DN - Van Shatter

About a half second after that, I’ve dropped him and I find myself spinning wildly on three axes, with my neck sore and the left side of my face stinging. He has somehow managed to hit me in the face hard enough that I feel it way more than I did when I got shot. I get control of myself about twenty feet before I hit the ground, and a moment later I hear the sound of something heavy hitting the ground after falling from a great height. The world still seems to spin, and I’m disoriented, which is going to be my excuse for why I just hang there in the air while he does a sprinting leap and slams into me like a truck. We land in the middle of a street and I take the worst of it, crushed between the ground and what appears to be a Bosco made of living steel.

He finds his feet, grabs me by the front of my suit, and throws me straight through a parked van. The van detonates shattered glass in every direction and I end up crumpled against a brick wall on the other side of it. When I push myself to my feet, he’s right there to put his fist through my skull and I just manage to jerk out of the way. He goes wrist-deep into the wall.

So, uh, maybe I ought to hit this guy—

His elbow takes me in the nose and I go skidding down the sidewalk, crack over a fire hydrant. Yellow pops of pain are dancing up my back. This is really not my night.

He’s up in the air again, coming down with both fists. I scramble sideways, pull into a roll, and he lands where I was with a night-shaking clang. Even as I get to my feet, throwing a halfhearted jab at his jaw, he’s moving into me, knocking me down.

His punches are like enormous, cracking strikes of lightning. He’s digging a new pothole with the back of my skull. But when I get a hand between my face and his fist, I’m able to stop him cold. His knuckles clap against my palm with a sound like a gunshot, but my arm doesn’t budge more than a centimeter or so. For a moment we’re both too surprised to continue.

“Stop hitting me,” I tell him. With a convulsive ripple of my stomach muscles, I get my knees between him and me, and he backs way the heck off before I can launch him into orbit. Okay, maybe not literally. But almost.

- Dreadnought, Chapter 20