Hero Technology Innovation Center Raid (4)
ZZZT—!
A violent spark leapt from the lights inside the Technology Innovation Center, and the whole interior plunged into darkness. Startled shouts rose from the government assemblymen.
"D-Dimension Walker! Protect the samples! We can't let them be destroyed!"
"Yeah, yeah~"
Even with his vision cut off in an instant, Dimension Walker answered in a bored drawl, not a flicker of panic in him.
He had been ordered to guard P, D, and I—the products of Project JD—yet nothing about his behavior changed. He made no move to shield the three artificial heroes.
The lights had already gone out; no one could see a thing. When Dimension Walker still showed no sign of taking a defensive stance, the assemblymen panicked and shouted again.
"Dimension Walker! I said protect the samples! What exactly are you doing right now?"
The artificial heroes were still in the earliest stage—they had no combat data loaded at all—so they couldn't be thrown into a fight.
Dimension Walker barely registered the assemblymen's words. He answered without looking at them.
"Hey now. You all got more field experience than me or something? Then by all means, go fight in my place. My head's already killing me, so quit making noise next to me. The best defense, you know, is removing the reason anyone's attacking in the first place."
"The lights are out! This is our chance! Push in!"
At Black Rose's cry, Dimension Walker snorted.
He was an S-class hero. Even if he couldn't see an inch in front of his face, his senses were sharp enough to pin an enemy's position by hostility alone.
"Sure, cutting off vision closes the power gap a little. But..."
THUD—!
Sensing the approach of the seven A-class villains, Dimension Walker lunged that way and launched a kick.
All seven of them—A-class villains, every one—couldn't take a single kick. They went flying backward together. Something crashed and collapsed in the dark, and the screams of the crowd grew louder still.
"In the face of a truly overwhelming difference, that barely means a damn thing. You think covering my eyes for a second is going to let trash like you catch up to me...?!"
Mid-sentence, Dimension Walker sensed something and cut himself short.
He sent a single fist toward the direction of whatever was creeping closer through the dark, then slammed it hard into the floor.
"Ugh...!"
Missed? Lucky bastard.
Even for him, landing a clean hit was hard—the interior was pitch-black, and panicking civilians were tangled everywhere. On top of that, the one approaching had been far more careful than the seven A-class villains, so the first strike went wide.
But his eyes were slowly adjusting to the dark. The moment a scrap of vision returned, Dimension Walker spotted the figure closing in on P, D, and I.
Honestly, the outfit had already given him away.
Dimension Walker threw another punch, caught the white-masked man reaching for P, D, and I, and slammed him into the floor.
"Guh...!"
With the rest of his body still fighting Black Rose and the A-class villains at the same time, Dimension Walker pinned the white-masked man and flicked a glance at him—the closest target by physical distance.
"White hat, white cape, white mask... So you're that Kid G everyone's been talking about? Gate opening, and clone creation... that was it, right?"
Dimension Walker deliberately released the hand pinning Kid G, pulled a dagger from his coat, and flung it at the man's gut.
A probe—thrown at deliberately moderate power and speed.
Kid G didn't even try to dodge. He took it clean.
"Gyaaah...!"
Didn't dodge.
In that split second, Dimension Walker ran a flood of calculations through his head.
Not that he couldn't dodge—he chose not to.
Dimension Walker had fought plenty of villains with clone-generation abilities. Drawing on the patterns those types always showed, he reached a conclusion in an instant.
It's a clone.
Clone users only dodged attacks headed for the real body.
They didn't have the bandwidth to care about every hit that landed on a clone, and damage to a clone wouldn't kill the original. So they used the clones as bait—give flesh to take bone.
The fine details of the tactics varied, but the core premise of using clones as bait never had a single exception.
Then where's the real one?
Killing a clone only meant the original would spit out another and keep running a diversion.
But every clone-type ability user had a hard limit on how many they could make.
Putting together everything known about Kid G so far, the max he could run at once was two.
Dimension Walker left the clone restrained instead of finishing it and swept his gaze around for the original. The dark still made it hard to lock a proper target.
In the end he switched on the earpiece mic he'd been wearing the whole time without ever turning it on, and spoke.
"Operator. Give me the positions of every person within a two-kilometer radius acting suspicious."
"Dimension Walker?! Do you have any idea how many times I've been calling you?! Why do you keep turning your mic off?!"
"I've got a hangover and my head hurts. Save the lectures for later and just look."
"Honestly...! Southeast of the Technology Innovation Center, 1.5 kilometers out at the power plant—there's one person whose ID won't scan... wait, now there are two!"
"You should've said something the second you saw that."
"Because you had your mic turned off!!!"
Click—
Dimension Walker cut the channel again, checked once more that Kid G's clone still couldn't move with the dagger in its gut, then left only the bare minimum of his body—and half his face—behind to handle Black Rose and the A-class villains. The rest of his face and body he space-shifted out through a visible window of the Technology Innovation Center.
Whoosh—
"Nngh..."
His head already ached from the hangover. Going from the dark straight into a sky washed with evening sunset made his eyes sting; he screwed up his face hard.
When he opened them again, he saw two identical figures peeling apart beside the power plant that EMP bombs had knocked dead.
Both of them slapped their hands to the ground at once, tore the earth open, and vanished underground.
"A couple of moles. Too bad for you—I don't only split my own body."
Dimension Walker flicked his hand. The entire stretch of ground around the power plant heaved upward in one piece.
"Aaaagh!"
With the earth they'd been tunneling through yanked into the air, the two Kid Gs who'd been opening the ground ahead of themselves dropped out into open sky together.
"All right. Which one's the real body?"
Dimension Walker split the lifted ground in two and hurled a slab at each Kid G. In that instant he caught the left one raising a guard.
"There you are!"
BOOM—!
Using the flying earth as a shield to close the distance, Dimension Walker drove Kid G's real body into the dirt.
"Gyaaaah!"
"Making a man come all the way outside just to deal with you..."
POOF—
The second he locked the pin, both of the Kid Gs who'd come out of the power plant vanished.
Trying to punch straight through Dimension Walker was never going to work—not in a hundred tries, not in a million.
The second any physical force entered the picture, no plan against him had a chance. So what I'd set up was pure deception.
Black Rose and her A-class villain subordinates had already issued the terror warning and actually launched the attack. I decided to quietly ride that wave.
Once the fight between Dimension Walker and the villains heated up, I would detonate the EMP bombs I'd sourced from the black market from outside, kill the lights in the Technology Innovation Center, and blind him.
And last of all—the weakness only I knew about.
He had too much experience.
Dimension Walker had fought clone-generation ability users like me more times than he could count. Those types all fell into the same patterns, and that knowledge had been burned into his brain and body. So I decided to turn his stacked experience against him.
I flipped the assumption—built from experience and plain common sense—that the real body would always put its own safety first. I had the real body step out first, get grabbed, and deliberately take the dagger he threw instead of dodging it.
It hurt like hell, but by refusing to dodge and just eating the hit like a clone would, I made Dimension Walker write me off as a fake.
He space-shifted most of his body toward where he assumed the real one would be. What remained inside the Technology Innovation Center was still fighting Black Rose and the seven A-class villains.
The second his eyes left me, I yanked the dagger out of my gut—it had been driven in so deep it was stuck in the floor like a stake—clamped a hand over the wound, and ran for the biggest capsule in the center of the venue.
Other heroes had come as ordinary spectators—Valkyrie among them for sure. I had to finish before their vision recovered.
I put my hand on the largest capsule, the one holding the sleeping prototype JD Eve, opened it, and whispered into her ear the wake code that no one outside a handful of government assemblymen could possibly know.
"Youth. Full sprint. Adventure."
"Oh, I get it, Kid G. You twisted your thinking one more turn and decided to make a complete idiot out of me, is that it?"
Right then I heard Dimension Walker, space-shifted back inside, drop his voice into something cold and furious.
No time.
"Android. Storm. Knight. Ball. Collapsed world."
"There you are! Hope you're ready, Kid G!"
"Command."
The instant Dimension Walker found me, Eve opened her eyes.