John Wick - Chapter 33: Assassination at the Hotel (Patreon)

Nate stuffed the last bite of food into his mouth, picked up his water bottle, took a long drink, then stood and started packing up the lunch box.

His hands kept moving, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had forgotten something. He just couldn’t remember what.

Getting up this early really did mess with his head.

The old doctor also rose to leave with his medical kit. Before going, he pressed a tube of ointment for bruising into Nate’s hand and told him it worked best if applied before bed.

The gym door closed, and silence returned to the twelfth floor.

“One more round before we start the afternoon session?”

Henry was putting the whiteboard back into the equipment box. He turned and looked at the young man standing there, covered in bruises but still perfectly upright.

“Just a warm-up.” Nate smiled and opened one hand in a come-on gesture.

Henry set the whiteboard down, picked up the Glock again, and loaded a magazine.

“Rubber bullets. Fifteen rounds.”

“Works for me.”

Nate walked to the center of the training mats. Every movement made the bruises covering his body ache, but the pain seemed to sharpen his nervous system rather than dull it. His senses felt unnaturally keen.

Henry raised the gun.

Nate focused on the hand holding it, specifically on the angle of the first joint of Henry’s index finger as it hovered outside the trigger guard.

The gun fired.

Nate shifted his head roughly three centimeters to the right.

The rubber bullet skimmed past his left ear, the air displaced by the projectile making his earlobe itch. Another round struck him in the right side, sending a dull ache through his waist.

But his head was safe.

“Good.”

There was a trace of satisfaction in Henry’s voice that he couldn’t quite hide.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Three more shots.

For that brief instant, Nate didn’t look like someone being shot at. He looked more like someone moving through falling rain.

His shoulder angled slightly away. His chin tucked in. His neck turned.

All three rubber bullets passed harmlessly beside his head.

His feet were perfectly steady when he settled back into position. His knees were slightly bent, his center of gravity low, his arms hanging naturally at his sides.

He looked like a cat landing on its feet.

“Your form slipped a little,” Henry said, lowering the gun. “You raised your right shoulder too high. It threw off your lower-body balance.”

“Again.”

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

Gunshots echoed through the gym, making the windows hum.

Once all fifteen rounds had been fired, Henry lowered the Glock and walked over to the small whiteboard. He picked up a marker, but instead of writing a new calculation, he added another number beside the morning’s comparison of 260 ms versus 47 ms.

180 ms.

“You shaved off eighty milliseconds.” Henry put down the marker. “In one morning, you cut the combined time for your neural response and physical movement by eighty milliseconds. The first time you tried to dodge, your reaction and movement together took 260 milliseconds. For those last three shots, you averaged 180.”

Nate was breathing hard. Sweat rolled down his forehead and into his eyes, making them sting.

“One-eighty. Still too slow.”

“That’s a huge improvement. It’s only been one morning, so quit complaining.”

Henry sounded mildly annoyed as he flipped the whiteboard around.

“You’ve already started reacting to the signals in my movements instead of trying to dodge during a window that no longer exists once I pull the trigger.”

Nate slowly straightened and rolled his neck.

Henry looked at him from across the room.

“You really can take a beating. A normal person would’ve been flat on the floor after getting hit that many times.”

Henry laid the gun barrel on a white cloth, the hint of a smile on his face growing slightly wider.

“Rest another fifteen minutes. Then we start basic firearms training.”

Nate closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.

Pain rolled through his body in waves, but his mind was clearer than ever. He could feel his muscles trembling slightly beneath the pain, a deep soreness that made it feel as though his body were being reshaped.

He looked at the upgrade condition beside Steel Body and grinned.

He hadn’t expected taking rubber bullets to actually count as a Severe Injury.

Damn.

Getting shot all morning had been worth it.

“System, upgrade.”

[Received.]

[100 Resource Points consumed.]

[Steel Body (Lv1 → Lv2): Damage and Pain Reduction increased from 20% to 25%. Vitality increased from 10% to 15%. (Severe Injury status: 0/2.)]

A warm current flowed through Nate’s body, and the pain eased slightly.

He clenched both hands experimentally.

They felt a little stronger.

Did increasing Vitality also increase strength?

Might as well test it.

Nate had just started walking toward the dumbbells when Henry suddenly glanced toward the door.

His hands kept moving, but something in his eyes changed.

It was an incredibly subtle shift, but Nate caught it.

He stopped and was about to ask what was wrong when the sound of the elevator doors opening came from outside.

The receptionist greeted someone in the hallway.

Her voice suddenly cut off halfway through.

Then two sets of footsteps began approaching the gym.

Henry set down the gun-cleaning cloth.

“Put on the weighted vest,” he told Nate quietly.

His voice was serious now, completely different from the tone he had used while teaching.

Nate didn’t ask why.

He quickly grabbed the weighted vest from the floor and slipped it on, fastening the buckle around his waist.

The roughly five kilograms of extra weight settled onto his shoulders again. Every bruise on his body immediately protested, but Nate clenched his teeth and made no sound.

He equipped his Level 6 Body Armor from the Loadout. The extra layer between his bruises and the weighted vest made things a little more comfortable.

Footsteps continued down the hallway.

Two people were coming toward the gym.

Henry stood, reassembled the partially stripped Glock with astonishing speed, loaded a magazine, then reached into the equipment box and tossed Nate another fully assembled pistol.

The gym door opened.

A woman in a dark brown jacket stood in the doorway.

She had long, wavy blonde hair, sharp features, slightly hollow cheeks, and lips pressed into a thin line. She was strikingly attractive.

Her gaze swept across the entire room.

It paused on Henry for half a second, passed over Nate, then settled on the punching bag in the corner, as though she were mapping out the room.

“Looking for someone?” Henry asked.

His tone was polite, but cold.

“You, Mr. Wang.”

The woman gave a slight nod.

The corners of her mouth curved upward, but there was no warmth in the smile.

One foot had already crossed the threshold as she spoke.

Behind her stood a man in a black jacket.

He was lean but broad-shouldered, with the build of someone trained in close combat. His eyes stayed lowered, never once looking directly into the room.

Nate didn’t recognize either of them.

Something was wrong.

But the system had given him no warning.

Henry Wang looked completely relaxed, yet his right hand remained at his side.

The hand holding the gun was perfectly still.

“I was hired by a client to discuss some business,” the woman said.

Her voice seemed to come from deep in her throat.

“What kind of business?” Henry asked.

“Your life.”

She said it without the slightest change in tone, as casually as ordering coffee.

The man in the black jacket moved.

His hand came out of his pocket with a folding knife held between his fingers.

With one fast motion, he hurled it at Nate.

Nate reacted instinctively.

Bang!

A gunshot cracked through the room.

Nate hadn’t even realized Henry had fired.

The 9mm round struck the folding knife in midair and knocked it straight to the floor.

Henry had hit a flying knife with a single shot at this distance.

When the first attack failed, the man in black immediately charged Henry.

As he moved, he drew another knife from his waist.

Less than ten meters separated them.

The blade traced a bright arc under the gym lights.

Nate had no time to think.

The blonde woman had already drawn a compact pistol.

The muzzle swung toward Nate’s head.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Three shots.

She was fast.

Nate was faster.

He snapped his head aside and avoided the first two rounds, then stepped left and slipped past the third.

Immediately afterward, he began shifting side to side, constantly moving his head away from the line of her muzzle.

His sudden movements threw the woman off for a fraction of a second.

By the time she tried to fire again, it was too late.

Nate raised his Glock.

Raise.

Aim.

Fire.

The entire motion flowed together seamlessly.

The twenty percent [Firearm Proficiency] made the weapon feel even more natural in his hands.

Bang!

The bullet punched straight through the woman’s wrist.

Her pistol flew from her hand and struck the dumbbell rack with a sharp metallic clang.

The woman let out a muffled grunt and stumbled back a step, grabbing her bleeding right wrist with her left hand.

Shock filled her eyes.

What the hell was this?

At barely more than ten meters, she couldn’t hit him?

On the other side of the room, Henry had already taken down the man in black.

Nate hadn’t seen how he had done it.

All he saw was Henry planting one foot on the man’s knife hand.

The wrist broke with a crack as sharp as a dry branch snapping.

The man screamed.

The knife dropped from his fingers.

Then everything went quiet.

Sunlight still poured through the windows.

The entire fight had lasted less than five seconds.

Nate’s hand trembled slightly around the Glock.

All the bruises across his body had flared in protest during the sudden movement.

His gun was still aimed at the woman.

She didn’t dare move and slowly raised her hands in surrender.

“Pretty fast.”

Henry’s voice came from beside him, steady and calm.

He kicked the folding knife across the floor into a corner, then bent down, picked up the woman’s semi-automatic pistol, and casually tucked it into the back of his waistband.

“That shot you fired. Where were you aiming?”

“Her wrist.”

“And where did you hit?”

Nate looked at the woman’s still-bleeding wrist.

The bullet had passed straight through the center just above the wrist bone, almost exactly where the hand was most vulnerable.

“Her wrist.”

Henry nodded.

A satisfied smile appeared on his face.

“Good. Very good.”

That nod meant more than any praise Nate had received after hundreds of rubber bullets that morning.

Henry turned toward the woman and crouched in front of her.

She leaned against the wall, clutching her right wrist. Her face had gone pale from blood loss, but she neither screamed nor struggled.

Henry reached out and tore the human-skin mask from her face.

The real face underneath was familiar.

Perkins.

Nate recognized her immediately.

Henry stood, backed away several steps, and aimed his gun at her.

“Who sent you?”

“The High Table.”

Her voice was slightly hoarser now, but still calm.

“My name is Perkins. Your life is worth twenty million dollars, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

“Straightforward. Just not very smart.”

Henry pulled the trigger repeatedly.

Like hammering nails into a cross, he put a bullet into each of Perkins’ and the man’s remaining uninjured limbs.

Their screams tore through the empty gym.

Henry dragged over a chair and sat down.

He rested the gun on his knee, its muzzle pointed toward the two people writhing on the floor.

Nate pulled out his phone.

“Don’t bother checking,” Henry said. “You won’t find this on the bounty list.”

Henry smiled.

The expression was as cold as light reflecting from a knife.

“If the High Table wants me dead, why would they put the contract through their own system?”

He sat calmly in the chair, watching the two assassins writhe and scream on the floor.

“Go check on the receptionist. Then notify Winston. Tell him something happened on the twelfth floor.”

A faint smell of blood hung in the hallway.

The receptionist on the twelfth floor was already dead.

Her eyes were wide open.

Her mouth hung open, and both hands were clamped around her throat. Her face was deathly pale, while blood seeping between her fingers had soaked into the carpet.

Nate stood there looking at her for a long time without saying anything.

Finally, he picked up the desk phone from beside her and called Winston.