Field Trip (3)
One swipe was enough to paralyze the modified humans.
However heavily they’d been altered, the foundation was still human. And if a poison worked on humans, then it worked on modified humans too.
There was no reason to keep any of them alive, so I didn’t need to fuss over concentration or hesitate for even a second.
I just kept stabbing and raking with my nails, hitting them with the maximum dose every time until they dropped dead.
As I cut my way through the crowd and kept killing modified humans, the other kids soon started moving toward the civilians behind me, as if to back me up.
The villains did the same.
“What the hell do you little brats think you’re doing, charging in like that?!”
Dumas blocked the students’ path, bulging his muscles before slamming both hands into the ground and releasing a shockwave.
That was Dumas’s power: shockwaves.
The ability to transmit force through earth or empty air by using them as a medium. But it wasn’t some insane power like that white-haired old monster from a certain manga.
At least not right now.
The ground heaved like a wave and tried to swallow the students, but from the other side, Lapis canceled it out in one stroke.
“Go! I’ll handle this somehow by myself!”
“Those horns, that skin color... that tail... Are you of dragon blood? Good, I’ve wanted to fight one someday! Come on, lizard!”
“D-Douma, earth shaman!”
“Hornhead, there’s no way you can handle him alone! I’ll help!”
“I told you, I’m Lapis...!”
Daruyzien and Lionel couldn’t just stand by and let Lapis fight alone, so they each settled into combat stances and moved to stop Dumas.
“What is this! Get lost!”
Dumas swatted at Daruyzien, whose body had turned blade-like, but Daruyzien didn’t fly back. He drove his feet into the ground and held firm.
Lionel circled behind Dumas, pinning his arms and sinking his teeth into his neck, while everyone fought from their own position with everything they had.
During the time they bought me, Lapis softened the ground under Dumas’s feet and buried his lower body, then shook the earth wildly beneath him.
It was the sort of thing that looked like it was meant to wreck his legs completely.
Lionel was hammering him like he meant to crack his skull open from behind, and Daruyzien had simply hardened his forearms like steel and kept pounding Dumas’s head in an attempt to knock him out.
Not that it was the kind of thing that would put him down. The bastard was stubbornly hanging on.
Still, they were fighting well enough.
I wouldn’t have minded watching a little longer, but I had something else to do, so I looked to the other side.
“Grrrreaaagh... aaagh...”
In the middle of the modified humans, Eliza was using her ability to keep summoning more of them, so I had to deal with her somehow.
That bitch’s mirror dimension was disgustingly annoying.
Her mirror dimension let her flick her fingers and move between reality and a world that was perfectly similar to it, like something reflected in a mirror.
Only Eliza could store things in there and take them back out.
Getting kidnapped into the mirror world by Eliza didn’t kill you or anything.
You could survive in there without eating. You could even move.
You just couldn’t get out.
Also, entering the mirror world wasn’t like teleporting; you crossed into it at the exact coordinates of the real world.
In other words, if she wanted to summon something, she had to move whatever she’d stored in the mirror world to a spot near the coordinates where she wanted to call it out.
So it wasn’t quite the all-purpose cheat ability she thought it was.
Even so, the fact that she kept dragging out modified humans like that meant she must have stocked up on all kinds of things over on that side of the mirror world.
It would be faster to take Eliza down than to kill every modified human one by one.
I could do it if I wanted to.
Using a liquid instead of a gas meant burning through more material, but since it was a poison so deadly that even one drop was enough to take effect, it wasn’t much of a burden.
But then the civilians would die.
No matter how generously you put it, the students’ speed at rescuing the civilians was sluggish at best.
The reason was all the modified humans that had gone completely rigid like stone.
Because they’d frozen in place exactly as they were when they’d been clutching civilians or attacking them, the students had to somehow remove those arms if they wanted to save anyone.
And since they were modified humans, their durability was high, so that wasn’t easy.
To make matters worse, most of the kids handling civilian rescue right now had powers that made it hard for them to shine in a fight, so the rescue efficiency was even worse.
And if Eliza just kept tossing more modified humans into the mix?
Forget rescue. It’d take forever just to clear them out.
I couldn’t even imagine how badly the plot would break if I killed her, but the plot was already broken.
Who cared? We’d already gone too far to consider every little consequence.
Since there was no end to fighting each one individually, I pushed straight ahead while only paralyzing the ones I absolutely needed to deal with.
Eliza looked at me and shuddered as if she could feel something crawling over her skin, then called for backup.
“Cayenne! Do something...! I can’t handle that one on my own!”
“If you die, the amount of work that falls on me only increases. Why should I help?”
“You crazy bitch, we’re on the same side!”
“Were we? I thought we’d only banded together out of mutual interest.”
“...Ugh! Fine, I’ll get you rare metal, okay?!”
“Now that, at least, is a good deal.”
The moment my hand was about to land on Eliza, Cayenne, who had been standing there with their arms crossed doing nothing, finally moved.
They wedged themselves between me and Eliza, blocking me from touching her.
There wasn’t a single thing about Cayenne that looked human. Once the black coat was thrown off, their body was literally a hunk of metal.
That was her... or his... ability. Iron Man, in the most literal sense.
Even the organs and brain were nothing but metal.
“You looked awfully smug because you don’t have a single poison resistance, huh? Too bad. This body doesn’t have a single spot where poison can get through—”
“I know.”
I shoved Cayenne aside as they tried to grab my wrist and widened the distance between us, then coated myself in diluted sulfuric acid and lunged again.
Cayenne just watched me rush in as if I were a joke. Like they were telling me to try and touch them if I could.
But the instant my hand made contact, they seemed to realize something was off and swung their arm hard in resistance.
“...It’s not just poison you can use?”
Cayenne’s torso, which I’d touched only for a moment, had already corroded slightly.
“Go find out for yourself, tin head.”
In reaction time and raw speed, I had the overwhelming advantage. Cayenne might have been tough, but they weren’t fast, so adding that into the equation didn’t put me at a disadvantage.
But if I ignored them and pushed through, there were far too many modified humans—enough to build a wall with.
What should I do? Should I accept the damage?
If I just grit my teeth and spray gas once, this would be so much easier.
“What the hell kind of bitch is that...!”
Eliza went pale watching me shift freely between poison and acid, then kept flicking her fingers in a panic, summoning more modified humans again and again.
“T-This sort o-of thing...!”
Cayenne, too, kept stubbornly coming after me, enduring the way their corroded body kept breaking apart.
If this kept up, the one being worn down was me, so just as I was about to grit my teeth and unleash the gas—
“We came to help, Blanca!”
Minho burst into the battlefield from the sky with Jinhyun and Yeonhwa tucked under his arms.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one startled by the sudden reinforcements, because Cayenne and Eliza both froze for an instant and stared at the newcomers.
“Why the hell are you here—no, later! Yeonhwa, there aren’t any civilians around, so burn the whole place down!!”
I knew there was nothing more pathetic than asking why they were here, so I decided to count my blessings and told Yeonhwa to burn everything to the ground.
Yeonhwa hesitated for a moment, but then looked at my face and lit the lighter anyway, unleashing that whirlpool of flame she’d shown before and incinerating the trash mobs in one sweep.
“Minho, take out the sniper on the rooftop! We’ll handle things here somehow!”
“The rooftop...?”
“The place with the huge X-shaped sign behind the bus stop! Watch out, they’re firing icicles from there! You can do it, right?!”
Minho looked at me with an expression that practically screamed he had a lot to say about this.
“...Just trust me already!”
Still, he answered brightly enough and flew into the air, heading straight for where Alexei was.
I could trust Minho with that.
Even if this was still early in the story, he was still pretty damn capable.
And, well, he was the protagonist.
Just as I was thinking that, a little too casually, and preparing to finish off Cayenne, who was blocking Yeonhwa’s flamethrower with their whole body, and Eliza, who was trembling behind them, Wang Tai-ryun’s clone approached us and smiled ominously.
Jinhyun immediately hurled a lump of ice at the illusion, but of course, since it was an illusion, there was no way the attack would actually land.
“Wow. For mere students, you’re pretty impressive. Scary, even. I heard you were just picked up off the street, but you really are something, to have pushed people like this.”
“What do you people want, anyway?!”
“What do you mean, what? It’s right in front of you. I even told you nicely, didn’t I? That cross-eyed titted bitch.”
“Blanca is Blanca! I’m not letting you have it your way!”
Jinhyun was still making only the most irritating choices possible in the middle of all this. Did I really look like I needed help that badly?
“Yeah, go on and do your best. Man, I really envy young people—so much spirit.”
Wang Tai-ryun’s clone walked slowly toward Yeonhwa.
Yeonhwa fired a blast of flame at the illusion.
The illusion didn’t even pretend to be hurt. Then, in an instant, it materialized right in front of her.
For just a split second, its whole body was seared by the flames, but the bastard still managed to smash Yeonhwa away with a fist.
“Yeonhwa!”
Yeah, it wasn’t going to be that easy.
When I looked around, I saw Wang Tai-ryun’s illusions materializing and vanishing all over the place as they attacked the students.
Near Jinhyun, who’d gone to check on Yeonhwa, and around me too, illusions were scattered everywhere.
Yustitia had tried to join us late, but she seemed helpless against Wang Tai-ryun as well, who kept materializing and disappearing in all directions.
Why the hell was this appearing now, when it was supposed to show up in second year?
I gave up on the nice idea of taking the executives alive and moved with the thought that I needed to kill one more of them, no matter what, within the time I had been given.
“Long live the Suicidessssss!!!!!”
Something completely unexpected barged in and changed everything.