Bruce did not lunge. He did not roar. He didn't even think.
He moved.
He dropped his bag. He took one, single, impossibly fast step.
Ruth, still catching her balance, saw it as a blur. One second, Bruce was by her side, his eyes wide and dark. The next, he was... gone... and was in front of Dickson.
Dickson was still sneering, his hand still half-raised from the shove. He didn't even have time to register the new threat. His eyes widened, his "oh, shit" moment of realization arriving a million years too late.
Bruce's hand came up. His left hand. His palm was flat.
He pushed.
It was not a punch. It was not a shove. He simply... placed his hand, with all the speed of a striking snake, flat against the center of Dickson's chest, right on the big, stupid, chenille "O" of his Oaktown jacket.
The moment his skin touched the wool, two things happened at once.
The ignition in his chest—the white-hot agony of the amulet—discharged.
The law in his head—MAKE. HIM. STOP.—was obeyed.
It was not a push. It was an expulsion. It was a catastrophic, violent rejection. It was seventeen years of the hum, seventeen years of the roar, seventeen years of being a human dam, all focused by the amulet into a single, needle-point, and released in one, microscopic sliver of a second.
Ruth, five feet away, felt it before she saw it.
First, the sound.
It was not the "thwack" of a hand. It was not the "thud" of a punch.
It was a CRACK.
It was a dry, deafening, impossible sound, like a thousand-year-old tree splitting from root to crown in a dry lightning strike. It was the sound of the world breaking.
Second, the air. The air shoved her. A hot, dry, static-filled wave, like the air in front of a furnace, blasted outward from Bruce, making her stumble back again, her hair flying across her face.
Third, the smell. Ozone. Sharp, sterile, and hot. The smell of a subway's third rail. The smell of burnt... something.
Fourth, the sight.
Bruce's hand touched Dickson. And a wave... a wave of visible... something... exploded from his palm.
It was not a fire. It was not a light.
It was a ripple of pure distortion. A wave of darkness. Like a heat-haze, but black. It was a shockwave of pure wrongness.
It hit Dickson. And it didn't just hit him. It went through him.
The shockwave, this bubble of unseen, dark force, kept going.
It hit Miller, who was standing just behind Dickson. It hit the other two, the one on the car and the one by the path.
It hit them all.
And Dickson, and his friends... they flew.
It was not a "stumble back." It was not a "fall."
They were hurled. They were launched. They were ragdolls hit by an invisible, speeding truck.
They flew backward, their arms and legs flailing in a cartoonish, silent-movie kind of way, for what felt like an eternity. Ten feet. Fifteen.
Twenty feet.
They slammed, all four of them, into the primer-grey Camaro.
The sound... this sound was different. It was not the crisp, sharp CRACK of the power. It was a wet, heavy, sickening CRUNCH.
It was the sound of four, 180-pound bodies hitting two tons of American steel.
WHUMP. CRACK. CRUNCH. THUD.
And it was the sound of the Camaro's windshield exploding inward in a spider-web of shattered, glittering glass. It was the sound of the hood buckling. It was the sound of the driver's-side door bending inward from the impact of Dickson's own body.