Max and Aron had done enough searching on the mountain peak—at least as much as they possibly could have given the wreckage. There was no way for them to confirm if Hercules was still alive, or where the monsters had dragged him off to, but one thing was for sure: whoever he’d gone against, the giant would have given them a hell of a fight before he went down.
Just like their ascent, they had to physically scale back down the steep trail to head toward their car. As they walked through the dark woods, the silence between them was heavy.
"We’re completely surrounded, right?" Max asked, his voice low but completely calm.
"Correct," Aron replied, his hand dropping casually to his side.
"Well, these definitely can’t be the high-level professionals you were just talking about," Max muttered, a cold smile touching his lips. "If even I was able to spot their positions from this far away."
The two of them stopped dead in their tracks, freezing in a small clearing. The moment they stayed still, figures began to spill out from their hiding corners. They emerged from the thick brush in front, stepped out from the treeline on the sides, and closed the gap from behind, cutting off the escape path.
Several men materialized in the dark. There had to be around fifty of them in total, all carrying nasty smirks on their faces and heavy weapons gripped tightly in their hands.
"Are you guys the crew that just took Hercules down?" Max asked, looking around the circle.
There was no actual answer from the mob. Instead, a wave of arrogant snickers and giggles rippled through the crowd. They looked at each other as if they were going to thoroughly enjoy this, or maybe it was just because they thought they’d lucked into an incredibly easy hit contract.
Max shook his head, a look of profound boredom crossing his face. "Why am I asking stupid questions? These idiots don’t even have a single scratch or bruise on their bodies. Of course Hercules didn’t fight them... but then again, his own Vow probably would have stopped him from laying a finger on ordinary people anyway."
Max had a pretty solid guess as to what the specifications of Hercules’ Vow actually were. He felt like the giant had held that restriction true to his soul for decades, and ironically, that absolute discipline was exactly why he had been defeated in an ambush.
"It is absolutely no coincidence that these people are waiting for us right after we visited the cabin," Aron declared, his eyes scanning the front line. "So it’s safe to assume that the leadership of this group might actually know something about the paper trail."
Before Aron could finish his thought, three of the men suddenly charged forward, sprinting across the dirt to steal the first hit. The guy in the lead was wielding a heavy bike chain; he swung it with a violent hiss, aiming straight for Max’s skull. Instead of flinching or dodging, Max simply lifted his left arm, allowing the heavy metal links to slam into his forearm and wrap completely around his sleeve.
With a brutal jerk of his shoulder, Max pulled hard on the chain, violently ripping it right out of the man’s grip. In one continuous motion, he swung the stolen weapon back at the other two attackers who had closed in. The heavy iron crashed into their faces with an echoing crack , cutting their skin, fracturing their jaws, and shattering the chain itself into useless pieces.
"Aron, stay out of this," Max said, his eyes darkening as the mob began to surge. "Don’t get involved. I have a lot of rage I need to get off my chest right now."
Even after seeing Max shatter a bike chain with his bare skin, the men in the back were still snickering, entirely relying on their numbers.
"I see you’re all still incredibly confident just because you brought a crowd," Max said, his voice dropping into a dangerous frequency. "I guess that means you guys aren’t from Notting Hill. If you were from my city, you’d be running for your lives."
Max charged ahead, moving with a blinding speed that left the front line paralyzed. When he reached the first individual, he fluidly lifted his leg and kicked him dead in the stomach. The pure kinetic force sent the man hurling backward through the air until he crashed violently into an ancient pine tree, completely shattering the thick bark behind him before collapsing into a motionless heap.
Max had been getting stronger and stronger by the day, fueled by the steady drip of the Bloodline’s wealth. Whether his Vow had officially elevated his physical conditioning to the legendary level of Hercules yet was hard to calculate. But he was quickly realizing that simply being recognized as a true superhuman wasn’t the same as being invincible against a coordinated war.
A sudden thought flashed through Max’s mind as he fought. From what he knew of the underworld’s higher tiers, there were quite a few superhumans embedded within the major syndicates that had received the high-level invitation. The White Tiger group would have definitely received that invitation as well, and there was a very high chance his former subordinates had grown significantly stronger during the timeline since he was their leader.
If they hadn’t evolved, they would have been slaughtered and fallen by now. Which was honestly perfect in his eyes—because Max wanted to be the one to personally march into their headquarters and take them down when the time was right.
Max continued to tear through the forest clearing, a blur of motion beneath the canopy. He effortlessly dodged the frantic swings of pipes and machetes coming his way, countering with precise, devastating punches and kicks. Every single time his knuckles or shins connected with an opponent, the enforcer was taken out in one clean shot, their consciousness instantly slipping away.
Although Aron didn’t directly jump into the main melee, a few of the stragglers had naturally tried to flank him, assuming the older man was an easy target. Aron dealt with those idiots with a few quiet, brutal takedowns, but he spent the majority of the time focused on his own specific job: securing an interrogation target.
After about ten minutes of continuous violence, the chaos in the woods finally died down. Max had successfully dealt with every single person who had come to attack them. He stood in the center of the clearing, breathing easily as he looked at the sea of broken bodies scattered across the dirt.
"Yeah... the old Max Smith would have never been able to pull off a slaughter like this," Max claimed, wiping a smear of dust off his knuckles as he started to walk back toward his guardian.
He stopped in front of Aron, his eyes locking onto a terrified, bleeding lieutenant whom Aron had pinned against a boulder by the throat.
"Did you manage to extract any useful information from the survivors?" Max asked.
"I did," Aron claimed, letting go of the lieutenant, who immediately crumpled to the ground, gasping for air. "They’re a mid-tier street gang mobilized from a neighboring city. They had absolutely no clue who their actual targets were tonight. Their contract parameters were simple: get rid of anyone who came to investigate the cabin."
Aron adjusted his jacket, his expression turning cold. "But I managed to dig deeper into their transaction history. They were paid a massive lump sum of cash to execute this ambush, and based on the physical description of the payer... it was Donto Stern."