Chapter 192: Running Scared
Chapter 192: Running Scared
"Or maybe you don't want to know the truth—about how your mother really died."
Caesar's feet nailed themselves to the floor.
Monica kept talking, and every word landed like the edge of a blade. "And the final formula for the Enhancement Serum."
"Ever wonder why so many top-tier financial cartels and underground organizations, in so many different countries, all happen to be holding a piece of that classified, incomplete formula?"
Caesar turned back around slowly, every muscle in his body already coiled tight in a combat state.
"What do you know?"
Monica didn't answer.
Her hands slid to the inner seam of that flame-red slip dress, high up along the top of her thighs.
Shhk—
Two razor-honed Kukri blades came free in her grip. Under the laser lights, the steel gleamed with a cold, killing silver.
Her entire presence flipped in a single instant, an almost terrifying transformation.
Gone was the drunk, wanton dancer. In her place stood something feral—teeth bared, hungry for blood.
A sick smile curled at the corner of her mouth. "Beat me, and I'll tell you everything."
The words weren't even out of her mouth.
Her whole body was already launching forward like a shell out of a barrel.
She moved faster than any human should—the red hem tearing a blinding afterimage through the air.
In the blink of an eye, Monica was on him, both Kukris howling as they split the air and came down at the same time. One slash for his throat, one thrust for his heart.
Caesar's pupils tightened. He whipped his upper body back in a violent Matrix dodge.
The keen edges skimmed a hair off the tip of his nose, shearing away a few strands of hair.
Using the momentum of the lean-back, he snapped his right leg out like a striking serpent, driving a heavy kick square into Monica's stomach.
That kick carried enough force to rupture the internal organs of a two-hundred-pound man on the spot.
Monica only let out a muffled grunt. Impossibly, she rode the horrific force of the blow into a flawless one-eighty backflip, landing clean on her feet.
She staggered back three steps, planted herself, and crossed the two blades in front of her chest. The only sign of damage was a thin thread of crimson leaking from the corner of her mouth.
Caesar straightened up, his expression turning grim. He stared hard into her eyes—bloodshot, glowing red.
"You're juiced up," he said. "You injected the Enhancement Serum."
In Caesar's memory, Monica had always been a top-tier female operative—but never at this level.
That inhuman speed. That explosive power. The ability to eat a full kick from him and not shatter a single bone. All of it blew clean past the outer limits of human physiology.
Only one thing could explain it. She'd shot herself full of the serum—the version that wasn't even close to stable yet.
Monica gathered her loose hair and tied it back into a ponytail, and there was something chilling in her eyes now, a fanatical heat.
"For revenge."
Her voice carried a flat, absolute calm. "I'll pay any price. Including my soul."
The vein at Caesar's temple jumped. He forced his fury down and spat, "You're insane. The side effects of that serum will burn your brain out of your skull."
Monica threw her head back and laughed, hysterical.
"Ha ha ha…"
"That's right!"
She gripped both Kukris tight and dropped back into a lethal attacking stance.
"Caesar! Today is the day you die!"
With a beast's roar she became a red streak of lightning again, charging.
The next second—
BOOM—!!!
A single, crushing thud.
Monica was launched away even faster than she'd come in, catapulted off a full roundhouse kick from Caesar.
She flew like a rag doll and slammed into one of the club's load-bearing concrete pillars, hard enough to crack the surface into a spiderweb of fractures.
She crumpled to the floor, dropping onto one knee, and coughed up a huge mouthful of blood laced with shreds of ruptured tissue.
The serum had reinforced her body, sure. But standing in front of a genuine apex predator like Caesar, the gulf between them was still one she could never cross.
Caesar walked toward her, step by measured step, and looked down at her, his eyes cold as Siberian permafrost.
"My mother's death. How much do you actually know?"
"Who told you all of this?"
His voice was calm. But whatever was pressed down beneath that calm was more terrifying than any scream.
"Tell me. Or I snap your neck right now."
Monica's hair hung in tangles. Blood and cold sweat streaked that impossibly beautiful face.
But she was still smiling—a wretched, deranged smile.
"Ha ha ha… He was right about you."
She lifted her head and stared into his eyes. "The second it touches your family, you cold-blooded monster—you lose your mind completely."
"You've got all this power everyone's so scared of, Caesar. But go on, look behind you. There's nobody there. Every single person you loved is dead."
"You're just like me. Just another poor wretch cursed by fate."
She was clearly trying to gut him with the ugliest words she could find, to bait his rage.
Caesar's hand closed in her hair and hauled her up bodily, his voice dropping into something demonic.
"Who is he?"
"Whoever fed you this intel—who is he?!"
A flash of pure madness lit her eyes.
"You want to know?"
"Keep dreaming. Go to hell and ask him yourself!"
The words had barely left her lips.
Up in a VIP booth on the club's second floor, someone hit the Rainmaker.
Rrrrrrip—
Thousands upon thousands of green hundred-dollar bills came pouring down from the ceiling like a blizzard.
"Money! So much money!"
"Fuck! We're rich! Grab it, grab it!"
The men and women who'd been standing there stunned lost every ounce of reason the instant they saw Benjamins raining out of the sky.
Hundreds of people surged toward the dance floor like rabid dogs, clawing madly at the cash on the ground. In seconds the whole place dissolved into a horrifying crush of trampling bodies and chaos.
The moment the frenzied crowd shoved Caesar back, Monica ripped herself free and stumbled out through the club's rear exit, escaping into the dark alley beyond.
Out in the alley.
A black armored Dodge with no plates sat waiting, back door hanging open.
The V8 rumbled low. Engine still running.
Monica threw herself into the back seat.
The door hadn't even latched.
The driver, face hidden behind a tactical mask, had already stomped the accelerator to the floor.
VRRRM—!
Rubber shrieked against asphalt, kicking up acrid white smoke, and the car shot away like an arrow loosed from a bow.
The driver flicked a glance at the blood-soaked Monica in the rearview. "You lose him?"
She clutched the ruined mess of her stomach, breathing hard. "I—I think so…"
She never finished the sentence.
Because she saw Caesar—materializing like a ghost less than thirty feet directly in front of the car.
Arms hanging loose at his sides. An immovable god of death.
Her pupils crushed down to pinpoints. She screamed, "Run him over! Drive!"
The driver's reflexes were lightning fast.
He didn't brake. He wrenched the wheel hard instead, and the black car snapped into a savage drift, the body shaving past Caesar close enough to brush him, dragging a gust of wind in its wake.
Caesar just stood there. Didn't so much as blink.
In the instant they passed each other—
Their eyes met for one full second through the bulletproof glass.
Every drop of blood in Monica's body froze solid.
What she saw was a pair of eyes with no warmth left in them at all. Gone was the lazy indifference from before. Now there was nothing but pure, undisguised, absolute intent to kill.
The black car tore out of the alley and knifed into the traffic streaming down the Las Vegas Strip.
Monica twisted around in terror.
No pursuit.
No car.
Her heart, lodged in her throat, had barely dropped for a single second—
When a black armored beast of a Humvee roared into the rearview like a monster clinging to bone.
"Faster!" she shrieked at the driver. "Floor it! Lose him!"
The driver was drenched in sweat, mashing the pedal into the floorboard.
The Dodge's engine screamed up to its redline.
But Caesar's heavily modified Humvee never fell more than a hundred and fifty feet behind, jaws locked tight on their tail.
"Up ahead—the canyon road at Red Rock!" the driver yelled, eyes flicking to the GPS. "Once we're on those switchbacks, there's no way his heavy Humvee can outrun this car through the turns!"
Tires screaming, the black Dodge cut into a treacherous mountain road at brutal speed.
Monica's eyes were riveted to the mirror.
They cleared a few tight hairpins.
And finally, the Humvee's blinding headlights vanished.
Her throat was dry and cracked. She swallowed. "Did we lose him…?"
"FUCK!!!"
The driver's voice ripped up an octave, shrill as a man who'd just seen a ghost in broad daylight.
Monica's head snapped up, following his gaze to the windshield above.
Caesar's black Humvee had appeared on the switchback directly above them.
Somehow—through some insane maneuver—he'd cut a straight off-road shortcut and put himself on the stretch of road hanging over their heads.
The skin on Monica's skull crawled and split.
She forced down that primal dread, the kind you feel staring into the face of death itself, but her voice shook out of her control. She wasn't sure if she was reassuring the driver or herself.
"It's fine… don't panic!"
"He can't catch us. This is a switchback road. No matter what shortcut he cuts, a car's physics have limits. He can't just fly down here—"
She never finished.
Because she witnessed the single most horrifying, most physics-defying thing she'd ever seen in her life.
On the cliff road above, Caesar wrenched the wheel of that three-ton Humvee into a suicidal turn.
The nose swung with unstoppable, savage force—straight into the metal guardrail lining the outer edge of the canyon road.
BOOM—!!!
The heavy steel barrier tore apart like tissue paper against the Humvee's armored front end.
The Humvee smashed through.
Its front wheels hung fully out over open air—and hundreds of feet of sheer cliff dropped away beneath.
But Caesar didn't touch the brake. He drove the accelerator to the floor.
To the desperate roar of the engine, the black steel behemoth launched clean off the cliff.
Through the sunroof, Monica watched three tons of Humvee drop out of the sky like a black meteor.
Her pupils shrank to two absolute pinpoints.
"He's insane… he's completely insane!!!"
BOOM—!!!
A deafening, world-shaking impact.
The Humvee came down at a near-vertical angle, riding a monstrous gravitational acceleration, and slammed into the asphalt twenty yards directly in front of the black Dodge.
The force shook the whole mountainside. It punched a massive crater into the road, blasting rock and shattered tar outward like bullets in every direction.
The Dodge's driver was scared straight out of his mind by the steel monster that had fallen from the heavens. On pure instinct he stood on the brake and cranked the wheel like a lunatic, trying to swerve clear.
But at these Speed Limit velocities—
The sheer inertia ripped every bit of traction out from under the black car in an instant.
Crash! Crash! Crash!
The Dodge flipped onto its side and began a violent death roll down the mountain road. Five, six full rotations, then it slammed hard into the rock face, belching thick smoke.
One minute later.
Caesar kicked open the crumpled door of the Humvee and climbed out.
Aside from a single scrape on his forehead, he didn't have a scratch on him.
Expressionless, he walked over to the black Dodge—now twisted into a mangled heap of scrap.
The car lay upended in the ditch, all four wheels to the sky. The roof was crushed flat. Every window was gone.
The rear door was warped, jammed shut.
Caesar grabbed the handle, loaded his right leg, and BAM—drove a kick into the deformed panel.
That heavy bulletproof door tore clean off, hinges and all, and went flying into the rocks off in the distance.
Then, like he was dragging out a corpse, Caesar hauled Monica out of the crumpled cabin.
She was a wreck. Utterly.
The entire left side of her face was carved up with glass cuts. One eye was gone, destroyed by a fragment of impact debris, the socket caved in horribly, blood sheeting down her cheek.
The serum had kept her alive—but it also left her enduring agony no ordinary person could imagine.
The driver was still pinned in his seat.
His whole lower body was crushed beneath the mangled dashboard and the engine bay that had folded into the cabin. His thigh bone had snapped, a pale-white spur of bone jutting through his pants into open air, blood pooling across the ground.
When the driver saw Caesar's eyes—those eyes like Death himself—he started shaking violently. He reached out one blood-slicked hand, begging.
"Help me… please… save me…"