The bushes were once again alive with rustling, crackle of breaking branches, several pairs of footsteps; then opened up to release four men in identical spotted jackets carrying stick-like objects and briefcases. The locks and metal corners of the briefcases shone with a ghostly blue light. They saw Suhov and stopped dead; one of them, a big guy, as wide as a dresser and at least as tall as Nikita, moved towards him with heavy shuffling steps. The objects Suhov had mistaken for sticks were revealed to be short spears with long and sharp, sting-like points that glowed with the same ghostly light.    It was too late to run; besides, the four men looked so strange that Nikita’s first thought was “Paratroopers! They must have quite simply disembarked here as part of some war games. There could be no other logical reason for these four to be walking around in camouflage. Or could they be actors shooting some exotic action movie?” was his second, no less soothing, thought.    “Did you hear?” asked Nikita, taking a fight stand just in case. “Somebody was yelling.”    The giant came closer. The tip of his spear touched Suhov’s chest and the glowing intensified.    “Watch it!” growled the dancer, stepping back. “What kind of games are you playing at this time of…” He didn’t finish: at that moment, he saw the man’s face.    It was unnaturally pale – in fact, it was completely white! The whites of the eyes flashed around large muzzle-like pupils that radiated menace and a strange sucking anguish. The lips, straight and thin, looked black, and the nose resembled a triangular valve and was vibrating gently, as if the stranger was smelling the air.    “Get back,” said the paratrooper in a heavy, morose rustle devoid of inflection. “March.” Nikita swallowed hard and with a great effort looked away from the stranger’s hypnotic eyes. Indignation rose up in his chest.    “Why should I get back? I’m going home, this is a shortcut. What’s your problem?”    The sting of the spear sliced through the shirt and punctured the skin. Nikita yelped and stepped back. A shocked and disbelieving realization dawned on him that this wasn’t a dream, and that the strange paratrooper wasn’t joking.    “I repeat: get back. Quickly. Quietly. Understood?”    “Understood.” Nikita felt anger roll over him like a hard, fast wave. Suhov wasn’t used to this kind of tone.    He grabbed the spear near the tip, planning to rip it out of the dresser’s hand, and yelped again in surprise: the spear sent a painful electric shock through his body. But he was stubborn and didn’t like doing things halfway; and now the rage, fired up even more by electricity, demanded release, though the stranger’s bizarre face continued to hypnotize him, demanding answers.    The spear found Nikita again, scratched his chest, but he was already moving to the left, diverting the force of the attack at the briefcase. The paratrooper swung at him. Nikita lunged for the spear… and was thrown to the ground, stunned by another shock from the glowing sting. He rolled down the alleyway and tried to pick himself up, but the giant was already moving back towards Nikita. Another stranger tumbled out of the bushes. Nikita sat down and leaned against the railing. He felt his buzzing head, tried to concentrate.    The new character was revealed to be a graying old man dressed in something resembling a tattered, bloodstained raincoat of a nondescript color. He bent down and began to claw the asphalt, turning his head towards Nikita. His eyes had been scratched out; a mix of blood and tears was running down his dark face; his open mouth was twisted in a mute scream – he had no tongue.    The paratrooper looked at his friends, who were grouped silent and motionless nearby. He lazily strode up to the old man and calmly pierced him with the spear.    “What are you doing?” yelled Suhov, jumping to his feet.    The dresser slashed his victim again. The old man stretched out on the ground and was still.    Nikita hurled himself at the paratrooper and hit him square in the head mid-jump, kicking the spear away with his bag. For a while, they moved together in a strange dance: Nikita was ducking the spear and the briefcase as he tried to reach the stranger with his foot or his fist, while the dresser avoided his attacks with a sort of casual, languid grace which seemed completely out of place on such a massive, unwieldy body – until the electric sting of the spear connected once again with Suhov’s shoulder, paralyzing him. Though the shock of the spear could scarcely be called electricity: Nikita’s body contracted into a tight ball of tight but unmoving muscle, and a wave of deathly cold radiated out of the point of contact.    Nikita collapsed, fixing his eyes on the paratrooper’s ghastly pupils in impotent fury. The tip of the spear closed in on Nikita’s eyes, played near his heart, moved back to one eye, then the other, as if the white spook couldn’t decide where to start. Suddenly, one of his mates barked out a warning in a strange language: somebody was running down a side alley.    The spear froze and disappeared. The paratrooper bent over Nikita.    “Weakling. Not for the Way. You’ll die.”