The instant the cold muzzle of the pistol pressed dead center over the heart in his chest, Ji-hwan’s instincts screamed the answer before his mind could catch up.
He couldn’t dodge this. If he stayed here, it was over. And then time around him stretched into something grotesque.
Click.
The faint scrape of metal inside Aguila’s gun as the hammer drew back to strike the firing pin. The instant before the powder exploded at the muzzle, the instant the chill pressure of that steel barrel was about to blow Ji-hwan’s heart apart.
Neither [Gear 1], which accelerated blood flow to warm up his senses, nor [Gear 2], which amplified his reflex receptors, could possibly get him out of a point-blank shot that was already touching his skin.
The trigger was pulled. The powder detonated. The bullet was about to spit out. In that impossibly brief instant, every stray thought and emotion in Ji-hwan’s head was wiped clean.
"I have to dodge. Dodge."
That one absolute thought took over his brain.
At perfect point-blank range, with not even a millimeter of space to spare, the only way to twist this certain death aside was to force his body past its limits with explosive output, even if it meant tearing bone and flesh apart.
Thump!
Without hesitation, Ji-hwan forcibly threw open the switch for [Gear 3].
But this wasn’t the usual mindless rampage that boiled his whole body over and burst every vein in sight.
His body synchronized perfectly, almost instinctively, with that pure, singular intent to dodge. A grotesque degree of [partial enhancement] flared violently through only the specific muscle fibers in his waist, back, and lower body needed for evasion.
It was a miracle his own rational mind had never consciously intended, something his unconscious had forged at the edge of the cliff called survival.
The trajectory that produced the shortest path and the most explosive speed. The so-called minimum maximum movement. The true essence of [Gear 3], which he had once dismissed as nothing more than an incomplete rampage eating away at him, fully manifested in that instant.
Bang!
The moment the hot force of the armor-piercing round left the muzzle and tried to tear into his skin.
Ji-hwan’s torso, condensed by partial enhancement, twisted in a bizarre yet fluid motion that defied physics, snapping aside like lightning.
The bullet that should have pierced his heart by any measure missed it by a miraculous one millimeter.
Instead, the devastating round shredded the hem of Ji-hwan’s worn coat, tore through thick chest muscle, scraped bone, and ripped mercilessly through him before being flung uselessly into the air with a spray of blood.
"Just now... how the hell did I dodge that?"
A miracle pulled out of the unconscious under the instinct to survive.
Ji-hwan had barely begun to wonder what had just happened when Aguila, realizing his perfect point-blank assassination had failed, squeezed the trigger again and again.
Tatatatang!!
Follow-up rounds came screaming straight for Ji-hwan’s heart and forehead.
But even if [Gear 3], which he had dragged out unconsciously, had shut off, [Gear 2] was still raging, violently accelerating his cerebral cortex and central nervous system.
"Ghk...!"
Ji-hwan swallowed his thoughts and read the incoming bullet trajectories with brutal precision through his dynamic vision and reflexes.
With the minimum possible movement, he slipped through the hail of fire by a hair’s breadth, biting down on the awful pain of his creaking bones and torn chest, then charged straight at Aguila.
Creeeak—grind
But as Ji-hwan lunged at him, a chilling friction sound rang through his entire body. The partial opening of [Gear 3] he had forced out to evade the point-blank shot had finally come due, and bones and muscles began screaming under the recoil.
It was his body’s warning that collapse was imminent.
"What do I do?"
Tatatatang—clang!—thud!
Ji-hwan drove in at [Gear 2] speed and unleashed a barrage, but Aguila, dressed in an old-fashioned suit, intercepted every strike as if he could read the future from the slightest contraction in Ji-hwan’s muscles.
Like a bullfighter facing a charging bull, whenever Ji-hwan threw a punch, Aguila was already outside the line of attack. Whenever Ji-hwan tried to evade, a cold muzzle was waiting at the path ahead.
Like a seasoned hunter driving a beast into a trap and tearing it apart, Aguila gave Ji-hwan no opening at all.
"Grrr...!"
As the bullets piled up, Ji-hwan’s coat was reduced to rags and his whole body was carved up. He was barely avoiding the fatal shots aimed at his heart and head by instinct alone, but forcing his creaking body to keep moving only made the bleeding and wounds spiral out of control.
Watching that desperate struggle, Aguila’s lips curved into a smile as he kept pulling the trigger without pause.
Tatatatang
Even as ruthless muzzle flashes burst from the cold barrel, Aguila’s voice remained languid and relaxed, as if he were out enjoying a leisurely stroll.
"Remarkable. Truly excellent instincts."
"I’ve never seen a human dodge my shots like this, not even in Havana."
In stark contrast to his lazy praise, the bullet storm pouring from Aguila’s fingertips kept targeting only Ji-hwan’s torn muscles and joints with obsessive precision.
"Ghk...!"
As the bullets piled up, Ji-hwan’s coat was reduced to rags and his whole body was carved up.
He was barely avoiding the fatal shots, but forcing his creaking body to keep moving only made the bleeding and wounds spiral out of control.
"Then get lo...ghk...!"
But before Ji-hwan could even spit out the rest of the insult, he sensed something off in Aguila’s movement. A bullet he hadn’t seen punched brutally through Ji-hwan’s abdomen.
Even while coughing blood and staggering as he ran, Aguila’s fierce pursuit and rapid fire poured down on him.
Ji-hwan deflected the rain of bullets with the dagger he still barely held, and in the end he was driven into a corner piled with collapsed concrete rubble.
The mercs and gang members watching that suffocating exchange from behind cover had their throats bobbing hard.
"Gulp... Is that really human movement?"
Ji-hwan, cornered and gasping for breath, had his pitch-black eyes shaking violently as well.
Something’s wrong.
He quickly replayed the dozens of exchanges he had just traded with the man, blood and all, in his head.
Even through the pain of broken bones, his beastlike instincts had clearly caught the fatal wrongness in the man’s trajectory.
This wasn’t just fast reflexes or high-level martial skill.
The instant Ji-hwan’s shoulder or thigh muscles twitched ever so slightly before a punch, the man was already reading the attack’s path and landing point with perfect accuracy before the strike even began.
Not just predicting where he would attack and dodging it, but slipping into the deadliest blind spot at the same time to intercept him. That grotesque dance was not the biological reaction speed of a living body moving by sight and brain alone.
"Don’t tell me...?"
Ji-hwan quickly replayed the dozens of exchanges he had just traded with the man, blood and all, in his head.
He didn’t know every piece of machine tech in this insane world, but his instincts honed on the edge of death and his bitter combat experience were fitting the scattered pieces together into one horrifying puzzle.
A perfect algorithm that took the slightest muscle contraction before an attack as input, then skipped rational thought and even survival instinct entirely, letting the body automatically output the optimal interception trajectory.
"Let’s do this... If I stay like this, I’m dead."
Ji-hwan reached into his clothes with a bloodied hand and touched the last dagger he had hidden deep inside.
He had no choice but to collide with that skin-crawling puzzle himself and see whether the instincts he had pieced together were right.
Ji-hwan gave his battered body an order.
It was the final gamble, one he was making on instinct alone.
Thump!!
His heart slammed inside his chest like it was about to burst, pumping blood furiously.
To confirm whether his hunch about the man’s movement was correct, he shattered the limiter his body was rejecting with a cracking sound and forcibly twisted open [Gear 3] again.
As the price of that horrific forced activation, torn organs screamed in agony and hot, metallic blood surged up his throat, but Ji-hwan clenched his teeth hard and swallowed the clot down while trembling.
"This is my last shot."
He could feel it in his bones. After firing this strike, the recoil would slam through his whole body and he wouldn’t be able to twitch a single finger for dozens of seconds.
And if that happened, the man in front of him would have enough time to kill him dozens of times over.
But if he kept dancing to the man’s tune and died like a dog anyway, then he might as well throw every last bit of remaining life into the fire and pull out the final gamble.
In an instant, the forcibly jammed [Gear 3] output grotesquely inflated his collapsing muscles.
In Aguila’s view, as he approached leisurely with his pistol trained on Ji-hwan, the figure cornered at the edge of the rubble vanished in a bizarre off-beat lurch.
An unexpected trajectory not present in his database.
Ji-hwan’s body scraped the ground and sprang up like a beast, and from the dead angle hidden inside his coat, a blue dagger was drawn in reverse grip and launched like lightning.
But his opponent was not so easy either.
That miraculous movement from before, when Ji-hwan had twisted a point-blank bullet by a mere millimeter and survived. Aguila’s chip was already running the numbers on Ji-hwan’s possible aberrant trajectories based on that absurd dodge, warning lights flashing.
Wiiing—Pzzzt!
The instant Ji-hwan tried to drive into the blind spot, [Kerenzikov] in Aguila’s spine burst with blue sparks and activated at maximum output.
Unlike [Sandevistan], which forces the body itself to move at abnormal speed, this implant only cranks up the user’s perception and reflexes.
Ji-hwan’s body scraped the ground and sprang up like a beast, and from inside his coat, the blue dagger shot out like a bolt of lightning.
In the stretched-out time, Aguila twisted his head with grotesque precision and barely managed to evade the instant-kill trajectory of Ji-hwan’s dagger, as if flicking it aside.
But Ji-hwan’s off-beat strike, wrung out by sheer will and the cost of his own life, still exceeded even that mechanical acceleration by a hair.
Sshhhk—
The moment Aguila’s head turned, certain he had perfectly dodged it, the cold tip of the dagger bit into his pale cheek and carved a long, razor-sharp line of blood without mercy.
"Mm...?"
Red droplets scattered into the air.
An absurd strike from a living body that had broken through even his perfect acceleration and evasion. The reaper Aguila, who had always been dry and composed like a machine, had his eyes suddenly widen to the point of tearing, filled with a shock and confusion he had never felt in his life.
The instant Aguila’s stunned gasp scattered into the air, a dark red clot of blood burst from Ji-hwan’s mouth like a waterfall.
"Kuh, huh...!"
He had just unleashed [Gear 3] and [Instant Strike] in succession against elite solo mercs, with not even a single minute of rest in between.
His body had already suffered horrific internal damage, and he had forced [Gear 3] open again to dodge Aguila’s point-blank shot. Then he had thrown himself into one last gamble, thinking only of victory.
In the end, the body had long since exceeded its limit and could no longer endure the recoil of that horrifying activation.
"Cough, hack!"
Ji-hwan’s ferocious momentum, which had created a miracle by leaving a shallow cut on Aguila’s cheek, cut off like a lie.
All the strength drained from his muscles, and both legs buckled like logs.
With no resistance left in him, Ji-hwan pitched forward and slammed face-first into the muddy ground.
Splash.
Blood seeped from the torn skin all over Ji-hwan’s body as he lay sprawled on the ground, pooling beneath him.
His vision flashed black, and he could feel, deep in his bones, the thin thread of his life trembling precariously.
Sssss...
The body, thoroughly wrecked by recoil, instinctively tried to drag up its super regeneration in order to survive.
A faint red mist rose over the wounds, but that was as far as it went.
Like an engine out of fuel, it could only manage to keep him barely alive for the moment, maintaining the status quo without actually stitching the torn flesh back together or healing it.
But the reaper standing in front of him had no intention of waiting for even that pathetic recovery time.
Step.
Silent dress shoes approached through the mud, and then the cold muzzle of a pistol pressed mercilessly against the back of Ji-hwan’s head.
"Amazing. Truly amazing... but this is where it ends."
Aguila’s indifferent, dry voice fell over the top of his head.
"Any last words?"
It was an obvious, absolute death sentence. But Ji-hwan, with his face pressed into the ground and gasping, barely managed to raise his blood-soaked right hand, trembling all the while.
Then, facing Aguila’s gun, he lifted his middle finger straight up.
"Go fuck... yourself."
It was a filthy taunt mixed with blood, but one that refused to bend to the very end.
At that vulgar, insolent last word, Aguila’s usually languid, old-world brows twitched ever so slightly in disgust.
"...How uncivilized."
With a short, cold sigh, Aguila began slowly squeezing the trigger that would blow Ji-hwan’s skull apart.
Click.
The hammer of the pistol drew back, and just before a huge hole was about to be blown through Ji-hwan’s head.
"WOOOOOOO-!!"
A savage roar tore into the shattered plaza.
Throwing open the steel door of the bunker that had been sealed shut, the underlings of the Animals gang charged into the plaza, each of them brandishing a metal pipe or blunt weapon.
After their boss Mammoth had gone alone into the jaws of death, the beasts of the arena, who had been forced to hold back all this time, finally dragged their muscle into the fight to save Ji-hwan.
Aguila’s eyes flickered with the faintest trace of surprise as he glanced at the spectacle.
But then he clicked his tongue, annoyed.
"A bunch of small fry got tangled up in this. You deal with them."
Aguila gave the remaining elite mercs standing back a quiet order.
"What? Who the hell do you think you are, ordering us around...!"
A few mercs blinded by the bounty started to snap back angrily.
But other veteran mercs, who knew Aguila’s reputation, hurriedly shut them up.
"You idiot! Do you even know who that man is?!"
They backed away from Aguila’s line of sight, trembling like leaves.
But one of the merc leaders carefully raised his voice.
"Then... if that guy K dies, what do you want us to do with the body?"
Their target was Ji-hwan’s bounty. At the mercs’ cautious question, Aguila, his fedora pulled low, answered dryly.
"My employer only asked me to stop that man’s breathing. I’m not interested in any more meat than that. The shell is yours. Do what you want with it."
The moment that satisfied answer fell, cruel, greedy smiles spread across the faces of the remaining elite mercs.
The most dangerous monster, Ji-hwan, would be killed by the legendary assassin on his own, and they would just scoop up the expensive bounty.
The mercs all raised their smart rifles and unfolded blue blades at once, turning to face the Animals gang members charging at them with clubs raised and roaring.
"I’ll turn you into minced meat, you beasts!"
Normally, gang members relying only on brute muscle and metal pipes would be reduced to ground meat in a few seconds before elite solo mercs armed with high-end implants and smart weapons. That was how a proper massacre was supposed to go.
But something strange happened.
Instead of a one-sided slaughter, the Animals gang members were holding the line with desperate grit, maintaining their formation even under the merciless hail of fire.
The reason was obvious.
It was because of the horrific wounds Ji-hwan had left on them just moments earlier, when he had thrown his life away and rampaged like a beast.
The mercs had already suffered ruptured organs and crushed cybernetic skeletons from Ji-hwan’s merciless blows and [Instant Strike], and they were the worst kind of casualties, the sort that should be lying in a hospital bed for a long time.
With their bodies no longer in normal condition, the mercs’ movements had become visibly sluggish, and thanks to that, the Animals were barely managing to hold out with the firepower of heavy weapons like machine guns.
"Ah, shit! This is such a pain in the ass! Why won’t you die already?!"
"Stop wasting time! Finish this crap already and grab the bastard’s corpse!"
But holding out did not mean they could win.
The mercs, irritated by the Animals’ leechlike resistance, kept swinging their smart rifles and high-frequency blades in frustration, just trying to end this annoying mess as fast as possible.
In the middle of that blood-soaked melee, the guard Bison, who had joined the fight leading the Animals, was desperately struggling with a metal pipe and pistol, his whole body slashed and grazed by bullets until he was covered in blood.
But the gap in firepower was not closing, and as Bison watched his side’s formation slowly collapse, he felt a bitter, bone-deep self-loathing for his own weakness.
"Damn it... We’re too weak. We’re too weak to save him...!"
Choking on his own despair and spitting blood, Bison’s hopeless gaze landed on Aguila once more as the assassin raised his pistol again toward Ji-hwan’s head on the ground.
"Boss!! Get up!!"
Bison roared like a beast, blood bursting from his throat.
Did that desperate cry cut through the gunfire and reach him? Ji-hwan’s body, which had lain face-down on the ground and barely moved like a corpse, twitched ever so slightly.
He tried to brace himself on the ground and rise again.
But the body that had collapsed far beyond its limit betrayed his will completely.
Every time Ji-hwan tried to force himself up, dark red blood gushed from his ruptured muscles and torn skin, and the thick arm he tried to plant on the ground could not bear any strength at all, flailing helplessly in the air like a newborn child’s.
"N-no!!"
Bison screamed with his eyes rolled back, reaching toward Ji-hwan like a madman.
"...Huh?"
Bison’s eyes, wide with despair, suddenly froze into stunned confusion and disbelief.
Right beside Aguila, tearing through the blackness and the rain, an overwhelming weight pressed down on the air as if a massive tank had silently descended from the sky.
The instant the trigger was about to be pulled, a huge, rough steel prosthetic arm, smeared with blood and brain matter, shot out like lightning and clamped down brutally over Aguila’s pistol muzzle.
Breaking through Logan’s forces in the abandoned factory, Mammoth, the boss of the arena’s Animals, stood there like a wall.
"Hah... hah..."
Mammoth panted hard, blood and sweat streaming down him.
Aguila’s brow twitched faintly as well, clearly irritated by the sudden appearance of the man.
Then a short, heavy silence fell between the reaper and the beast.
It was Mammoth who broke it.
"Move."
Clang!
With a metallic crash, Mammoth violently knocked the gun muzzle he had grabbed aside and slammed the pneumatic steel knuckle on his other hand straight toward Aguila’s face without mercy.
He put his full weight behind the strike.
But the legendary assassin’s reaction was absurdly fast.
Instead of dodging or panicking, Aguila drew a razor-sharp dagger from his sleeve and stabbed the blade straight up into the falling steel knuckle.
Kwaang—thud!
"Hm...?"
The dagger bit into Mammoth’s thick gray synthetic skin and drove deep into the steel knuckle.
But Aguila’s calm eyes suddenly widened as if they might split.
Even with the blade buried in his hand, the enormous beast in front of him showed no hesitation, no pain at all, and kept driving the punch forward with savage eyes blazing.
Puuuurk—!!
"Ghk...!"
A short groan escaped Aguila’s lips as he took the hit squarely.
But he did not absorb the impact head-on.
At the instant of contact, he threw his body backward and cleverly bled off the punch’s destructive force.
But Mammoth gave him no room at all, roaring like a beast and swinging his second steel knuckle like a bolt of lightning.
Aguila, retreating through the air, twisted away from the heavy follow-up with grotesque agility and flexibility.
At the same time, a blue dagger flashed in his hand, unleashing several ferocious slashes meant to sever Mammoth’s massive arm outright.
Kagagang!!
Blue sparks flew as a screeching metallic shriek ripped through the air. Aguila’s sharp blade tore brutally through Mammoth’s gray synthetic skin and thick muscle.
But the vicious edge that should have cut clean through bone was stopped and thrown back by the anti-tank-grade [titanium armor] skeleton buried beneath Mammoth’s muscle fibers.
Because of the impossible strength of that skeleton, only the muscle had been shredded to ribbons. Mammoth’s massive arm remained intact, still maintaining its imposing shape.
Aguila landed safely and widened the distance again with elegant ease.
Watching that ghostlike dance, Mammoth’s feral eyes twisted sharply.
If he gave up distance here, he would never win.
Mammoth swallowed the pain in his shredded arm like a beast and prepared to leap at full force to finish the man off.
That was when it happened.
Aguila, who had just calmly opened the distance, shifted his gaze away from Mammoth and locked onto Ji-hwan instead, lying behind him and gasping. Rather than dealing with the charging Mammoth, he immediately pulled the trigger on his pistol toward the defenseless Ji-hwan.
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