For a fraction of a second everything went dark. Roland’s world was riotous red pain and little else. If his body had required the input of his conscious mind, he would have been in a real pickle. During the milliseconds it took for his dampeners to cut through the pain haze, Roland’s body dove ten feet to the left, enough to take him out of the Callahan’s spray and behind an outcropping of rocks. Two rounds cracked into the rock above his head. Roland came back to himself as the shards cut into his skin.

He glanced down at the ruin of his shoulder. His little blood robots were already hard at work, rebuilding the muscles, bones, and sinews blown out by the giant slug. A couple seconds more and the limb would be usable again. But Roland had a better idea.

He used his intact arm as a flesh-catapult and flung himself up over the boulder, toward the Callahan and its three guardians. The man with the two-bore fired again. Roland had known he would and his hindbrain had already calculated the ideal motions to avoid the dozen most-likely shot patterns. He sailed over the half-pound bullets with ease and used the hand of his intact arm to rip his wounded arm free at the shoulder.

Roland landed hard in front of the Callahan. He swung his own severed limb like a club and knocked the barrel to the left. Then he laid into the gun’s crew with a mix of pounding swings from the arm and stomps to the other men’s knees and ankles. Bones shattered. Assassins screamed. The man with the two-bore and the newborn child at home wavered and broke. Roland had expected this. Many normal humans, even hardened veterans, found it nauseating and unsettling to see a man move as fast as he could move. Add “beating their friends half to death with a severed limb” and, well, he’d predicted the guy would break.

It’s not your fault buddy, Roland thought as he watched the man run. Don’t feel bad. He’d wanted to say that out loud but he was having trouble working his vocal cords.

In roughly seven seconds, Roland had eliminated five out of eight threats in the kill-team. His hindbrain predictions had given him six more seconds, at least, before the entry team cleared themselves from the debris of his collapsed hovel. But the other post-human, the man who’d shone blank on most of Roland’s senses, had freed himself faster. Roland realized this when a trio of .50-caliber slugs burst into his chest cavity. He dropped, avoiding the last three rounds of the burst, and rolled behind another pair of boulders with his severed arm in hand.