Chapter 51 :Thinning Out (3)

“A bold presence showing not even a hint of concealment… Did you come alone? To steal my card?”

“The good reputation you have among the Jincheon class is all thanks to Tsubaki Fuyuno, but you don’t even realize that. I’ll personally show you what kind of end awaits a lone lamb cast out into the wild.”

Ranked 40th, Beast Tamer Gapari Fatima.

A superhuman who commands three tamed beasts as if they were her limbs: a two-headed snake, a giant venom-spike rat, and a poison-fanged giant lizard.

She was a villain who, during large-scale beast outbreaks, would hide her venomous creatures among the chaos and use them to carry out terror attacks against the cadets.

Of course, she was merely following her country’s orders to eliminate promising students of Daecheon.

Whether she acted out of her own will was unclear—but that didn’t matter.

Crash! Boom!!!

“W-What? My poison-fanged lizard… taken out in one hit?!”

The only thing that mattered to me was this: she was going to interfere with my plan.

Tsk.

Feeling the impact of the lizard’s massive skull being smashed under my punch, I clicked my tongue, then kicked off the ground and sprinted forward.

Screeeech!!!

Fwhoosh-whoosh-whoosh!

Sensing danger after seeing its comrade killed in one punch and a blast, the giant venom-spike rat fired all its spikes in a panic, despite not yet receiving an order.

Honestly, that rat’s instincts are better than some people’s.

The venom spikes, like rain pouring from the sky, filled my vision.

Each one was lethal.

Each spike carried paralysis and neurotoxin—getting hit even once was not an option.

“Y-Yeah! Just turn into a human pincushion and writhe in pain before you die!”

Gapari Fatima, previously stunned by the sudden death of her poison-fanged lizard, regained her composure under the rain of spikes and smiled victoriously.

But her smile didn’t last long.

Snap—BOOM!!!

“Wha?!”

The moment I flicked my fingers forward, an explosion erupted, scattering the venom spikes in all directions, completely nullifying their momentum.

My fingers ached from handling the explosion of Solar Subsystem mana—but I could handle it.

“All spent now.”

Blocking the full barrage of that giant venom-spike rat’s attack with just two cracked fingers?

That was a total win in my book.

“Then it’s time to die.”

Having approached without taking serious damage, I aimed a clean soccer kick right at the head of the now spike-less rat—nothing more than an oversized rodent.

Crunch—BOOM!

I felt the rat’s jaw shatter beneath my instep, and the burst of Solar Subsystem mana blew its head clean off.

Thud.

The headless hunk of meat that had been the giant rat crumpled lifelessly to the ground.

“Phew, rat’s down too.”

After turning two of them into boneless meat, I turned my head to go deal with Gapari Fatima—only to see her aiming her outstretched arm at me.

She struck a pose like she was about to fire off an energy blast, and when I played along by standing still for a second, she smirked with a twisted grin and shouted—

“Die!”

Sssrrrk—Shhhhk!

At the same time, a two-headed snake shot out from Gapari Fatima’s wide sleeves like a harpoon.

Launching a venomous beast with two heads from her sleeve was one of Fatima’s desperation patterns.

New players encountering her for the first time often fell victim to this ambush, then ended up cursing the developers’ parents.

“WTF is this? Why the hell is a venomous snake flying out of her sleeve?” — posting game-over screenshots on the Legend of Reversal Heroes community became something of a meme.

That’s how fast and vicious Gapari Fatima’s two-headed snake was.

But ambushes lose all meaning the moment the opponent knows they’re coming.

Grab.

“Hiss?”

BOOM!

I already knew about the two-headed snake.

The moment it launched at me, I grabbed its body and triggered an explosion from my palm.

Rattle-rattle-rip.

And just like that, the two-headed snake became a mess of shredded body parts and two decapitated heads.

Without sparing even a glance at the snake’s remains, I strode straight toward Gapari Fatima.

“Wh-what? H-how…?”

Completely neutralized, Gapari Fatima looked up at me wide-eyed, unable to believe all her beasts had been taken out in an instant.

Naturally, I had no obligation to answer.

I just silently threw a clenched fist at her face.

Crack—Boom!

Thud!

Without her beasts from her homeland, she was less than the thugs in the general class.

I took the card from her collapsed body—her face smashed in and unconscious—and moved on to the next target.

***

Hunting the third and fourth targets was way easier than taking down Gapari Fatima.

Rank 37, Ivanov Yelena, and Rank 32, Zoe Ioannu Demitrianou, were a mage and a spirit summoner, respectively.

Though their classes differed, both dealt in mystical arts, and their core characteristic was the same:

They fought using magic or spirits from long range.

Which meant that despite their high damage potential, their actual bodies were pathetically weak.

“You are… Yang Woobin? Alone? A man like you wandering around such an eerie place all by himself… you’re either very brave or—”

BOOM!

“Huh?”

Crack! KA-BOOM!

“A man…? You’re Yang Woobin? Alone? Wow, you’re fearless. Or maybe… just unlucky? If you’d been hiding under Tsubaki Fuyuno’s skirt like always, maybe you’d have gotten lucky and picked up a white card to survive… What a sha—”

BOOM!

“Huh?”

Crack! KA-BOOM!!!

Both of them were spouting some nonsense the moment I showed up alone through the bushes, but I didn’t miss the timing.

I kicked off the ground and rushed them with full force, landing a punch to the face before they could even think about casting magic or summoning spirits.

I fought Chao Mingming and Gapari Fatima exactly as expected and won exactly as planned.

But these two were even easier to deal with than expected.

Because they were completely off guard.

“So this is how it goes… It only happened because I’m a guy.”

That little show during the promotion match—going all out just to defeat trash like Choi Ingyu—definitely contributed to making the other targets let their guard down.

But more than anything else, it seemed that the fundamental belief ingrained in the superhuman world was what made them drop their guard.

‘A male superhuman can never become as strong as a female superhuman.’

A basic, widespread belief throughout the global superhuman society—one rooted in the physical differences between men and women.

Everyone I faced had let their guard down because of that obvious, foundational knowledge: that a man with only one mana core could never surpass a woman who had two.

“This world… living as a man in it might actually not be so bad.”

As long as I was male, things like this would happen regularly.

No matter how strong I became, there would always be female superhumans who looked down on me or underestimated me.

But that wasn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, it was a good thing—very good.

For someone like me who’d have to win countless battles to survive, gaining such a powerful tool to make my enemies drop their guard… was something to be happy about.

“Heheh.”

So I allowed myself a moment of joy, then wiped the smile off my face and continued moving forward.

“Honestly, finding these guys is harder than actually fighting them.”

Toward my final prey—the one enemy who wouldn’t fall for the ‘male superhuman’ advantage.

***

While Yang Woobin was busting his ass hunting down the terrorists threatening Daecheon and going through hell…

Tsubaki Fuyuno, who had been teleported along with Jin Sejeong, found herself in a very awkward situation.

“…”

“…”

Sitting alone in a cave with Jin Sejeong.

‘Why is the disciplinary committee president following me…? She said she didn’t know where Woobin went and didn’t plan on meeting him either. So why did she follow me into this nicely dark, damp cave I found for myself?’

Tsubaki Fuyuno had heard about the purge beforehand from Yang Woobin, and he had told her not to come looking for him.

And since Tsubaki always listened to Woobin no matter what, she had planned to just hide out somewhere and train her abilities during the purge.

But that plan was blown to bits the moment she got teleported together with Jin Sejeong.

Because Jin Sejeong had kept following her non-stop.

Even when she said she wasn’t looking for Woobin, even when she said she had no idea where he was, even when she entered a dark cave—Jin Sejeong followed her all the way.

And now, here they were.

“…”

“…”

The silence was suffocating.

The one to finally break it was Jin Sejeong, who hadn’t spoken a word until now.

“So… you and Woobin really aren’t, like, a thing, right?”

“…What?”

Girls’ Talk begins…!