Ch.251Work Record No. 035 – A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (6)

After tossing aside the Flechette Carbine, I drew Small Evil. While an ordinary pistol couldn’t penetrate the bulletproof walls of a safe house, Small Evil was no ordinary pistol.

I tracked Copyright’s movements and pulled the trigger toward the wall. Perfect bullet-sized holes appeared in the wall, but I couldn’t see Copyright on the other side.

I’d overlooked the fact that he wouldn’t move along a predictable path. Even though I myself prefer hiding above the line of sight, I’d assumed this Copyright would walk down the stairs.

He must have already gone downstairs. He wouldn’t run away, but he certainly wouldn’t wait around while I gained an advantageous position.

I leap toward the stairs, habitually checking above me. We all had our own unconventional movement patterns. We all had our reversal tactics.

His preferences weren’t similar to mine. In that subtle moment when I paused to check above, I heard the vibration of a high-frequency blade coming from beneath my feet. Below me.

The wooden floor split as his fingertips emerged, making my footing unstable, but it didn’t affect my ability to jump. I leaped lightly, though not as high as usual. I grabbed the wall with one hand.

His arm, segmented like a mollusk’s, extended upward, nearly grazing my nose—I barely avoided it by tilting my chin up. Adrenaline surged through me, making adrenal stimulants unnecessary.

I lowered Small Evil’s muzzle and pulled the trigger. The burst of armor-piercing rounds scraped through the floor where he was hiding. The smell of blood erupted, but the wound didn’t seem serious.

His arm’s trajectory wasn’t directly below but veered to the right. Just as I had dodged his hand, he seemed to have moved immediately while extending his arm.

This was genuinely, indescribably enjoyable. I aimed along the trajectory of his retreating arm, calculating the length his arm could extend and… anticipating he would use another deception.

I deliberately aimed in the opposite direction of his retreating arm and pulled the trigger. Though I didn’t even hear a brief held breath, this time I saw a metallic prosthetic arm emerging from inside.

I hit better than my previous burst. I was one step ahead. If so, I needed to look two steps ahead. When you’ve gained an advantage, run faster. Overtaking isn’t the goal—it’s the starting point.

Never be satisfied with merely overtaking. Think about advancing faster. What he currently lacks is ranged firepower. I have Small Evil, but he’s empty-handed.

Considering that he can move as freely as I can at my level, the place he’ll aim for is… the second floor where I threw away my gun. I reload Small Evil and grab a coin-sized electric shocker.

I hear his voice from downstairs. Don’t be fooled. It’s deception. The kind of deception I often use. I ignored the feeling of realizing how much I’ve lived like an assassin. I was just doing my job.

“Has Bellwether developed the technology to see through walls now? Damn, even trying to attack through walls… you’re completely predictable.”

I attach a voice module at about my height near the stairs leading downstairs. I spoke through the voice module:

“Not Bellwether, but the Greeks developed it. This isn’t technology to see through walls…”

The moment my voice sounded, I heard something from downstairs. The sound of an injector administering drugs. He hadn’t come upstairs or spoken to deceive me.

This was a stalling tactic. I knew what component was embedded in his nape. I recalled the drug injector at least four or five times larger than the one I had equipped. He was buying time to safely inject his drugs.

But he apparently hadn’t considered that the Type IV’s performance could detect even that sound. I pulled the trigger first, then continued speaking with my own mouth.

Small Evil’s armor-piercing rounds penetrated the bulletproof panels in the wall. The bullets seemed to have lost considerable velocity penetrating the panels. They embedded in Copyright’s bulletproof helmet without piercing it.

“It’s called logical deduction.”

While it was good that I’d developed the habit of shooting before speaking, I should have remembered that Small Evil’s enhanced ammunition wasn’t a cookie-cutter. It could be called inexperience.

Still, I’d located him. I retrieved the voice module while descending the stairs and aimed at where Copyright had been standing. He wasn’t visible. I glanced upward again. This time I wasn’t wrong.

Attacking from outside the field of vision is a fundamental virtue of an assassin. Just as I move along walls and ceilings, that Copyright was clinging to the ceiling, using it as a foothold to leap toward me.

At least I hadn’t been acting like an incompetent fool. I stepped on the mat at the bottom of the stairs with just one foot, pushing myself backward into a controlled fall. This created time to aim Small Evil.

As my center of gravity shifted backward, in that instant of both losing and maintaining balance, I blocked the sharp high-frequency blade fingertips of the Copyright leaping from above by extending my left forearm.

Though falling backward had created some distance from his overhead swing, I hadn’t completely evaded his attack. I’d barely bought enough time to aim Small Evil.

A sharp pain shot through my forearm as skin and flesh were carved away. It didn’t last long. Though the cut was deep, it wasn’t serious enough to impede combat.

With adrenaline surging, making adrenal stimulants unnecessary, all I felt was heat. With the Copyright bearing down on me with no escape route, I pressed Small Evil’s muzzle almost against his chest and squeezed the trigger.

The heavy recoil of Small Evil was absorbed by my shock-absorbing body. This Copyright, who hadn’t shown proper pain even when grazed by a shot or two, now gasped for breath several times.

With nearly fifteen bullets piercing his chest, instant death wouldn’t have been surprising, but a Copyright wouldn’t die from just this. His blood was blue.

Not blood. Preservative fluid. He must have already injected a blood modifier. Though he coughed up blue preservative fluid, the wounds on his chest were being sealed with a bluish scab.

It was just a hemostatic effect. After the preservative fluid forcibly supplied oxygen for a few minutes, the Copyright would die. But for those few minutes, I had to face a biological weapon on adrenal stimulants.

The Copyright swung his prosthetic arm again, but this time it wasn’t vibrating. A long, sharp needle-like object had emerged from beneath the high-frequency blade. Probably a poison injector.

He was aiming for… my forearm, already sliced open by the high-frequency blade with exposed muscle. He knew a regular needle wouldn’t easily penetrate and was handling it cleanly.

Feeling blood flowing down from the cut surface under my black suit, I blocked his downward prosthetic by grasping it like interlocked fingers. Even with adrenal stimulants allowing me to use strength without regard for my body, that only applied to flesh.

Machines ignore drugs and poisons. A prosthetic arm doesn’t get stronger because of adrenal stimulants. I gripped his prosthetic arm with increasing force.

I could block his downward strike, but the material wasn’t weak enough to break. I needed to take different measures.

I threw away Small Evil, which I had no time to reload, and grabbed his chest with my right hand. I clutched the membrane of hardened preservative fluid that was forcibly stopping the bleeding from his chest, which was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese.

I gathered strength in my tendons, replaced with metal coils, and tore away a handful of the hardened preservative membrane that was stopping the bleeding. Blue preservative fluid, warmed to about human body temperature, poured over my helmet and began to harden again.

I’d shortened the time he could remain alive. He roughly pulled out his prosthetic arm and tried to step back, as if surrendering to the instinct of not wanting to die. I rose in that opening.

But he didn’t run away. He didn’t beg for his life. Rather, as if ashamed of having taken even one step back on instinct, he struck his own helmet with his prosthetic arm.

“Right. I’m dying here because I’ve become this weak. Someone who steps back because they don’t want to die in four minutes instead of five can’t win against someone who fights with a smile.”

His prosthetic arm rippled smoothly before reshaping into a human arm. Like a beast extending and retracting its claws, he smoothly vibrated the blades at each fingertip and extended and retracted the needles.

“Can I kill you and Polaris within four minutes? No. Can I do something else meaningful? No. Whatever I do, it’s all meaningless. Right.”

From him came not the voice of a human but the howl of a beast. He threw off his helmet, which had cracked from Small Evil’s armor-piercing rounds.

Inside that helmet was an ordinary person. His eyes were prosthetics that could adjust light like a beast’s eyes, and his jaw was reinforced with metal.

I worried that his talk about meaninglessness meant he wouldn’t fight, but he gladly proved that the bestial howl I’d heard wasn’t wrong.

“Because it’s all meaningless, I’ll go all the way. I’ll push to the very end. I’ll exhaust my strength to the absolute bottom, and then… naturally, I’ll be eliminated like the weak should be. Right!”

He charged at me again with his face exposed. His expression seemed almost serene—a result of adrenal stimulants and endorphin secretors eliminating pain while maximizing concentration.

Or perhaps it truly was serenity. Nothing had meaning. Defeating or killing me here, escaping—everything was meaningless.

Only then did he choose what he enjoyed and loved. Not because he believed survival of the fittest kept the industry healthy. Not because he believed it was the right principle for the world.

He chose it purely because he loved that world of survival of the fittest with all his heart. How refreshing that must feel… I could almost envy that sensation of exhausting oneself.

I threw off my helmet too. I decided to give him a chance in the last four minutes of his life. Now we faced each other, and neither of us wore particularly unpleasant expressions. We were both enjoying ourselves.

His prosthetic hand, momentarily fixed in human form, began to bend like a mollusk’s body again. He swung it in a wide arc, adding centrifugal force. A movement I could easily dodge and create an opening from… suddenly stopped.

The widely swinging arm realigned into human form and thrust forward with its fingertips. The fingertips moved so fast that even Type IV eyes could barely track them, making it impossible to grab. I barely dodged with superhuman reflexes.

I had no intention of waiting for him to die either. I stepped toward him as he appeared to be dying, pale from the fluid filling his skin. I dove inside his extended prosthetic arm.

He fought truly desperately. The moment I dove into his embrace, he gritted his teeth and exhaled a dense yellowish-green gas. Judging by my burning skin membranes, it was a nerve agent.

But that was the extent of it. Ignoring the poison gas that merely reddened Type IV skin, I stabbed my high-frequency tactical dagger into his abdomen. I sliced sideways. More blue fluid poured out.

He hurriedly withdrew his arm, struck my chest to create distance, and raised his prosthetic arm without the poison injector. His wrist, not opening properly, detached completely, and he aimed the grenade launcher inside at me.

It was a thermite grenade like Rozashan had shown. The fist-sized metal piece began rotating along the rifling in the forearm frame. It flew toward me. I regained my momentarily shaken balance and charged at the Copyright.

Explosives have a minimum safe distance. I blocked the grenade launcher in his prosthetic arm with my palm to prevent the grenade from properly launching. The thermite grenade misfired.

Despite failure after failure, he seemed unwilling to stay still. He thrust with the severed end of his wristless prosthetic. I caught it.

He tried to create even a small opening by pulling his captured forearm outward, then aimed to stab my side with his other prosthetic hand, fingers formed into a single blade.

But the high-frequency function wasn’t working properly. The middle and ring fingers penetrated somewhat, but the wound wasn’t serious because the other fingers weren’t vibrating. He was gradually breaking down.

Yet unlike when he took that one step back, he didn’t look ashamed. Perhaps because in a situation where his entire body was breaking down, only fighting and exhausting himself to the end mattered.

Soon his prosthetic control system malfunctioned too, causing his arm to go limp. He staggered slightly. Perhaps the bullets to his head had some effect after all.

But he still didn’t seem willing to let me finish him easily. The weakness itself was a feint. When I paused upon seeing this, he whipped his malfunctioning arm like a flail.

It was almost admirable that he could manage such movement with just shoulder strength while his face had turned corpse-white… but it no longer felt threatening.

I grabbed the wrist of his swinging prosthetic. I stabbed my now-vibrating high-frequency tactical dagger into that wrist and cut along the limp arm.

With his neural feedback system also malfunctioning, he showed no signs of pain. Only his eyes remained full of fierce vitality. His eyes were full of fighting spirit, but his body wouldn’t cooperate.

He tremblingly raised one leg. He tried to strike even my instep with the positioning stake pulled from his prosthetic leg. I easily withdrew my foot and kicked his knee, breaking it. I forced him to kneel.

Now he had truly exhausted himself to the absolute bottom. He had tried everything, and everything had failed. Could it be called a dignified failure? He had decided to push on regardless.

As the preservative fluid’s forced oxygen supply was ending, he barely moved his lips to mutter something. No voice came out. A moment later, the voice module that had fallen to the floor spoke for him:

“Kill me. The weak should rightfully be eliminated. If you’re thinking of leaving me here to die slowly…”

What was he going to say? I didn’t care. With respect, I grabbed his head and stabbed my high-frequency tactical dagger into the back of his skull. His speech stopped. I twisted the blade to cleanly end his life.

In a world where cardiac death isn’t considered true death, the death of gray matter was the certain, perfect death. The unmanned cameras watching our fight greedily transmitted the footage.

There would be no need for a report. I returned to the second floor, unstained by his blue preservative blood or the blood and flesh of other assassins. I opened the closet in the bedroom. The equipment box was visible.

The equipment box… was open. The booby trap, precisely installed like a music box, had been remotely deactivated. I checked the access log.

The equipment box, which was supposed to lock and activate its booby trap using his brainwave cessation as a dead man’s switch, had been remotely unlocked. The timing… was during his speech through the voice module.

Perhaps his computational assist device had been queued to relock the box and arm the booby trap seconds later. With both his gray matter and computational assist destroyed, it was impossible to know now.

Since the dead tell no tales, I decided, quite arbitrarily and self-righteously… that this must be his response to my respect. It was the rightful privilege of the victor.