“Alright, bitch. We’ve tried playing nice, now we’re gonna get ugly.” Asuka turned her head just enough to see the four senior students blocking one end of the alleyway. The leader was the captain of the Kendo club, and she thought that she recognized the captain of the school dojo and the self-described “toughest punk in Tokyo-3”. The fourth member she only vaguely recalled seeing around school. The fact that the Kendo-punk and the wannabe Yakuza were carrying a bokken and a length of chain were noted.
“Wait, now you’re going to get ugly? What have you been doing up until now, warm-ups?” She didn’t sound as if she was worried about being cornered in a dark ally by four militant, armed, and threatening young men in the least. Provoking them, under any circumstances, would have been considered a less than intelligent move. She didn’t care. She was sick and tired of everything. Sick of being in this shithole country, sick of these moronic people, sick of being forced to sit in on classes that she had completed years ago, sick of the wait for a new monster to show up, sick of having to get permission to kill things that threatened the existence of the human race, sick of these peons thinking themselves her equal, and she was finally going to get a chance to vent. They thought that they were the predators here. It was funny, almost. Like a flock of sheep threatening to hurt a she-wolf.
The kendo captain smirked at her defiance. “Ah, the wit of the great Asuka Langly-Sohryuu. That’s the best you can come up with? Well, you’ll be screaming something else in a few minutes.” A dark chuckle ran through the group. They were smart. They had chosen to corner her at a time and place where no one would hear her, no one would look for her, and she wouldn’t get away. They had even brought some tools to keep her from being a nuisance. Rokko shrugged off the backpack with the ‘accessories’ in it, as Hyono started to swagger forward. “Alright, this is going to feel so good. Play nice, or we’ll have to get rough. You can start by stripping.”
Asuka rolled her eyes. So unoriginal. It was like these goons had planned everything under the influence of the shitty local beer and hentai manga. She glanced over where she stood, spotting a length of rebar lying on the ground. Since the city was being rebuilt so often, it was hardly surprising that bits of scrap were left lying about. After all, why bother to keep things too tidy? Keep it off the main thoroughfares, but leave it out. We’re going to have to rebuild anyway, next time those damn robots decide to waltz through. Ah, this piece was a tad long, but she compensated by choking up on the grip a bit, and even better, it had been sheered off, so it had a nice pointy tip. Taking a stance, she declared “I am Asuka Langly-Sohryuu, Leviathan’s Bane and Twinslayer. I have voyaged through the heart of a volcano, have strode among the works of Man as a goddess, and seen and done things that your frail minds would break to contemplate. This is your only warning. Depart, and lest I ever see your faces again, I will break you.”
Kendo-punk wanted to try his luck first. It was stupid of them to try and engage me here. She thought. The alleyway prevents them from surrounding me, so they can only engage me from the front. It’s a dead end, so they can’t get around behind me. In this sort of terrain, the advantage goes to the superior combatant. Asuka was, by any reasonable definition, superior.
Kendo-punk advanced, tried to strike at her head. A lazy block, sidestep, and parry at the wrist. That would have hurt if she had done that with a training weapon. As it was, bone was showing, and he almost lost his grip on the Bokken. Shifting to his left hand, he tried to use t he blade to keep her improvised sword immobilized while he ran up to grapple with her. She waited for a half second, then reversed her grip on the rebar, jamming the handle into the underside of his jaw, then stomped on his foot, crushing his metatarsals. He went down, screaming and clutching himself. The blood in his mouth made it come out as a sort of high-pitched gurgle.
Yakuza-wannabe was next, already swinging his length of chain. Idiot. They do that in the movies to make it look threatening. She already knew what was going to happen. He was going to throw one end of the chain at her and try to wrap it around something. Then he was going to try and pull and try to unbalance her. She made the first move, backward, deeper into the ally. When he followed, she attacked as he was stepping over kendo-punk. One strike, and she broke his collarbone. Second strike, and she punctured his femur with the sharp end of the rebar. Fuck. It was lodged in too deep for her to retrieve it. The karate man was up next, and the one she didn’t recognize was fumbling with the backpack he had dropped not thirty seconds before. That can’t be good. She made a running jump over her two downed opponents, simply trying to get around them. She wasn’t stupid enough to try some Jet Li move on this guy. His first move was to punch her. She grabbed his wrist, rotated on her front heel, palmstrike to the nose, turn again and push and now his arm was out of socket. She dropped him, then stomped on his knee, shattering it. By the time that she was done with him, the last would-be rapist had pulled out a handgun. Colt .45 revolver, 5th and 6th chambers empty, 2nd and 3rd full. So somewhere between three and four shots. Before he could bring it to bear, she tackled him. A pressure point on his right hand got him to scream, but he refused to drop the gun. No matter, with his grip weakened, she pried it away from him. Kicking him in the groin as she stood, she pointed it at him, both hands on the pistol, like her instructors had trained her.
“Alright, you had your chance. Now it’s my turn. What else do you have in that bag?” She stepped away from him. Not because she was scared, but because she was the one with the gun now, and there wasn’t any reason to be near. “Empty it out. No tricks.”
After he emptied it out, she was disgusted. Sex toys. Figures. “Take the handcuffs and cuff yourself to those pipes over there. No, facing outward. I want to see your face.” As he did so, she started looking through the pockets of the Yakuza-wannabe, before finding what she was looking for in his back pocket. She advanced on him with the switchblade.
There was no one to hear his screams. They had chosen this place rather well, apparently.