Chapter 361: Battle Royale [II / Bonus - ]
"AHHHHHHHHH!"
The man clutched his ruined inverted leg.
Before the man’s scream even finished echoing off the Null-stone bars, Silas had already moved on.
He pivoted flawlessly on his heel with his cloth whipping around his knees.
"Ah! Fuck you!"
"You bastard!"
The second and third enforcers charged him simultaneously from the left and right flanks.
They roared, throwing a furious coordinated flurry of heavy brutal boxing hooks aimed at his jaw and temples.
SWISH! WHOOSH! SWIPE!
Silas moved like a ghost in the dust.
His Rip-Current Perception processed their muscle twitches and predicted their strikes a full half-second before their fists even fired forward.
He slipped seamlessly between their crossing punches. He wove his torso left, then right, ducking under a massive right hook with flawless millimeter-perfect precision.
They were swinging at a shadow.
"That won’t be enough... you know?"
Silas stepped directly between them. He reached his left hand out, grabbing the second man tightly by the throat.
He didn’t try to punch him as he simply used the man’s own forward momentum against him.
Silas twisted his hips, effortlessly lifting the heavy enforcer off his feet, and hurled him violently sideways directly into the charging path of the third man.
CRACK!
Their skulls collided mid-air with a sickening crack of bone against bone.
Both enforcers instantly went limp with their eyes rolling back into their heads.
They dropped simultaneously, falling completely unconscious into the blood-soaked mud at Silas’s feet.
Three down... Three left...
The fourth man stopped his charge. He stared at the three bodies on the ground, entirely terrified by the incomprehensible speed of the man in front of him.
Panic took over his training. The man reached into his waistband and pulled out a smuggled serrated hunting knife.
"Die, you freak!" the man screamed, abandoning the semi-circle formation. He lunged blindly, sprinting forward to plunge the steel directly into Silas’s exposed back.
Silas didn’t even turn around.
He didn’t need to see the man to know his exact coordinates and Silas simply planted his left boot into the dirt.
He executed a flawless blindingly fast spinning back-kick.
THUD!
His heavy combat boot caught the charging man squarely in the center of the chest.
The force didn’t just stop the man’s momentum as it completely caved in his sternum, driving the bone directly back into his lungs.
The man was launched backward through the air, flying ten feet across the dirt.
He slammed violently back-first into the towering glowing bars of the Null-stone cage.
BZZZZZT!
The anti-magic field reacted to the violent physical contact as a massive surge of blue electrical energy discharged from the stone bars, electrocuting the man instantly.
His body spasmed wildly against the cage for two seconds before slumping lifelessly to the ground with smoke rising from his tactical vest.
Only two men remained of the original six-man coordinated gang.
They completely froze in their tracks.
They lowered their fists, staring in soul-crushing horror at the masked demon standing amidst the carnage.
"Aren’t you going to... come at me?"
He had just dismantled their entire elite crew in less than four seconds.
The fifth man’s survival instincts finally kicked in as he dropped his brass knuckles into the dirt.
He turned around and began to sprint away, desperately trying to run back into the chaotic anonymity of the main Battle Royale.
"No you don’t." Silas muttered quietly to himself.
Silas closed the distance in a single explosive burst of raw speed. The dirt literally exploded beneath his boots, leaving a small crater where he had stood.
He crossed fifteen feet in the blink of an eye.
He grabbed the fleeing man forcefully by the thick Kevlar collar of his tactical vest but Silas didn’t slow down.
"Where do you get off thinking you can run?"
He effortlessly hauled the man’s entire two-hundred-and-twenty-pound body weight straight up into the air above his head, holding him suspended for a brief terrifying second.
With ruthless power, Silas brought his right leg up and then he drove his leg straight down in a devastating vertical axe kick.
The reinforced heel of his combat boot slammed precisely into the back of the suspended man’s skull.
KRA-CRUNCH!
Silas drove the man’s face violently straight down into the hard, packed dirt of the arena floor.
BOOM!
The impact caused the ground to physically shudder as a small circular crater formed in the packed earth around the man’s buried head.
The enforcer went instantly limp with his arms splayed out awkwardly, buried completely up to his ears in the mud.
He didn’t twitch anymore.
Silas slowly lowered his leg, turning his masked face toward the final survivor.
The sixth and final man didn’t even try to run... He didn’t try to fight.
He immediately dropped heavily to his knees in the dirt. He threw his hands high up into the air, trembling violently with tears of pure terror streaking down his dirty face in a desperate surrender.
’Damn...’
Silas stared down at the trembling man for a long second.
Then, Silas simply ignored him. He stepped casually past the sobbing thug, leaving him alive in the dust.
Suddenly, a subtle dangerous shift in the air currents caught Silas’s attention.
His Rip-Current Perception detected a minute flex of muscles thirty feet away.
The original street thug from the very first punch... the one he had blasted twenty feet into the crowd was not dead.
He was still groaning on the ground, clutching his shattered ribs but he was desperate.
He was utterly humiliated and he was enraged beyond all logical reason.
’Don’t tell me he’s going t—’
The thug slowly reached over with his good arm. He pressed a hidden release latch on his left forearm and a hidden compartment popped open in his cheap cybernetic arm.
’Why do I even try?’
He reached inside and pulled out a small illegal kinetic pistol.
The thug raised his trembling arm, aiming the barrel directly at the back of Silas’s dark clothes, fully intending to shoot the distracted demon in the back and claim the glory.
"I got you..." the thug whispered, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Silas didn’t even flinch.
He knew the unbreakable rules of the arena significantly better than the desperate drug-addled fool lying in the dirt did.
CRACK!
A heavy high-velocity kinetic slug rained down from the dark shadowed catwalks high above the Null-stone cage.
The sniper shot was flawless and it hit the thug squarely in his left shoulder.
SPLAT!
The massive caliber bullet didn’t just pierce the flesh.
It completely blew the man’s cybernetic arm and the illegal, smuggled pistol entirely off his torso in a horrifying explosion of hot blood, shattered bone, and sparking metal shrapnel.
"AGGGHHHHHH!" the thug shrieked, rolling in the dirt as arterial blood geysered from his missing shoulder socket.
The strict lethal enforcement of the Underworld snipers had cleared the cowardly threat before Silas even had to turn around to address it himself.
The overwhelming brutality of Silas’s blistering counter-attack, combined with the explosive sniper intervention, created a massive visible circle in his specific quadrant of the arena.
Dozens of brawling fighters had stopped their matches to watch the slaughter and now, they frantically backed away, pushing against each other just to put more distance between themselves and the terrifying man.
They completely refused to even look in the general direction of the silver Oni mask.
The place cleared up a bit, giving Silas a wide comfortable radius of room to breathe.
"Haah..."
He stood alone in the center of the carnage with a pile of broken bodies scattered around his boots.
But the empty peaceful space didn’t last long.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Heavy mechanically enhanced footsteps echoed loudly over the packed dirt, cutting through the noise of the surrounding brawls.
The remaining crowd of fighters actively parted like water. They stumbled out of the way, making a wide path for the undisputed recognized apex predator of the fighting pit.
The massive tattooed Mantis guy approached Silas.
He walked with the slow arrogant swagger of a man who owned the very ground he stepped on.
His bulging steroid-pumped body looked incredibly grotesque up close. His muscles were so unnaturally massive that the tribal tattoos stretching across his chest and arms were physically warped and distorted.
His bright green angular metal Mantis mask gleamed sharply under the harsh stadium lights.
Silas stood perfectly still, watching the giant approach.
With his glowing blue enhanced eyes, Silas could see the thick, pulsing, purple veins bulging violently on the giant’s thick neck.
The Boss’s son was actively circulating his massive pool of internal mana.
He was pushing his physical strength, his bone density, and his muscle fibers to an unnatural extreme.
’Ah but it’s not enough...’
He was breaking every biological limit his body possessed but still... Silas was not impressed.
The giant stopped exactly ten feet away from Silas.
"You," the Mantis brute growled, his voice a deep rumble of pure arrogance.
He pointed a thick cybernetically reinforced finger directly at Silas’s Oni mask.
"You are making too much noise in my father’s pit," the Mantis guy declared. "And for that reason, you need to be eliminated immediately."
Silas didn’t say a single word.
He didn’t offer a witty retort as he just stood there with his hands in his pockets.
’So he’s the son of the Boss, huh? No wonder he smells like those cigarettes.’
He just stared silently through the narrow slits of his mask.
His light blue, enhanced eyes were rapidly reading the myriad of glaring structural flaws hidden within the giant’s over-pumped unbalanced muscles.
The giant was strong, yes but his mass made his joints stiff and his center of gravity completely top-heavy.
The silence infuriated the arrogant giant.
"I SAID DIE!" the Mantis guy roared with spit flying from behind his green mask.
He charged directly at Silas.
He moved with the unstoppable speed and massive crushing mass of a runaway freight train as the dirt literally shook under his heavy boots.
He closed the distance instantly and he planted his massive feet and threw a devastating wide haymaker punch aimed directly at the side of Silas’s head.
It was a brutal full-power blow specifically designed to decapitate a normal man but Silas simply took a calm, measured half-step back.
WHOOSH!
"You’re quite slow..."
The massive metal-plated fist whipped violently through the air, passing harmlessly just an inch past the silver horns of his Oni mask.
The wind pressure generated by the missed punch violently ruffled Silas’s dark hair and snapped the collar of his uniform backward but the physical fist never even grazed him.
’Is he perhaps in the second stage of Core Advancement too?’ Silas thought, the guy was quite strong.
The Mantis growled in frustration, quickly recovering his balance.
"HAAAAAAH!"
He immediately launched into a relentless high-speed overwhelming combo of devastating strikes.
SWISH! WHOOSH! SWIPE!
He threw heavy right crosses, brutal hooks, and sweeping devastating leg kicks aimed at Silas’s knees.
He was undeniably fast for his size and he was incredibly strong but against the flawless precognitive Rip-Current Perception of Silas?
He was painfully slow.
Silas dodged every single one of his strikes without breaking a sweat.
He slipped to the left, effortlessly weaving his torso under a massive crushing cross.
WHOOSH!
He leaned smoothly backward at the waist, letting a sweeping cybernetic kick sail mere inches from his chest plate.
WHOOSH!
He bobbed his head slightly to the right, easily ducking a massive, jaw-breaking uppercut that would have sent a lesser man to the morgue.
WHOOSH!
It was as though Silas was the wind itself... intangible, completely formless, and absolutely untouchable.
He didn’t even bother raising his hands to block the strikes since blocking meant absorbing force.
’Not like the forces of his attacks would do anything...’
He just moved his body, letting the furious screaming giant completely exhaust his massive stamina reserves punching at ghosts and empty air.
Behind the dark visor of his mask, Silas was getting genuinely annoyed.
He had honestly thought, based on the terrified rumors in the fitting room and the overwhelming physical size of the man, that the Boss’s son would be a good trained martial artist.
He had actually expected a decent physical challenge to test his stats against.
But he was absolutely not a martial artist.
He was just a spoiled overgrown brawler relying entirely on expensive, daddy-funded cybernetics and a rigged tournament script to win his fights.
There was no technique and there was no discipline.
WHOOSH!
The Mantis guy finally stopped his furious useless assault.
"Haah... Haah..."
He stood panting heavily, his massive chest heaving with deep ragged breaths as sweat poured down his tattooed torso.
’Fuck...’
He realized with a sinking terrifying dread that he couldn’t land a single, solid blow on the man wearing an Oni mask.
Frustration and deep public humiliation twisted his rigid posture as the entire arena was watching him swing at air.
Desperate to regain control of the narrative, he resorted to the lowest and most pathetic denominator of a losing street fighter.
"Stand still, you pathetic coward!" the Mantis guy roared furiously, spitting a massive wad of saliva onto the dirt between them. "Stop dancing around the ring like a frightened little woman! Put your hands up and fight me like a man!"