"Now, it’s my turn."
Garza’s words hung in the freezing air like a suspended death sentence.
A microsecond later, he vanished.
Moving so fast it looked like a glitch in reality, he slammed into my chest, carrying a biting gale that reeked of blood.
I heard the crisp snap of my own sternum fracturing. At least three ribs caved in. I was launched backward, violently smashing through two crumbling brick walls before finally being buried deep beneath a pile of jagged rubble.
The air was punched from my lungs. The edges of my vision blacked out, and the heavy, metallic taste of rust flooded the back of my throat.
Crunch... crunch...
Heavy combat boots ground against the frost-covered dirt, a bone-jarring sound in the quiet ruins. Garza, the Wolf King, approached my makeshift grave with an aura of crushing arrogance. He was in no rush. Using that greatsword—a blade as wide as a steel door—he casually flicked aside the heavy wooden beams pinning me down like they were toothpicks.
"Tin toys can't save you, mortal."
Garza loomed over me, his voice a low thunder rolling deep in his massive chest. "Tell me. Where is the stray cat?"
He pressed the blood-dripping greatsword against my throat. The freezing edge bit painfully into my skin. "Where is the 'Royal Key' hanging around her neck? Hand it over, and I’ll leave enough of you to bury."
Through the agonizing pain, my brain shifted into overdrive, flooded by a massive spike of adrenaline. I remembered the intel extracted from the wolf scouts. His primary objective had always been Zayla's key.
That was the only 'Information Asymmetry' I could leverage. It was the only operational window I had left to survive the next five seconds.
I had to deliver the performance of a lifetime.
"Cough... cough..."
Clutching my caved-in chest plate, I faked extreme weakness, hacking up a mouthful of blood. I dragged my body backward through the rubble, perfectly mimicking the terrified death throes of cornered prey.
"The key... I have it... right here."
Gasping for air, my trembling hand reached inside my tactical vest.
Garza let out a cold, mocking laugh. His absolute supremacy made him careless. Instead of raising his guard against a dying human, he treated me like a rat caught in a trap, taking three massive strides forward to close the distance.
On my retinal UI panel, a green crosshair achieved hard lock on the cracked stone slab directly beneath the Wolf King’s boots.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
He stepped right into the kill box.
"My patience is exhausted, grub." Garza gripped his hilt with both hands, hoisting the massive greatsword high. Bone-chilling frost mana instantly condensed along the edge of the blade. "Hand it over, or I’ll carve open your chest and find it myself."
I didn't pull out a key.
My hand snapped out of the vest, gripping a crude alchemical flare gun. I didn't aim at the Wolf King. I aimed straight up at the suffocating, smog-choked sky.
I didn't waste oxygen on a one-liner. My tone was dead and flat.
BANG!
The recoil numbed my fractured wrist. A blindingly bright red phosphorus flare shot straight up into the clouds like a reverse meteor, emitting a shrill, ear-piercing whistle.
In the absolute darkness of the wasteland night, pupils are heavily dilated. The exact microsecond that the red flare tore into the sky, Garza’s eyeball moved independently of his conscious brain. Pure biological instinct forced him to track the blinding light.
Now.
A fatal, half-second visual blind spot.
I didn't try to stand. Using raw upper-body strength, I violently kicked off the rubble, throwing myself backward like a heavy stone.
CLANG!
I smashed through the iron grate behind me, dropping straight down into the pitch-black, bottomless chute of the sewer system.
[Perspective Shift: Zayla]
High above, Zayla clung to the heavily weathered, unstable demonic cliff overhang. Pressed flat against the freezing rock, she blended into the mountain like a shadow.
Suddenly, a blinding red flare shot up from the ruins, illuminating the wreckage below.
The Cat-kin Queen didn't hesitate for a microsecond.
"Shadow Blade."
Drawing her broken sword, she dumped every last drop of her mana into the steel. The black edge violently expanded. She drove the blade brutally into the weakest structural fissure at the base of the overhang—the exact load-bearing fulcrum Alex had mathematically calculated to its absolute breaking point.
"Die, monster."
[Perspective Shift: Sector C Ruins]
Garza realized too late that his prey had used a cheap parlor trick to slip down a hole.
"Damned insect!!!"
He roared in unhinged fury, preparing to channel a blast of frost mana to flash-freeze the entire sewer line.
But the sound coming from directly above drowned out his magic.
It wasn't thunder. It was the teeth-grinding shriek of millions of tons of solid rock tearing apart.
The sky was falling.
The Wolf King violently snapped his head up. In that single moment, reflected in the bloodshot, furious eye of this arrogant S-Rank powerhouse, was the most primal terror of a carbon-based organism.
Above his head, there was no magic.
Dictated by the absolute, unbreakable law of Gravitational Potential Energy, the cliff had sheared off. Fifty thousand tons of impossibly hard black rock dropped like an iron curtain, carrying the kinetic energy to annihilate anything in its path.
It smashed brutally down onto Garza’s head.
Tumbling down the steep sewer chute, I violently bounced against the darkness, finally crashing hard into the freezing, stagnant water of the deep-level bunker.
In the final second before the stench and absolute blackness swallowed me...
I heard the apocalyptic impact from above. The entire earth violently convulsed.
Dust rained from the basement ceiling. The sewage violently sloshed, as if I had just triggered a localized earthquake.
For a terrifying second, the thick, Old-World reinforced concrete of the chute groaned in absolute agony. The massive kinetic force tore through the upper bedrock, sending hairline fractures spiderwebbing across the ceiling. But the cylindrical architecture held. The pressure were deflected around the tunnel, absorbed by the surrounding earth.
Slumped against the moss-covered wall, I gasped for air...
I closed my eyes, letting the darkness pull me into a hard reboot.
The trap is sprung. The mountain falls.
Question of the Day: Is this overkill?
(Click to evaluate the damage)
?? A) Yes.
Result: The Pacifist's Complaint. "Did you really need to use 50 tons of rock for one wolf?" Alex: "Yes. He had a lot of HP. Better safe than sorry."
?? B) No, it's engineering.
Result: The Safety Factor. In engineering, we don't call it "Overkill." We call it "Ensuring a Safety Margin of 5000%." Gravity is free energy; it would be wasteful not to use it.
?? C) There is no such thing as overkill, only "Open Fire" and "Reload."
Result: Maxim 37. The Absolute Truth. If the enemy is still recognizable as a solid object, you haven't used enough high explosives yet. Rating: Satisfactory.
Follow and Rate. The dust settles in the next chapter.