Chapter 18: Chapter 17
TL/ED: Hamsterminator
It’s been almost a year since he fell into this unfamiliar world.
During that time, Jin had faced countless crises.
Shot by guns, stabbed by knives, smashed by clubs.
Starved for ten days, hovered at the brink of death from food poisoning.
Heatstroke in the summer, frostbite in the winter.
Moments when he stayed alive only because he couldn’t die, and horrid days when he lacked even the strength to die.
Despite all that, he had never experienced a moment like this one.
What the hell is this now.
An enemy too much to handle?
Telling him to escape?
Normally, Jin would’ve spat at the status window that blocked his vision like a giant door.
Don’t tell me what to do, he would’ve muttered angrily to himself.
But he couldn’t do that now.
Even without the status window, he could feel it.
The ominous presence so intense it made his skin sting.
That was when it happened.
“...Hm, was there one more?”
A expressionless voice, like someone discovering a bug on the roadside.
At that, Jin flinched. The moment he tried to distance himself from the railing.
An invisible force struck him.
More precisely, it struck the entire metal staircase he had stepped on.
Thunk!!
Before he could react, Jin was flung away and spun violently through the air like a fish caught in a whirlpool.
As the world twisted wildly in every direction.
Dull impacts crashed into him from head to toe in erratic waves.
Bounced this way, bounced that way, Jin finally crashed to the ground and gasped sharply.
No, it was more like being forced to inhale than actually gasping.
Even screaming takes some presence of mind.
With a shock so unexpected and so excessive like this, anyone would end up like Jin.
The pain surged into his nose and mouth like seawater, and he choked as if drowning on solid ground.
He would’ve been better off losing consciousness.
But his abnormally resilient body began to recover even in this state, fighting through the pain.
So Jin was half-forced to regain his senses.
The blood streaming down from the gash on his forehead blurred his vision uncomfortably, but Jin stubbornly lifted his head from the ground in case of a follow-up attack.
And he saw it.
The figure slowly climbing the stairs from the basement.
The strange man wore a black leather long coat with a subtle sheen and a fedora hat.
His hands and feet were covered by leather gloves and boots, hiding all bare skin.
Perhaps because all of it was a black so deep it seemed to devour light.
The beak-like mask with its only dull silver tone stood out even more.
In Jin’s homeland, it was known as the exclusive gear of a Plague Doctor.
The mask, with its eerie crow-like appearance, exuded an unsettling aura as it turned toward the fallen Jin.
Then the man tilted his head.
“Still alive?”
He murmured like that, and his gaze shifted from Jin to Fenrir.
Then from Fenrir back to Jin, moving back and forth.
“...Was I not strong enough? Or are you two just tough?”
The man, who had been opening and closing his hand repeatedly, suddenly clapped once.
“There’s no way I’m weak. You two must be sturdy.”
What the hell is this guy talking about. Crazy Son of a Bitch.
As Jin tried to rise to his feet, a sharp pain twisted his nose.
When he glanced down quickly, he saw his right ankle completely bent the wrong way.
At this rate, he couldn’t even walk, let alone run.
And all the while, the status window in one corner of his vision persistently flashed a warning to escape, which didn’t help at all, if anything, it only made things more frustrating.
“If you’re not gonna help, then go to hell......!”
Jin growled and grabbed his ankle, twisting it.
Crack!!
He worsened a simple fracture into a compound one and bit his lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
It was insanely painful and, frankly, a completely insane thing to do, but he had no choice.
Based on his past experiences, if he didn’t align the bone in advance, recovery took much longer.
“Fuuuck...!”
Just as Jin clenched his teeth.
Grrr!!
Out of nowhere, a beastly roar rang out, and Fenrir, who had seemed dead, suddenly leapt up from the ground.
A massive jump. At the same time, he drew the hilt from his waist.
The large scimitar, with a blade over 1 meter long, became a streak of light as it was driven down to the ground by the over 2-meter-tall werewolf's hand.
A strike that mocked distance.
It was exactly the attack Jin had imagined in his head.
Slash!!
At the same time, the strange man turned his head.
That was all he did.
Yet Fenrir’s sword stopped dead in midair.
As if it had been blocked by something invisible.
“Grrrrrr!!”
A fierce beast-like growl poured out from Fenrir’s snout.
Judging by the bulging muscles of his arms, he was clearly exerting tremendous strength, but despite the beastkin's power, the blade didn’t move forward at all, it merely trembled in place.
“I don’t get it. You’re a beastkin, so why are you doing this here? Taha is a racist who blindly believes in beastkin supremacy, so wouldn’t it be better for you to side with TB than oppose it?”
At the strange man’s question, Fenrir bared his teeth.
“And what about you? Why is a Black Mage from Styx sticking with TB? What filthy scheme are you hiding?”
“Sticking? That’s a clueless thing to say. We’re strictly in a business relationship.”
The strange man murmured softly,
And at that moment, Jin pulled the trigger on the Gravis.
Bang─!!
The muzzle burst with fire and kicked upward.
Jin controlled the insane recoil with sheer strength, and his trigger finger pulled back relentlessly.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
As ear-shattering gunfire rang out in succession.
Jin was knocked onto his back from a sitting position by the accumulating recoil.
In the middle of it all, he recalled what Brof had said.
Something about custom-modified .666 R&D magnum rounds.
With the Gravis's superior performance, these lumps of metal supposedly had destructive power that rivaled anti-materiel sniper rifles, limited to within a 50-meter radius.
He had already confirmed it wasn’t just a merchant’s exaggeration when it blew a chameleon beastkin’s head apart.
As Jin raised his upper body, he hoped.
That the damned strange man would be lying on the floor, bleeding.
However.
What greeted Jin was the same strange man, still facing off against Fenrir.
Clang-
The bullets that had failed to penetrate the man's long coat or rather, the shimmering veil, clattered to the floor.
Beyond the veil, which rippled momentarily in iridescent light, the mask of the strange man slowly turned.
What the hell.
Jin was momentarily flustered by the fact that even the Gravis hadn't worked.
“Interesting.”
The strange man lightly waved both hands.
His right hand toward Fenrir, his left toward Jin.
At once, fire and lightning burst from the man’s fingertips and shot toward them with terrifying speed.
“Hup!”
Seeing the white electric flash incoming, Jin hurled himself with his still-injured leg.
But the lightning he thought he had dodged traveled along the metal frames of the shelves, chaining from one to the next in an unpredictable trajectory, and ultimately caught up to him.
So just before the current surged through his body.
Jin’s hand hit the detonator in his pocket, not with reason but with pure instinct.
Immediately afterward, an agony unlike anything he had ever felt overtook him.
Zzzzzzzzzt-!!
His entire body convulsed, his internal organs were damaged at the cellular level, and his skin visibly burned bright red.
“......Guh, hack.”
With his eyes rolled back and smoke pouring from his mouth, Jin collapsed with his head to the ground.
He twitched on the boundary between life and death.
Not long after, Fenrir, his entire body charred black, tumbled over beside him and slumped down.
Naturally, their eyes met at the lowest angle in the world.
Jin, unable to move even a finger but barely able to move his lips, forced out his voice.
“You... okay?”
The dying reply came back.
“...Yeah.”
To be honest, from Jin’s point of view, there were more things he couldn’t understand than not.
What the hell was that crazy bastard?
Why was he guarding the warehouse?
Was he even really one of the TB people?
He wanted to shake Fenrir’s shoulder and scream, but he held it in.
It wouldn’t change anything anyway.
The situation had already unfolded, and it was dangerously close to the worst-case scenario.
But that didn’t mean he would just die doing nothing.
Jin forced his bloodshot eyes wide open.
Don’t give me that bullshit. You think I endured all those hellish moments just to die like this?
A survival instinct bordering on obsession pumped adrenaline through his veins, and barely clinging to consciousness, he recalled the only possibility that could break this deadlock.
“...The bomb’s about to go off. There’s about 90 seconds left.”
“You triggered it too?”
Surprisingly, Fenrir asked him that.
It seemed he had activated his detonator as well before ending up like this.
Though unspoken, the two had reached the same conclusion and exchanged bitter smiles.
So Jin proposed first.
“Wanna run while we can?”
“From that monster? No way we make it out in the open.”
“So you think we can fight him?”
“...For about a minute, maybe.”
“Good. I’m in.”
After wrapping up a conversation barely worthy of being called a strategy, the two of them pressed their hands and forearms to the ground.
Jin aside, the fact that Fenrir managed to raise his body at all clearly proved he wasn’t just any beastkin.
Otherwise, the strange man wouldn’t have clapped for him earlier.
“Back on your feet again. Impressive.”
He wasn’t mocking them, his voice was sincerely admiring as he pointed his finger at Jin.
“You, in particular. You don’t seem like a beastkin, yet your recovery is far superior to theirs. No, wait. It’s not mere recovery. It’s... something closer to reconstruction, I’d say...”
“Shut up, you plague doctor cosplaying bastard.”
Even as his legs trembled from the aftereffects of electrocution, Jin raised his middle finger.
Fenrir twitched his snout in response. It was hard to read expressions on a wolf’s face, but it looked less like anger and more like scornful disbelief.
“Don’t slow me down.”
At some point, Fenrir’s face had twisted into a fierce snarl as he suddenly dashed forward.
For some reason, his speed was far faster than before.
Clearly, he was now using a trump card he had been saving.
Not to be outdone, Jin closed his eyes.
Not to escape reality.
In this moment, Jin’s consciousness was standing in the middle of a grand night sky.
The second star of beginning that he had ignited.
[Mana Circuit]
Beyond its countless branching paths, darkened stars clamored, begging to be lit first.
Jin had gained enough experience from defeating the chameleon beastkin to continue along the path of the stars.
In this moment.
He scrapped the cautious plan of weighing his options, asking questions, and hesitating.
Anything was fine.
As long as it let him survive the next minute...!
Crackle-crackle-crack!!!
In the next moment, blue lightning surged from Jin’s body as he opened his eyes.
The intense sparks vaporized the blood clinging to his skin.
And the soft blue glow soon turned red, raging in every direction.
[Mana Rampage]
Jin surrendered himself to the self-destructive image etched into his mind.
Crack..!
He stomped on the cracking floor as he charged, rapidly closing the distance with the strange man.
Then, joining Fenrir, who was already swinging his sword, he used the momentum of his sprint to launch a powerful kick.
52 seconds until the warehouse explosion.
With the outcome already decided.
The plague doctor in the beaked mask, the human, and the wolf beastkin clashed in chaos.
~~~
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