Switched Off
"Whew……."
Cain's eyes were trembling.
Meanwhile, Won-goo was moving forward, delivering his final word of caution to the others.
"Alright. Yeongyeong opened up her hidden card for this fight. That barrier lasts thirty minutes, so within that window—"
"We wrap it up?"
Fresh cut him off.
"Tch. I'm talking here."
"I've heard the briefing so many times it's coming out my ears. All we have to do is go in and finish it. That's the job, right?"
"Yes. We end it. Slowly, but quickly."
"By the way, Boss Gong."
"……?"
"How far are we allowed to go with that one? The Ganjeol brat, I mean."
"How far? We kill him. Simple as that."
"Hm?"
"……?"
"……?"
"I figured you'd want to capture him and use him for negotiations or something. Wasn't that the plan?"
"Well, I got to thinking…… negotiations are a thing you do with people. And Ganjeol's not a person, so I don't feel like negotiating with him either."
"That's……."
"You good with that?"
"If you claim you're negotiating, what kind of tricks would he pull? I don't trust Ganjeol anymore, so we just hit him. Now that relations are this broken, one of us was always going to have to die eventually anyway."
"……."
"……."
"……."
"No, hold on—can everyone really just let this slide? Yeongyeong, can you? Fresh? And hyung, can you seriously let it go too?"
"No way. I nearly got burned to ash, and I'm supposed to just swallow that?"
"Which is why we kill him."
"Are you sure it's actually fine to kill him?"
"It's fine. Though the order of the queue might not reach you, hyung. I've already booked that son of a bitch for myself."
With that, Won-goo broke into a sprint—a run so fast he hardly looked human anymore.
Cain was, without question, showing a movement style that outclassed everyone else. Fast, powerful, and backed by real experience.
And yet Won-goo judged him nothing special.
Weaker than Kim Yang-cheon in raw strength, and nowhere close to Ralph in regeneration. The only thing Cain had over them was combat instinct—and even that fell short of a man named Sde.
In short, Cain was the textbook specimen of an enhancement-type: nothing outstanding, but every stat solidly good across the board.
Ah-bal occupied a similar position, but she was a different story. At least Ah-bal had a deeply unusual concept that made her hard to read—her essence was the same as any other enhancement-type, yet the eccentric packaging made adaptation difficult. That was precisely why Won-goo found her such a pain to fight.
Cain, by comparison, was an almost embarrassingly honest style. The kind of opponent a max-experience veteran like Won-goo could read within minutes.
So Won-goo ended his probing phase early. He'd seen enough.
Cain was someone he could take down alone. No need for the gun, no need to reach for any other cards. Turnon's Warhammer alone was more than sufficient.
One thing to watch for is that he's a mood fighter…… So I just knock him down before the mood hits him.
His type got dramatically stronger when the momentum was on their side. Won-goo threw out the bait immediately—let the mood swell a little first, then drag it back down. To that end, he decided to allow a single attack through.
But the attack that came was bigger than expected.
Pow! CRACK!
Cain's spinning back kick caught Won-goo square in the nose. The kick was powerful enough to send Won-goo's body skidding back several meters in an instant. Seeing it land, Cain's face twisted into a cruel grin.
"Boss Gong, Boss Gong—I heard so much hype I was curious what you'd actually be like…… Turns out you're nothing special."
"Something special's happening. Today's the day you die."
"I meant your skill. Turns out it's mostly hot air."
The two had already exchanged blows several times, but no clean hit had connected yet. Then, for the first time, a decisive one landed.
Cain knew. In an evenly matched fight, the first clean strike carried enormous weight. When things were dead even, the one who landed the opening blow usually won. And so Cain was riding the momentum.
His whole body was a weapon. He wielded his reinforced frame for unpredictable, off-angle attacks—tight, compact strikes, punctuated now and then with a full-swing haymaker.
That wide movement was the one that caught Won-goo for the first time.
"There goes your nose."
With his nose crushed flat, Won-goo's face now resembled a squashed sweet pancake. In the old world, such a grotesque sight would have made people scream; now, everyone knew this much wouldn't kill a man.
"That was the most intact part of my face, and you do this to it? What am I, Voldemort?"
Psst.
Cain taunted him with a beckoning hand. Won-goo picked the warhammer back up and advanced.
Pow! Thud! Crack!
Not even five minutes had passed before the situation reversed itself.
Won-goo drove the very same spinning back kick he'd taken directly into Cain's face. The timing, the trajectory—everything matched. Like looking at a decalcomania.
He'd allowed that one big hit at the start, but that was all. A few more of Cain's irregular patterns came out afterward, and that was it. Compared to Ah-bal, it was practically patternless. If anything, Won-goo thought Ralph or Sde had been far more dangerous opponents. Cain felt a tier below them.
No, wait—not a tier below. More like the same tier? Looks like we've eaten roughly the same amount of coins.
Similar coins, the same enhancement-type. Fights could only be settled by actually fighting, so armchair predictions meant nothing anyway.
"……."
"Cat got your tongue? Starting to feel heavy, aren't you? I hear that barrier isn't just any barrier."
"You cowardly……"
"Cowardly is a word that should never come out of your mouth."
Pow!
Won-goo moved faster than the charging Cain and snapped out a front kick—then didn't forget to line up a follow-up with the warhammer.
Thwack!
Cain's reactions were still alive. He raised his arm to block the follow-up. Had he not, that strike would have buried itself in his face.
"Starting to feel like things are going wrong?"
"Kkuk-kek."
Then Cain let out a low laugh. Watching him, Won-goo grabbed his nose with his left hand.
Crunch-crunCH!
The process of resetting his broken nose—with brute force. Medically speaking, it was absolutely the last thing anyone should ever do, since there was no telling what side effects might follow.
But Won-goo knew it had to be done fast. Survivor recovery rates couldn't be judged by human standards—and the same went for him. Unless the injury was life-threatening, the sooner you treated it, the better. The bleeding had already stopped, and he could feel the nasal cartilage fusing back together. Leave it crushed and the bone would set wrong; then he'd have to re-break it just to straighten it out.
He set the nose back into place, then drained the blood pooling inside it. Blowing his nose forced the blood to backflow, leaking out from the corner of his eye instead—a side effect that completed the look of a man weeping tears of blood.
For an ordinary person, this would have been an act of sheer madness—forcing a crushed nosebone straight and popping the trapped blood out with a blow of the nose was lunatic's work. Honestly, even a lunatic couldn't pull it off well. The agony that would come crashing in was on another level entirely; the bone-breaking itself would have been an afterthought by comparison.
Yet Won-goo did it without so much as a flinch.
Knowing he wouldn't die. Knowing exactly how tough a survivor's body really was. The difference between knowing and not knowing had always been everything.
Won-goo knew, down to each individual feat, what kind of stunts became possible once his toughness stat accumulated. That was why he could do something like this without hesitation.
"Pehh!"
He spat out the blood in his mouth and readied himself for the fight all over again. Cain simply watched.
"Feeling a bit more handsome now?"
"The last look was better. You've gotten uglier."
"You little…… All mouth, all the time."
"How long are you going to make me wait? Come in already."
Cain took his stance again. Won-goo didn't charge in right away, pausing for a beat.
"What's your old man playing at? I knew he was rotten to the core, but I didn't think he was this conniving a bastard."
"Why are you asking me?"
"Fair enough…… what would you know? And you—you're moving like you expect not to die today, aren't you? No. You're dying today."
"……?"
"You're dying. Did you think we'd keep you around as a bargaining chip? No. We've passed the point of no return on our side too."
Cain's only answer was to raise his middle finger.
"The way you move—I'll have it confirmed in five more minutes. Everyone who gets treated by me ends up knowing. Whether you're really trying to kill me, or just testing the waters."
Won-goo's estimate was off. It took Cain less than three minutes to end up flat on the ground.
Cain looked up at Won-goo as if he couldn't believe it. Not an ounce of strength remained in his body.
"At this point I'm starting to think enhancement-types are defined by their personalities. Why do they all turn out to be pickled radishes like this? Even their fighting style runs in the same direction."
"You were playing with me?"
Pow!
"And it's 'were you playing with me,' formally. A kid your age doesn't get to talk down to me. Your old man never taught you any manners? Trash runs in the family. Lowborn bastard."
Hot blood ran down Cain's head in a slow, steady stream.
"Well, your blood pressure must be stable. Not a single spurt. No high blood pressure here."
"……."
Cain wasn't in any state to answer. His mind was stuck on the final exchange.
Fight an opponent once, and you've learned their strength. You might not measure exact numbers, but you can tell whether someone is weaker than you, comparable, or stronger.
By that measure, this opponent was clearly below Cain.
And yet, in that final exchange, he had been overpowered in pure strength. Not by a narrow margin—by an overwhelming one.
Cain simply could not understand it. A Gift that grows stronger with time? An item? A Seal? None of it fit within his common sense, which was exactly why the man's words weren't reaching him.
SMACK!
This time the warhammer caught him in the cheek.
Crack-crack-crack!
Cain's head whipped violently to the side. Teeth came raining out.
"You should answer when you're spoken to. You still haven't figured out how this works, have you."
Won-goo glanced around and took stock of the situation. His fight with Cain was decisively settled, but the others were still locked in battle—and a ferocious one at that.
Their numbers were double Ganjeolgot's, yet they were even losing ground slightly. The enemy troops weren't the problem. The problem was the bodyguard squad dressed head to toe in matching military fatigues.
So that's Ganjeol's personal unit, huh. They're strong, I'll give them that.
Still, Won-goo felt no great threat in their movements.
"Gahh!"
In the moment Won-goo's attention wandered, the fallen Cain lunged into a tackle.
Thud.
But Won-goo didn't budge an inch, as though the tackle had hit a dead tree. And with that, the light died completely from Cain's eyes.
"What are you doing? You're…… nothing but an appetizer before the main dish called Ganjeol. No—amuse-bouche might be the better term."
Thwip!
Won-goo tore off the struggling Cain's ear without expending much force at all. It came away cleanly, as if sliced with a knife.
"AAAGH!"
Cain screamed—because Won-goo had already seized the other ear and wrenched him down by it. Cain collapsed onto the ground in a heap, unable to resist even slightly. Won-goo crouched down to his eye level and looked him dead in the face from close range. His black pupils—eyes without a single flicker of hesitation—burned themselves into Cain's memory.
"Still don't get it? You're nothing."
RIIIP!
Like tearing paper, Won-goo ripped the other ear off. The follow-up came right after.
And with that, Cain's mind switched off.