3v1 fight

He could see them all, drawing on the anger and the pain that had been
festering beneath the surface for those long months. They desperately
needed someone to blame, someone who was here and real and in front of
them, not a ghost like Hugh Darrow, his body crushed beneath thousands of
tons of steel in the Arctic Ocean. They wanted a scapegoat, and somebody
had decided it was going to be him.

Jensen lost focus for a moment as that thought echoed through his head,
and it was enough for someone behind him in the crowd to shove him
forward, spitting and jeering. He stumbled, and the tattooed man hurtled
toward him, snarling. He had kitchen knives in both hands.

Reflexively, Jensen cocked back his cyberlimb and triggered the nerve
impulse that would have deployed the blunt-tipped nanoblades concealed
beneath the forearm – but there was nothing but a hollow click and he
recalled too late that the augmentations had been disengaged. Instead, he
went into a clumsy block that set the knives cutting across the
polycarbonate shell of his arm.

Jensen turned the inelegant move into a counterattack, dropping low and
throwing a punch into the tattooed man’s gut. He took it with a grunt but
little else, the shear-thickening gel in the dermal armor absorbing most of
the force of impact.

The crowd were shouting at him, baying for his blood. It wouldn’t matter
what he said to them. He was the outsider, the new and the unknown, and
even if she was their tormentor, Belle was still one of them. It wouldn’t
have been hard to manipulate people like this, to pour all their hate into one
single target. They didn’t care about the truth. Jensen had been on
Panchaea, that was a fact, and it was like they smelled the scent of that
place – and what was done there – still on him.

The knives fell toward the exposed flesh of Jensen’s throat, but his
attacker was inexpert with them and held the makeshift weapons too close
together. Jensen’s free hand snapped up and grabbed the closest blade,
hearing the metal crunch against the surface of his cyberarm’s synthetic
palm. He pulled the tattooed man toward him, forcing him to overbalance.
Then, as he fell, Jensen struck with his other arm and caught the man hard
across the face. His assailant’s nose broke with an ugly cracking sound and
blood jetted. He fell, howling in pain, losing the knives along the way.
Jensen kicked them away as Belle and Mono-Eye came at him together. The
bigger woman was powerful, but she wasn’t agile, and her heavy
augmented leg failed to hook Jensen’s and bring him down.

Instead, he slipped back, grabbing a folding chair. Jensen swung around
and beat the other thug across the shoulders with it. Mono-Eye jabbed at
him with the electro-prod, arcs of blue-white fire sparkling. He missed, but
the aura of the weapon was so close as it passed Jensen’s temple that his
right-side optic implant briefly became blurred by the electromagnetic field.
Where are the orderlies? Jensen wondered. Why are they letting this
happen? But then he was fully back in the fight a heartbeat later.

Mono-Eye’s limbs were organic, and that made him vulnerable. Jensen
grabbed the wrist beneath the hand holding the prod and broke it cleanly,
using the servos in his cyberarm to twist it to a degree off true that no
human bones could bear. The thug screamed and Jensen plucked the prod
from his nerveless fingers, slamming a point-blank punch into the mono-
band over his eyes. Plastic fragmented and splintered, and the second of
Belle’s men went down to the floor.

But Belle herself had not waited for the outcome, and she put a trip-
hammer kick into the back of Jensen’s legs. He buckled at the knees and
crashed into a table, collapsing it underneath him. He lost the weapon and
twisted, rolling away as Belle stamped down with the force of a wrecking
ball. Her steel foot crumpled the table and smashed the prod into pieces.
Jensen scrambled, trying to get back up, but the crowd were following
the example he had set and threw chairs at him, along with anything else
they could lay their hands on. He saw Stacks coming to his aid, but a savage
blow from Belle knocked him aside and the other man stumbled against a
wall.

Belle crossed the short distance toward Jensen in two heavy pneumatic
strides. She spat at him and went for the killer blow, her leg coming down
to crush his chest and stop his heart.

He was fast enough to block the fall with his hand, and for long seconds
it became a contest of hardware – the exacting, precise mechanism of
Jensen’s Sarif-built cyberarm versus the brute-force power of Belle’s Tai
Yong-made augmetic leg.

In her eyes there was nothing but raw hate. “You’ll pay!” Belle cried.
But Jensen would never learn what personal cost the woman was trying to
balance.

There was motion in the corner of his eye and suddenly Stacks was
there, his face bloodied, swinging a fire extinguisher like a club. The unit
connected with the side of Belle’s head and she was knocked away. Stacks’s
dual-thumbed hand came down and grabbed Jensen’s, hauling him up.

Belle rolled and rose on one knee as the rest of the angry crowd closed
ranks behind her, but before they could react Jensen snatched the
extinguisher from Stacks and aimed the nozzle at them. He thumbed the
trigger and sprayed an arc of freezing, choking CO2 gas at them, stopping
any new attack in its tracks. “Enough!” he snarled.

The day room’s doors crashed open and a dozen orderlies came rushing
in with electro-prods drawn, shouting out orders and making threats.
Thorne followed them, scanning the room with a measuring gaze. Jensen let
the extinguisher drop and raised his hands as the rest of the processees
reluctantly did the same. He saw Belle give Thorne a questioning look that
the federal agent completely ignored, and Jensen knew immediately that she
had been the one who revealed the circumstances of his recovery from
Panchaea.

- Deus Ex: Black Light, Chapter 2 pgs. 29-31