"
Fiss roared. He knocked down a thug trying to flee with the butt of his gun, his eyes locked on the rain ahead.
He was a hardened killer who had spent years living on a knife's edge. Fear didn't break him. Instead, it awakened an animal instinct.
The rain.
The downpour was too heavy.
Fiss narrowed his eyes. He noticed a tiny irregularity in the falling rain less than five meters in front of him.
Droplets struck an invisible curved surface and slid off unnaturally. In the instant a flash of lightning illuminated it, they outlined an extremely faint human shape.
A physical flaw in the cloaking device.
"Got you, you piece of shit!"
Fiss's eyes bulged with rage. He whipped up the Remington shotgun, its thick barrel locked on that watery outline.
The distance was too short. The shotgun's spread was enormous. Once he fired, countless steel pellets would turn that invisible monster into a sieve.
His finger squeezed the trigger.
Beneath the camouflage blanket, Yang Ming's pupils contracted sharply.
I can't dodge it.
He was too close. The shot's spread had already sealed off every escape route.
But Yang Ming had never intended to dodge.
The dark silver storage ring at the base of his right index finger suddenly flashed with a dim gleam.
"Bang-!"
The Remington shotgun erupted with a deafening roar. An enormous fan of flame burst from its muzzle.
In the very same ten-thousandth of a second that the muzzle flash lit up.
"CLANG!!!"
An extraordinarily heavy, grating crash of metal hitting the ground thundered through the alley.
A massive object appeared out of thin air between Yang Ming and Fiss without warning.
It was a three-hundred-pound multifunctional stainless steel operating table, complete with a complex hydraulic lift system!
"Clangclangclangclang-!"
The dense swarm of steel shot hammered the operating table's thick metal base and stainless steel surface like a raging storm, throwing off a dazzling shower of sparks. Every hard steel pellet ricocheted away, leaving a dense spread of craters in the brick walls.
The operating table didn't budge.
Fiss's brain shut down completely.
His eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.
An operating table?
Where the hell did it come from?! Did it fall out of the sky?! Or had that thing been hidden in the alley all along?!
This went far beyond anything a Gotham gang boss could comprehend.