Chapter 28
There was a movie Jin had really liked.
John Wick.
It was about a retired assassin taking revenge for his dog, and with only a little exaggeration, he spent the entire hundred-minute runtime killing people.
Stabbing them to death, shooting them to death, beating them to death.
Apparently, eighty-three people met their end at the protagonist’s hands.
And since enemies were dropping at a rate of nearly one per minute, there was one line they often uttered as their dying words—
“What’s so damn important about one lousy dog?!”
But that was an ignorant statement made by people who did not understand what the dog meant.
To the protagonist, that tiny puppy had been the final gift left behind by his deceased wife.
In other words, something that looked insignificant to others could be an irreplaceable treasure to the person who owned it.
And right now—
Jin fully understood Mr. Wick’s rage.
My money!
My gun!
To Jin, those were his dog and his lover.
Money he had earned through blood, sweat, and tears.
The first weapon he had ever bought with it.
Things whose value could not be defined by a mere price tag.
Jin clenched his fist.
You touched my stuff?
Pretending to be kind and preaching about mercy before stabbing me in the back wasn’t enough for you?
“...You’re all dead.”
Jin’s nose wrinkled as he took a heavy step forward.
“You’re just leaving?”
The voice striking the back of his head made him stop.
“Oh, right.”
Jin hurriedly turned around and approached the middle-aged man watching him.
He grabbed the chain and pulled hard—
Cr-cr-crack—BOOM!
Unable to withstand the immense tension, the chain tore free from the ceiling along with the stake.
The middle-aged man’s feet naturally touched the floor. While he rubbed his loosened wrists and worked the chains free, Jin watched him and spoke.
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Look after the people here.”
Jin gestured with his chin toward the human butcher shop.
“Imagine how shocked they’ll be when they wake up. So you—no, Senior—you know? Act like a proper senior, explain the situation, calm them down, and all that. Got it?”
“What exactly am I supposed to explain to calm them down?”
“Tell them they were kidnapped, yes, but there’s no need to worry. Why? Because the future king of solo players has gone to take care of everything. Something like that.”
Even after saying it, Jin still found the middle-aged man deeply unreliable.
Only after repeating the same instructions two or three more times and receiving confirmation did he finally turn away again.
Damn, the momentum’s gone.
This kind of thing was supposed to flow naturally while the anger was still fresh.
So he focused again.
...My dear gun, the day I first bought you, all of Downtown whispered your name.
Gravis.
Hmm. Good enough.
With his anger naturally reloaded, Jin picked up the chains lying on the floor, wound them several times around both forearms, and immediately walked through the open door.
“...”
A peculiar gleam appeared in the middle-aged man’s eyes as he silently watched Jin’s retreating back.
北米*
Jin was not a natural-born psychopath.
He might have fallen into an insane world, but he had never crossed the line he had set for himself—the final boundary of what it meant to remain human.
Take murder, for example.
He had grown so accustomed to it that he could commit it several times a day without feeling much of anything.
Even so, Jin never regarded killing as a tool for his own growth.
He knew.
He knew every death caused by his hand became experience points to sustain him.
But knowing that and deliberately exploiting it were worlds apart.
Hmm, I’m a little short on XP to light up a new star.
Guess I’ll go kill ten gang members or so.
That sort of thinking was a perfect recipe for mental illness.
Jin’s already precarious state of mind could not withstand that kind of mentality.
Of course, this was not always the case.
There were exceptions.
Namely, when his opponent was unmistakably evil.
What if they were beasts wearing human skin—or something even lower than that?
Then treating them as experience points caused him no mental strain whatsoever.
In fact, he welcomed it.
He could clean up garbage that contributed nothing to the world—
And earn experience points in the process.
Two birds with one stone.
Like eating the pheasant and its eggs, or finding money while sweeping the yard.
This situation was exactly like that.
Not long after Jin began exploring the factory, he discovered enormous test tubes filled with grotesque, bubbling liquid and monks chanting incantations beneath flayed corpses.
There were more than ten monks at a glance.
The number of corpses was easily several times greater.
Borrowing the final words of the now-deceased priest, they were clearly making mutants or whatever they called them.
Even Jin, who had seen all manner of filthy things, could not help but frown.
The sheer horror of the scene was difficult to put into words.
What the hell is that?
It’s ruining my appetite.
The important point was that Jin did not particularly care why they were doing it.
It merely gave him one more reason to beat them to death.
And this was the kind of reason that would not leave him with even the slightest trace of guilt.
Whoosh, whoosh.
The chains were long enough to trail along the floor even after being wrapped around his forearms.
Jin gripped one in each hand and spun them violently.
A threatening pressure built around his body.
His eyes mapped out the positions of the monks who had yet to notice his presence.
Then he found the ideal position and focused—
Mana evaporated.
His vision lurched.
Blink.
At the same instant, four heads burst like overripe tomatoes.
Splatter!
There were no screams.
They probably had not even understood what had hit them.
“What the—!”
A monk standing some distance away, injecting something into a corpse’s nose, spun around in shock.
The moment his widened eyes caught sight of his companions collapsing in sprays of blood—
Jin was already behind him.
Clatter!
Like a cowboy throwing a lasso around a rampaging beast, Jin used exquisite wrist control to loop a chain around the man’s neck.
Then he kicked the back of the monk’s exposed knee.
As the man collapsed, Jin braced the sole of his foot against his lower back and pulled hard with both arms—
The monk’s spine literally bent like a bow.
Then his body folded completely in half, and the back of his head met his own heel.
Cr-cr-cr-crack—
As a bonus, every disc in his spine seemed to herniate at once.
“An intruder!”
“Is he one of the city government’s dogs?!”
“Stop him! Stop him now!”
At last, the enemy noticed Jin.
Different exclamations burst from beneath their hoods, and they immediately launched a counterattack.
Some began chanting spells.
Some slashed open their forearms with knives to draw blood.
And one of them drew a gun...
Gravis! No—my baby! Why are you over there?!
Well, maybe not something he would happily stick in his eye...
But regardless, the moment Jin saw his beloved sidearm in someone else's hands, his eyes widened.
He was just about to charge straight at him—
“O wicked beast of the depths!”
Only then did someone finally finish the spell he had been mumbling all this time, shouting the last line at the top of his lungs.
Jin's attention shifted toward the voice.
And then he saw it.
A four-legged beast stretching itself as it emerged from the boiling pool of blood.
If someone had soaked a pit bull in blood for three straight days, perhaps it would have looked like that.
Its entire body was crimson, save for its gleaming white fangs. The muscular creature twitched its savage muzzle.
There were three of them.
Exactly the same number as the monks who had sliced open their forearms and let their blood drip onto the floor.
Roar!
The blood-bound beasts kicked off the ground.
Their ferocious presence was enough to make an ordinary person collapse on the spot.
But Jin did not panic.
He simply did not have to fight them.
After all, when dealing with summoned creatures, the most efficient strategy was always to kill the summoner.
Comic books.
Movies.
Games.
Novels.
More than a decade of accumulated wisdom across every form of media had already proven that.
There was no way Jin—a proper man of culture and an avid gamer—would be ignorant of such common knowledge.
Immediately, he whipped the chains in both hands into a storm.
Blink!
Blink!
Blink!
With almost no delay between teleports, the summoners were shredded apart.
“H-How?!”
“Impossible!”
Cries bordering on screams erupted from every direction.
The reason they were so shocked was simple.
Spatial teleportation was considered one of the hardest techniques to use effectively in real combat.
It required selecting precise coordinates within a three-dimensional space defined by the X, Y, and Z axes, then transferring both body and consciousness to that exact point.
Without an innate ability to convert two-dimensional visual information into a three-dimensional understanding, abusing such an ability was little more than suicide.
In short, one needed extraordinary spatial awareness and a profound understanding of the very concept of teleportation.
Jin happened to fulfill both demanding conditions perfectly.
The combination of a superhuman's senses and the forcibly implanted knowledge in his mind made his current movements possible.
CRAAASH!!
The last summoner collapsed beneath a chain swung with every ounce of Jin's strength.
At the same moment, the blood beasts that had done nothing but chase after Jin's flashing figure dissolved into puddles of blood and splattered across the floor.
A wave of dizziness suddenly hit him.
Jin staggered.
He had burned through too much mana, and his vision darkened.
Instinctively, he reached out to steady himself.
Only afterward did he realize what he had grabbed.
It was a large cylinder containing the skinned body of a human.
“Ugh! Damn it!”
Startled, Jin punched it on reflex.
Glass shattered.
The liquid inside poured out like a waterfall, and he hurriedly jumped backward to avoid it.
“No! You lunatic! Stop!”
“Do you have any idea what you're doing?!”
The few enemies remaining shouted desperately.
Judging by the horrified looks on their faces, Jin simply swung his arms.
One after another, he smashed every test tube within reach.
It was senseless destruction—
But to those on the receiving end, it was an absolute nightmare.
“Yooou baaastard!!”
As Jin spun around like a human windmill, spells fueled by offerings of blood and flesh came flying toward him.
Projectiles arced through the air.
Blink.
A fraction of a second faster.
Jin appeared squarely in the attacker's blind spot and threw a punch.
Crack!
By the time the sound of a skull fracturing echoed from the blow to the back of the monk's head—
Jin was already gone.
Instead, another monk who had been frantically looking from side to side had his neck snapped with a sickening crunch.
Only one enemy remained.
Jin casually nudged a corpse aside with his foot and spoke.
“Hey. Put it down. You can't even fire it anyway. Why cling to it so desperately?”
The last monk, standing on the blood-soaked floor with Gravis gripped in both hands, clenched his teeth.
“...I know who you are.”
“Me?”
“We've long heard rumors of the city's spatial mage... the Psyker. The information was only half true. They said you were a cold-faced woman...”
Jin narrowed his eyes.
Why was the city government suddenly entering the conversation?
Apparently, the man had misunderstood things rather spectacularly.
Well, people only saw what they expected to see.
It was a remarkably shallow deduction.
The fool had practically convinced himself that no one but government agents could possibly attack their factory.
“Whatever.”
Jin had no intention of correcting such narrow-minded thinking.
He simply strode forward.
“Give me back my gun. Then maybe I'll let you die without too much pain.”
The monk answered by raising Gravis beneath his own chin.
“You foolish unbeliever. Death is not the end. It is the beginning of everything.”
Without the slightest hesitation, he pulled the trigger.
BANG!!
The tremendous recoil hurled his body backward, and he crashed onto the floor.
“...”
Jin stared blankly at the corpse with its head blown apart.
He had never imagined the man would choose suicide.
Then—
Hissssss...
A foul stench filled the room.
The bodies of every dead monk began melting simultaneously.
Then, as though possessed by a will of their own, the liquefied flesh squirmed together into a single mass.
It happened in an instant.
The mass took the shape of a grotesque monster with two heads and four legs.
ROOOOOAR!!
A deafening roar bared five overlapping rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Jin let out a sigh heavy enough to sink the ground beneath him.
He bent down and picked up Gravis.
“What a crazy world. Now every damn thing imaginable is crawling out.”
He raised the gun toward the creature.
Then—
KRAAAAAK!!
A bolt of violet lightning shot past his shoulder and engulfed the monster.
Beneath the raging flashes of electricity, the gigantic creature writhed in agony—
Then its body blackened, charred, and crashed lifelessly to the floor.
Jin turned around without thinking.
The middle-aged man stood there.
One arm extended straight ahead.
A satisfied smile played across his lips.
He grinned.
“So? Doesn't that finally make me worthy of being your senior?”