Chapter 377: The World’s Fastest Fall (4)
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 377: The World’s Fastest Fall (4)
“Huh? What the… it’s gone?”
After ripping the prosthetic arm, Airgetlám, from Flash’s corpse to give to Cheon Yu-hak, I tried to take the sword he had used before the regression as well. However, no matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find his blade, Claiomh Solais.
I wondered if he hadn’t obtained it yet at this point in time, but if my memory served me correctly, he definitely used a sword even before this period. Unless he was such an idiot that he’d left a Holy Relic behind, it likely meant it had been taken from him.
…Well, I felt bad about breaking Ha-ni’s sword and wanted to get her a decent replacement. What a waste.
I felt like I could find it if I took my time, but I didn’t have much to spare. I decided it would be better to look for the sword later if possible.
“Now then, shall we get started?”
One of the Three Great Hells for superhuman criminals.
As time went on, it failed to live up to its name, but that was only because increasingly insane villains kept appearing. It didn’t mean Alcatraz was an easy fortress to breach or escape from.
Strictly protected by five sealing artifacts and barrier artifacts, this island was not only difficult to enter, but even if one did manage to infiltrate, they would be immediately detected by the artifacts and have their location pinpointed. It was a notoriously difficult place to conquer.
That ‘King of Villains’ or whatever he called himself probably knew by now that I’d taken down Flash.
He would likely try to prepare himself while I was busy dismantling the five layers of barriers.
Even if I could grasp the structure itself with my Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils, dismantling such a complex, massive barrier required a certain amount of time. So, his response wasn’t entirely wrong.
Of course, I had no intention of giving him the conventional reaction he expected.
Just because I knew the structure didn’t mean I had to follow the rules to break through, right?
I mean, it wasn’t like this was a dungeon. Forcing my way through a few barriers wasn’t going to cause a catastrophe, and the weakest point was glaringly obvious. Why should I play along with the opponent’s intentions?
I identified the barrier’s weakness and aimed Ruyi.
* * *
“An S-rank Hero-led villain squad wiped out in one minute?”
The King of Villains was slightly flustered.
It had taken him roughly a week to conquer Alcatraz.
It was an incredibly unprecedented achievement, but it was a result made possible by a plan built on meticulous calculations, coupled with a stroke of luck.
If Flash hadn’t been such a petty man, or if he had chosen to fight with everything on the line because someone held his life hostage, the King of Villains probably wouldn’t have achieved such a feat.
But to clean them up in just one minute? Was that even possible?
“…Could it be that Seo Ye-hwa has arrived?”
He wondered if the monster holding the Rank 1 spot in the Hero Rankings had come, but that was impossible.
She was supposed to be busy resolving another incident right now.
“…Is it some hidden trump card of the Association?”
Regardless, the fact remained that his plan had gone awry.
Winning would have been ideal, but even if he lost, he had planned to stall for time and isolate his opponent. Now that they had been defeated so quickly, he had to devise a new strategy.
First, he had to use Alcatraz’s barriers to drag this into a war of attrition.
He had a shield capable of withstanding almost any attack, so utilizing that would be his best option for now.
After reaching this perfectly common-sense and rational conclusion, the King of Villains summoned his subordinates and thought to himself:
As always, he just needed to solve things slowly and step by step.
The moment one panics, they only end up doing their opponent a favor.
Yes.
That was exactly what he was thinking—right until a massive roar shook the air and a portion of the Alcatraz detention center was pierced through and vanished by something enormous.
“Huh?”
At the end of the massive object that had blown away both the barrier and the building stood a boy, looking down at him from the sky while riding a cloud.
He had seen him before.
The one who had ruined his plan to escape Labyrinthos, and at the same time, the boy who had destroyed Labyrinthos in his stead and saved them all.
According to what he had looked up later, the boy was still just a cadet.
Kang So-hyun.
“Bloom.”
The voice sounded strangely clear despite the distance. The King of Villains threw himself aside and activated a defensive artifact.
“Ruyi.”
Then, the massive object that had pierced Alcatraz split into thousands of branches, and on each and every branch, an Iron Flower bloomed.
…How the hell was he supposed to deal with this?
* * *
…I wondered if I’d overdone it a bit, but to completely blow away the barrier so it couldn’t be repaired, a large-scale attack like this was necessary.
Anyway, according to the information I got from looking into Flash’s head, all the heroes who hadn’t betrayed the Association were being held separately in the basement. So, the only ones who would die from this were the villains or the traitors.
Wouldn’t it be better to just crush them quickly before they could take hostages?
“Hup.”
Usually, the leader is located where the barrier is strongest. I headed toward the most heavily guarded spot, and it seemed I had guessed correctly.
A guy wearing a robe I’d seen somewhere before was staring this way, gasping for breath.
He seemed to have managed to block Ruyi’s attack once, but that appeared to be his limit. The sword he was clutching in his hand…
Oh, wait, that’s Claiomh Solais.
I wondered where it went since that bastard Flash didn’t have it, but this guy was the one holding it.
Anyway, the guy dropped his weapon and knelt, trembling.
“So you’re the one they call the King of Villains?”
Now, how would he play this?
I released the first seal so I could respond to whatever trick he pulled and peered into his mind with Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils.
The way he was thinking about so many things at once made it clear he was scheming, which I didn’t like. But looking closely, he actually harbored surprisingly favorable feelings toward me.
And the conclusion he reached after organizing his thoughts for a moment was quite absurd. If I hadn’t seen inside his head beforehand with my Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils, even I might have been quite flustered.
“Kang So-hyun. I will give you half the world—no. I will make you the King. Won’t you become my comrade?”
…He’s proposing an alliance?
It was so ridiculous that even after looking into his head, I couldn’t be sure if I’d seen it correctly.
“…No, why would I?”
“I am certain. I am certain that if you and I join forces, nothing is impossible.”
Unless he had some means of deceiving the Fiery Eyes and Golden Pupils, he was, surprisingly, speaking exactly what he was thinking.
“I have the strategy and the luck to make the greatest detention center my own in just a week. But to be honest, my personal combat power is, at best, around the high end of A-rank.”
Ah, that was a lie.
He was stronger than a high-tier A-rank. If you added up all the artifacts he possessed, he was probably just slightly weaker than Flash.
“Hmm, and?”
“But you possess the martial might to tear down the castle I built in just a day—no, in a moment so brief it could be called an instant.”
“Yeah, so. How does that lead to the conclusion that you and I should join forces? You villainous prick~”
“Because you are too great to remain under the Association. If we join forces, nothing will be impossible!”
“I’m not even part of the Association, though? I’m not going to the Association even after I graduate.”
“No, the framework of a ‘Hero’ itself is too narrow to contain you. You are not a talent that should rot away doing trivial things like hero work!”
“Hey, that’s a derogatory remark toward heroes. And besides, who the hell becomes a villain just because being a hero is ‘too narrow’?”
“I’m not telling you to be a villain. I only called myself a villain because my starting position was in the gutter. I wasn’t a villain to begin with.”
…He was a guy who spoke such novel bullshit with total sincerity.
“Right, I get what you’re trying to say, but being a ‘villain’ isn’t something you decide for yourself; it’s what others define you as. You’re already a villainous bastard who has committed impressive crimes against society.”
“Even so, the values I hold are not those of a villain.”
He probably didn’t know I could read his thoughts, yet he was speaking nothing but the truth with startling consistency.
In a way, he was a lunatic with convictions, but the problem was that the ‘values’ he held were completely unrealistic.
“I want to create a world without discrimination. A world where there are no villains, and therefore, no need for heroes.”
That sounded plausible enough, but the means he had in mind were quite something.
“Therefore, my immediate goal is the monopoly of overwhelming force. An overwhelming power that no one can resist.”
“Oh, that really is total bullshit.”
“No, it is not. Originally, it was a goal with an infinitesimally low probability of realization, but if you take my hand, it can be achieved. It can even be achieved much faster than I originally thought. A world where everyone except us is equal is right before our eyes!”
I knew no villain was sane, but this guy was truly, properly mad.
He was saying he wanted to monopolize overwhelming power to oppress the world.
It would be nothing short of a crazy dystopia.
There’s nothing more dangerous than a world where a small minority monopolizes power. Why did he think I would empathize with that?
Whether he knew my thoughts or not, he reached out to me again with an incredibly hopeful voice.
“So please, become a God! Become the strongest God who will reign as the sole and absolute rule of this world…!”
…Wait. Holy shit, hold on. I feel like I’ve heard someone say something similar before.
— Executing Evil.
— That great person will become the absolute law and discipline.
…Good grief. This guy was just Masked Villain No. 2. I should have realized it when he was covering his face.
I figured it would be best to just capture him.
What good could come from having two such people in the world?
“You intend to capture me.”
“Of course, you villainous bastard. Did you think I’d let someone talking such nonsense go?”
“I understand. It must be sudden for you. You’ve probably never even considered such a thing.”
Actually, I used to say stuff like that all the time.
“If I have failed to persuade you, then it cannot be helped. Praying that the persuasion succeeds next time, I will accept my defeat for now.”
“Don’t worry. There won’t be a next time for you.”
The moment I tried to restrain him, he smirked.
‘Will you be okay with that? I’ve set up artifacts so that the basement will collapse the moment I die. I’m not sure if the weakened heroes will be able to endure it.’
At the information that flashed into my mind, I stopped my reaching arm.
“As I thought, your reactions have been strange for a while now. You can read your opponent’s thoughts. But seeing as you fell for that, I suppose reading multiple thoughts at once is difficult, or perhaps you can only read the parts I directly visualize.”
He was right.
Perhaps because I wasn’t used to it yet, when I encountered multiple pieces of information at once, the thoughts being visualized most strongly were read first.
Well, regardless of that, this was clearly my mistake.
Even if I was going to stop, I should have done it more naturally. I panicked and made it too obvious.
‘Then you must also know that I have a resurrection-type artifact, and that I can escape by committing suicide?’
Unfortunately, most of what he was thinking wasn’t a lie.
I suppose he would have prepared himself, not knowing what kind of enemy might come.
‘Just let me go, and I will leave without any trouble. I promise not to pose any threat to the heroes in the prison.’
To be honest, I wanted to deal with someone with such good intuition quickly before he could cause more trouble.
If I used my Cloning Technique or Nimbus Cloud well, I felt like I could both deal with him and save the hostages.
The resurrection artifact was a bit unusual and annoying, but it wasn’t at a level where he was impossible to catch.
‘Think carefully. If you deal with me and the immediate enemy disappears, the Association will discard you like a used tool and shift the responsibility onto the survivors of the Starlight Team.’
You might wonder if that made sense, but honestly, that bastard Association President was exactly the kind of person who would do that.
Noticing that I had begun to hesitate, the guy threw his final card.
“Kang Na-hyun’s condition is a bit dangerous right now.”
And it was a card I could never ignore.
“She might be in danger while you’re busy chasing after the resurrected me, you know?”
Infuriatingly, there was no lie in what he said.
“Then, I’ll consider our agreement settled!”
The guy jumped out through the wall Ruyi had smashed, and I ran toward the basement, following the map I had read from his mind.