A Man of Honor.

Chapter 73: Final Touches.

"Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others." ~ Niccolo Machiavelli.

I was having a business lunch when Yang had her match against Mercury. I was meeting with Vincent in a local pizza joint when it all went down.

"Isn't that the girl who visited you at the club? Your old Beacon friend?" Vincent said, pointing a finger at the television mounted at the corner of the room. We had a booth in the back and the bartender was watching so that no one disturbed us or tried to listen in on our conversation.

I turned my head and watched as the match started. "Yeah, that's her." I said, taking more notice of her opponent. Mercury, I didn't know what was going on but just seeing the two of them squaring off against one another made me nervous. There was no way it was just a coincidence, Cinder was playing her hand in some way.

Vincent gave a low whistle. "Man, not to sound like a creep but if I was your age going to that school I would not have been able to concentrate."

"I don't think there's any way a man of your age can say that without sounding creepy." I told him, looking back and grabbing my beer and taking a sip.

"Yeah, sorry. Let's get back to business." Vicent said to me.

"Did you do it?" I asked him.

"Yeah, it's done." Vincent told me. "The guys hit the place last night."

"How'd you do it?" I asked him.

"This isn't the first time the Family raided an evidence lockup." Vincent told me. "We got the crate and set fire to the place, it'll take them a while to realize that shipment of missiles is missing, eventually they're going to find that a lot of stuff isn't in the ashes."

"Are they hunting an arsonist now?" I asked them.

"I don't know, but I told our associates to get out of town, and they took a few other random items to cover tracks." Vincent explained to me. "And we sent that shipment off to White Peak like you ordered."

"Excellent." I said, happy to hear his report.

"That's a lot of work for one crate of missiles." Vincent told me. "Whatever the badges think about all of this they're not going to be happy."

"Let me worry about that. I'm just glad that you managed to get this all together on such short notice." I said to him.

"Yeah well, if you ever need anything stolen or a building burned down I know the right guys to call." Vincent told me. "But I must admit that this would have gone a lot easier if they had Neo, she's good at this kind of thing,"

"Like I told you, she's currently busy." I said to him.

Vincent nodded and looked back up towards the screen. "Looks like she won."

I looked back towards the bar and gazed at the screen. Sure enough Yang was standing over Mercury with the screen flashing news that she was the victor. That had been a surprise to me, I had expected Mercury had some plan to beat her in the match or something but here she was the certified winner.

Then she struck.

I watched the gauntlet go down and blast his leg as he laid there on the ground of the stadium appearing helpless. I listened to Oobleck and Port exclaim their shock at the event before the feed was cut out.

"What the fuck!?" Vincent said. "Why the hell did she do that? With all those fucking cameras rolling?"

"I don't know..." I lied, this was clearly Cinder's hand at work and I was more than sure that they had used Emerald's semblance to trick her into doing that. Though the idea of Mercury taking a blow like that directly to his leg seemed like it would put him out of action for a while, not exactly a good thing considering Cinder's deadline was approaching.