Oops
The screams merged into a single, jarring discord.
The boys felt a pain in their shattered shinbones beyond anything they had imagined in their entire lives.
"D-do you even know who you're messing with?!"
Kendrick forced the words out through the agony. With his nose smashed flat, his voice came out thick and nasal.
Crack!
"…!!!"
Kendrick's right shin joined his left in a matching pair.
The other boys, watching, opened their mouths in a frantic spasm. Terror, rage, and confusion tangled together into some nameless emotion none of them could name.
"You crazy bastard! You think you'll walk away from this?!"
Crack!
"I'll have your entire family beheaded!"
Crack!
"You… you'll never live this down. I guarantee it."
Crack!
Leon didn't react. He simply kept breaking shins in silence.
"…"
By that point, the last boy's lips only twitched, whatever he'd been about to spit out dying unspoken.
"Nothing to say?"
Leon tilted his head and looked at him.
Crack!
"…I didn't… say… anything… so why…!"
And then his shin was smashed to pieces as well. With that, both legs of every boy were ruined.
Leon hooked his scabbard back at his waist.
"Let's see."
He walked over to Kendrick, who was crawling across the ground, and crouched down in front of him.
Slap!
Kendrick's head snapped sideways from the blow. Fluid from his crumpled nose sprayed out in a long arc along with it.
"Name."
"Hhk…! Hhngh…"
Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!
"Name."
"Kendrick… Borsha…"
"Kendrick Borsha?"
"Y-yes…"
Kendrick gave a weak nod, and teeth and bloody spit leaked from his mouth in a thin stream.
"Borsha, Borsha?"
A house he'd never even heard of.
Leon snorted and moved on.
Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!
For a while, the cheerful sound of open-handed blows rang out.
Leon worked through the boys one by one, cracking them across the face and prying out their names. Every last one of them carried a noble surname.
A short while later.
"Line up. Single file."
Leon tapped the ground in front of him with the toe of his boot as he spoke.
They all stared back at him with the same look — our legs are ruined, how the hell are we supposed to do that?
Leon was impressed.
"Still haven't learned your lesson."
He started grinding his heel into their broken legs, nice and thorough.
"Put on new shoes! And! Let's go for a run, clap! Clap!"
Crunch! Crunch! Crrrunch!
"G-gyaaaaaah!"
"Aaaargh! Stoooop!"
"Keeeeeeh!"
"Your head's gonna reach! The! Sky!"
Every time he bounced from one to the next, something made a fine, splintering sound.
…
"Let's run, whoosh! Whoosh! Even a tall mountain in one go! We'll! Climb!"
By the time he'd finished the second verse, the boys had somehow dragged themselves into a single line on their upper bodies alone, sprawled out in a row.
Leon pushed his bangs back.
"Hey. What the hell are you little shits supposed to be? Why pick a fight with someone minding their own business? Couldn't you just ask me nicely to leave?"
"…"
"And then you draw steel? Steel? In front of me?"
"…"
"Answer."
"I-I'm sor—"
"Did I just…"
Leon's eyes flashed wide.
Crunch!
"Did I tell you to apologize? I said answer. Answer. Answer. Answer."
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
The boy who'd opened his mouth — Gien — was trampled without mercy.
Sensing death closing in, Gien wrung the words out in a desperate rush.
"W-we didn't know you were this strong…!"
"Ah, so if I'd been just a little weaker, you'd have stuck me full of holes and left me dead, is that it?"
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
"Guh-hack!"
"Useless bastards who only know how to run in packs… Hm?"
Leon paused mid-kick at a foreign sensation under his toes.
He bent down and rifled through Gien's clothes.
"This it?"
The moment Leon pulled free whatever he'd grabbed, Gien suddenly found a heroic well of courage and fought back.
"Th-that you can't take!"
Wham!
Leon's fist drove into his face.
"Hmm."
What Leon had pulled out was a glass ampule the size of a finger joint. Inside was an unidentified black powder.
Rummage, rummage—
With practiced hands, Leon searched the rest of the boys.
They, too, summoned some unknown reserve of defiance, same as Gien — and after a brief conversation with Leon's fists, they went down again.
"Side income's not bad either."
The coin purses and valuables that turned up along the way, he pocketed as a matter of course.
Ampules of black powder came from all five of them.
"Looks like drugs no matter how you slice it."
Leon lowered his gaze.
Under that chilling stare, the boys' mouths opened.
"Th-that's right!"
"You really do it all, don't you. So what exactly is this?"
"Exactly… what is it? We just received it from someone, so we don't know the details…"
Smack!
"Guek!"
"Here."
Leon popped the ampule's cap, seized Kendrick by the hair, and dragged him close.
"Eat it."
He was curious what it was — but not curious enough to put it in his own mouth.
"M-m-my nose…"
"Ah, so you snort it?"
Given that Kendrick's nose was no longer functional, Leon simply forced the powder down the bastard's throat himself.
"Spit it out and I'll rip your tongue out."
"…! Ghk, gulp—!"
Kendrick threw everything he had into holding back a cough and swallowed the powder.
The change came within seconds.
First his pupils blew wide, focus skittering every which way.
His heartbeat surged; veins rose in livid ridges across his skin; his muscles swelled.
"Oh, for fuck's sake. This is…"
Just as Leon narrowed his eyes on a sudden hunch—
"Kh… heheh! Khheheh!"
Kendrick burst out laughing like a madman.
The sniveling, wailing wreck from moments before was gone without a trace. Even the pain seemed completely forgotten.
"Hheheheh! Hngh, hngh…!"
Kendrick floated happily on the drug's high — then his eyes locked on Leon and he flew into a frenzy.
The euphoria had erased his fear and filled him with baseless confidence.
Kendrick stretched out an arm and snatched up a sword lying on the ground. The violent motion twisted his broken bones with an audible grind, but he didn't care in the slightest.
"Y-y-you son of a bitch! Die!"
The wild swing carved empty air.
Even injured, he moved with a strange strength and speed beyond his original ability.
Thud! Smack!
Leon casually flicked out a foot, kicked the blade away, and knocked Kendrick cold.
He muttered, brow furrowed.
"Yeah. That's the one."
Similar effects, similar color. Close to the drug Belger had used last time — and the one the lizardman colony had taken.
The difference, if anything, was that this powdered version seemed tuned more toward the pleasure side. The physical enhancement was also far weaker than anything he'd seen before.
"Hmm."
So the capital's nobles were carrying this stuff around on their persons.
They might have been on drugs already, sure…
This world had no shortage of narcotics just like the ones from Leon's previous life on Earth.
But.
This isn't ordinary dope.
It was the stimulant high-ranking demons dispatched to Middle Earth used — the same stuff Reconnaissance Bureau spies had scattered over monster hordes.
And that drug had turned up again, right in the heart of the capital?
Are the Gonghyeol Group and the Reconnaissance Bureau working together? Or were they the same outfit from the start?
Either way, someone was seeding the Empire with this stuff to rot it from the top down.
One thing still didn't add up.
But is this really that different from regular drugs? Overwhelmingly more addictive, maybe?
People who did drugs would do whatever was available. He couldn't see what made this black powder so special.
Was the goal simply to get them hooked? Or cut the supply later and turn them into puppets?
All of it was guesswork. Nothing certain. He didn't have enough information.
So Leon reached for violence. Revenge, stress relief, and interrogation, all at once. With this many people, cross-checking was easy.
Under Leon's practiced interrogation technique, Kendrick's crew were soon spilling everything down to what kind of liquor they'd drunk the night before.
Kendrick's pack were thorough scum. Their main pastime was calling girls they fancied to drinking parties, drugging them, and gang-raping them. They'd done it as recently as yesterday.
The place they drank and did drugs was a high-end tavern that only admitted verified members. The first place they'd gotten the black drug — Black Sand — had been one of those exclusive taverns.
They'd been on narcotics already; the reason they'd switched to Black Sand was simple. Strongest high, strongest addiction.
The drug they used when working the girls was Black Sand too, apparently.
"Drug-addict gang-rapist pieces of shit."
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
Leon crushed them underfoot as naturally as breathing, his mind racing, building hypotheses.
The Gonghyeol Group. Cryptos. Valcansus.
All of them enemies Leon had already crossed — bastards who needed to be made to pay.
And before long, they'd be making an enemy of the Empire itself.
This is probably the original story's flow, when you get down to it.
Piecing together everything he'd learned so far with what he remembered of the original work, the Great Demons' invasion of Middle Earth had to have been the core of the plot.
The butterfly effect Leon had set in motion had accelerated some futures, erased others, and twisted more than a few — but the great current hadn't changed. Before long, war would break out between the Empire and the Demon Realm.
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
With violence pouring out of him and his brain fully online, Leon made one more leap.
The Gamelon Republic.
Something Daniel, the Information Bureau's Team Two leader, had told him at the start of the term came back to him.
The Great Demon Realm that had opened in the Republic still hadn't closed. Of course it hadn't. Closing it was impossible without the Empire's help, even if they wanted to.
Which meant the Demon Realm and the Republic were, for all practical purposes, directly linked.
And at the time, the Republic's hardliners had been in the ascendant. Hardliners who had no qualms about indiscriminate, inhumane terror against the Empire.
What if those hardliners were pieces the Demon Realm side was moving? Digging into the Gamelon Republic's rotten government to seize total control.
Not wiping the place out entirely — using it as a disposable pawn to harass the Empire.
If they had the ability to take the Republic politically, it was a masterstroke.
The Empire was vast. The absolute hegemon of the continent. Even a Great Demon couldn't take it lightly.
So throw the entire Republic at the Empire first, grind it down as much as possible — then move the main Demon Realm forces in for the kill. That had to be the plan.
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
It more or less fits.
"…on! Le…!"
Stomp! Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!
Right. That's why the Reconnaissance Bureau was pulling moves that bold.
"Le…! St…p!"
Crunch! Crunch! Crrrunch!
Then what about Billy, that bastard? Is he just genuinely the unluckiest man alive?
"Leon! Stop, stop it!"
Whump!
Arms locked around his waist from behind, and Leon snapped out of his deep reverie.
"Huh?"
Celia had him in a hold and was hauling him backward.
"Leon, stop…! You're going to actually kill them…!"
"…"
Leon blinked and looked down at his feet.
A sea of blood across the floor.
"…"
"…"
"…"
Not a single groan escaped the wreckage of bodies strewn about in a ruinous heap. Eyes rolled back, tongues lolling.
Leon's feet and legs were soaked in blood.
The product of unconscious violence carried out while he was lost in thought.
"Oops."
Did they die?