Chapter 14
Bogus’s reaction was extremely explosive.
Why was he suddenly acting like that?
‘Did I press some kind of seizure button?’
The owner of the burger place, not caring about his subordinates, being a narcissist with that face—in hindsight, he really did have something wrong with his head.
These weren’t thoughts I would normally have had while teasing Bogus every time he opened his mouth, but there it was.
“What did I even say….”
“It looks like you had magic circuits implanted in the back alleys, so the pain must be considerable. And since it’s fire-type magic power, you must feel searing pain as though your skin is being scorched every moment.”
“Aha.”
“So he seems angry at Hotdog-Man, who appears to possess proper magic circuits. Your comment about him being a wizard must have flipped the switch. People living in the lower sectors also tend to harbor greater hatred toward corporations and noble families.”
“I really appreciate the kind explanation, but—”
I don’t have time to listen right now.
Bang! Bang!! KABOOM!!!
The concrete wall caved inward.
Even the rebar within it was exposed.
With his eyes rolled back in rage, Bogus charged at me, looking only at me.
I felt as though I had become a Spanish bullfighter.
I wished I had a red cloth, but unfortunately, the only weapons I had on me were my two fists.
The handgun the boss had given me?
Of course, I had left it at the grocery store.
I didn’t have a separate holster, and I had been out of my mind when I left, too.
BOOM!!!
I casually changed direction, and Bogus slammed face-first into the wall. Oof. That must have hurt.
The wall split open, spiderweb cracks spreading across it.
The room was already a complete mess.
The mirror ball that had lit up the room had already been smashed, leaving the neon sign shining through the broken window as the only source of light.
“…How long are you going to keep running away?”
“Oh, you can speak like a normal person.”
His eyes had been completely rolled back, so I thought he had lost his mind again.
Bogus seemed to have regained his senses after the impact of his face against the wall.
…Crack.
A menacing sound came from Bogus’s mouth.
His metal-coated teeth gleamed with a glossy sheen.
I snickered at the sight.
“Looks like even a gang boss is afraid of the dentist. I understand to some extent. I get chills down the back of my neck sometimes whenever I hear classical music there, too.”
It was probably a fear engraved at the genetic level.
From my perspective, there was nothing good about my opponent regaining his composure.
It would have been much easier to deal with him if he had kept charging recklessly like before.
But this time, my provocation seemed to have the opposite effect.
“Hoo, enough. What a low-level provocation. You’ve got a filthy personality. Truly filthy.”
“Not as much as a gang boss.”
“…You really don’t lose a single exchange. Someone might think you came from the slums.”
Bogus wiped away the flowing blood with a handkerchief taken from his pocket.
But the tattoos did not turn black again.
Which meant.
He was still fully in combat mode.
Bogus no longer shouted or acted agitated.
He simply approached me with calm footsteps.
“……”
If anything, he seemed more vicious.
In the end, fights weren’t settled with words, but with bodies.
Bogus took up a stance as calmly as a fighter standing in the ring at a UFC match.
At the same time, his fist came flying toward me.
──Thump.
The entire world moved slowly.
Little by little. Very, very slowly.
Slower still.
Only the sound of my heartbeat, pulsing once every few seconds,
proved that the world was still moving forward.
My muscles expanded, and my lungs contracted.
My senses sharpened until I could feel the movement of the blood vessels flowing throughout my body.
In the slowly moving world, Michael’s dumbfounded face in the distance enlarged in real time.
Michael was speaking at the speed of a grub, though.
“Beee-care-fuuul….”
He was speaking so slowly that it was difficult to understand what he was saying.
‘What strange explanation is he trying to give me this time?’
Anyway.
Before I knew it, the enormous fist had come within a handspan of my face.
I saw my face reflected in the jeweled ring Bogus was wearing as I ducked.
I had grown fairly large myself, but I still couldn’t compare to Bogus, whose entire body was packed with muscle.
As I slipped inside the path of his extended fist,
Bogus’s pupils slowly widened.
I drove my fist forward.
My targets were his chest, solar plexus, and stomach.
Tap. Tap-tap.
I really heard sounds like that.
It was because my movements had slowed along with the world.
Eventually.
Bogus’s body moved away from me.
Not by staggering backward from the pain, but by floating straight up into the air.
──Thump, thump-thump.
The sound of my heartbeat returned to its normal pace.
The world began moving quickly again.
“Guh…!!”
Clutching his solar plexus, Bogus slammed into the wall.
He seemed to have barely avoided collapsing by leaning against it.
“You fucking….”
I thought that would be enough, but his eyes were still filled with the will to fight.
I didn’t know why I, an ordinary job seeker, had been dropped into a game world after committing some great sin.
But I couldn’t simply stand there and do nothing.
Ignoring my numb fist, I ran forward and kicked Bogus in the abdomen.
CRUNCH!!
Bogus’s body folded forward along with the fingers clutching his abdomen.
But.
Even with his fingers crushed and his insides being turned upside down,
Bogus was looking at my face.
A sense of foreboding swept over me.
“…Cheese, you bastard!!”
A brilliant light burst from Bogus’s mouth.
Something I was extremely familiar with from FPS games.
A flashbang.
The so-called ‘ping’ effect.
But unlike the flashbangs I knew, the pain in my ears came before the blinding light.
My hearing had become more sensitive, but that also made it more vulnerable.
My ears rang terribly, as though a grenade had exploded right in front of me. It was enough to momentarily destroy my sense of balance.
‘…So that’s why he had his teeth plated.’
It wasn’t simply because he hated going to the dentist.
A momentary mistake had cost me my hearing and vision.
They would return soon enough, but in this situation, those few moments were the problem.
At the same time, a heavy pressure descended upon me.
“─Die─!!”
Though I couldn’t hear it, murderous intent seemed to ring in my ears.
Something was clearly strangling my neck from behind.
Of course. He couldn’t throw punches with broken fingers.
‘One second. Two seconds….’
When the oxygen supply traveling to the brain through the carotid artery is cut off, a person loses consciousness in just a few seconds.
Eeeeeee─.
A ringing in my ears.
In a life-threatening situation,
I unconsciously grabbed what I thought was Bogus’s arm.
Thud.
Warm liquid splashed across my cheek.
I forcibly tore away the thing clutched in my hand,
and threw Bogus’s body forward.
Eeeeeeeee─.
The faces of the robbers who had threatened my life when I first fell into this world flashed through my mind.
The sense of danger that had taken root like PTSD sent commands from my brain to every nerve.
Move as quickly as possible.
…CRUNCH!! BANG! THUD!
I could hear something faintly.
I continued bringing my fists down on what I believed was Bogus.
I never stopped moving.
Because I still couldn’t see anything.
After several seconds had passed like that.
“…Hotdog Man! It’s all over now…!!”
Michael’s voice, coming through the ringing in my ears, brought my actions to a halt.
Along with my muffled ears,
my blurry vision gradually returned.
“Ghk, guh….”
I looked down at Bogus’s face as he lay on the floor with all his teeth broken.
Ugh.
One arm, which appeared to be a cybernetic prosthetic, had been completely torn off, and some unidentified black liquid was streaming from the cross-section.
So those weren’t real muscles. They were mechanical muscles….
It was a little shocking.
No wonder he moved so well despite feeling searing pain. I didn’t realize he was a mechanical roider.
When I stopped moving, Michael’s cautious voice came from behind me.
“…Hotdog Man. Are you all right now?”
“Mm.”
I nodded without answering.
Because of my memories from when I first fell into this world, I seemed to have acted a little excessively without realizing it.
“Heh, heheh…. The real thing really is different. Cough.”
The fallen Bogus muttered.
He still seemed to have enough energy left to speak.
This guy was pretty impressive in his own way.
Bogus’s bloodstained face looked straight up at me.
“The fight is over. Now finish it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“……??”
Bogus was bewildered for a moment by my immediate reply.
Then his expression twisted with rage.
“…You think I’m not even worth killing? You really are a noble bastard. Fuck, you’re arrogant beyond belief.”
What noble?
But apparently Bogus had misunderstood something, because he continued speaking while thick blood dribbled from his mouth.
“You’re trying to uphold some kind of no-killing policy, huh? No-killing in Risk City. That’s fucking hilarious.”
“It’s not like that, so shut up.”
It was simply a hassle.
To completely eliminate future trouble, I would have to kill every fallen member of the organization in the building, including Bogus.
That wasn’t as easy as saying it.
And I had already told Michael earlier.
By then, much of my anger had cooled, so I had even considered simply going back.
Not that I had actually been able to leave.
Anyway, I had to see the matter through to the end.
I left the writhing Bogus where he was and turned my head toward Michael.
“Then let’s head back soon.”
“…Is it really all right to just leave him like that?”
“Well, for now.”
When I indifferently turned my back, Bogus’s neck veins bulged behind me.
He didn’t look like someone who had just lost an arm.
“…You fucking bastard, where do you think you’re going?! Kill me! I said kill me!!”
I stopped walking for a moment at his reaction.
Was he clinging to some strange hope?
Bogus looked up at me and fell silent.
And then.
“Get lost.”
I don’t obey orders from anyone weaker than me.
Bogus saw my extended middle finger, then buried his face deeply in the floor.
* * *
Bogus was left alone.
Even as he groaned in pain, he was too consumed by his blazing rage to come to his senses.
“Fuck, fuck! I’ll kill him…!!”
He had no subordinates left, his half-completed magic circuits were all destroyed, and one of his arms had been torn off, but
none of that was enough to quell his rage.
And yet.
“……”
Someone appeared before the dazed Bogus.
A girl whose face was hidden by shaggy hair─Rivera quietly watched Bogus writhe.
It was a mystery how the girl, who should have been waiting at the grocery store, had followed Abel and Michael after they left in the truck.
Bogus, who had been muttering curses to himself, raised his head when he suddenly sensed someone’s presence.
“…Y-you.”
He stopped speaking when he saw the girl appear like a ghost.
Soon, Bogus’s face filled with delight.
“Yes, you came! I knew it wasn’t a bad deal for you, either!”
Bogus concluded that he had succeeded in recruiting the girl.
Why else would she have come here all of a sudden?
From his perspective, he had no choice but to think that way.
“Cough, that’s an excellent choice. If you just help me, I’ll help you get your revenge, and I’ll take care of all your companions, too! Heh heh, that fucking bastard. He dared to leave without killing me? I can’t just let this—.”
Bogus stopped speaking.
At the back of his neck.
Because he felt something very cold there.
Something cold and sharp.
“…Uh, excuse me?”
“I made a contract with a corporation. I agreed to keep my head down in this bottom-of-the-barrel neighborhood.”
“Y-yeah, right? I know.”
He knew that the girl before him was a mutant─a genetically engineered life-form created by some corporation, and that several corporations were hunting her because of it.
He had learned that purely by chance, though.
“But there’s an exception in the contract.”
“An exception….”
“My family. If something happens to my companions, I’m free to act as far as that’s concerned.”
“Fuck, what the hell does that have to do with this?!”
Bogus’s voice burst out.
But the girl, Rivera, remained utterly calm.
Rivera thought of the owner of the grocery store.
Ever since entering the Bogus Gang’s hideout,
she had secretly watched him the entire time, and he seemed to have an extremely softhearted personality.
Even more so because not a single member of the gang had died yet.
She didn’t dislike his softhearted personality.
On the contrary, it felt warm, and she liked it very much.
But not everyone living in the city would show him consideration.
This was a city where all the refuse of the world was gathered together.
Risk City.
Then the conclusion was simple.
She only needed to make up for that softness herself.
From the shadows. From the darkness.
“When did I ever touch your companion—”
Bogus’s death was instantaneous.
Without even having time to leave any last words.
Even though it was the death he had wanted, Bogus’s end was not the conclusion he had expected.
“You did touch my companion.”
Because he had joined the organization she belonged to.
They were only companions for now, so it was difficult to call them family.
But perhaps that would be possible someday.
‘Hotdog Man….’
She murmured the nickname playfully.
For now, that was enough.
The girl rose from her crouched position.
If she simply left Bogus’s corpse there, it might lead to other problems.
A corpse was a mass of information, and uncontrollable variables needed to be eliminated.
“…Hmph.”
And then.
The simplest way to clean up was always.
* * *
On the way back in the truck.
Michael suddenly opened his mouth.
“Should I leave the gas pipes open?”
“Why all of a sudden?”
“Well, didn’t you say earlier that you wanted to blow up that building?”
…Did I say that?
I had been so furious that my memory was hazy.
My stress had been relieved to some extent by now, so I no longer felt like going back and smashing the building.
“Forget it. You don’t need to blow it up.”
Right after I said that.
─Fwoooom!!!
A fierce wave of heat erupted from the back of the truck.
We got out of the truck for a moment.
“……”
“……”
The Bogus Gang’s hideout was blazing fiercely.
The explosion had been so large that burning embers fell from the sky like snow.
After a brief silence.
“…Hotdog Man?”
“It wasn’t me.”
“No, I don’t want to suspect you, but….”
“I’m telling you, it really wasn’t me.”
It was unfair.