Free High Water by R.W. Tucker

that technique always overcame power. Strength of arms was not the only factor in a fight. As long as you were trained past the point of hesitation, skill was much more of a determinant.
    Catching the opponents’ arm with his and using the mantis technique to make the arm a lever, Pete swept the newcomer, a Southeast Asian man, to the floor. Still holding the arm, he stepped over it and squatted down. Dropping his weight, he used his tailbone to break bone. The limb split easily, the shearing away of muscle from bone seeming as easy as pulling ripe peach flesh away from the pit. With a wounded ear and adrenaline pumping through his veins, the loud crack of the breaking bone barely registered.
    There was no substitute for sloppy technique, Pete reflected coldly.
    Settling into a zone of violent expression, activity around him seemed to happen in slow motion. The smell of blood mixed with the scents of rotten cantaloupe and chlorine was over powering. But his mind sorted the odor information out and set it aside as being extraneous. Instead of focusing on details, Pete let fighting instinct whisper to him that the punch was coming. He turned as Pigtails tried to hit him in the ribs, and deflected some of the punch’s power. He managed to ram an elbow hard into the girl’s arm. It was not enough to drop her, but staggered her momentarily. He chanced a look over to Liz. She had deployed the ladder and was beckoning him from some kind of catwalk. He could see she was screaming words at him, but couldn’t hear anything.
    Two hands grabbed his shoulders, and he saw Pigtails getting ready to attack him again. Intuition told one to pull away from a grapple, but Shaolin and other arts preached the opposite. Rather than try to pull away, he stepped between the legs of the opponent behind him. Pete grabbed as much arm as he could and twisted his torso. For good measure, he roared a kiai , adding his chi to the throw. The tall woman sailed over his shoulder. Without waiting, he stood and sent another elbow in the direction of the smaller girl, viciously connecting with her temple as she charged into the blow. Pigtail’s feet buckled and she crumpled to the floor, as a pained expression lit up her face.
    Pete gasped for air. A quick visual check on the tall woman splayed out a few feet away revealed a broken neck. The Southeast Asian man whose arm he had broken was cradling the ruined limb, bawling through brown-sugared eyes like a child. Whatever these individuals still felt, a compound fracture was too much pain for the infected brain to ignore.
    “Pete!” cried Liz.
    More figures plunged out of the darkness, one of them leaping over the body of the stocky man he had disabled earlier. Pete used the split second to lunge for the ladder, almost escaping another blow to his ribs. The breath left his lungs again, but he managed to get part of the way up the ladder. Liz’s outstretched hand grabbed his shirt and hauled him up to the catwalk.
    Pete drew a deep breath, his pulmonary system lagging far behind the exertion of his muscles, but inhaling was not without some pain. Some harsh hits had been taken in that last melee. He watched Liz slash her knife across the eyes of Pigtails, whose head disappeared. Liz then raised the knife and bellowed her own primitive kiai , bringing it down in a glistening arc into the crusty, caked eye of a man in a black t-shirt. Rage and desperation drove the knife deep, burying it to the hilt, but the man’s fall wrenched the weapon from her grasp.
    Having regained some of his breath, Pete shimmied over to Liz and helped her kick a different girl in the face until the girl fell down the ladder. Below, he saw a Hispanic man with surprisingly little ocular discharge lunge out of the darkness, making a beeline for the prone figure of Bryan. Several other figures joined the man in the ghastly execution of Liz’s friend. Achieved with nothing but bare hands, the thudding of fists on skin and soft tissue