An arrogant kickboxing champion challenged a quiet plumber to a full-contact fight—and realized his mistake the second his fist missed.

Rain battered the tar-paper roof of the old warehouse as Damon kicked open the hatch, shoving Julian onto the gravel-strewn surface.

The wind off the rail yard was freezing, howling between the rusted brick chimneys and industrial ventilation shafts. Below them, Pine Ridge lay silent under a blanket of fog, streetlights flickering in the storm. But the rooftop was far from safe.

A low, menacing thrum vibrated through the rain.

Hovering sixty feet above the adjacent grain silo was an unmarked MH-6 Little Bird helicopter, painted in matte black, its skids equipped with forward-facing searchlights. The spotlight snapped down, pinning Damon and Julian in an incandescent pool of white light on the slippery roof.

*"Ghost-Six,"* a voice crackled through the chopper's external speaker. It was one of Valeria's assault commanders. *"There is no perimeter to slip through. The town is cordoned. Lay down your arms and step to the center of the pad."*

On the far edge of the roof, four fast-ropes dropped from the helicopter’s side rig. Four heavily armed operators slid down the ropes, boots hitting the gravel roof with practiced, synchronized thuds. They formed a tactical wedge immediately, laser sights painting Damon's chest with four crimson dots.

Julian backed away until his shoulders hit the brick chimney. "Damon... there's nowhere to run! We're three stories up!"

Damon didn't look back at Julian. He looked directly at the lead operator advancing across the gravel.

"Julian," Damon spoke without turning his head, his voice cutting through the helicopter's rotor wash. "Remember what you asked me when you brought that pipe to my workshop?"

Julian's breath hitched. "I asked... how you moved without telegraphing."

"You telegraph when you care about the outcome," Damon said coldly. "When you accept that you are already dead, the body moves without hesitation. Hold onto that chimney."

Before Julian could process the words, Damon drew the captured Glock from his belt.

He didn't fire at the operators.

He aimed directly at the heavy cast-iron counterweight cable of the building's decommissioned freight elevator winch—a massive, rusted apparatus mounted on the rooftop right above the operators' heads. The winch held a four-ton iron block suspended twenty feet in the air, secured by an old, corroded safety clamp that Damon had inspected two years ago when the warehouse owner refused to pay for a certified overhaul.

Damon fired three shots in rapid succession.

*BANG. BANG. BANG.*

The nine-millimeter steel-core rounds struck the fractured, rusted safety pin of the winch assembly. The weakened iron shattered.

*GROOOOAN—SNAP!*

With a terrifying shriek of failing metal, the four-ton iron counterweight tore loose from its housing and plummeted toward the roof.

It didn't hit the operators directly, but it crashed through the reinforced concrete roof deck right in front of them with the force of an artillery shell. The entire roof section buckled. Concrete dust, gravel, and shattered rebar exploded upward in a concussive cloud, tearing the floor right out from beneath the tactical wedge.

The four Blackthorn operators were swallowed into the collapsing ceiling, falling through the floor into the empty third-story storage bay below with screams of shock and crashing timber.

The helicopter pilot violently banked the Little Bird away from the dust cloud, the downdraft whipping the rain into a blinding vortex.

"Now!" Damon roared, grabbing Julian by the shoulder harness of his hoodie.

Damon dragged Julian toward the eastern edge of the roof, where a heavy telephone and fiber-optic trunk line bridged the thirty-foot gap between the warehouse and the rooftop of an adjacent lumber yard.

"Jump?" Julian yelled in sheer terror, looking down at the flooded alleyway thirty feet below. "That line won't hold both of us!"

"Then you go first," Damon said.

Without giving the young champion time to hesitate, Damon grabbed Julian's belt and collar, using Julian's own kinetic mass in a textbook judo hip toss that launched the two-hundred-pound athlete cleanly across the gap toward the lower gravel roof of the lumber building.

Julian hit the lower roof with a thud, rolling through the gravel, gasping for air, bruised but intact. He scrambled to his feet and looked back across the gap.

Damon stood on the edge of the collapsing warehouse roof.

Behind him, the dust cleared to reveal Valeria Vance stepping out of the rooftop stairwell. She wore her charcoal overcoat, unbothered by the rain, a silver-plated semi-automatic pistol resting loosely in her right hand. Behind her stood two more operators with rifles raised.

She locked eyes with Damon across the rain-swept roof.

"Running doesn't suit a legend, Damon," Valeria called out over the roar of the wind. "Every exit is sealed. I hold the bridge, the highway, and the water. Where will Ghost-Six hide when the entire county is a cage?"

Damon didn't answer with words.

He raised his right hand, revealing Mercer’s encrypted micro-drive pinched between his fingers. He gave Valeria a cold, mocking salute.