Chapter 29
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【Risk City, District 49, Temporary Bulletin Board】
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Title : ※Pay♥Attention※(☞☞Largest in the Old Town☜☜)$$Hol◎e Paradise$$↘Androids for Every Taste↗【For New Customers】★30-Minute Free Event★Call Now ▶▷☏☎☏☎◁◀
(Photos of various beautiful women)
Are you lonely at night when you sleep alone?
Are you afraid of gang attacks and want to enjoy a comfortable night's sleep in a safe place?
Do you have secret preferences you can't tell anyone else about?
Welcome!!
At Hol◎e Paradise, we can help you with all those worries!
We have numerous cutting-edge androids released by megacorps!
For customers afraid to go outside, we even offer special outcall services!
Low prices!
Amazing service!
Satisfying results!
Call or message us right now.
─ Fuck this title.
─ Hey, eraser bitch, push the ad down already.
─ Wow, the service must be so amazing they'd probably strip the customer's intestines out too, huh??
└ (Author) Hol◎e Paradise prioritizes the safety of our customers above all else.
└ Your mom.
└ This place has been in business for quite a while in the Old Town, but the facilities are so damn poorly maintained that I don't recommend it unless you're absolutely desperate to get your rocks off.
└ Yeah, the touts even pitch to street homeless people lolllllllll.
─ Watch out, you fucking bastards. If those pimp bastards see an android that looks intact, they rob them all. They have a gang organization behind them, too, so……
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(This post has been deleted.)
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Walter and I were merely in a business relationship.
Selling things and buying things.
A seller-and-buyer relationship.
From his perspective, I was just the nemesis who had haggled a $1,200 terminal down to $500, then successfully negotiated the speaker and connection port down too.
At most, I was a customer he recognized.
But even so.
- Take my daughter…. Cough!!
Walter had asked me for help.
Of course, in that situation, there was no one else he could ask but me.
I had heard that the RCPD, the Risk City Police Department, didn't patrol District 49 either.
The lonely old man, with nowhere to turn, had handed me the suspect's business card as if he were grasping at a straw on the edge of a cliff to save his kidnapped daughter.
And I had no intention of refusing Walter's request, either.
Honestly, it hadn't been an easy choice.
People who had robbed and kidnapped an android.
The smell of crime was practically pouring off them.
But the moment I confirmed Walter's condition, I moved without hesitating for even a second.
The treatment's side effect making me somewhat hot-blooded was probably one reason, too.
‘…Because it happened to someone around me.’
What should I call this feeling?
I imagined this was probably how an animal felt when something invaded its territory.
If I had to put it into words, it was closest to a sense of responsibility.
The one thing I knew for certain was that if I didn't go save Walter's daughter now, I'd spend quite a long time regretting it.
That was enough for the moment.
As I ran back down the alley I had come through,
“Huff, huff…. Fuck, I'm dying….”
I found Michael leaning against a grimy wall and vomiting.
Michael, breathing extremely hard, looked at me with trembling eyes.
“……Just what the hell, huff, Hotdog Man. Huff, what’s going on...? Anyway, I-I can help you, urk….”
He didn't seem to have much stamina, but he had somehow run all the way here without stopping to rest.
Unfortunately, there was no time to admire him.
“I’ll explain the details later.”
I briefly summarized what I needed.
“If you go farther down that alley, you’ll find an injured person and Rivera. Look after them for me.”
“Huff, injured…?”
“Walter.”
That much should have been enough for him to understand the situation.
Although he looked like a total airhead, Michael had also spent time in this city as a cold, hardened urban man.
A small fry in a cyberpunk world.
I really didn't want to imagine it.
“Understood… Huff.”
“I’m counting on you.”
And breathe properly while you're at it.
After relaying to Michael exactly what I had told Rivera, I tossed him the pistol Christine had given me, just in case.
Life had been so dangerous lately that I had kept it on me, but it seemed better for Michael to have it for now.
Then I checked the navigation app on the terminal, into which I had entered the destination earlier.
[About 24 minutes to destination…]
The route and timing were a little iffy.
I wanted to return to the grocery store and bring the truck, but I didn't know what would happen to Walter's kidnapped daughter if I did.
‘If I rammed it into the building entrance like last time, it'd be a one-shot.’
People learn through experience.
As someone who had been on the receiving end of a truck ramming the grocery store building, I knew very well how powerful an attack it was.
‘Unfortunately, that will have to wait until next time.’
If I ever had to raid another gang, I would make sure to bring the truck in advance.
That was as far as I let myself think.
I moved at top speed along the route displayed on the screen.
Today, it wasn't Walk. It was Run.
The time displayed on the navigation app began decreasing in real time.
[About 21 minutes to destination…]
[About 17 minutes to destination…]
[About 11 minutes to destination…]
[To destination…]
Even looking at it was a waste of time.
The Old Town's streets were extremely complicated, and sometimes walls or barbed-wire fences that shouldn't have been there appeared in my path, but I didn't need to be Iron Man or Captain America to get over a wall.
Batman was an ordinary human being, too, after all.
He just relied on his equipment a bit.
But when I thought about it, my physical abilities had also improved after I received the treatment serum, so maybe I was closer to Captain America than Batman.
Still, the DC boom is coming….
Anyway.
Before long, a luxurious hotel building that didn't fit in with the street appeared in front of me.
But unlike its clean design, the building was in an extremely filthy state of disrepair. It looked as though someone had stitched rags together and made something new out of them.
With steel plates stuck all over it.
The numbers on the signs easily exceeded ten at a glance, and they all glowed in different colors, lighting up the surrounding street, but─.
Every sign displayed just one name.
《Hol◎e Paradise》
『Hol◎e Paradise』
「Hole Heaven」 〔Hol◎e Paradise〕
【Hol◎e Paradise】
….
I had thought the same thing when I first saw the business card, but it really was an incredibly blatant name.
You could even call it completely explicit.
Just then, one of the touts at the entrance approached me.
“Yo, buddy. Here to drain your balls? Judging by how you ran here, you must've been pretty damn desperate.”
He tapped the top of his fist with his palm, making an obscene gesture.
The person who had come to the grocery store last time had probably been a tout who worked the same way.
“That’s how incredible our shop is. Technology is fucking amazing these days. We can accommodate every preference people want. And the holes are so damn tight and juicy…. Just tell me quietly. Personality, gender, face, breasts, ass. Anything you want. We can even accommodate ASFR preferences. We can peel off the skin and leave them with a doll's face, fur, or even just a metal shell….”
“I choose you.”
The way this guy talked….
When I cut him off, the man frowned in confusion.
“What the fuck? Don't you know our shop only deals in androids? And a decent-looking guy should like women. What the fuck do you mean, you chose me?”
This time, I cut him off in the middle of his sentence, too.
Not with words, but with action.
Thud!!!
In martial-arts terms, it was a grounding stomp.
In subculture terms, it was a ground-shaking stomp.
The tout's head gradually drooped downward.
He looked down at his feet.
“……??”
There, inside his leather shoe, was his foot, completely flattened.
The cracks spreading widely across the ground looked unreal.
A delayed scream burst out.
“F-Fuuuck!!!”
The tout fell backward.
With his foot flattened like a sheet of paper, he wouldn't be able to move even if he tried to run.
The guards nearby noticed the commotion and rushed toward me.
“Customer! You can’t lay hands on our employee!”
“Step back!”
I calmly looked around.
Some of the touts were looking at me with bored expressions, while others were watching me with curiosity.
I couldn't see any female androids or Anna among them.
‘The androids must all be inside the building.’
I made a quick decision.
At the same time, my heart began beating terrifyingly slowly.
─Thump.
In the time that flowed slowly,
my fist sank into a guard's face.
One, two, three, four, five.
As the bridge of his nose crumpled into a circle, red drops of blood flew through the air.
A light shockwave bursting around the guard's face came as a bonus.
The guards, all larger than me, each rotated half a turn before falling headfirst to the ground.
Then time began flowing normally again.
Thwack-thwack!!
The delayed sounds of impact rang out.
There had been five guards at the building entrance, and there were now exactly five guards lying on the floor and groaning.
There were probably many more guards inside the building, but for the moment, not even a breath could be heard anywhere nearby.
Only a heavy silence flowed through the area.
“…Huh?”
Immediately after someone let out a startled voice,
“…It’s an attack.”
“Holy shit, run!!”
The people gathered at the building entrance scattered a beat late.
All except the one tout whose foot I had stepped on beforehand.
I roughly wiped the blood coating my fist on my pants, then walked over to the tout, who was looking up at me from where he had fallen backward.
“P-Please spare me….”
“I won’t kill you.”
“…!! Thank you—”
“That is, if you do exactly what I tell you.”
The hope that had bloomed on the tout's face was swallowed up by despair once again.
I grabbed the back of the tout's neck and lifted him straight up to shoulder height.
He wasn't particularly tall, so his feet dangled and swung in midair.
Gulp.
The sound of him swallowing nervously rang out loudly.
Perhaps unwilling to miss his chance to live, the tout looked at me with a much more serious expression.
“…What would you like me to do?”
“Where are the ones you abducted?”
“Th-that’s….”
When he suddenly seemed to be thinking again, I gripped the man's neck and shook him violently from side to side.
Whoosh, whoosh-whoosh─!!
A human body tore through the air.
Fortunately, the clothes he was wearing were sturdy enough not to rip.
Though that was probably unfortunate for him.
“Ghk, ghrk, kkh, I’ll tell you, kkh. I’ll tell you!!”
“Okay.”
And then I stopped again.
Not even a few seconds had passed, but the tout's face was already filthy with sweat, as though he had aged several years.
The pain in his stepped-on foot must have been considerable, too, so he probably wasn't capable of making rational decisions.
From his perspective, this must have been like a bolt from the blue, but as I had said at the start, I had decided to use this bastard as my guide.
I could have singled out an android and snuck inside, but with a time limit hanging over me, I had no choice but to be more forceful.
Looking at the nauseated tout, I opened my mouth.
“Guide me right now.”
“Th, urk. If you put me down….”
Sss.
The navigation app talks back?
“Then it’ll be slower. I’m going to keep carrying you like this, so just give me directions.”
“…Understood. F-first, over there.”
The tout's eyes glistened with tears, but someone who made money off other people's tears had to bear the karma for that.