Brainless Vince
He's actually come looking for me already?
Arthur Sterling watched in genuine, cold surprise as Vince stormed straight across the cracked asphalt toward him. The hulking, heavily tattooed musclehead moved like a raging bull, his heavy combat boots slamming against the pavement of the dimly lit parking lot.
Arthur had logically assumed the explosively jealous guy would at least wait until the day after tomorrow, when Arthur was scheduled to return for his regular shift at the neighborhood garage, to try and corner him and 'teach him a lesson' on familiar turf. He absolutely hadn't expected him to show up at his private residence today.
Inwardly, Arthur's simmering resentment toward Old Parker immediately deepened into a cold, hard anger.
Absolutely no one else in this sprawling city knew his exact home address except for the older mechanic. Last time, Arthur had grudgingly let the massive breach of privacy slide when the old man had given his address to Mia. But now, seeing Vince's enraged face charging through the shadows, it meant the violent enforcer also knew exactly where he slept.
Old Parker was entirely too slick and entirely too willing to play both sides to save his own skin—he had clearly, undeniably sold him out to Dom's crew.
Looks like I need to cut ties with that dusty garage as soon as humanly possible, Arthur calculated, his eyes locking onto Vince's approaching form.
You simply couldn't make real, life-changing money working underneath someone else in this city! Whenever Arthur did those highly dangerous, illegal side jobs with Old Parker, the absolute biggest cut of the untraceable cash always went straight into the old man's pockets.
Originally, Arthur genuinely didn't mind the unfair split, since the relentless, heavy mechanical work still allowed him to rapidly level up his [Repair] skill. But Old Parker's blatant, dangerous betrayal now violently magnified every single past grievance. In a matter of seconds, standing beside his ticking engine, Arthur firmly resolved to sever all connection with Old Parker's repair shop.
A rapid torrent of strategic thoughts flashed through his enhanced mind, yet Arthur still unhurriedly and smoothly dismounted his vintage motorcycle.
Every single dense muscle in his newly sculpted body coiled like a steel spring. He appeared entirely relaxed, standing casually with his hands resting near his hips, but he was completely, perfectly ready to violently counter in an instant.
Why else had he specifically gone out of his way to spend hours sweating at the elite boxing club today?
Besides actively wanting to confirm his earlier, strategic guess that physical combat skills could indeed be triggered and leveled up quickly—provided you were willing to spend a small fortune on professional coaching—he had been actively preparing for exactly this moment.
After Mia had driven back to Letty's house that morning, Arthur had immediately begun to prepare for the inevitable day their intimate relationship became explosive public knowledge.
Dominic Toretto and his fiercely loyal crew had grown up entirely entrenched in the violent, unforgiving underground street racing scene. They were notorious, highly organized highway thugs in California who openly and fearlessly robbed massive transport trucks on the freeway at a hundred miles per hour.
Although in the theatrical Fast & Furious storyline Dom's gang had never actually used loaded guns to murder those innocent truckers, Arthur knew only too well that this was a raw, bleeding, real world.
Dom and Vince had ruled the underground racing circuits with iron fists, entered countless illegal, high-stakes races, and heavily modified cars against every state and federal law. For years, they had successfully pulled off more than a dozen highly coordinated heists on the sprawling highways. In Arthur's previous, mundane life, this group would have instantly been labeled a standard, highly dangerous criminal syndicate by the FBI.
So, the exact moment he had chosen to entangle himself with Mia, he had started heavily bracing for their brutal retaliation.
Safely hidden inside his invisible, private dimensional space lay loaded, high-caliber firearms. Therefore, Arthur absolutely wasn't worried about the worst-case, lethal scenario.
Vince probably wouldn't dare go too far or attempt to actually kill him in cold blood right here in the open, deeply fearing he might force Arthur to call the cops and instantly put Dom's entire secret operation squarely on the LAPD radar. Most likely, the enraged brute would just try to use his massive size to aggressively beat him to a bloody pulp and teach him a lesson about boundaries.
Arthur had deliberately spent his rapidly dwindling money grinding out the [Boxing] skill precisely to effortlessly deal with an unrefined, street-brawling thug like Vince.
As the two men rapidly closed the remaining distance across the dimly lit lot, Arthur's enhanced, hyper-aware vision quickly saw every single aggressive detail.
Thick, angry veins bulged against the skin of Vince's massive arms, and his rugged face was grotesquely twisted with a toxic, blinding mixture of pure rage and suffocating jealousy.
Seeing that Arthur didn't immediately turn and run for his life in absolute terror but instead stood perfectly still, calmly waiting for the impact, Vince burned even hotter. He snarled, baring his teeth like a rabid dog, "Damn street trash!"
He spat the insult with absolute, unfiltered venom. To a man like Vince, who considered himself local royalty in the underground, anyone outside his tight-knit crew was nothing more than disposable garbage.
In fact, Arthur felt absolutely no real emotional attachment or fear toward the towering man. Still, Vince's arrogant, degrading slur instantly grated on his nerves.
In that single, electric instant, Arthur, who was already entirely set on teaching Vince a brutal physical lesson, threw every last remaining reservation over his shoulder into the night air.
"Filthy cockroach!" Vince roared, his voice echoing off the crumbling apartment walls. "Eat shit!"
Vince's actual verbal repertoire of insults was pathetically limited. No matter how angrily he cursed into the humid night, it was always the exact same predictable lines over and over again.
From the heavy wooden apartment door to the shadowed parking spot was barely ten meters.
Arthur kept standing there, his posture perfectly balanced, even wearing a faint, chillingly cold smile on his face.
Vince rushed up, closing the final gap, and angrily reached out his massive, calloused hand to violently grab Arthur by the collar of his jacket, fully intending to hurl him against the brick wall.
To a meathead like Vince, aside from possessing a bit of decent height, the young mechanic was nothing more than a weak, fragile coward. Vince had violently hurled abuse at him back in the garage, and Arthur hadn't dared to raise his voice or answer back. In Vince's twisted mind, this kid had only managed to fool the naive, innocent Mia with his pretty face and quiet demeanor.
Thinking vividly of the sexy, incredibly hot Mia being completely deceived and touched by this mechanic made Vince's raw fury spike to dangerous, explosive levels; his already contorted face grew even uglier.
"Bastard!" Vince bellowed, his eyes wide with madness.
Dropping the attempt to grab the collar, he tightly clenched his massive right fist and swung a heavy, wild haymaker directly at Arthur's handsome, deeply envied face.
But the lean man standing in front of him merely stepped half a calculated pace back, his footwork textbook-perfect, leaving Vince's devastating punch swiping violently through completely empty air.
At the exact same time, a calm, chillingly cold voice sounded right in Vince's ear over the rushing momentum of his missed swing.
"Done cursing?"
The absolute moment the mocking words landed in the quiet air, Vince felt a sudden, sharp stab of agonizing pain entirely envelop his swinging right fist.
He looked down in absolute, stunned disbelief and saw that the tall, lean mechanic standing in front of him had somehow, impossibly, shot out a single hand to effortlessly catch and block his furious, full-force punch mid-air.
And that horrifying realization wasn't all!
Vince, feeling deeply, violently humiliated by being so easily caught, desperately tried to aggressively yank his heavy fist back to his chest.
Only to suddenly find that the young man's fingers had clamped down around his hand like an industrial steel vise, locking his right hand so completely and flawlessly that he absolutely couldn't withdraw it an inch.
And as those five iron fingers tightened their crushing grip, Vince could actually hear the sickening, wet sound of his own knuckles crackling under the pressure—the other man's terrifying, unnatural grip was literally squeezing his thick bones together.
"Bastard, let go!" Vince screamed, his eyes watering from the sudden, blinding pain.
Vince had always been notoriously short-tempered and completely short on actual brains, or he absolutely wouldn't have come out here entirely alone in the middle of the night to ambush and try to teach an unknown variable a physical lesson.
Completely unable to free his trapped right hand from the crushing grip, he only grew exponentially angrier, losing whatever tiny shred of rational thought he had left.
His massive left fist, which had previously completely missed grabbing Arthur's neck, tightly clenched again. Driven by blind, agonizing rage, he swung it wildly in a wide, desperate arc aimed straight at Arthur's face.
Arthur simply tilted his lean body slightly to the right, slipping under the aggressive trajectory, and once more effortlessly dodged Vince's furious, predictable punch.