Chapter 363: Battle Royale [IV / Bonus - ]
Thousands of people were screaming death threats at the man in the uniform, their faces red with fury.
Far above the chaos, sitting comfortably in a private security booth overlooking the arena, the wicked black-haired receptionist from the dive bar leaned back in her squeaking leather chair.
She took a slow deep drag of her Red-Lotus cigarette.
"Hm?"
She exhaled a thick cloud of cherry-scented smoke with her dark eyes glued to the live holographic feed of the demon-masked young man.
She raised a pierced eyebrow.
’Oh,’ the receptionist thought to herself with a smirk curling on her black-painted lips. ’He’s that strong? What a terrifying monster.’
Back down in the filthy blood-soaked field of the Null-stone cage, Silas completely ignored the thousands of death threats raining down from the bleachers.
He let out a sigh with the sound vibrating through his mask.
’Is this enough to prove a point...?’
Silas looked around at everyone else in the dirt. The Battle Royale was still technically ongoing as there were still over two hundred desperate fighters trapped in the cage, and only twelve were allowed to survive.
But upon decimating the Mantis guy with such casual brutality, an invisible perimeter had formed around Silas.
Apparently, there were no more idiots left in the pit who were willing to challenge him.
The surrounding street thugs, cybernetic assassins, and Syndicate enforcers actively pressed their backs against the Null-stone bars just to stay as far away from him as physically possible.
They resumed fighting each other, but they kept one terrified eye glued to his mask.
’I need to make myself more scary so that even the idiots don’t approach me...’ Silas thought.
He didn’t want to waste his stamina chasing down terrified rats for the next hour as he wanted them to leave him alone entirely until the timer ran out.
And so, Silas did the most disrespectful and intimidating thing a fighter could possibly do in the middle of a two-hundred-man death match.
He sat down.
Right there, in the dead center of the blood-stained muddy arena. Silas slowly lowered his massive frame, folding his long legs into a casual cross-legged sitting position.
He was wearing the smart-fabric Black-Ash uniform which repelled grime, so he wasn’t particularly worried about getting his gear permanently dirty.
"Haah... What an exhausting boring fight..."
Silas let out a slow breath, slumping his head forward slightly as he closed his golden-ringed eyes behind the silver mask.
The surrounding brawls momentarily paused with dozens of fighters frozen mid-punch, staring at the man in horrifying disbelief.
It seemed that he had literally just fallen asleep in the middle of a slaughterhouse!
It was a display of such crushing arrogance and overwhelming confidence that it shattered the morale of everyone looking at him.
If he was willing to sleep while surrounded by armed killers, it meant he viewed them as less than insects.
Nobody dared to approach him... Not a single fighter took a step toward his seated form.
They swallowed hard, turned away, and desperately went back to fighting and killing each other on the outer edges of the arena, abandoning the center ring to the sleeping demon.
’When will this end...?’ Silas thought, listening to the wet sounds of flesh tearing and bones snapping around him.
As of right now, he was genuinely bored out of his mind.
High above the carnage, in the crowded luxurious VIP viewing box, Evelyn stood frozen near the reinforced glass.
A single drop of cold sweat rolled down her pale temple, hidden behind her Kitsune mask.
’He’s... he’s that strong?’ Evelyn thought, her brain struggling to process the math of what she had just witnessed.
Even she, a classic Lord who was directly affiliated with him was still surprised by his strength.
’Is he even a regular Lord at this point...?’
She knew Silas was strong, the Lord of Blessed Land had to be strong beyond belief but this was different.
This was completely without outer mana enhancement.
The Null-stone bands on his wrists strictly forbade external projection and sure, she knew he could have manipulated the rules and enhanced his inner muscles and bone density, but still...
To launch a three-hundred-pound man a hundred and fifty feet straight up into solid rock using nothing but raw power?
Suddenly, a deep laugh echoed from the front of the viewing box.
"Hah... Hahahaha."
It was the Boss.
The silver-haired Syndicate leader sat in his leather throne, staring down at the shattered bleeding body of his own cybernetically enhanced son but he didn’t look angry.
He seemed to let out a genuine entertained laugh.
The sound instantly made the entire crowded room feel icy cold.
The temperature in the luxury suite seemed to plummet twenty degrees as the other Managers froze, lowering their expensive drinks, terrified by the Boss’s reaction to his own blood being pulverized.
Evelyn turned her masked head toward him with her hand instinctively twitching toward her thigh holsters.
The other Managers turned as well, but the Boss’s dark gaze was solely fixed on Evelyn.
He smiled at her.
It was a cold razor-sharp smile that didn’t reach his dead eyes.
Even though this man didn’t possess a Lord Core, even though he couldn’t summon heroes or cast massive area-of-effect spells, he could clearly use internal mana.
He was a mundane underworld kingpin, and despite Evelyn being an Classic Lord who commanded an army... she was suddenly frightened.
A cold shiver raced down her spine.
’Is there something else going on here?’ Evelyn thought. Why would she be afraid...?
The concentrated weight of the killing intent radiating from the Boss was suffocating.
It was the aura of a man who had murdered thousands of people with his bare hands to build his empire but why was it affecting her?
The Boss slowly stood up from his chair as he walked gracefully toward the back of the room, stopping a few feet away from Evelyn’s chair.
"Manager of Contestant Onii-chan, I presume..." the Boss stated, looking down at her Kitsune mask.
Evelyn forced her body to remain rigid as she gave him a single stiff nod.
The man smiled wider, exposing perfectly white teeth.
"Welcome to the Top Twelve list," the Boss told her smoothly, acknowledging Silas’s dominance of the pit.
He simply raised a hand and snapped his fingers, calling for the hospitality staff which was surprising considering Eveyn had thought the man would want revenge or something.
The young maid in the black-and-white uniform immediately rushed over, bowing deeply.
"Direct the Manager of that amazing man to a private exclusive suite," the Boss ordered the maid with his eyes never leaving Evelyn’s mask. "She no longer needs to prove herself by sitting out here with the general rabble. She has earned a quiet room..."
The maid bowed lower.
"Right away, Sir. I will oblige the errand."
The maid turned, gesturing politely for Evelyn to follow her toward a side door leading out of the general VIP box.
Evelyn didn’t hesitate. She stood up and followed the maid, eager to escape the suffocating pressure of the Syndicate leader’s gaze.
She walked down the plush crimson-carpeted hallway in silence.
Only after she had completely left that crowded room, only after the heavy oak doors shut behind her, cutting off the Boss’s line of sight, did Evelyn feel a lot calmer.
The icy grip on her lungs finally loosened.
The maid smiled warmly as they walked.
"Congratulations on your Fighter’s incredible performance, Ma’am. It was truly a historic strike..."
However, the polite words fell entirely on deaf ears. Evelyn wasn’t listening at all as she looked down at her own hands.
Her leather-gloved fingers were slightly trembling.
’What...’ Evelyn thought to herself, swallowing hard behind her mask. ’What made me so afraid of him?’
She was a Lord but standing in front of that mundane, silver-haired mafia boss had triggered an instinctual terror in her brain.
There was something terribly wrong with the Black-Ash Syndicate.
[An Hour Later]
Deep in the arena, the deafening chaotic noise of the Battle Royale finally ceased.
The heavy booming Taiko drums rolled to a dramatic final halt as the harsh blinding white stadium spotlights shifted to a dim moody crimson glow.
Silas sat up properly from his cross-legged position.
He didn’t stretch because he was trying to shrug off any sort of physical tiredness as his stamina was perfectly full.
"Hup..."
He sat up simply because the wet sounds of absolute slaughter had finally stopped.
He opened his golden-ringed eyes and looked around the Null-stone cage.
The packed dirt was completely saturated with dark coagulating blood to the point that it honestly looked like a freshly tilled graveyard.
People had killed each other a lot to secure their spots.
There were dozens of people scattered across the dirt who were just deeply, critically wounded, groaning and clutching severed limbs or shattered cybernetics.
And on the other hand, there were a far greater amount of people that were just dead.
They were completely deceased. Bodies were piled on top of each other, their faces caved in with their chests pierced by jagged shivs.
Just like that.
Two hundred men had walked into the cage, and over a hundred and fifty of them had been brutally massacred in the span of sixty minutes.
The neon-suited Announcer, having acquired a new un-crushed microphone, hovered his anti-gravity platform down from the ceiling.
"TIME IS UP!" the Announcer’s magically amplified voice boomed across the silent bloody arena. "THE PRELIMINARY ROYALE IS OFFICIALLY OVER!"
The surviving crowd in the stands let out a roaring bloodthirsty cheer, stamping their feet against the metal bleachers.
The Announcer hovered lower, sweeping his platform across the carnage.
"Through the blood! Through the shattered steel! There are exactly twelve participants that have made it through the meat-grinder!" the Announcer screamed, hyping the survivors. "Welcome to the Top Twelve! These elite bastards will be pitted against each other in one-on-one bracket matches for your gambling enjoyment!"
The people cheered louder, throwing empty cups and betting slips into the air.
The Announcer floated his platform directly down to the center of the ring, hovering just a few feet away from Silas first.
The spotlights snapped onto the oni.
The Announcer pointed dramatically at Silas.
"Coming out of the center ring untouched! The man who broke the Boss’s bloodline! The Demon of the Dirt! The Apex Predator who defied gravity itself!" the Announcer shrieked. "If you want to get rich tonight, if you want to rob the house blind... ALWAYS BET ON ONII-CHAN!"
The crowd, their previous anger completely forgotten in the face of overwhelming power, erupted into a massive deafening chant.
"O-NII-CHAN! O-NII-CHAN! O-NII-CHAN!"
Silas stared blankly at the Announcer.
The absurdity of thousands of hardened criminals chanting a degenerate anime moniker was almost too much for his brain to process.
’The hell is going on here...? I like it though.’
The Announcer quickly pivoted his floating anti-gravity platform with the harsh blinding white stadium spotlights violently sweeping across the blood-soaked dirt to highlight the other eleven survivors who had managed to claw their way out of the meat-grinder alive.
"From the Eastern slums, with fists forged of pure depleted mythril, give it up for KURO THE MANGLER!"
The stadium spotlights slammed down onto a literal mountain of a man.
Kuro stood triumphantly atop a jagged bleeding pile of crushed cyborgs.
He was shirtless, his dark skin covered in a roadmap of jagged white scars.
His arms from the elbows down were entirely replaced by massive oversized blocks of solid dull-gray mythril and his glowing red cybernetic eyes flared as he raised those heavy metal arms and pounded them violently against his own bare chest.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
The concussive metallic sound echoed through the arena like a blacksmith’s hammer, driving the crowd into a roaring frenzy.
"WE LOVE YOU KURO!"
"RAHHHHHH!"
"Next one, The shadow in the smog! The man who bleeds his enemies dry before they ever even see his blade... VIPER-TOOTH!"
The spotlight snapped to the dark edges of the Null-stone cage.
A thin hyper-agile assassin wearing a sleek, form-fitting tactical suit stepped out of the shadows.
He held two wickedly curved daggers.
The rusted steel was coated in a glowing, corrosive green neurotoxin that dripped audibly onto the dirt.
Viper-Tooth casually wiped the flat of his poisoned blade across the torn shirt of a dead man at his feet, looking up at the roaring stands and delivering a sweeping mocking bow.
"Be sure to praise me too..."