Page 92 of Mad Dragon of Chaos

As they neared the group of soldiers trying to move the chancellor down the hallway, Tyche plucked up bloated blobs of bad luck and sent them careening into the guards. Half of them dropped almost immediately, choking, clutching their chests, gasping for air. Their killer was invisible and terrifying.

The guards surrounding Feng broke up, swinging their guns, searching for a villain to attack, but there were only more guards and panicked government officials.

“Hurry, Chancellor! We must get you into your office. They’re using gas!” Jules squeezed through the guards and shoved a heavily sweating Feng into the office.

“Guard the doors! Stop the protestors!” Tyche ordered, following on Jules’s heels.

He and Jules slammed the doors shut behind them and turned the lock. Tyche’s heart hammered so hard in his chest he swore he could feel it in the back of his throat. Cold sweat covered him under his clothes. Every muscle in his body trembled.

They’d made it.

Just one more step to go.

“What the hell is going on? I need to get to my ship. This is anarchy. Absolute anarchy,” Rati Feng blustered, pacing in front of his desk. Every once in a while, he’d look toward the double glass doors that led to the balcony, but he never ventured close enough to gaze out as if he were afraid of snipers.

Jules straightened from the door first, and Tyche watched a change come over the man. It was as if all the tension that had tightened his frame sloughed off. He grew an inch before Tyche’s eyes, but his manner became more languid. This was a person who did not know what it was to be nervous or afraid.

“Perfect,” Jules said, and that single word sent a chill down Tyche’s spine.

Something was very wrong.

THIRTY-THREE

TYCHE

The voice.

That tone.

It was all wrong.

Cool and confident. So incredibly smooth.

That wasn’t Jules’s voice at all. Had the wrong person accompanied him into the office in all the chaos? Where was Jules?

Yet, as the thought occurred to him, the person in body armor stepped forward. With his right hand, he pulled the black pistol from his holster, but his left hand withdrew a suppressor from a hidden pocket in his black cargo pants. He screwed it on with quick efficiency.

“What the hell is going on?” Feng roared. His eyes locked on the gun as he took several steps back until his ass bumped into the front of the desk.

With the suppressor in place, the man reached up and pulled off his helmet, revealing that it was Jules holding the gun. He dropped the helmet with a thud, and it rolled away.

Rati narrowed his eyes at Jules only for them to pop wide with recognition. “Zayd? What’s the meaning of this?”

Zayd?

Not Jules. Why did he know that name?

It teased the edge of his memory, but he couldn’t grasp it when so much was happening. Everything in his brain was a mess.

“Sorry, old man,” Jules-turned-Zayd purred, not sounding sorry at all. He lifted the gun and took aim.

Rati held up both hands and waved them as if that could halt his fate. “Wait! We-we had a deal.”

“I know, but now you’re more valuable to me dead.” With stunning precision, Zayd squeezed off two nearly silent rounds, putting one bullet in Rati’s chest through his heart and a second one in the middle of his forehead. The man was dead before his corpse could hit the floor.

Zayd released a lusty sigh of relief and spun to face Tyche, grinning like a madman. “Whoo! That was a long time coming.” He waved the gun at Tyche, motioning for him to move away from the doors.

“Who…what? Who are you?” Tyche stammered, trying to get his brain working. Their goal had been to kill Rati Feng, and it was accomplished, but it felt like this entire endeavor had taken a strange, unexpected turn. He stumbled and moved into the room, while keeping a healthy distance from the dead chancellor.