Ten minutes slid past.

The street stayed empty except for the twenty men huddled by the curb, eyes fixed on the dark mouth of the road as if a friend might step out of the shadows.

Alex walked up to them with the calm of someone already decided.

"Ten minutes," he said. "No friends showed. Like I promised - every pinky gets broken. So bear the pain."

"Don''t you dare!" Max bellowed, panic cutting through his bravado.

"We''ve called the Chicago Outfit — a thousand of our men are on their way. You''d better run while you can, or we''ll turn you into mince."

"Really?" Alex stepped closer until Max could feel his breath. "I don''t see your thousand."

Color drained from Max''s face. He tried to force menace into his voice. "You''ll regret this. You''ll regret everything."

Alex didn''t warn. He grabbed Max''s other pinky and snapped it like a twig.

Max howled. The sound ripped into the night and seemed to pull the darkness apart.

Engines answered the cry: trucks, pickups, motorcycles roaring down the avenue, lights cutting through the fog.

Men poured out of beds and from behind doors, clutching iron pipes, nailed bats, chains — anything that could smash bone and split skin.

The number swelled fast - easily hundreds.

"Who the hell touched one of ours?" someone yelled. "Who wants to die tonight?"

Normal people fled. Couples, joggers,temuters - they scattered like leaves.

The thugs surged into the road, swinging weapons inzy, dangerous arcs.

Most were kids with too much venom and too little sense; manipted, impatient, hungry for violence.

They''d grown up trusting numbers more than skill.

They''d never tasted defeat.

Park staff and security guards watched, faces gone ashen. These men were used

to chasing drunks and scooping up pickpockets, not facing a street army.

"Everyone inside the park — now! Close the gates. Keep the children safe. Say nothing to anyone," Alex ordered.

"Are you sure?" one of the guards stammered. "They''re too many."

"Trust me," Alex called over the growing din. "I''m more than enough. Move!"

The guards exchanged looks, then ran. The gate mmed shut, bolts nking as they locked them from the inside.

Alex stood alone in the center of a hundred raised faces and crude weapons. They spat at him, lungs full of threat.

"You''re dead, asshole!" one screamed.

"You hear us? You''re begging for death!"

"Hurting the Chicago Outfit? You''ll pay!"

The mob tightened like a fist ready to close. Men lifted bats, chains glinted, and for a heartbeat the world held its breath.

Then twenty figures stepped from the darkness behind Alex, the sound of boots and quiet authority.

Carlos led them, his expression t and businesslike.

"Sire, we''re here," he said.

Alex didn''t look back. "New Kingswell recruits?"

"Like you ordered, sire. Just brought them from training."

"Good," Alex said. He turned his head just enough to let the word cut through.

"Each of you will face twenty. Win, and you''re Kingswell."

Carlos turned to the group. "You heard the boss. Move."

Twenty men and women - jeans, shirts crumpled like they''d just left ate party - fell in behind him.

They walked past Alex with the calm of people who''d been waiting for this exact moment.

No hesitation.

"You twenty wanna face hundreds?" Max roared, trying to reim the night. "Show no mercy. Kill them—show what the Chicago Outfit does to rats."

The Kingswell didn''t answer.

They spread out, eyes t, then exploded forward as one.

They ran like moths to a me - not blind, but hungry.

At first, the thugs also surged forward like they owned the night.

They came with cocky grins, swinging bats and chains like trophies, shouting over

one another with curses and promises of blood.

The road shook with their confidence, the kind born from always being the predators — from always having the numbers, from never once being challenged. But the Kingswell moved faster.

Where a thug''s swing was wild, clumsy, and loud, a Kingswell''s strike was sharp, quiet, and final.

An elbow crushed a windpipe, a knee shattered a ribcage, a knife slid between bone and muscle with surgical precision.

The first few thugs went down screaming, clutching broken jaws and twisted limbs.

Their friendsughed at them at first.

They thought it was luck, a mistake, that their buddies had just been sloppy.

But when the next wave charged, they too dropped, gasping for breath with bones bent at unnatural angles.

The swagger began to crack. Theughter turned brittle.fnb1c4 ???s ??????? ?s ?????? ?? findnovel/fnb1c4

Each body hitting the pavement made the next thug hesitate.

They had always believed in numbers. Numbers had always been their shield. Ten against one, twenty against one it was how they ruled the streets.

But against these twenty, numbers meant nothing.

Fear crept into their eyes. They swung harder, faster, trying to bury their rising panic beneath violence, but each desperate attack was punished with ruthless efficiency.  s

A bat swung wide — countered by a wrist lock and a snapping elbow.

A chainshed out — caught, yanked, and turned into a noose against its wielder''s throat.

Their arrogance once a roaring fire burned out into the cold stink of terror.

Bones snapped like dry sticks. Blood sprayed across the asphalt. Ragged breaths turned into screams. The ones who had sworn to kill now stumbled, backing away, tripping over the fallen as their own lines copsed.

Some of the Outfit pulled handguns, their hands shaking, firing wild into the chaos.

The cracks of gunfire split the night like thunder.

But the Kingswell flowed between the muzzle shes, weaving through death with

terrifying calm.

One snatched up a fallen de and hurled it across the melee.

The steel buried itself into a shooter''s skull with a dull, sickening thunk. He

dropped, eyes wide, mouth frozen mid-curse.

That was the breaking point. Panic spread like disease.

The math that had always worked for them—we outnumber them, we can''t lose

- shattered.

Now they saw their numbers shrinking, their friends dying, their confidence bleeding out into the gutter.

They bolted. Tough guys who had strutted in with threats now screamed like children.

One tried to run, but a Kingswell

caught him by the hair, yanked him back, and smashed his skull into the pavement until bone gave way with a crack that silenced everything around it.  s

Another thug swung a nail-studded bat, missed, and took a fist to the throat so

deep it copsed his windpipe.

Another gasped once, blood bubbling from his mouth, before crumpling.

The predators had be prey. The hunters had be meat.

And in the space of minutes, the Chicago Outfit learned what it felt like to fear.

On the sidewalks, citizens stood frozen at first, afraid the storm would swallow

them too.

For years these streets had belonged to the Outfit.

Every shopkeeper, every passerby, every mother with a child had learned to lower

their eyes when the thugs came swaggering through.

Extortion had been the tax of survival.

A word spoken out of line, a payment dyed, and bones were broken-

sometimes worse.

Fear had been the onlyw.

Now that fear cracked. Faces wet

with tears stared at the sight they''d never dared imagine the Chicago Outfit being ughtered in the very streets they once owned.  s

A shopkeeper pressed his trembling hands against the ss of his storefront,

voice shaking with awe.

"You snapped my boy''s arms and legs for refusing to bow when you passed. Now someone breaks yours. This-this is justice."

A woman in her sixties wept openly, clutching her rosary to her chest.

"They bled us dry for years. Stole every coin. Threatened to burn my home. And

now... now the fire takes them."

Others clenched fists, not in fear, but in righteous fury.

Relief spread like wildfire, braided with vengeance, the kind that had been bottled

up for too long. Some shouted through tears, their voices cracking:

"They robbed my shop every week-look at them now!"

"They beat my brother half to death. Now they taste their own medicine!"

"Finally! Finally, we are free from these parasites!"

One man, his face scarred from an old beating, dropped to his knees and sobbed.

"I thought no one would ever stand for us. But tonight-tonight justice walks."

The Kingswell moved among the chaos like wolves thinning a herd.

They weren''t savage for the sake of blood; they were exact, deliberate, cold. A pack of hunters culling diseased animals.

And when thest thug fell — some moaning, most silent — the night air shifted. The street that had known only fear exhaled in raw, ragged relief.

The citizens stood taller, their chains broken not by their own hands, but by the twenty who hade to do what no one else dared.

For the first time in years, the people of that block felt the taste of justice. And it

was sweet.

''The debt of cruelty is repaid by the same harsh currency.''

Alex stepped forward, looked at the broken heap of men around Max.

"Ten minutes, call your Chicago Outfit now. If no one shows, I''ll take a limb from

each of you - ten minutes apiece."

Max''s face went white. He''d seen iron before; today he''d felt it.

Some of the Kingswell used the lighters off their belts.

They lit fuel, one by one, setting motorcycles and pickup beds alight. mes

licked the night sky, orange and hungry, and the parked vehicles burned like torches.

Alex stood in that ring of smoke and heat and watched the city breathe again. "We''re going to kill the cancer eating this city tonight. Leave no one alive."