Yaga hunches up in a ball, on the hallway’s floor. So many years of superstition, this ball had weathered, been raised on– and learned from.

Fate exists. Angels exist. God exists, though he’s less conscious than religions would have one believe.

Yaga grips their still-aching jaw. The image of Ranov’s face comes to their mind.

Devils exist.

Devils that manipulate, intimidate and abuse all they can. Devils that walk among men.

Creatures of a greater darkness, one that not even the brightest light can hope to pierce.

Whilst Yaga is roiling in their cynicism, Scott is many floors above– amidst a half-circle of muscle-bound, bat-bearing men.

The three begin inching closer, scanning Scott’s armored form for weapons, or weak spots.

Though none can see it through his visor, gleaming with the reflected light of the moon as it is, Scott is on the verge of a panic-attack.

As he raises his arms, palms out towards his to-be assailants, he whispers a short prayer.

Needing no more incentive, they lunge at him, bats held high!

Their war-cries are threats and curses in a mosaic of languages, none of which Scott can understand.

With a sound like a camera-flash, Scott’s light-cannons fire. 

His momentum staggered by the sudden pain, the rightmost thug bites his cigar nearly in half as he yells through clenched teeth.

The other baggily-jacketed thug, too, is blinded, their swing panicking into a glancing tap on the Mk-1’s plating.

The last among them, however– the most outright rugged, his inked musculature restrained only by his tank-top, manages to maintain his strike’s power– the wallop it packs sending Scott tottering back to just in front of the stair-case! Even with that, he’s not done.

The galoot charges blindly forth, swinging again, though this time Scott’s footing is right to side-step it fully. 

The man goes barrelling, bellowing in shock as his running-path turns to air beneath him, down onto the stairs Scott’s just dodged back away from.

Thud! Thump! Tunk!

As the two men before Scott struggle to rouse themselves from their blinded, panicked state, sheltering their heads in a pathetic attempt at defense, the third of them is struggling to lift their bruised body from the flight they’d fallen down.

Scott admires his handiwork, his own panic melting off a bit as he leaps to the next step of his combo.

His baton, out of charge as it was, served to do no good here. Instead, Scott took to crotch-booting one of the two men in front of him, as they staggered to their feet, trying through tear-clouded eyes to once again check their watch.

The two men are all but helpless to resist as Scott plays a gruesome game of whack-a-mole, driving the MK-1’s angular knuckles into the jaw, temple, back, or ribs of whichever one of the two comes closest to regaining their footing.

Even whilst revelling in the fact that his palm-cannons weren’t busted after that previous altercation, Scott is cautious. 

Remembering what he’d learned from those street-fight tutorial videos, he was staying an arm’s length from his opponents even whilst delivering his many punishments. He stayed constantly wary of rabid attempts at grappling, and kept his patterns of assault varied. A cycle or three into the beatings, he’d even woven some kicks and stomps into the mix.

Soon enough, though, Scott was feeling some stress in his lungs– his stamina failing. He could hear the sounds of the rough-and-tumbler making his way back up the stairs, too, yelling something about being what “them conservatives and christians fear the most”.

Scott steps off, backing fast into another section of the floor, by the window that had been illuminating their fight with pale moon-rays.

From where the three men are, now, approaching Scott would mean skirting dangerously close to the barrier, soon after which laid a painful collision with the stairs below.

Scott knew that they were the only ones huge enough, being taller than him, that stood a chance of falling over this railing.

As the thugs regroup, rubbing their eyes as Scott catches his breath, they see him silhouetted in pale moonlight, standing right before the window.

Even acknowledging the beating he’d heaped on them, these are grown men. They feel at their bruises and pick themselves up, only the watch-wristed one having ever dropped their bat. He wasn’t getting all-too-much done. He’d need a bigger sort of hurt to put them out before he collapsed from exhaustion.

Spitting up the smoking remains of his cigar, one yells to Scott– a vein popping visibly by patches of split skin on his forehead.

“‘’F this is how you want it, we’ll give it ‘ya.”

Scott ignored him. In this cramped corridor, they’d only be able to come through to “give it” him one at a time. That’d make it easy to blind them, then maneuver them over the railing.

Scott thought– maybe he was getting overconfident, or straight up delusional. Maybe he was dreaming.

He was starting to feel a little light-headed.

All the same– fight-or-flight had held control over him for a good bit, now. He was hyper-focusing on his three attackers, not deigning even to scan his new environment.

All that mattered, now, was the window behind him, lighting his way, and the railing to his left.

He could practically hear them hitting the stairs below, and yet he hesitated.

 It wouldn’t kill them– they were big, tough guys. They’d at most get some sort of fracture.

Right?