The Society (A Broken World Book 1) by Dean Murray Read Free Book Online Page B

plenty deadly enough—for a blunt weapon—on its own, but the handle carried a battery capable of emitting a charge that would drop a buffalo.
    We nodded at each other and then I stepped forward and sent out an exploratory jab. What I found made me grit my teeth. Her reaction time was better than I'd been expecting. Despite my best efforts I hadn't been training hard enough. Apparently she'd always been a hypocrite, but she'd pushed herself harder than I'd ever done. Given a few more weeks our baseline capabilities would level out as I caught up with her, and then the greater multiple from my nanites would make a fight like this child's play.
    Unfortunately this wasn't taking place in the future, it was taking place now, and our capabilities were too close for comfort. She dodged my jab and stepped into me with a punch to my short ribs. As quickly as that, the fight was full on and the two of us blurred into a flurry of blows that no normal human could have hoped to follow.
    I checked her punch with my left elbow and launched my knee up towards her midsection. She blocked that with her shin, using enough force to nearly knock me off balance, and then moved forward with a palm strike to the base of my throat.
    I slipped to the side, just far enough that her hand shot through the empty space next to my ear, and then I slammed a punch home to her ribs, smiling as I heard a pair of cracks that signified she was going home that night with at least two broken bones.
    I expected her to back down—broken ribs weren't the kind of injury you could fight around without feeling every muscle contraction. Instead, I saw something change behind her eyes. I'd always suspected that none of the rest of us were really real to her, now I had confirmation. She wasn't just fighting to hurt me now, she was going to try to kill me—she just needed to find a way to make it look like an accident.
    She hooked her heel around the back of my leg and pulled as she threw her weight forward and slightly to one side. I'd put too much into my punch to her ribs; my balance was too far off.
    I was going down—there was no stopping it—but I wasn't going to make things easy for her. I grabbed hold of her mid-fall and tightened every muscle along the front of my body to generate the maximum possible force as I drove my knee into her gut.
    She screamed out in pain—something I'd been convinced I would never hear—as the shockwave from my blow sent fragments of rib up into her lung. I expected to feel the lash of the instructor's stun baton at any second, but until it actually landed I had no choice but to keep going at her with everything I had.
    A split second later I hit the ground with her on top of me, and her elbow slammed into my chest with enough force to break several of my ribs. Even nanites could only go so far when it came to overriding involuntary muscle contractions—she'd knocked the air out of me.
    Before I could knock her off of me she repositioned, throwing me into an arm-bar as she flipped me over on my stomach. She'd won—there wasn't anything I could do to get out of the hold—but I knew that wasn't going to satisfy her. She needed a pretext for killing me; she was going to let my arm slip out of her hands.
    I felt her pull back and knew she was about to make her move. From a kneeling position with only my back exposed to her and no weapon there were only so many options open to her. She was going to try to snap my neck.
    My timing had to be perfect. I heard the faintest whisper of breath and chose that moment to move. I tore my arm free of her hands at the same time that I brought my right leg around and slammed it into her knee, destroying the joint.
    She was falling, but I knew I couldn't just back off—not against Megan. I had to prove I was the more lethal fighter. I wrapped both of my legs around her upper body and used my hip as a fulcrum to snap her arm.
    A second later I felt the paralyzing jolt of the instructor's