Chapter 80: First Shot… Arrow? (Second update, seeking first subscription)
On Loop Plaza, the depraved party was reaching its climax.
This area had been ruled by the Skeleton Iron Society for many years. No gang had dared touch this territory for a long time. The thugs in charge here, aside from bleeding dry every target they could afford to bully, could only vent their excess energy through wild revelry.
Inside massive holographic billboards, models dressed scandalously performed frenzied dances. Towers of shoddy speakers pumped bass into the humid air. The cloying scent of psychoactive drugs fermented in the air, mixed with body odor, brewing a depraved, damp stench.
The ear-piercing sounds carried far, yet no one tried to stop them. The district’s peace officers (Note 1) only cared about factories, technical schools, and proper apartment complexes. Beyond that, as long as it didn’t affect the city’s main framework, they wouldn’t take the initiative to risk their lives for that meager salary.
Beneath the night sky, over a dozen Skeleton Iron Society grunts were already sprawled about. The cold flash of needleless injectors flickered across their necks and arms before vanishing. What followed was increasingly loud, manic laughter and cursing.
“I collected eight hundred today again! That old bastard was still yapping at me. I jammed the needle into his neck, and the guy shut right up. Heh, didn’t he think? How could something this good be cheap for him?”
A thug with cheap metal replacements covering half his face sprayed spit as he waved the empty injector in his hand. Hearing this, the thug beside him immediately felt competitive and, feigning disdain, flaunted the crackling knuckle dusters in his hand—
“Eight hundred is chicken shit! I recruited three ‘fresh goods’ into the society. My cut is enough to party for a month! See this? Electric. Name brand!”
“Your off-brand crap counts as a name brand? Look at my new [Bleep—], this is a name brand!”
“Holy shit, which dumb [Bleep—] installed that for you? This thing costs tens of thousands, right? So, was it worth the price?”
Filthy language and boasts about their “accomplishments” fermented and swelled amidst the hallucinatory lights and shadows, as if to saturate this district with sin and madness. Listening to his underlings brag, Du Xie’s cyan-black skin gleamed with a metallic luster under the shifting lights. On the mechanical skeleton tattoo symbolizing his status, rivets faintly reflected light with the rise and fall of his chest.
He had his arm around a woman in fluorescent fabric with hollow eyes, his hand roaming indecently. The woman smiled numbly, letting him do as he pleased.
“All of you shut the fuck up!” Du Xie suddenly roared for no reason, baring his mouth in a cold grin that revealed his cheap gold inlays. “You’ve wasted my song!”
He viciously pinched the woman in his arms, drawing a short cry of pain. This only excited him more. The surrounding clamor of his minions lowered slightly, only to be pushed higher by a new wave of narcotics.
Du Xie was immensely pleased with himself. He tilted his head back and took a gulp of cheap synthetic spirits, savoring the sensation of his esophagus burning.
He was calculating this month’s “performance,” figuring out how long it would take to get his hands on that coveted prosthetic.
He had a decent relationship with Young Master Theodore, and his performance had ranked near the top these past years. As long as he could get his hands on a four-star prosthetic, no matter how lousy, he could become an officer. By then, he’d naturally have plenty of ways to trade up.
“I heard Young Master Theodore is a bit bored lately. Maybe I can find some entertainment and get some reward money from him? As long as the young master casually drops a few scraps, I can…”
As if accompanying his dreams, a meteor seemed to streak through his peripheral vision. Before a single thought could form, an extremely faint buzzing—one that should have been completely swallowed by the music and noise—seemed instead to sound directly inside his mind.
The woman Du Xie held suddenly felt the pain in her chest vanish. Immediately after came an incomprehensible, bizarre sound, and a warm, sticky wetness splattering across her body.
A sphere, still warm, landed on her chest, bounced, then fell, spinning round and round. And within the gradually fading red light, a belated warning no longer had the chance to be issued—
[Warning! Ultra-high kinetic object approaching!]
“Ahhhhhhh—!”
A piercing scream temporarily suppressed the chaos on the scene. The thugs who had subconsciously turned around because of Du Xie’s cursing now found their brains nearly grinding to a halt.
Time seemed to freeze at this moment.
When the bar girl’s brief scream ceased, all that remained was the arrow that had pierced through Du Xie’s skull and was still embedded half a foot into the ground, humming faintly as it trembled.
Thump!
Thump!
Thump!
The silence stretched on, as if no one was willing to believe the information their senses were receiving.
Then…
Click.
The crossbow bolt embedded over half a foot into the alloy ground suddenly emitted a strange sound. The collective heartbeat of the entire place skipped a beat. Following the survival instincts of street life, even the junkies already too blitzed to remember their own names subconsciously threw themselves to the ground.
There was indeed a mechanical catch on the alloy shaft that had just sprung open, but instead of the explosion the thugs were imagining, what followed was a playing card that had been curled inside a cramped space and could finally unfurl.
The metal card popped out from the shaft like clockwork. Accompanied by a soft snap, it embedded itself into the billboard standing at the edge of the plaza.
A wing-spread demon joker revealed a mocking grin, its eyes seeming to reflect the blood and chaos of this very moment.
That scarlet “Jo” signature seemed written in Du Xie’s blood.
“Ah!”
As if finally waking from the sudden incident, the thugs who had barely shaken off the drug effects let out waves of panicked shouts—
“Boss! The boss’s head exploded!”
“Enemy attack! There’s a sniper!”
“Run! Run for it!”
The thugs who had been immersed in the pleasure of violence and drugs mere moments ago now scattered and fled like startled cockroaches, scrambling and crawling. The tower of speakers was knocked over, and harsh electrical static combined with the dull thud of the overturned equipment joined the accompaniment of this rout.
The plaza was a mess. Only Du Xie’s headless corpse remained, still twitching slightly from the residual vitality of its flesh and blood.
“Whew~”
John slowly straightened his body. The concealment of [Mirage] had already faded the moment he fired. He folded the compound crossbow whose string had already snapped, turned around, and leaped off the elevated platform.
“Using the Impact Hand as an activator worked better than expected. Unfortunately, energy utilization is still a bit lacking. Too much energy dissipated—even the bowstring snapped… I’ll have to research how to concentrate more power into the bolt… Also, the force from my arm and the force from the crossbow mechanism didn’t stack well. At best they added separately. I’ll need to fine-tune that later. I’m not asking for independent multiplicative scaling, but at least the [Weapon Reinforcement] skill needs to benefit from both sides simultaneously…”
The night wind stirred the loose hair on his forehead, interrupting this technician’s subconscious post-mortem. He picked up his instrument case. [Dark Canopy] silently unfolded. He turned around and walked down the maintenance ladder he had come from. The black figure quickly merged into the deep shadows of the tower, as if he had never appeared.
Note 1: Public security (excluding private security) varies by location. The Trash Zone has none at all.
In the Block District, they are peace officers. The pay isn’t high—only around twenty credits a day—but it barely counts as public service, with dorms and a cafeteria.
The Building District is split into two systems: the guard corps and security. The guard corps handles “conventional” incidents, while the security system belongs to individual corporations. Simply put, if someone is firing wildly on the street, that’s the guard corps’ job. If someone is shooting at a corporate storefront, office building, or laboratory, that’s security’s job. The pay is good, with commission. They already count as corporate dogs. If you can make team lead, you might even score a Building District residency permit.
The Spire District is impressive—the former military police. High wages, great benefits, equipment all at least full four-star sets. They are the dogs of the Spire District’s big shots and generally don’t leave the Spire District. Of course, that’s during working hours. The nature of their work guarantees them the best perks. It’s perfectly normal for them to come down below and throw their weight around on their days off.
As for Heaven… Heaven has no public police force.