Kwaang---!!!!
It was the explosion caused when the truck Ji-hwan had been driving at full tilt slammed into the concrete outer wall.
Just before reaching the enemy line, Ji-hwan had leaped out of the vehicle without hesitation, leaving the stolen rifle mounted on the accelerator and locked at maximum output. The truck, turned into a mass weapon, smashed through the front gate defenses like they were paper.
The high-efficiency biofuel, CHOOH2, that filled the vehicle ignited in an instant, and a searing flash mixed with blue-white flames surged up like a tidal wave, swallowing the nearby Maelstrom remnants without leaving a trace.
"Aaaagh! My eyes! My lenses are fried!"
"Cough, damn it! What the hell is going on...!!"
The blinding flash from the superheated blast caused severe noise in the multi-optic lenses of the Maelstrom troops who had been cursing and rushing out from inside.
As they staggered in the distortion of their mechanical eyes, with vision warped and sparks flying, a lone Asian man in a worn vest quietly emerged in front of the burning truck. It was Ji-hwan.
He stood there in the dust, and before anyone noticed, a sharp dagger was already in each of his hands.
"Sh-shoot that bastard! Shoot him now!!"
Before they could even pull the trigger, only the sharp slicing sounds of air being cut apart rang out in rapid succession. The daggers that had left Ji-hwan’s wrists traced perfect lines through the air and shot toward them with no margin for error.
"Ghk...!"
"Ugh...!"
The freshly emerged Maelstrom troops, who had been spewing curses just moments ago, collapsed one after another without even managing a proper scream, spilling dark blood onto the ground.
And then the officer who had rushed out of the power plant with his men, dodging the dirt and debris raining down from the collapsing ceiling, Deadzone, saw something that was not Dakota’s armed force.
It was a huge vehicle burning fiercely as it remained embedded in the wall, and a pile of Maelstrom corpses scattered miserably around it.
Against the wreckage of that burning vehicle stood only one Asian man, holding blood-dripping daggers in both hands.
Wheeeing-.
The red multi-lens cyber-eyes implanted in sniper Deadzone’s face locked focus with a sharp mechanical whine.
In one corner of his vision, a black-box video that Boss Vice had uploaded to the gang network overlaid itself as a hologram.
Beep-!
Then a red [Target Match] warning filled Deadzone’s sight, and his lenses, frozen at the sight of the explosion and the fallen Maelstrom troops, began to tremble violently.
"Th-that face...!"
The men standing behind Deadzone also shouted in shock.
"No doubt about it! That’s the bastard from the black-box footage the boss sent us!"
Confident in their numerical advantage, Deadzone finally relaxed and smiled, and his men also tightened their grips on their weapons and began to close in on Ji-hwan, slowly surrounding him.
"You’ve got some guts, I’ll give you that."
"I’ve got a question for you. That cyberpsycho you wrecked out in the wasteland—where’s the shard you recovered from her?"
To Maelstrom, that shard was worth a fortune.
At Deadzone’s question, Ji-hwan, casually twirling the blood-dripping dagger in his hand, answered with a lazy tone.
"Ask your mother."
"You little...!"
As the enraged men were about to pull the trigger at once, Deadzone raised a hand to stop them.
"Don’t kill him! Shoot his arms and legs—keep him alive!"
As the men lifted their rifles,
the moment Deadzone’s order fell and the Maelstrom remnants all raised their guns at once, a strange red light flashed deep in Ji-hwan’s dark eyes.
He had entered the world of [Thought Acceleration], a state that pried open the locks on his neural pathways at the edge of death.
The physical time of the world began to flow slowly, like thick syrup.
Ji-hwan did not hesitate.
From the start, he had intended to wipe them out with everything he had.
And to move within this slowed time, he simultaneously forced explosive [Body Enhancement] into his lower body and waist.
The instant those two grotesque abilities were crammed into him at once, a horrifying pressure, as though his bones and organs were about to be crushed, slammed through his entire body.
The fatigue of his flesh and the strain from the abilities hit him so fast it was hard to breathe, but Ji-hwan swallowed the suppressed groan and violently crossed both arms.
"Hup!"
With that short shout, his hands snapped through the air inside the world of accelerated thought, and the throwing motion, packed with the overwhelming output of [Body Enhancement], sent dozens of throwing daggers flying from his fingertips like a machine gun opening fire, raining mercilessly down on the Maelstrom troops.
"Huh?!"
Deadzone, seeing the blades flying straight at him, barely managed to dodge them in time, but his men were different.
"Kraaagh!"
"W-what the hell is this!!"
"Aaaagh!!"
Under the hail of daggers pouring down like gunfire, screams burst out all over the place from the Maelstrom remnants who had been trying to pull their triggers.
Because this was the first time Ji-hwan had thrown daggers while boosting two abilities at once, the trajectories had lost their usual precision and scattered.
Ji-hwan hadn’t expected to hit every target exactly anyway.
But the enemy numbers in the cramped open lot were overwhelming, and even blind throws were enough to land dangerous hits.
And, lucky for him, several Maelstrom troops with daggers through their throats and faces collapsed to the ground, vomiting dark blood.
"You damn bastard!!"
"Kill him! Kill this bastard!!"
The remaining remnants, barely regaining their senses, spat out vicious curses and raised their guns again, but Ji-hwan’s eyes caught sight of something round flying from his hands once more.
The men who had been battered by the dagger rain assumed it was another blade and reflexively hunched down, covering their necks and chests.
But that was their fatal misjudgment. What Ji-hwan had thrown was not daggers, but the fragmentation grenades he had stuffed into his clothes as many as he could carry.
The moment he finished throwing the daggers, he ignored the blood streaming from his hand, which had been torn apart by the strain on his muscles, and ripped the pins from all the grenades, scattering them wide.
If they had been a little calmer, or had enough room to understand the situation, they would have tried to reach out with their mechanical arms and throw the grenades back at Ji-hwan.
But already rattled by the barrage of daggers, they only realized too late that round lumps of metal were dropping at their feet, and their faces went pale.
"Shit, grenades...!!"
"R-run!!"
Panicking, they scrambled to throw themselves aside or retreat backward, but it was already too late.
Kwaang!! Kwang!!
The chain of massive explosions shook the abandoned power plant to its foundation, and the mechanical parts and chunks of flesh from the Maelstrom remnants caught in the merciless blast and shrapnel were torn apart and flung in every direction, grotesquely decorating the lot.
In the thick gunpowder smoke, Ji-hwan finished counting in his head.
'Not many of the little fish left now...?'
But things did not go the way Ji-hwan expected.
Enraged at seeing his men turned into meat pies in an instant, Deadzone roared and called out the names of the other officers.
"Get your asses out here now, Slash! Specter!!"
The instant his shout rang out, a thunderous Kwang—Kwang! echoed as the concrete wall inside the power plant shattered like paper and burst open.
Through the choking dust stepped Slash, carrying a massive hammer in a heavy linear frame.
And right behind him came Specter, walking lazily with a yawn, her grotesque reverse-jointed legs carrying her forward in an almost bored stroll.
With the arrival of the fellow officers, the extreme strain on Ji-hwan’s body finally burst.
Unable to withstand the terrifying backlash of [Thought Acceleration], red tears of blood streamed down from both of Ji-hwan’s eyes.
Then the red glow went out, and Ji-hwan’s eyes returned to their original dark color. He winced at the pain stabbing through his skull and drew in ragged breaths.
Not missing the opening, Slash spotted Ji-hwan and charged, grinding the ground beneath his absurd mechanical legs.
"Die!!"
The huge industrial hammer in the bastard’s thick arm came crashing down with murderous force, ready to crush Ji-hwan flat.
"Grrr...!"
With his body already at its limit and no way to dodge, Ji-hwan clenched his teeth and tightened his fist.
He forcibly pushed the output of his body enhancement to the maximum, starting from his lower body. Veins bulged across his entire frame, and the old clothes clinging to him stretched tight against muscles swelling as if they were about to burst.
Ji-hwan’s body did not disappoint him.
With a grinding crack of misaligned bones, the red vapor pouring off him grew even thicker.
Ji-hwan swung his fist straight at the massive hammer crashing toward him.
Kwaaaang!!
The impact was tremendous. It was a collision so violent it was hard to believe human flesh and a block of metal had met at all, as if solid iron had slammed into solid iron head-on.
Dust burst outward in a circular shockwave, and the force of the blow tore Ji-hwan’s skin and sent his numbed fist rebounding. He was shoved backward several steps by the immense recoil.
He shook out his wrist, relieved that nothing had broken, and glared sharply at the newcomers.
But the one more shaken than anyone was Slash.
"Kh?!"
Slash staggered back, his hand seeming like it might go completely numb from the recoil.
The hydraulic cylinders of the heavily modified Gorilla Arms wrapped around his thick mechanical arm were overloaded, spitting blue sparks wildly.
"Huh...?"
Slash looked back and forth between the monstrous hammer that had been knocked away, scraping across the ground, and Ji-hwan standing tall in the dust.
His lenses first locked onto the hammer buried in the dirt. It was a ridiculous lump of metal weighing several tons, made by tearing apart a crusher column from a junkyard. It was the full-force strike of a linear frame and Gorilla Arms pushed to their absolute limit.
His circuits could not accept the fact that that merciless mass, which could crush even the thick armor plating of an armored vehicle into scrap, had been blocked and sent flying by nothing more than a human fist.
Then his gaze trembled and shifted back to Ji-hwan.
Ji-hwan’s fist, the one that had stopped the hammer, had burst open from the impact and was dripping bright red blood, but the bones inside it were not broken—in fact, they remained shockingly intact.
On the contrary, thick red steam rose from between the torn flesh, stubbornly tightening the densely packed muscle fibers even harder.
"What the hell... This bastard’s strength is on my level?!"
While Slash stood frozen in shock, a bizarre laugh came from behind him, mocking the failure.
"Ahahaha! Move, idiot! I’ll kill him!!"
With a shrill laugh bursting through her grotesque metal mask, the female officer Specter shoved the stunned Slash aside and sprang forward.
Blue sparks erupted violently from the military implant running along her spine.
It was the activation of [Sandevistan], a high-speed movement that defied physical time itself.
The instant her form surged forward, leaving only a blurred afterimage as if she had vanished from sight, the strange red light flashed again deep in Ji-hwan’s dark eyes, and [Thought Acceleration] activated against her [Sandevistan] as well.
Inside the sensation of the world stretching out slowly like thick liquid, the clashing times of the two monsters collided head-on.
Swish-!
As the vicious scythe-shaped [Mantis Blades] that curved inward from both arms shot toward Ji-hwan’s neck, he twisted his upper body violently.
Swishh-!
The knife wind barely grazing his skin tore his old leather jacket and sliced off strands of hair, scattering them through the air.
Because he had forced his body output too far, sweat was pouring nonstop from Ji-hwan’s entire frame.
Blood from the torn skin mixed with the hot sweat, and soon red droplets were falling to the dirt with soft tap, tap sounds.
Having dodged that terrifying slash, Ji-hwan dragged his heavy body forward and sent a heavy counterattack toward her opening.
Compared to the acceleration of [Sandevistan], it was a slow motion, but it was still a dangerous strike for her.
"Ha-hah... What?!"
Specter’s mechanical eyes trembled with shock as she watched the fist coming toward her after she had dodged her own scythe.
She flinched, hesitated for a moment, then used the overwhelming speed of [Sandevistan] to blur into an afterimage and slip quickly behind Ji-hwan.
But just as Specter was certain she had entered his blind spot perfectly, Ji-hwan’s reddened eyes were already turning back toward her, slowly but surely, tracking her movement.
Seeing Ji-hwan’s gaze follow her precisely in the world of extreme acceleration, Specter was stunned beyond belief.
"You too?"
In the stretched-out time-space, Specter asked in a metallic voice full of disbelief.
But Ji-hwan had no room to move his lips and answer in that slowed time.
With no machine assisting him, he was forcing his brain to accelerate and holding onto the flash of life itself, while his body poured every ounce of energy into instinctive survival alone.
Ji-hwan simply stared at her in silence with a fierce gaze, reacting only with his body.
"Tch...!"
Overwhelmed by the silent beast’s stare, Specter gritted her teeth and swung the massive scythe again.
Swish!
This time it was a follow-up attack that was hard to evade by a hair’s breadth.
Once again, with the blade about to carve him open, Ji-hwan reached out toward the oncoming blue edge.
And just before the scythe touched his body, Ji-hwan’s palm snapped out and struck not the sharp blade, but the broad flat face of the scythe blade itself.
Clang-!!
With a dull grinding sound like metal being struck hard, the trajectory of the [Mantis Blades] twisted completely and sliced uselessly through empty air. Specter was left speechless by the combat sense that had read the weakness in the weapon’s path and knocked it aside.
"Ahah!! Why won’t you... get cut?!"
As her strongest weapon was neutralized over and over in such absurd ways, Specter’s shrill scream echoed through the abandoned power plant.
And then, at that very moment.
Hissss-!
As the military [Sandevistan] ran out of time and the acceleration faded back into normal flow, Specter hurriedly tried to spring backward on her reverse-jointed legs.
At the same time, the [Thought Acceleration] constricting Ji-hwan’s brain also reached its limit, and his red-hot field of vision slowly returned to normal.
Even as the acceleration began to break, Ji-hwan never let go of the attack. While exhaling harsh breaths, he surged forward with the rotational force of his torso, aiming a heavy blow at her grotesque mask as she tried to retreat, and his fist was about to smash her face in.
Chill—!
In that instant, a cold shiver stabbed down the back of Ji-hwan’s neck like lightning.
A sense of déjà vu, as if an invisible, razor-sharp awl were about to pierce his skull.
The moment Ji-hwan felt that murderous intent, he instinctively twisted his head and dropped his upper body sharply toward the ground.
Bang-!!
Almost at the same time, an electromagnetic round fired from Deadzone’s tech sniper rifle ripped through the air with a piercing crack and sliced through the space where Ji-hwan’s head had just been like paper.
From atop a pile of scrap metal, Deadzone’s red multi-eye lenses blinked in shock as he looked through the scope.
'Damn it?!'
That shot had come at a timing that should have been impossible to predict or evade unless you had eyes in the back of your head.
And yet Ji-hwan had not activated [Thought Acceleration], nor had he boosted [Body Enhancement].
He had simply read the killing intent carried on the scope through pure [Instinct], and moved out of the way.
It was a realm that Maelstrom, with their bodies buried under chrome until their biological senses had gone dull, could never reach.
It was a fighting skill only those who used nothing but flesh without a single mechanical part, or veteran mercs who had survived countless death lines, could sharpen. Ji-hwan’s genius combat sense, evolved through endless life-or-death battles, and the body’s instinct adapting to the situation made that battle intuition possible.
"Shit...!"
As Deadzone swallowed another curse and hurriedly chambered the next round, Ji-hwan rose from his lowered stance and shot a terrifying, razor-sharp glare toward the scrap pile where the sniper had taken position.
Taking advantage of that split-second opening, Specter, who had nearly lost her life, frantically widened the distance between herself and Ji-hwan by kicking her reverse-jointed legs like mad toward Slash’s side.
"Hah...hah... I almost died...?"
Specter breathed hard, laughing behind her grotesque mask as she hardened her guard.
Ji-hwan, having let the prey he could have finished off slip away, clicked his tongue in disappointment and reset his stance.
The backlash from [Thought Acceleration] that had been crushing his head dispersed, and the red vapor pouring from the torn wounds was now only drifting faintly like heat haze.
The mechanical arms and iron hammer that broke straight through with brute force, the scythe of [Sandevistan] that cut into the blind spot at high speed, and the sniper’s [Kerenzikov] waiting for an opening.
The three Maelstrom officers, each gripping their weapons tightly, spread out and formed a tense encirclement around Ji-hwan.
Ji-hwan casually shook off the dripping blood and silently calculated the situation.
'...Now what.'
Comments (0)
Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register