Fu didn't even think about it; the very moment the two titans started clashing in truth, he fell to his knees, hands raised in the air and well in evidence, his gut screaming at him that this was the only course of action left available to him.
He is proven right the next second, when the gleam of the little balls of scarlet lights trailing the white armored cape turns even harsher somehow in the evening light.
His heartbeat thundering in his ears, and time seemingly stretching like taffy, Fu watches as the hero lops Lung's arm off with contemptuous ease with her sword's help, her steps light and easy, like a dancer at home on a battlefield, and the little balls of scarlet light unleash a hail of yellow-red laser on every ganger still standing.
He has heard of the girl, of course. Nictimène, open cape, and independent hero. When he had read the headlines yesterday, the first thing Fu told himself was that the girl must've been either completely insane, or so powerful she didn't feel the need to play by the rules.
A decade ago, when he joined the Triad for protection and debuted as a simple runner boy at twelve, old man Gang had told him that knowing was half the battle, and that he should keep his eyes and ears open at all times. A fair counsel, in a city mostly dominated by Nazis who'd like nothing more than to hang him to a lamppost.
Old man Gang was gone now, killed when Lung had forced every Asiatic criminal to bend the knee to his rule back in 2007, but his words had never left Fu.
Rare was the member of the ABB that understood the importance of regularly looking up the local PHO board, vanishingly so now that Lung was done with his second round of purges.
Fu had never liked the Dragon. He had had some respect for his right hand, but none whatsoever for the brutish man who didn't make an effort to pretend he gave a shit about the men under his command. Worse even, Lung didn't even bat an eye when enslaving the people he pretended to call his own. It was all pageantry and lip-service to him.
All things he kept firmly to himself of course, there was a reason Fu made it through two different purges.
Bodies drop next to him, screaming in pain just as the Dragon reels back with a roar of defiant anger, while the little balls of scarlet light gleam once more, undoubtedly readying another salvo.
In the corner of his eyes, Fu watches that braggart Yosuke slumps with tears in his eyes, the scent of burned flesh heavy in the air, and finds himself surprised when he sees the man's knees had been bored straight through. In the background, he can see that Ga-eul has suffered a similar fate.
…Fu feels a little relieved that the hero is apparently going for non-lethal takedowns. Granted, for all its faults, the ABB isn't the Slaughterhouse Nine, and even the Dragon couldn't be that much of a threat to the girl who took down the Siberian.
His focus goes back to the fight, if it can even be called one, right in time to see a torrent of flame rushing toward the girl, the leader of the ABB having grown another half foot in a mere handful of seconds.
Yet for all his fire, Lung is retreating, his remaining arm extended palm first in front of him while flesh starts to bubble out of the stump of his other shoulder.
In that moment of stretched time, Fu grimly notices that the man supposedly leading them does not care for collateral damage, the flames swallowing the fallen just as well as his opponent.
Out of nowhere, the ground ripples with a green-tinged lightshow, like a really big stone falling smack-dab into a pond.
With the cry of a thousand dying souls, the little balls of scarlet light unleash their second salvo, goring through Lung's body in twelve distinct places, all at the joints, while the green lightshow sweep away the fallen gang members and send them all tumbling away from the epicenter of the confrontation.
A kindness, if not a gentle one. More than one hits walls and the floor with heavy, meaty impact and the occasional crack of bones, sometimes even bawling over those who had stood further and fell where they stood.
The Dragon's flamethrower cuts off as abruptly as it started, the now nine feet tall cape falling ass over teakettle, bloodied silvery scales raining down everywhere. As for the hero, she stands unmarred, arcs of white-eyed current jutting out of her armor without rhyme or reason.
Deep down, Fu cannot help but laugh at the tyrant's long awaited comeuppance. Hate was too strong of a word for what he'd become while running with the ABB, but he had certainly resented the man for not holding up his end of the bargain.
The Triad had been like a second family to him, gruff, old fashioned gangsters who did some protection racket and dabbled in prostitution, true, but at least they gave back some of it to the community and stood by each other. And Lung had come and ripped all of it away to satisfy his own ego.
By then, Fu had been in too deep, so he had no choice but to carry on under their new leader, even if it angered him.
But he had not forgotten, just like he had not forgotten why he had to choose a life of crime when others still went to middle school. Wasn't much a recently orphaned slant could do in Brockton Bay but to try his hand with the gangs after all.
In a way, it was poetic justice, that the girl who'd brought the Nine down would be the one to finally cow the Dragon.
And as he watches as Nictiméne reappears in a crimson blur above his fallen, and unlamented leader, her little orbs trailing her like a cape, Fu grins.
"Bàba, māma, bear witness," he whispers in Chinese under his breath as three titanic metallic stakes appear from thin air in a shower of green light next to the winking owl, "Your avenger shines so bright; she's like a bloody sun!"
From one moment to the next, the stakes fall with a crack of displaced air, and the Dragon lets out a gurgled scream.
"I can do this all day," the hero says calmly while touching down atop the pinned monster's back, her blade lazily coming to rest against his bulging neck, the sound of sizzling flesh oddly loud amid the pained whimpers of the fallen, "Stand down. You lost."
"'ll k'll," the Dragon gurgles while straining against the restraint pinning him down, his body still growing, his voice like rocks in a trash compactor, "'ou!"
"No you won't," the hero sighs, "But if words are useless–"
Three more stakes appear, before sinking through Lung's body with another crack of displaced air, the ground rumbling as they dig through metallic scales, hardened flesh and concrete alike.
"–then let me show you how thoroughly outmatched you are," Nictiméne says, before idly adding, "I wonder, will I have to drown you into your own blood for you to finally see reason? Probably not; it didn't exactly work that well the first time around after all."
Somehow, the trashing redoubles, before halting once again as another trio of stakes gets summoned and sunk into the cape and floor alike.
It takes another trio of stakes before Lung finally falls silent, either dead or passed out, and Fu finds that he doesn't care which.
A beat passes as an uneasy, tense silence falls on the warehouse, occasionally broken by the moans and whimpers of the injured.
Fu barely made to move – with his hands well in evidence, he is not completely crazy – that the visage of the winking owl turns his way, the cape's high ponytail artfully following along with the motion, like in the movies.
Another beat passes, and a bead of sweat trails down Fu's cheek as the cape tilts her head while finally stepping down from the Dragon's pinned form, silvery scales slowly flaking off as his power starts to subdue.
"...Yes?" the girl asks, her tone hinting at curiosity.
"You've killed the Nine," Fu bluntly says in his accented English, "Did Jack Slash suffer?"
"He died betrayed and confused." Nitcimène answers after a moment.
Fu lets the words sink in, before bowing at ninety degrees.
"From the bottom of my heart, thank you." The gang member says, and finds that he means it.
A pause.
"Well, I didn't do it for the accolades, but I can appreciate the sentiment," the cape muses aloud, "You're still going to jail though."
His head still bowed, Fu smiles a little ruefully at that.
After putting up with Lung's tyranny for four years, prison sounds like a vacation anyway.
***
Ethan didn't know what he had expected when puppy and him had received an alert that a fight was happening in Lung's territory, but a blanket 'nothing good' pretty much summed it all up quite nicely.
Finding the Bay's newest darling taking a selfie next to a passed out Lung, his body quite literally pinned to the ground with the help of humongous stakes, kneecapped gangers laying everywhere in broken heaps, certainly wasn't on his bingo card.
"Hello there!" He calls, prompting the winking owl mask to turn his way even as a flash goes on.
"Assault, Battery," the armor-clad form of Nictimène nods their way as the phone in her hands disappears in a flash of green light, "Well met."
"What happened here?" Ethan's better half asks gruffly, her arms crossed across her chest, and he finds himself suppressing a wince.
His Puppy is probably either the third or fourth person to take Nightflyer pulling one over them the most badly among the local PRT, and the afternoon's meeting didn't exactly help change her mind in that regard; they now all had a standing order to not antagonize the 'Tinker: Yes' backed up by the Chief Director herself, and it didn't exactly sit right with her.
"The glorified carp was about to throw a public tantrum to remind everyone that he existed. I took offense to that and took him down before he started." the preteen explains dispassionately, like she's telling that she took the trash out, and Ethan finds himself shaking his head in bewilderment.
"As an affiliate, you were supposed to call this in." He watches his partner frown in the corner of his eye.
"I did, four minutes and thirty-seven seconds ago," the girl tilts her head slightly to the side – though in a decidedly less uncanny way than in her Nightflyer's guise, which suit Ethan just fine, "In fact, I'm probably the reason why you got dispatched as quickly as you were."
Before the ambient animosity can reach a higher level, Ethan steps forward with a smile on his lips and his arms spread apart.
"Well, you were certainly quick to act!" he says the first thing that comes to his mind, before making a show of looking around, "Say, can you walk me through what happened here exactly. It'll help with the report, you see?"
"Of course," the girl answers, before snapping her fingers, an USB drive appearing in a shower of green light that Ethan has to scramble to catch when she lazily throws it at him, "Here's what my camera feed recorded, but let me walk you through it. I got some intel that this guy–" she lightly kicks the passed out Lung to show whom she's speaking about, prompting Battery's frown to deepen, "–was about to go 'ur-dur, I'm the strongest' in the streets of the Bay. Don't know what went through his mind to think that this was a good idea, especially now that you guys are by far the strongest faction in the city, but oh well."
Considering they got their asses kicked seven ways to Sunday the last time, it wasn't as foolhardy as it seems.
"Now, I'm honestly too busy to really bother with street-level stuff," the preteen carries on, gesturing vaguely around as she speaks, and Ethan has to suppress a rueful smile at the idea that Lung is apparently merely street-level to her, "But the amount of collateral damage this moron can do when ramped up is no joke, and I'd rather you guys didn't get badly injured or even killed when I could easily solve the issue.
"I came through that door that no longer exists," she gestures at their back, "And basically told them all 'surrender, or else'. This guy–" she points to a nearby gang member seating cross-legged on the floor, who dips his head when his puppy and him give him a look, "–was apparently the only one smart enough to know that I wasn't joking, and pretty much hit the deck as soon as Lung started throwing hands. I disabled everyone else–" which certainly explained why they were all currently lacking a left knee, "–and tossed them away from the fight when I realized that Lung gave no shit if his men survived or not. Then I took down the rage dragon himself, took a few pictures for posterity's sake, and you guys showed up."
There was a lot to unpack in all of that, but chief among those–
"That sounds like a lot of unnecessary brutality, Nictimène." His Puppy points out, and he has to reluctantly agree.
"Eh," the girl shrugs, looking unbothered, "That's the best I can do with my current gear, the SNOW OWL isn't exactly built with a non-lethal setting. Plus, let's be real here; they're gang members, the court of opinion won't give a shit if they get too banged up while resisting arrest."
Once again, Ethan finds that he can't exactly say anything against that; if someone is dumb enough to try to fight the girl who apparently threw hands with the Siberian and won, they probably earned the consequences of their ill-thought decision.
"Sooo, if it's no trouble, can I go now?" out of the blue, Nictimène asks, shuffling a little on her feet, "Dinner is coming soon and my aunt will be beside herself with worry if I miss it."
Ethan has to suppress a snicker, and he quickly makes a shushing gesture toward his better half with one hand while waving the USB drive with the other.
"Yeah, you're free to go since we got this," he says, earning himself a sharp look from his puppy, "After all, it's not like we don't know where to ask if we have some more questions."
"Just follow where the paparazzi are," the girl drawls, before shaking her head, "Have a nice evening then."
Then she promptly lifts off before blurring through the front door, a crimson trail at her back.
A pause.
"'You're free to go', are you serious?" His better half asks, her tone bewildered.
"Listen, Puppy," he answers while pocketing the USB drive and looking at the surroundings once again, "Do you want me to pull a Lung? Because I can mouth off to the WMD in the shape of a preteen girl if you want me to, but that's going to end badly for everyone involved."
Under her glare, he shrugs before gesturing toward the still slowly shrinking gang leader.
"Besides, taking care of him is more important anyway," he says, "So, you wanna call Armsy to test if his Brute tranquilizer is up to snuff, or should I do it?"