Monster Hunter Legion-eARC (3 page)

“Dude, use your
inside
voice,” Trip suggested as he studied the table of muscle and testosterone growling at us. “I don’t want to get beat up.”

Green giggled. “I’m not worried. We got Z. Just hide behind him. That was my plan. He’s
huge
.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I’ll remember that when I’m getting my teeth kicked in.”

A server came by, and I quickly apologized for the mess and slipped her a twenty. Luckily nobody had called security, and it looked like everything was going to be cool. VanZant got back, saw that some of the staff was cleaning up my spillage and everyone looked tense, and asked what he’d missed. I jerked a thumb at Green. “I think he needs to sleep it off.”

VanZant shook his head sadly. “He gets spun up sometimes. I’ve got him. Come on, man. Why don’t you go splash some water on your face or something.” He dragged Green up by his collar.

“But I didn’t finish my creampuffs!”

“My apologies, Z. He is a really good Hunter when he’s sober.”

Crisis averted, I went back for replacement food as VanZant led our most inebriated Hunter away. I caught sight of a small man with a gigantic red beard waving at me from the entrance, and so I pointed Milo in the direction of our table. The last of the MHI dinner party had arrived.

Plate partially reloaded, I was preoccupied with using tongs to pick up some crab legs when somebody bumped into my arm. Another solid fellow had been reaching under the sneeze guard at the same time. “Pardon me,” he said politely.

“Sorry about that,” I answered as I moved a bit to the side. “Didn’t see you. Easily distracted by crab legs, you know.”

“Thanks.” He scooped up several pounds of crustacean and dumped them onto his plate. Crouched, he still barely fit under the sneeze guard. He straightened his back and towered over me. I’m 6'5", was wearing thick-soled combat boots, and he still had me beat by a few inches.

“If you’ve seen that show about how hard these are to catch, that just makes them taste even better…” I trailed off. The man seemed strangely familiar. Probably thirty, he was thickset, with biceps like hams stuffed under his black T-shirt. His enormous head was stubbly with short, dark hair, and there was a crease running down the middle where he’d had a severe skull injury or maybe brain surgery. Beady eyes narrowed as he got a better look at me. One of his eyes wasn’t pointing in quite the same direction as the other one. A look of confusion crossed his wide, flat face.

Where did I know this man from?

Of course I hadn’t recognized him at first. He’d aged. After all, it had been several years, and he hadn’t had that scar on his head nor the bad eye. Plus the last time I’d seen him I’d been kneeling on his chest and dropping elbows against his bloody and unconscious face until his eye had popped out and his skull had broken in half.

“You!”
we exclaimed at the same time.

His tray hit the floor with a clatter. The other patrons around the seafood area were suddenly quiet. The giant’s mouth turned into a snarl and his hands curled into a fist. “Son of a bitch!”

The final illegal, underground money fight I’d ever participated in had been against this monster. All I’d known going in was that he was a killer, a prison-hardened, brutal machine of a fighter, and then he’d beaten the living hell out of me until I’d finally taken him down, lost control, and nearly beaten him to death. I’d never even known his name.

I took a step back. He was right to be mad. I’d lost it. It was the worst thing I’d ever done. “It was an ac—”

“Accident?” Veins were popping out in his neck. “I was out, and you didn’t stop hitting me until they dragged you off! You put out my eye!”

“Sorry.”
Man, that sounded pathetic.

“You ruined my life!” And with a roar, the giant charged.

I lifted the metal serving tray like a shield just in time for his fist to bend it in half. The tray went flying and a waitress screamed. Dodging back, I thumped hard into the table with the ice swan. An instinctive duck kept my head attached to my body as the giant threw a massive left hook that decapitated the swan. Then he lowered his shoulder and rammed into me, taking us both onto the table. The ice swan toppled, hit the floor, and exploded, sending bits everywhere. The table collapsed beneath us and we went rolling off in separate directions.

There were a few seconds of shocked silence, and then fight-or-flight kicked in for everyone in the buffet. For the regular people, it was flight from the two very large men crashing about. Sadly, flight wasn’t the normal first reaction for a Hunter. There was a battle cry from near the exit. “That PT guy hit Z!” Green shouted as he shoved his way through the people.
The man that had attacked me was wearing a black shirt…
Green sprinted across the restaurant yelling, “Fight! Fight!” Then he dove and tackled a random PT employee who was getting a piece of pie from the desert bar.

“No! It’s not them.” I got up, but the giant was already coming my way again, and then I was too busy protecting my vital organs from his sledgehammer fists to communicate.

The occupants of the MHI table had all stood up to see what was going on, and so had the Paranormal Tactical crew. The two sides looked at each other for just a moment…and then it was
on
. The last thing I saw was one of the Haight brothers clubbing a PT Hunter in the jaw, because then I had to concentrate on my own problems.

The giant was coming my way, hands up and loose, protecting his face. Even enraged, he was moving like a pro. The last time we’d squared off had been a close one. This was the toughest human being I’d ever fought, at least now that I knew Franks didn’t count as human.

“I don’t want to fight you,” I warned.

“Should’a thought of that before you tried to murder me.”

He came in quick, but this wasn’t a ring, and I wasn’t fighting fair. I kicked a chunk of ice and he instinctively flinched aside as it zipped past him. I yanked a cloth off a table and threw it over his head like a net. I’d like to say that I did it dramatically and all the plates and pitchers stayed in place, but they didn’t, and most of them shattered on the ground. Temporarily entangled in the tablecloth, he couldn’t defend himself very well, so I charged in swinging. I slugged him twice in the stomach, and when his hands went down, I reached up and tagged him with a shot to the mouth.

But then he threw the tablecloth back over me, and I think it was an elbow that got me in the side of the head. I was seeing stars when he slung me around and put me into the meat area. Ham broke my fall. The meat-slicing buffet employees ran for their lives. Getting up, I hurled a pot roast at the giant and he smacked it across the room.

We clashed. There wasn’t any finesse at all; it was just a slug fest. We went back and forth, trading blows. Too busy trying to protect my face, I got hit in the ribs, which sucked, and then he nailed me in the stomach, which really sucked, and suddenly I was regretting the several pounds of food I’d just consumed. His shoe landed on a piece of ice, and as he slid off balance, I snap kicked him hard in the thigh of his grounded leg.

He went to his hands and knees. “Stay down!” I ordered.

The restaurant patrons were evacuating. Green had someone in a choke hold and another PT man on his back. I’d forgotten that VanZant had used to be a champion welterweight, and he was knocking the snot out of a PT man twice his size. The Haights seemed to be having a jolly time, until one of them got hit with a chair. Gregorius was wrestling a PT Hunter next to the soda machines. Ultimate Fighter had Cooper in an arm bar. Albert, despite the cane and leg brace, was a shockingly tenacious fighter, and he was facing two PT Hunters at once, which apparently Trip didn’t think was very sporting, because he slammed one of them
through
a corner booth. Even Holly had gotten into it. A PT man hesitated, not wanting to strike a girl, until she groin-kicked him like she was punting a football.

Turning back to the giant, I didn’t see that my opponent’s hands had landed on another serving tray, which he promptly swung and clipped me in the temple. That one rocked my world. I landed flat on my back. The giant came over to stomp me, but Nate body-checked him into the soft-serve ice-cream machine. Too bad the Shacklefords were from Alabama, because the kid showed a lot of promise as a hockey player.

The vanilla spigot had broken off, and soft serve came spooling out. “Got no problem with you,” the giant said through gritted teeth. “Just him. Get out of my way.”

“You mess with MHI, you mess with all of us!”

The giant cocked his misshapen head to one side. “What?
MHI?
”

Nate tried to punch him, and though he was fast and relatively skilled, the giant was simply out of his league. He effortlessly slapped Nate’s hands aside, grabbed my brother-in-law’s tie to hold him in place, then slugged him. One, two, three solid hits before Nate’s brain had even recorded the first impact. Nate went down, out cold.

That really pissed me off, and I came off the floor, ready to kick some ass.

Hotel security guards were pushing their way inside. Since the restaurant rotated on a platform, the whole place was shaking badly under the stampede. The other ice sculpture fell and broke, and somehow somebody had managed to throw something hard enough to break one of the chandeliers. There was some screaming as Green got pepper-sprayed, and more screaming as Lee shoved a rival Hunter into the chocolate fountain.

One of the PT men got in my way and I dismantled him. I didn’t have time to dick around with these chumps when there was a real enemy to fight. I stepped into the clumsy swing and drove my forearm and all my mass into him so hard that he went spiraling over a table. Another of the black polo-shirted Hunters had gotten between us, so the giant simply picked him up and tossed him over the sushi bar, not even bothering to slow his pace. We met in the middle and proceeded to beat the crap out of each other.

He was fast for a big man, and so was I, but he had a reach advantage, so I had to keep moving to stay ahead of him. I wasn’t used to being the smaller and lighter fighter. We locked up on each other as we hit the far end of the buffet, both of us throwing knees and elbows. Between the two of us we probably weighed close to seven hundred pounds, and the furniture broke around us like someone had turned loose a herd of enraged wildebeests. I didn’t realize we’d gone too far until my shoulder hit the cold glass of the restaurant’s bubble. The glass cracked.

I caught my boot against the railing, heaved the giant back, and managed to hit him with a staggering overhand right. That slowed him down.

“Lacoco! Stop! Z! Owen! What the heck? Quit hitting that Newbie!” Milo was running our way, just ahead of a bunch of casino security and a Las Vegas police officer. “You’re on the same team!”

The giant must not have heard Milo’s words, because he bellowed, launched himself into me, caught me around the waist, and we hit the interior window. The glass shattered around us and then we were falling,
briefly
. We hit water, but it wasn’t particularly deep, because right after the water came tile. And the tile was
very
hard.

Groaning, I lay there, flat on my back in half a foot of water, covered in sparkling shards, the wind knocked out of me, staring up at the hole in the buffet’s glass wall one story above, as cold water from a dragon-headed fountain spit on us. The giant was on his side next to me. He had a few nasty cuts on his face and arms from the glass. I probably didn’t look much better. I realized then that his not-quite-in-the-same-direction eye was fake, because it had popped out and was sitting at the bottom of the pool between us.

A huge crowd of gamblers and shoppers were standing there, gaping at us. Many of them started taking pictures.

At least the fall had finally knocked the fight out of him. The giant looked over at the MHI Happy Face on my tattered shirt with his good eye and groaned.

“Jason Lacoco?” I gasped.

“Uh-huh…”

“Owen Zastava Pitt.” I coughed. “Nice to meet you. Welcome to Monster Hunter International.”

Then several police officers converged on the fountain to arrest us.

Chapter 2

“This sucks,” Trip said as he studied the cement floor of our cell. I had lost count of how many times he’d said that already.

The two of us had been separated from the others not too long after getting our mug shots taken. I suppose it was good policy to not put too many members of the same rumble into the same cell afterwards. Sure, it was an ugly place that smelled like barf and was filled with losers, but it wasn’t
that
bad. “Come on, dude.
Way
nicer than the last jail I was in.” I slapped my bench. “See this? Not a single scorpion in sight.”

“We’re not in Mexico, and your mother-in-law probably isn’t going to show up and murder all the guards, either.”

True.
All things considered, though, despite having just been in a fight, both of us were relatively unscathed. My abs hurt and Lacoco had clipped me a few times, and I had a terrible headache from landing in the fountain, but overall I was doing fine. “Just trying to keep things in perspective is all.”

“You’re not helping.” Trip lowered his voice enough that the dregs of society we shared the holding area with wouldn’t overhear. He looked around nervously. “I’ve never been arrested before. I’ve never even got a speeding ticket! I’ve got a spotless record.”

“Had,” I corrected. “Does it matter? All the goody-two-shoesness in the world didn’t keep the feds from beating you like a piñata that one time anyway…And look on the bright side, now you’ll have way more street cred with the gnomes.”

From what we could put together about the chaotic aftermath of the events at the Last Dragon Buffet, most of my dinner party had ended up in jail. A few had been taken directly to the hospital, but Trip said that he was pretty sure he saw Tanya escape through the kitchen. Elves were sneaky like that. Matters had been complicated when the responding officers discovered that almost all of us had been carrying at least a gun, and in some cases, two or more guns. The cop patting down Cooper had nearly had a coronary when he had found the first hand grenade.