Kelly stared at his employer's broad, tensed shoulder and took heed of his stance. He automatically reached for the weapon secreted on the inside of his overcoat.
"You are a thousand years ahead of yourself to be dictating to me, scrub," Viktor snorted.
Kelly sucked in a deep breath; his cheeks swelled with the torture of curbing his tongue rather than correcting Viktor on his wrongly-worded metaphor. He released a calming breath as he drew out his nunchucks.
Kelly's weapon of choice strayed from the conventional nunchaku. Far from the ones sustained by Bruce Lee, they were not made solely of wood, but were silver-gilded with gold.
The top of the nunchaku were held together by a short silver chain; the body of each long silver-gilded stick was referred to as the shaft. Holding the batons' top between his thumb and forefinger, he swung the nunchucks upwards, towards himself, catching it squarely in his palm.
"Payne." Viktor turned his head briefly to look back at him. Kelly's head was bent. He did not catch the telling stare in Viktor's eyes. "The level of concealment is limited and we're heading into terrain where an ambush is highly likely."
Without looking up, Kelly acknowledged him with a short nod. Catching the nunchucks in the palm of his hand, as one slender shaft met the other, he lightly pressed a small mechanism that allowed him to freely control the many, rows of two-inch blades embedded in the weapon, which he incorporated into his fighting style. Spinning the nunchucks deftly between his fingers, the blades escaped through slits in their exposed surface. The blades did not all come out at once, but in a pattern only Kelly, and one other, were able to intuit: a unique, consistent pattern.
"I'd also like to keep the blow-by-blow to a minimum." Viktor was firm on this regard.
Unbelievable, Kelly thought. He couldn't believe that he was letting the misuse of all these common English idioms slide. Oh, to be Maleficent is a godsend, Kelly thought, his eyes trained on Viktor's back as he now spun the nunchucks with such speed that it appeared to be one long stick, the blades coming in and out of the shafts in quick succession. A novice would have had several fingers lopped off at this stage. Kelly was no novice.
Kelly's mind vaguely wondered at the other occupants that shared this darkened place.
Humph, Darksmith thought. Another pretty boy. Darksmith observed the lanky blond newly added to the group before looking back at Viktor. They were surrounded by - nothing. They were in a bubble, a vacuum, a minor dimension controlled by Viktor himself. Aside from the statue poses of the three little women who gave the faint whiff of dog to Darksmith's sensitive nose, blondie, and Viktor here, there were no other markers to speak of.