Chapter 29: Chapter 28
TL/ED: Hamsterminator
John Wick.
There was a movie that Jin really liked.
The story is about a retired killer who avenges his dog, and with a little exaggeration, throughout the 100 minutes of running time, he does nothing but kill people.
Stabbing to death, shooting to death, beating to death.
The number of people who took a trip to the afterlife by the protagonist’s hands was said to be 83.
So the enemies who died at almost one per minute always spat out the same last words.
That would be, “What’s the big deal about that fucking dog!”
But this was an ignorant statement that failed to grasp the meaning contained in the dog.
To the protagonist, that little puppy was the last gift left by his late wife.
In other words, even if something looks trivial in the eyes of others,
to the person concerned, it can be an irreplaceable treasure.
And now.
Jin fully understood the anger of Mr. John.
My money!
My gun!
For Jin, those were his dog and his lover.
Money earned through sweat and blood.
The first weapon he had ever bought with that money.
Something that could not be defined by its face value alone.
Jin clenched his fist tightly.
You touched my stuff?
Pretending to be nice, spouting mercy, and then backstabbing me wasn’t enough for you?
“...You’re all dead.”
As Jin twisted his nose bridge and stomped forward with a loud thud.
“Just leaving like that?”
A voice touched the back of his head, and Jin went, ah, right.
“Oh, right.”
Hurriedly turning his body, Jin approached the middle-aged man who had been watching him.
Then he grabbed the chain and pulled it hard.
Crack~~~Bang!
Unable to withstand the enormous tension, the chain was ripped from the ceiling along with the stake.
Naturally, as the middle-aged man rubbed his now looser wrists and worked the chain off, Jin, who was watching him, spoke.
“I have just one favor.”
“What?”
“Please take care of the people here.”
Jin pointed with his chin at the human butcher shop.
“When they come to their senses later, how shocked do you think they’ll be? So you, no, sunbae, okay? Since you’re a sunbae, act like one, explain the situation properly, reassure them. Got it?”
“And what should I say to explain and reassure them?”
“They were kidnapped, that’s true. But there’s no need to worry. Why? Because the future Solo King went to resolve it. Something like that.”
Even after saying it, Jin did not quite trust the middle-aged man in front of him, so he repeated the same words two or three times, made sure he understood, and only then turned his body again.
Ah, the flow is broken.
This is the kind of thing where you have to keep pushing forward when you’re angry.
So he focused again.
...My gun, on the day I first bought you, the whole Downtown whispered your name.
Gravis.
Mm. That should do.
With his anger fully reloaded naturally, Jin picked up the chain that had fallen to the floor, wrapped it around his forearms, and immediately walked out the open door.
“......”
In the eyes of the middle-aged man who silently watched his back, a strange light flickered.
***
Jin was never born a psycho.
He had been thrown into a crazy world, but he had never once crossed the line he considered the minimum standard as a human being.
For example, murder.
Now it had become so familiar that he could do it several times a day without feeling anything, yet Jin never thought of it as a tool for his growth.
He knew.
That death touched by his hands immediately became experience points.
But knowing it and exploiting it were two very different things.
Hmm-, since he was a bit short on XP to light up a new star,
he could just kill about ten gang members to make up for it.
That kind of mindset was a one-way ticket to madness.
And Jin’s already shaky mentality could not withstand that way of thinking.
Of course, it was not always like that.
There were exceptions.
That was when the opponent was an unmistakable villain.
Was this a beast wearing human skin, or something even lower?
Then treating them as experience points gave him no psychological damage at all.
In fact, it was welcome from his side.
Cleaning up the trash that was of no help to the world,
and collecting experience points along the way, truly killing two birds with one stone.
Eating a pheasant and eating its eggs. Sweeping the yard and picking up a coin.
This case was exactly that.
Not long after exploring the factory, what Jin found was,
a massive test tube in which strange liquid bubbled, and monks chanting incantations under flayed corpses.
There were at least more than ten of them at a glance.
And the corpses were easily double that number.
To borrow the words of the now deceased priest,
it was certain they were making some kind of mutant-thing.
Even Jin, who had seen all sorts of filthy sights, could not help but frown. It was a horrific scene too gruesome to fully describe in words.
What the hell is that?
Disgusting enough to ruin one’s appetite.
The point here was that why those bastards were doing such things did not really matter to Jin.
It simply gave him one more reason to kill them.
And in a way that did not stir even the faintest sense of guilt.
Whirr-
He spun the chains, which were still long enough to drag across the floor even after being wrapped around his forearms, with both hands violently.
As threatening gusts of air swirled around his body.
Jin located the monks, who still had not noticed his presence.
Then he focused on the most optimal position.
Mana dissipated like evaporation. His vision wavered. Blink.
At the same time, four heads burst like overripe tomatoes.
Splat splat splat splat!!
There were no screams.
They probably did not even realize what had hit them.
“What-!”
The one who had been injecting something into the nose of a corpse a short distance away jerked his head in shock.
At the instant his frightened eyes caught sight of his comrades collapsing, spraying blood, Jin was already behind him.
Srrrak!
Like a cowboy lassoing a wild beast, Jin’s impeccable wrist control coiled the chain around the man’s neck, then he kicked the back of his exposed knee.
As the man collapsed, Jin braced his waist with the sole of his foot and pulled both arms hard.
The monk’s spine bent like a bow, until finally his head slammed into his heels.
Along with the crackling, popping sound of vertebrae bursting free in unison.
“An intruder!”
“Is he with the City Government?!”
“Stop him! Stop him now!”
At last, the enemies noticed Jin.
From beneath their hoods, jaws twisted into various exclamations as they immediately launched a counterattack.
Chanting spells, slashing their forearms with blades to draw blood,
some pulled out guns…
Gravis! No, my dear! Why are you there?!
It wouldn't hurt to put you in my eyes... well, maybe it would, (TL Note: Korean Idiom is used here. Read Here )
Anyway, when Jin saw his beloved weapon in another man’s hands, his eyes widened.
He was about to dash straight at it.
“…O beast of the treacherous depths!”
One of them, who had been muttering spells all along, suddenly shouted at full volume at the very end.
Thanks to that, Jin’s gaze shifted toward him.
And he saw it.
A four-legged beast stretching within the roiling pool of blood.
If a pit bull had been soaked in blood for three days straight, it might look like that.
Its entire body was crimson, with only its teeth glaring white as the muscular creature twitched its savage jaws.
There were three of them.
Exactly matching the number of monks who had cut their arms and let blood drip to the ground.
Growl!
The blood-contracted beasts stomped the ground.
Their ferocity was enough that any ordinary person would have collapsed on the spot.
But Jin did not panic.
Because all he had to do was refuse to fight them.
When it came to summoned beasts, the most efficient way to deal with them was to kill the summoner.
This had long been proven by big data accumulated for decades across comics, films, games, and novels.
There was no way Jin, a cultured man and gamer, would not know this strategy.
He immediately swung the chains in both hands like a storm.
Blink! Blink! Blink!
With almost no time lag between teleports, the summoners were torn apart.
“H-how?!”
“Impossible!”
Cries that were closer to screams erupted from all sides.
The reason they were so shocked was simple.
Teleportation had always been considered one of the hardest skills to use in real combat.
It required marking coordinates within a three-dimensional cube defined by the X, Y, and Z axes, then transferring both body and consciousness there, an extremely dangerous act.
Without a natural sense for converting 2D visual information into 3D spatial awareness, it was not a power one could freely abuse.
In short, one had to both possess extraordinary senses and deeply understand the concept of spatial movement down to the bone.
Jin happened to be the perfect candidate who met these strict conditions.
A collaboration of superhuman senses and forcibly implanted knowledge enabled his current movements.
Splat!!!
With all his strength, Jin lashed out with the chain, and the last summoner collapsed.
At the same time, the beasts that had been chasing after Jin’s flashing figure, leaping back and forth, turned into nothing more than splashes of blood that splattered onto the floor.
Suddenly, Jin felt his head spin and staggered.
His vision blurred from having burned through too much mana.
So he quickly reached out to steady himself on something.
Looking again, it turned out to be a cylinder containing a skinned human.
“Ugh, fuck!”
Startled, Jin threw a straight punch, and as the glass shattered, he quickly darted backward to avoid the cascade of liquid pouring out like a waterfall.
“No! You crazy bastard! Stop!”
“Do you even realize what you’ve done?!”
The few remaining enemies shouted.
They were clearly horrified, so even in his dizzy state, Jin swung his arms.
He smashed every test tube within range without hesitation.
It was mindless destruction, but to those on the receiving end, it was enough to drive them mad.
“You bastard!!!”
The spells, fed by blood and flesh, came flying at Jin, who spun like a human windmill.
Projectiles arced toward him.
And Blink, just a split second faster.
Once again, Jin struck from his enemy’s blind spot, his fist swinging.
Crack!
The back of a skull caved in with the sound of bones snapping.
By the time it echoed, Jin was no longer there.
Instead, another monk’s head twisted grotesquely as he jerked his neck side to side in panic.
That left only one opponent.
Jin kicked aside a corpse at his feet and spoke.
“Hey. Put that down. You can’t even fire it. Why cling to it so stubbornly?”
On the blood-soaked floor, the last monk gritted his teeth, both hands gripping Gravis.
“…I know you.”
“Know me?”
“I’ve heard plenty about the City Government’s psychic, the one called the Spatialist. Seems it was only half true. They said she was a cold-faced woman…”
Jin narrowed his eyes.
Why is the City Government suddenly being dragged into this?
Looked like this guy had made a serious mistake.
As the saying goes, what you expect is all you see.
It was the flimsiest deduction possible.
As if he were declaring that only the City Government could possibly attack their factory.
“Shut up.”
Jin had no interest in correcting such narrow-minded thinking, so he strode forward.
“Hand me my gun. Unless you’d rather die in pain.”
In response, the monk shakily lifted Gravis and pressed its muzzle under his own chin.
“Foolish unbeliever. Death is not the end. It is the beginning of all things.”
Then, without hesitation, he pulled the trigger.
Bang─!!!
The violent recoil knocked his body backward, and he collapsed on his back.
“……”
Jin, who had not expected his opponent to commit suicide, stared in disbelief at the headless corpse.
Fsssshhhhh.
With a foul stench, the bodies of the dead monks all around began to melt at once, writhing together as if they had become a living organism.
It happened in an instant.
They took the form of a monstrous creature with two heads and four legs.
Rooooaaaar!!
A thunderous roar, its five layers of teeth bared in full.
Jin sighed deeply, as if the ground would sink beneath him, and picked up Gravis from the floor.
“This crazy world. Now anything and everything pops out.”
The moment he leveled the gun forward.
Crackkkkkk!!!
A surge of purple lightning shot past his shoulder, engulfing the monster.
Under the frenzied glow, the massive form writhed in agony.
and soon charred black before collapsing to the ground with a thud.
Jin instinctively turned his head.
At the place his gaze reached, the middle-aged man was standing.
In a posture with one arm stretched straight out.
With a satisfied smile on his lips.
He spoke.
“So. Was that enough sunbae-like for you?”
~~~
Hi! If you are enjoying this novel, please leave a rating and review on NovelUpdates via the link below. Thanks!