Chapter 12: Chapter 12. Bad Luck

 

With the crowd being riled up, more and more attacks came at Marcus from almost every direction - some with sticks and metal chains, and some with things like eggs, rotten cabbages and tomatoes. Marcus activated his Qi and ran it through the entirety of his body, and used his body to tank most of the attacks. Most of these attacks did no damage to him physically, just his clothes and pants, and those that came particularly hard and had a chance to threaten his safety were either blocked or evaded by him. Though the Ferocious Tiger Style was not known for its agile evasion and movement techniques, it made up for this weakness for its practitioners with the grantings of enhanced physical strength, endurance, abilities to sense danger, threats and hostile actions, and abilities to withstand greater damage, injuries, sickness and weather conditions. Under the current circumstances, messy as this situation might be for him, he felt that he was not in any sort of real danger.

 

“Back OFF!” Another attack of no honor with a shovel came for his back, and Marcus, having sensed the attempt, immediately stepped to the side and let the shovel glide through the space without hitting him. And instead, the shovel almost jabbed another man in the leg, who was trying to come at Marcus from the side. 

 

“Once again! Back off!” With a heavy push on his chest, the young man with a crooked haircut wielding the shovel flew in the air for but a mere second and landed on a pile of trash on the side of the street. And with a quick sweep of the make-shift flail he took from the first attempted assailant, four wooden sticks and poles aiming at him were shattered to torn pieces and splinters. The three men and one woman wielding these sticks and poles were thrown on their butts and backs by the force, which caused many from the crowd attempting to pile up on Marcus to flinch and step back - this was clearly a show of the level of force which they were not expecting. This sudden fear and hesitation spread through the rest of the crowd, and almost at the same moment all the attackers stopped what they were doing.

 

“I’ll say it once again - ” Marcus looked around with a stern but calm tone to the stunned crowd: “Back off - and this will go away peacefully.”

 

As Marcus took another step towards the direction he was facing, and the mob in front of him all took a step back almost in unison.

 

“Now, no more of this - and I’ll leave you to whatever you’re doing.” Marcus lowered the make-shift flail and started walking one small step at a time.

 

The crowd around him stopped getting closer to him, seemingly having lost their will to attack or even to just dish out harsh words. But those around and behind still followed him as he walked - it seemed that they were not ready to let him go like this just yet either.

 

“Help! Help!” Before Marcus could walk very far, the sound of two crying women echoed through the all of a sudden silent streets: “My babies! Those thugs took my babies!”

 

“What?!” “Fuckers! Where?!” “Get them! Get them! We need to break their fucking arms!”

 

These pleas for help seemed to have provided a much needed outlet for the aggression built up in the crowd, and almost all of them started rushing towards the direction the two women pointed to.

 

“What do they look like?” Marcus stopped by the sides of the two crying women and asked with haste: “How tall are they? What are they wearing?”

 

“About - about this tall, all of the thugs are taller and stronger than us, we couldn’t - ” One crying woman raised her hand over her head: “And they were wearing dark shirts and gray pants - please, you gotta help us - ”

 

“Okay.” Marcus sped towards the direction where the crowd was running to, with his eyes scanning through everything in front of him trying to lock onto the perps who seem like the abductors of children the two women described. 

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“Found them! They’re there! There!” After about half a minute, a young man reaching out from a window on the second storey of a complex on Marcus’ right side pointed at an alley on the left side of the street he was on. 

 

Marcus caught the backs of two men before they ran into that alley, and he immediately memorized what they looked like from the back: striped dark blue shirt, and dark gray canvas jeans.

 

With more Qi flowing into his legs, making his steps and stomps stronger and stronger and eventually much more powerful and propelling than normal human steps, Marcus sped up like a human-shaped motor vehicle and surpassed the rest of the chasing crowd in a matter of seconds.

 

The alley was dimly lit, and it was only wide enough for at most three adult men to run side by side. Not far in front of Marcus were three men, one running at the front and two in the back. The one in front had two children tucked in both his arms, and the other two were each carrying one child - which made a total of 4 children. It gave Marcus a moment of shock, as he had no idea that there would be kidnappers this bold as to grab children off the street right in front of people. Considering how much hatred against child smugglers flowed inside the veins and how some of them literally performed brutal lynchings on alleged kidnappers and smugglers, someone willing and daring to do this in open daylight was more than unexpected.

 

“... Do it!” Seeing that Marcus was gaining on them, the man on the left yelled at the man on the right.

 

“Shit - Fuck you!” The man on the right cursed and lowered his body, and the next moment, while Marcus was still wondering what he was doing, he flung his right arm in the air and threw the child in it into the air.

 

The crowd behind them and Marcus gasped, the child was thrown with quite a force, and within a brief moment, he had already reached a position that was over the height of a three storey building. And below on the ground, there was trash, glass shards from broken windows and alcohol bottles, even some large chunks of debris from buildings with exposed rebar with sharp tips pointing up into the air. If the boy fell down, he would surely suffer severe injuries, if not death.

 

“Fuck!” Marcus took a very quick look at the boy in the air, then immediately scanned through the buildings and streets around him. After less than 1 second, Marcus changed course and ran toward a watermelon stand on the side of the road. The owner of the stand already backed off from the main road, and all he could do at the moment was groan as Marcus used his watermelons as stepping stones. Watery, sweet pulp was spilled everywhere on the ground when Marcus leapt into the air, leaving the exploded and cracked melons below.

 

The young boy let out a muffled scream as he started to fall from the height - there was a piece of duct tape on his mouth and his hands were also taped together on his back. He could only squirm and struggle, but nothing seemed to be remotely useful to help with his impending fall.

 

A big, callused hand came from below just in time to grab the shirt on the front of this young boy, and he felt a gentle support coming from this hand and the arm connected to it. His fall was not broken, but decelerated, and the speed in which the ground lunged at him became much less terrifying.

 

Marcus successfully grabbed onto the boy on his left hand, and his right hand tried to reach for the edge of the handrails on a balcony on his right. The force of his and the boy’s fall caused him to leave three dents on the metal handrail with his fingers. The boy continued his way down with gradually slower speed. Before long, he stopped falling and was pulled up under Marcus’ left arm.

 

Many from the crowd cheered as Marcus let go of the handrail and dropped onto the ground with the boy intact. But Marcus just took the tape off the boy’s mouth and arms and handed him to the owner of the watermelon stand: “Take care of him - his mother is looking for him.” Then, he got on with his chase of the tree men.

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