Chapter 46
#046
1.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.
Why someone like me, who had spent my whole life thirsting for stimulation and cheap dopamine,
could stay so quiet lately, like some well-bred young lady.
“He disappeared to the left! Chase him! Kill him!!!”
“Block off the retreat! Cut him off from the rear!!!”
“Keep pressing him!!”
Exactly!
Every day is this bullshit—how the hell could I not be starving for thrills?
I shook them off in Uehara Cedric mode, after trading a few sticky skirmishes with the pursuers I ran into.
And the result was….
Huff… huff….
My breath was up to my throat.
I’d spent quite a bit of mana.
And then.
“Holy shit….”
A throwing knife was buried to the hilt in my left shoulder, handle and all.
“Haa… shit… can I even pull this out? No, no way, right?”
Even with adrenaline pumping, this fucking hurts like hell.
I’ll admit I stirred things up because I said we were doing a power-up event this round.
But does it make sense for that many people to swarm in to lynch a single 7th-ranker?
No matter how thoroughly I dismantle Rowen, it just isn’t cost-effective.
And the fixers gathered in this butcher street weren’t even all of them.
That was the number I confirmed when I first saw their faces earlier.
From the way more of them kept popping out beside me every time I turned a corner, there were even more in this area.
While clutching my shoulder and running.
“Found…”
I ran into one of them around a corner I turned in a hurry.
Before the guy’s eyes went round and he could yell at the top of his lungs,
the sticky mana, passing through the engraving, took shape in my mind.
“Die.”
-Shwack
A Sentence of Death, etched with an insignia and honed to the absolute limit.
Without any interval, I wove three straight lines into the air.
-Sshk!
Limbs severed with unreal lightness, and the torso toppling backward.
A fountain of blood shot up, turning the already red space a deeper crimson.
“Nobody saw that, right?”
Assassination successful!
“He’s here! That fucking bastard’s here!!! Jack’s been taken down!”
Fuck! Failure!
Unfortunately, I’d exposed my position to a witness.
The guy who found his prey screamed his head off.
“Please! Don’t!”
-Pew!
I fired a Sentence of Death meant to blow his head apart, but it only grazed the cover and left a tiny nick.
The guy hiding behind cover screamed like a living siren.
“Don’t chicken out and keep tracking him! As long as you stay hidden, that bastard’s an idiot!”
He wasn’t wrong.
There was a reason those guys had chosen this butcher street as their hunting ground.
This place was a narrow alley district in C-Sector, where all kinds of structures and buildings were tangled together like a spiderweb.
Cover and blind spots were everywhere, and the thick steam rising from the sewers blocked vision as well.
With all the information I’d revealed so far, they’d figured out Sentence of Death’s weakness and were properly sniping at me.
-Piiiip!!!
-Piip! Piip! Piiip!
A series of whistle signals echoing from all around.
The sound of footsteps growing closer and closer.
These bastards are sucking the life out of me….
A real chase in reality wasn’t the pulse-pounding action you see in movies.
The pursuers weren’t extras who would politely get picked off one by one as scripted.
“He’s dangerous! Stronger than Sunming! Everyone, be careful!”
“Ten of us are already down! Don’t rush in recklessly! Once his position is pinned down, measure the distance and all of us rush him together!”
“The 7th-ranks go first, then the 8th-ranks back them up!”
To survive. And to make absolutely sure I died for certain.
The guys slowly tightened the noose while keeping their distance.
Their danger level couldn’t even be compared to the mindless zombie horde from Project Z.
“Over there! Over there!”
“Close in! Close the distance! Block off every route leading to Yahwawon!”
“We can’t let him link up with Yiming!”
So that’s how much you’ve already figured out.
Yeah, you guys aren’t idiots, so you know it’d be a waste if I went running straight to Yiming.
Honestly, I don’t know this area that well.
If this keeps up and they keep cornering me until the very end….
The frail Cedric would be surrounded by a bunch of hairy old men whose number I didn’t even know.
Besides, with this round already winding down, there’s no way I can waste a copy of a copy of the Myobeop Seonggyeongchung on these bastards, right?
Conclusion.
Outnumbered and at a terrain disadvantage. The end was in sight.
....Come to think of it, that pisses me off?
Anyway, this round is already in the home stretch.
That runaway fake Jo would have long since run far, far away.
I’d managed to scrape together the challenge-point reward, and I’d gathered enough information. This was a situation where I could leave the rest for next time.
Was I supposed to run from those worthless bastards and die miserably while they slowly tore off my limbs one by one?
“No.”
Think of Xian Sunming.
Even with his death right in front of him, he tried to crush my head and drag me down with him.
Hell! Isn’t that the fighting spirit of a gutsy Necropolis fixer?
I pulled out Exceed, the illegal doping drug from Geumri-ga that Sunming had left behind.
-Crunch
I twisted off the ampoule cap and cracked it open, then downed the contents in one gulp.
A bitterness sharp enough to sting my tongue pierced straight through my brain.
And then.
“O… OOOOH!!!!”
This sensation. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life!
A prickling sensation like electricity running through my blood vessels and nervous system.
The sounds of the pursuers from all around separated layer by layer, until each one could be heard individually.
My dilated pupils greedily sucked in the reflected light.
My concentration shot to its absolute peak at once.
“Huuuu…!!!”
The edges of objects looked even sharper.
Hot breath leaked between my teeth in time with my pounding heartbeat.
[ ‘Drug Resistance’ neutralizes Exceed’s side effects ]
“Doping!!! The best!!!!”
From now on, I’m not running away.
Even if I’m going, I’ll take as many of you with me as I can.
I immediately hid behind cover and gauged the timing from the footsteps following me.
3
2
1
Now!
“Huh?!”
The pursuer close on my heels sucked in a breath when he spotted me suddenly bursting out from the side.
That was the last scene he ever saw.
-Sshk!
The man was sliced apart in the exact posture he’d been running in, like a victim caught in a wire trap in a B-grade horror movie.
I made an explosive leap along the route the bastard had chased me from.
“Come in here!!! You motherfuckers!!!”
I launched a reverse countercharge.
“W-what?!”
“What the hell?!”
Four pursuers panicked and put distance between us after my sudden burst out.
Confirmed: four of them, 8th- and 9th-rank.
-Piiip! Piiiip!
“Over here! Stop him!”
“Hide your bodies! Buy time until the others get here!”
Sentence of Death is definitely weak against cover.
But that’s only when I’m the one running away.
I kicked off the blood-slick floor and leapt into the air.
I flew over the heads of the guys hiding behind cover, who’d thought they were safe.
“Huh? Eh?!”
“Wait—!”
To the guys who lifted their heads and stared up with their mouths hanging open,
I poured Sentence of Death down on them.
The sign was “Falling Death,” the one that had taken down Sunming, the former strongest 7th-ranker.
Though it flew more sluggishly than my other attacks, its power was unmatched.
There was no better special move against an enemy who’d stopped moving and was hiding still.
-Crack! Crunch! Smash!
The shabby signboard, the boxes, the stall.
Beneath them, a pool of blood spread wide like a pedestal.
Using the momentum, I did a cool forward somersault in midair and landed.
Even I couldn’t believe how smooth that move was.
“This buff is fucking insane!!!”
Jon Jones!!! Was this how it felt for you too?!
However.
There was a reason I’d kept wiggling my ass and running.
This wasn’t a fight that ended just because I killed a few people.
The moment I started running back the other way.
-Clang! Clang! Clang!
I saw an opponent with a blade-fitted prosthetic leg, hopping along walls and signs as he came after me.
His movements carried the bizarre acceleration unique to body augmentation.
“Die!”
Even if I threw a slash, he forced his way through the gap and kept closing in.
That kind of Sandevistan-like movement is something only a 7th-ranker can pull off.
While wearing his embroidered protective gear, he could probably take one Sentence of Death head-on.
I didn’t back away.
One more step forward.
-Whoosh!
The prosthetic leg swung horizontally as if to cut my waist in two,
-Sshaaak!
I dodged it by sliding on my knees.
With Exceed’s effect, plus the Eye of Laplace.
The heavy hunk of metal passing overhead looked split into frame-by-frame slices.
“What?!”
Sliding past him, I crossed paths with him at point-blank range and let off two Falling Death shots.
-Kraaaash!
The 7th-rank fixer who’d been showing off his cool prosthetic leg got crumpled like an empty can and slammed into the floor.
Yep, Falling Death really is the strongest.
“Hup!”
I sprang up with a snap and moved immediately.
There wasn’t time to rest even for a second.
The encirclement was closing in from moment to moment.
Every second I delayed, the number I’d have to take on at once would only grow.
After that, it was pure frenzy.
“Die!!!”
“Aah! Aaaah! Don’t push me!”
Dodging swords, glaives, spears, machetes, and rocket hammers by a hair’s breadth.
I fired Sentence of Death as lines, circles, tendrils, and bullets.
“F-Fuck…! You said he was 7th rank! You said 7th rank!!!”
“That monster!!! Get out of our city!”
“Kraaaagh!!!”
It’s a simple game.
If you kill, you live. If you can’t kill, you die.
If you get surrounded after dragging it out and killing slowly, you die too.
I threw myself into the midst of the ambushers, who hadn’t dreamed I’d counterattack.
“Die, you bastards!!!!”
Using every bit of my combat-honed ability, I crushed the enemies like a killing machine.
“Save me!! Backup! Backup!!!”
“Where the hell did all those 7th-rank bastards go!”
“They’re already dead over there!! Dead, I said!”
So how much time had passed, and how many had I killed?
“Huff…! Huff…!”
Sweat streaming like rain, mixed with blood.
Everywhere across the Butcher Street area, fresh meat lay strewn about as if it had just come from the slaughterhouse.
“W-wait… Sorry, I was wrong… I was wrong, okay?”
-Kraak
Only after I finished off one pursuer who, despite losing, was begging for his life,
did I finally put my hands on my knees and gasp for air.
“Ugh… I’m dead….”
I’m not exaggerating—my body is in tatters.
The 8th-ranks weren’t much of a problem, but surprisingly there were way too many 7th-ranks.
I’d been stabbed here and there, cut all over, and had throwing knives lodged in me.
If it weren’t for Exceed, my body would already have stopped moving the way I wanted.
Still, if this was enough, I guess I preserved the pride of the strongest 7th-ranker?
Or maybe I’d already climbed to around 6th-rank?
Actually, I’ve never met a 6th-ranker, so I’m not really sure.
…So this is as far as it goes.
Doping has its limits, after all.
Because of the injuries and the excessive overclocking, my whole body was screaming.
If I got captured alive, I had a feeling I wouldn’t be dying cleanly.
“Well~ I had fun.”
I prepared Sentence of Death and got ready to blow my own head off.
I pressed the fingers I’d bunched up like a pistol to my temple....
Something feels off.
……
Why is it so quiet?
I killed a lot, but I couldn’t have killed even half of them.
Could they have gotten bored because the damage was too much and run away?
The Necropolis fixers definitely weren’t such softies.
“Cedric, you really did make a lot of enemies.”
From over there came a familiar voice.
My tension instantly melted away.
I understood why silence had suddenly settled over the area.
Her favorite jet-black dress.
Ceres, apparently already over her inner complex, was wearing towering high heels.
My guardian angel walked out with her arms folded.
“Ceres niiiiiiim!!!”
Cedric is seriously tearing up at the thought of seeing her again this round!
“What brings you here!”
I started to run up and hug her, then stopped.
Look at the state I’m in.
I’d end up getting our Ceres mama’s dress soaked in blood. It’s too beautiful for that, isn’t it?
Ceres looked me over and frowned.
“Haah… I came early, but I’m late. Come here, sweetie.”
Ah, the warmth of mama’s embrace envelops me....
Since she was using healing magic, I could feel the throbbing wounds knitting together.
“You can cling to me all you like.”
“How merciful you are…!”
“You really aren’t an ordinary one, are you? I saw on the way here—you put on quite a show, didn’t you?”
“I fought hard despite the terrain disadvantage….”
I’m all limp and sleepy.
The sweet scent of lemon, Ceres mama’s scent.
The fatigue and relief mingled together, and I felt like I could fall asleep at any moment.
Cedric.
Yes, Lady Ceres....
I have one thing to ask you. Will you answer honestly?
Of course....
As Ceres brushed back my blood-matted hair, she said in a low voice,
“Why did you smuggle Jinjo away?”