I bullet through the smoke, arcing upwards. He barely sees me coming - his raging ambient field will have masked my approach, which means I am able to take him by surprise, knocking him off-guard. I get a good punch in and wrap my arms around his waist in a rugby tackle. He's little: thin black hair, thin black tie, hot to the touch from air friction. He screams something at me but I ignore him and... and again, something's wrong with the picture--
He's about to start hitting back when we erupt out of the smoke cloud at a ten degree angle and that's when I see the second, taller office block right behind the first one. Mistake. Massive mistake. I try to pull up past it but there's not enough wiggle room. I duck and shield myself with the Chinese guy's body as we punch a diagonal hole through seven floors of rigidly constructed concrete and steel like a bullet through a box of tissues. The whole building is lifted off the ground by the impact - actually physically pulled, whole, upward off its foundations about two feet in the air and then dropped back down again. On my way through I spot several rows of businessmen and women watching the incursion from the office windows.
We smash upwards through the roof and keep accelerating. I'm still feeling a hundred percent but Chinese guy is dazed by the impact. His focus is wavering - more importantly, he's focused on me, now, not the civilians, whom we are rapidly leaving behind below us.
The civilians.
I recognised one of those faces in the cloud. He was mixed race, oriental/Caucasian. Younger and a tad shorter than me, and wearing not a suit but a t-shirt and dark jeans. A t-shirt I've seen before, black, with a white printed mathematical equation on it which I recognise but couldn't memorise if you gave me all day. There was a greyish drawstring bag slung around his shoulder, and on his face there was fear and shock where I am more used to seeing a cheery grin--
- Power of Two https://qntm.org/power