Chapter 138: Brawling and Fighting

Lin Jia let out a roar, leaped into the air, and kicked Longmao squarely in the chest just as the latter was struggling back onto his feet. The impact sent Longmao sliding a long way across the ground, crashing over several stools two meters away. Longmao thrashed like a fish stranded on a bank, his mouth gaping wide. The breath had been completely knocked out of him by that kick, leaving him gasping frantically for air. When he finally managed to suck in a breath, a stabbing, heart-wrenching agony ripped through his chest, forcing a miserable shriek from his throat.

Having delivered the kick, Lin Jia reached out to grab a glass cola bottle from the crate stacked beside the counter. However, the boss—sharp-eyed, quick-handed, and well-acquainted with Lin Jia’s habits—snatched the bottle away from his grip just before Lin Jia could secure it, roaring at him, "Drag him outside and beat him!"

The brothers had worked together in perfect harmony for years. At the boss's roar, Lao Si instantly realized she was trying to prevent Lin Jia from losing his mind again. Like a scurrying rat, he darted forward and unleashed a flying kick at the side of Longmao’s rear end as the latter still writhed and shrieked on the floor. The blow flipped Longmao over onto his front. Lao Si then bent down, grabbed a handful of Longmao’s shoulder-length yellow hair, and, dragging and struggling, hauled him toward the internet café's back door like a corpse.

With his cola bottle snatched away and Longmao dragged off by Lao Si, Lin Jia found himself suddenly devoid of a target. He spun around in circles like a madman, searching everywhere for a weapon of convenience. Unfortunately, the public section of the internet café only offered cheap plastic chairs; there was no sign of the legendary folding stool, universally hailed as the chief of all seven legendary weapons. After much searching, he spotted a mop beside the restroom, but it looked far too flimsy. Abandoning the search altogether, Lin Jia rushed out empty-handed, moving like a gust of wind.

The boss hurriedly muttered a few comforting words to Meimei, who stood frozen in shock, before rushing out as well without even putting down the cola bottle in her hand. She left behind a café full of stunned gamers, along with an utterly terrified Lao Zhao and Meimei, in a silence that stretched for several agonizing seconds. Finally, one gamer weakly piped up, "Uh... should we call the police?" The surrounding gamers shot him a disdainful look, then surged en masse toward the back door, eager to watch the spectacle unfold.

In situations like this, the internet café management usually handled calls to the police; hot-blooded, aggressive young gamers were never the ones to make the call. They were far too busy rubbernecking to bother with dialing authorities. Besides, some of the more timid players feared retaliation from the perpetrators and certainly wouldn't play the hero. After all, they weren't the ones getting beaten, so it was none of their business; better to avoid complications than invite trouble. Realizing the situation had turned sour, Lao Zhao scrambled to pick up his phone from the floor where Longmao had knocked it, and said rapidly to Meimei, "You stay right here! Don't go outside! I'm going out to pull them apart!" With that, he rushed out through the back door while frantically dialing the internet café owner's phone. After all, this incident had occurred on their premises, and one of the combatants was even a staff member.

Kopu Internet Café occupied the ground-floor commercial space of a residential building facing the neighborhood street. Some seven or eight other internet cafés lined the same block. Directly in front of the café’s main entrance ran a wide avenue, facing a lake just outside the residential compound, while the back door opened directly into the interior of the complex. Due to years of neglect, the streetlights around the corner near the back door were all broken. The passageways between towering apartment buildings plunged into deep, shadowy alleys. By now, it was around eight or nine in the evening, and with autumn settling in, the night was pitch black.

Dragged by Lao Si into the gloomy alley beside the internet café, Longmao experienced fear for the very first time. He had never seen young men fight with such lethal ruthlessness. Street thugs usually maintained a strong sense of proportion when throwing punches; after all, this was a society governed by law. No matter how much they bragged or how loudly they claimed to disregard the rules, none of them wanted to spend days rotting in a jail cell. Nobody wanted to inflict severe, debilitating injuries—especially since many youths who called themselves "members of the underworld" were nothing more than petty punks throwing their weight around under a false banner.

Yet the fellows he had run into today were entirely different from anyone he had ever encountered. He could sense that the bespectacled, mild-mannered fellow from earlier had been aiming to kill him! The piercing agony and suffocating sensation radiating from his chest made him terrified that his ribs might be fractured, while the agonizing pain at the crown of his head reminded him precisely where the fistful of yellow hair the bespectacled guy had flung into his face had come from! Amidst blinding waves of pain, a bizarre thought even flashed through his mind: *Am I going bald?*

Tasting the terror of death for the very first time, Longmao let out an inhuman shriek. Catching sight of that terrifying bespectacled maniac charging out of the internet café after him, Longmao screamed and began to struggle with the frenzy of pure desperation. Ignoring the fact that his hair was still gripped tightly in someone's fist, he thrashed his limbs wildly, broke free from Lao Si’s grasp, and bolted from the dark recesses of the residential complex. He tore through the narrow alley, sprinting at full tilt toward the lake across the street, leaving Lao Si standing bewildered in the gloom with a massive clump of yellow hair clutched in his hand.

Bursting out in pursuit, Lin Jia caught sight of the yellow-haired punk dropping onto all fours—in a display of atavistic regression—scrambling and tumbling frantically across the four-lane avenue outside the main entrance of the internet café. An oncoming bus slammed on its brakes with an ear-splitting screech, narrowly missing turning him into roadkill.

Without uttering a sound, Lin Jia dropped low and sprinted after him. Panicked, Lao Si and the boss—who had just chased them out—shrieked at the top of their lungs, "Lin Jia! Forget it! Stop chasing him!! Just drop it!!" But Lin Jia, now entirely consumed by a manic frenzy, was deaf to all warnings. Judging by the look in his eyes, he seemed determined to beat Longmao to death before he would even consider stopping.

Just as Lao Si and the boss braced themselves to sprint forward and haul Lin Jia back, they suddenly saw a crowd of people surge out from the lakeside across the street and instantly clash with Lin Jia.

"Damn it!" Lao Si panicked. He dropped low, grabbed two discarded chunks of construction concrete from the corner of the alley, hoisted one in each hand, and charged forward like a madman, roaring at the top of his lungs as he ran, "Boss! Go make a call for backup!"

Realizing he couldn't possibly be of any help even if he rushed into the fray, the boss flung the cola bottle from his hand and bolted back the way he came. He collided head-on with Lao Zhao, who was chasing after them while making a call. The boss snatched the phone straight out of Lao Zhao's hands and bellowed, "No calling the police!" She immediately hung up the active call, punched in a new sequence of numbers, and began dialing out furiously.

Left stunned after having his phone snatched away by a young woman, Lao Zhao stood frozen for a long moment before protesting, "I wasn't calling the cops!" Lin Jia had thrown the first punch, and his blows hadn't been light either; if the police showed things would get out of hand instantly!

Let us set aside the calling boss for a moment and turn our attention elsewhere. Why had such a massive crowd suddenly materialized to ambush Lin Jia? The reason was quite simple. The lakeside just outside the residential compound boasted exceptionally picturesque scenery, prompting the municipal government to landscape a vast stretch of grassy shoreline into a lakeside park. They had installed fitness equipment, stone benches, and rockeries for the local residents to enjoy during their leisure time.

However, once night fell, illumination relied solely on the distant streetlights lining the main avenue, leaving the park rather poorly lit. The secluded corners near the shoreline, plunged in deep shadow, gradually transformed into a favored sanctuary for young couples seeking privacy. Yet, as drug addicts began to infiltrate the surrounding neighborhood, the park slowly degenerated into a playground for junkies and petty thugs. When night fell, gangs of punks liked to squat there for reasons unknown.

The direction Longmao had fled happened to be the turf claimed by his pack of fox-spirit cronies. When Lin Jia charged blindly into their midst, he naturally drew an immediate, violent encirclement.

Although Lin Jia possessed a reckless and savage streak, he had never studied martial arts, nor was he some superhuman blessed with supernatural gifts. At best, he was merely an agile ordinary human. Surrounded and swarmed by a dozen-plus opponents, he was beaten down to the ground within three punches and a kick. His glasses were knocked flying, crashing onto the pavement where they were trampled into oblivion.

Living up to his nickname of "the Madman," Lin Jia felt not a shred of fear at that moment. Despite being swarmed and assaulted by a mob, he let out a feral roar, threw his arms around the leg of an attacker who was kicking him, and—rolling and dragging—pulled the man crashing down to the earth. Straddling his target, Lin Jia began flailing away with wild, indiscriminate punches aimed straight at the man's face. Blinded without his glasses, Lin Jia had no idea what he was striking; he simply shut his eyes and unleashed a flurry of windmill blows. He offered zero defense against the boots raining down on his back, waist, spine, and the back of his head, simply clenching the muscles across his back and gritting his teeth to tough it out. Operating on the principle of "a cornered snapping turtle won't let go even if lightning strikes," he made the unfortunate kid beneath him shriek far louder than Lin Jia himself, as if the dozen men surrounding them were beating the underling instead of Lin Jia.

When Lao Si came tearing around the corner brandishing two chunks of concrete, the sight of Lin Jia being beaten into near-unrecognition made his vision run crimson. Abandoning all sense of proportion, he charged in and brought the concrete slabs down hard, smashing two of the thugs directly to the ground. The red brick in his right hand actually shattered in half against a man's skull!

The two men struck by Lao Si collapsed instantly without a sound, stunning the dozen remaining thugs and shocking Lao Si himself so violently that his heart contracted and his pupils dilated to pinpricks. Then, he snapped. "Aaaaaargh!" Lao Si shrieked like a maniac, his voice warped entirely out of pitch. "I'll kill you all! I'll kill you all!"

The surrounding thugs were utterly paralyzed by Lao Si’s psychotic fury. Combined with the agonizing screams echoing from the center of the pile, their fighting spirit completely evaporated. Their courage shattered, they turned and scattered in terror, chased off by Lao Si and his concrete blocks, finally exposing Lin Jia, who was still buried beneath the pack. Lin Jia’s upper-body T-shirt had been torn to shreds, his back mapped with bloody lacerations, while the unfortunate wretch pinned beneath him lay completely motionless, entirely indistinguishable whether he was merely unconscious or dead.

"Madman! Beat these bastards!" Lao Si roared at Lin Jia, who was still swinging wild punches, snapping him back to awareness. But when Lin Jia lifted his head, the sight gave even Lao Si a jolt of terror: illuminated by the distant streetlight, Lin Jia's entire head and face were coated in gore, and his eyes were so bloodshot that not a single trace of white remained—they were completely, utterly crimson!