DN - Holding Back

I slam down a dozen yards from him, look into the lattice to see through the clouds to check if he made it in one piece. He has, and a few moments later I’m dodging streams of fire and ice. I dart in and hit him in the solar plexus with an open-palm strike. He goes skidding across the ground as he hacks and wheezes and tries to reinflate his collapsed lungs. In the past year, I’ve gotten pretty good at pulling my punches. That one was pretty gentle, somewhere between a heavyweight boxer and a mule’s hind leg. Most people will decide it’s time to give up when I hit them with something like that. But not Crenshaw. No, he’s too important to give up, I guess, and he comes out of the cloud throwing fire and ice with both hands.

Excellent.

His aim is better when he’s on the ground, and I find out that his fire is hot enough to sting and the ice hits hard. But the way his ribs crack when I send him sprawling out in the mud makes me think this will be a quick fight. That’s kind of disappointing, to be honest.

During my first real battle, I was hesitant. I was reluctant to go full power on the bad guys. The idea of hurting people was repulsive to me. That is not a problem I have anymore. Sometime in the last half-year or so I became the kind of person who can snap bones and rip tendons and feel nothing but satisfaction. But people don’t like to think about that kind of thing, about how the person they depend on to fight their battles for them might actually like it, so I don’t talk about it too much. Which is fine. After being in the closet for seven years, keeping my mouth shut about how much I like fighting is easy.

- Sovereign, Chapter 6