Casino Chaos (4)
Baek Jinwoo, having felt the stark gulf in power, was an unstoppable force. He closed the distance with the hulking boss in a heartbeat and threw his fist.
He didn't hold back an ounce of strength on this one.
The boss's crimes are worse, after all.
Those who sit at the top naturally bear the greater responsibility!
Whoooosh!
The moment his lead foot planted, the boss bit down hard on his lip at the punch driving up toward him. At the same time, he narrowed his eyes and focused.
One punch — that strong?
Nonsense.
Summon battles were another matter, but in raw hand-to-hand combat, no one had ever been his match. A former professional MMA fighter, a boss who'd built his name on the streets — he reset his mindset.
There's no way I'm losing to some clumsy punch that's nothing but raw power!
Hup!
The boss instinctively stepped back, leaning his torso away. Every muscle in his body pulled taut, and Baek Jinwoo's fist grazed the tip of his nose by a hair's breadth.
I dodged it!
For the first time, he had slipped the man's fist.
Not so special after all?
The hulking boss didn't close his eyes.
Closing your eyes mid-fight was strictly amateur hour!
He tracked Baek Jinwoo's passing fist to the very end of its arc and, on pure habit, let fly a right hook.
That unreasonable right hand of his.
If that counter caught your chin, one hundred times out of a hundred, you'd black out and go down for the count.
Whoooosh!
But his fist never found Baek Jinwoo's chin. The man had simply stood his ground and evaded it with the slightest tilt of his head.
What the—
The boss was aghast.
Was that even possible? That wasn't a weave, and it wasn't a duck... How did it make sense to dodge like that without taking a single step?
No matter how elite a fighter you were, nobody dodged like that. It defied reason.
This is beyond prediction — he's genuinely seeing it and dodging with his own two eyes...
But the big boss was a career criminal with deep roots in this world. His bewilderment lasted only an instant!
Whoooosh!
Riding the momentum of his missed right, he snapped out a left hook this time — aimed straight for Baek Jinwoo's midsection!
Fine, he slipped the chin shot. But how does he dodge a body blow without moving his feet?
The torso was a wide-open target. No matter how the man squirmed and twisted, there was no escaping this one...
Huh?
The boss's eyes bulged.
He's gone?
The target who had been right in front of him had vanished from his sight! No — how was that even possible!
His punch was already spent, and just as he panicked, rolling his eyes for a glimpse of the man—
Whoooosh!
An attack from some unknowable angle drove up under his jaw.
The sole of a foot?
The boss instinctively tucked his chin, and—
Crack!
Baek Jinwoo's sole caught the boss squarely on the nose and drove it upward. With the crisp snap of fragile bone giving way, the man's body launched into the air!
Unbelievable.
Getting dropped by an attack like this? With his head snapped back, only one thought surfaced in the boss's mind.
This man is a monster.
Talent beyond all reason! That power and precision simply ignored weight class altogether. At this level, the man would reign over the major fight circuits as an immortal god of war.
Whump!
The big boss crashed onto his back, and the agony flooding from his nose tore a scream out of him.
"K-Kuaaaaagh!"
Both hands clamped hard over his nose, he looked up at Baek Jinwoo — whose raised foot still hadn't come down. And then he went cold with horror.
The eyes gazing down at him were sunken deep, and so very cold.
F-Fuck.
And then he saw it. The man's foot, falling toward his nose one more time.
Goddamn it.
Crack!
That was the last thing the big boss would ever know.
"The boss is done. Who's next?"
Having flattened the boss in mere seconds, Baek Jinwoo swept his gaze around the room. Guild members were still locked in combat with a handful of terrorists.
Oh?
Someone caught his eye.
Song Yeonhee?
She wasn't wrestling down any giant, but with that small frame of hers she was darting in, slipping punches, and landing strikes of her own. And how dazzling, how exquisite the whole performance was...
They don't call it a gifted constitution for nothing.
The Heavenly Heart Body, and the Limitless Body. Physiques that would never be outmatched in a fight anywhere on Earth.
"You little bitch!"
When his strikes kept missing, the furious terrorist spread both arms wide like a bear and charged in a blind rush. Song Yeonhee seized that very moment, springing up and folding her body sideways.
Whirl!
And spin. A 540-degree kick slammed squarely into his jaw. The terrorist crumpled where he stood, knocked out cold by a kick that belonged on a movie screen.
"Woooooah!"
"No way!"
"What is up with those Easterners?!"
And it wasn't just Song Yeonhee. The guild members, who had long drilled Hungyo's conditioning and breathing techniques, could read their opponents' attacks with perfect clarity. Their own strikes might have been rough around the edges, but those hulking bodies couldn't push them around.
And then—
Hup!
With Baek Jinwoo wading back in, the terrorists' morale had nowhere to go but down. More than half of them — nearly seventy percent — were already sprawled across the floor, unconscious or howling in pain.
This wasn't working. The fight had lost all meaning; the attack was as good as failed.
And so—
"...I surrender!"
Someone raised his hands from his knees. Perhaps that was the spark.
"W-We were wrong!"
"Just spare our lives!"
One after another, they shouted their surrender of their own accord, and the hostages' cheers erupted.
"Wow..."
Rachel, who had watched every second of it, couldn't close her mouth. No sane person could believe the chain of events that had just unfolded before their eyes.
"Is this even possible...?"
Easterners. Even at a glance, the fire driving those national-team players — so obviously raised by Jinugod — was unmistakably different from before.
He forged them into that in a matter of days?
Xenos and Sugoi stood with their mouths shut; Moscowman had simply frozen in place. And old man Baekcheon was cheering at the top of his lungs right alongside the hostages. Every one of them was a mirror of Rachel's own disbelief at this absurd scene.
But hold on.
One more thing made no sense at all!
Weren't these people players? Players were supposed to excel at commanding summons... so why were their hand-to-hand skills like this? At this level, they weren't prepping for the World League — they were ready to enter a professional fighting tournament.
Regardless.
One thing was certain.
Baek Jinwoo really is a genius.
And not just any genius — the kind no one else could even comprehend. If Einstein or von Neumann laid eyes on that man, wouldn't even they sink into despair?
Thank goodness we signed that alliance.
Rachel swallowed dryly. She was confident in player-versus-player combat, of course... but with senses and control like that, being overtaken would take no time at all.
We have to keep South Korea as close as possible. No matter what.
It was the moment the policy she had held all this time hardened into something far more certain.
And Baek Jinwoo? The man was unbelievable.
With the hoods stripped from the hulking boss and every last terrorist, he had launched into some kind of interrogation with the woman called Yoo Jia. And the method was... a touch gruesome.
Thwack!
Baek Jinwoo's finger hammered into a terrorist's joint.
"K-Kuaaaagh!"
"Hm. Not this spot, huh?"
Watching with the detached air of a naturalist observing specimens, he murmured again.
"Next."
The sobbing terrorist dragged himself to the back, and the next target stepped up. And then, once more—
Crack!
"Kuaaaaaaagh!"
Baek Jinwoo was, at this very moment, learning Hungyo's Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation technique. He'd always figured there was no need, since Hungyo handled that sort of thing — but with the Day of Peace in effect, it had occurred to him that having it in his own toolkit might not be a bad idea.
"Hmm. This is definitely the right spot."
He had pressed the exact point Hungyo had shown him. And yet all he got was a broken bone — no wrenching of muscle and sinew, none of the writhing agony the technique was supposed to inflict.
"My Lord."
Hungyo drew near and murmured.
"The placement of the point is exact, My Lord. It is simply that your internal energy falls short."
"Oh, is that so?"
So he needed to drill the breathing techniques further?
"The technique only activates once a sufficient measure of internal energy flows into the point."
"...I see. Hmm. Then what am I supposed to do? I need to flush out whoever's behind these guys..."
The terrorists were stubborn as nails. No matter the beating, they muttered like fanatics, insisting that this one thing, of all things, they could never reveal... In Baek Jinwoo's estimation, one minute of the Tendon-Splitting Bone-Dislocation would have every last one of them confessing outright.
If a man refuses to talk, it simply means the pain hasn't been sufficient yet.
That was Baek Jinwoo's standing doctrine. But well — he couldn't use the technique just yet, so another method it would have to be.
"Jia."
"Yes."
Perched on Yoo Jia's shoulders sat two mind-reading birds. Two chances, exactly. These little creatures could sort truth from lies beautifully.
"Listen up."
Baek Jinwoo surveyed the terrorists kneeling in orderly ranks. Tough as they were, there was no way every single one of them was loyal to the organization. With the boss and their comrades awake — eyes open, ears listening — the loyal ones would surely manage to hold out.
"Everyone, close your eyes."
In the end, Baek Jinwoo reached for the classic method schoolteachers had always used back in his day.
"Shut them tight. Anyone so much as tries to peek gets ten minutes of everyone piling on him."
Around them, players who fancied themselves tough prowled with murder in their eyes, while a few others searched for an exit through the elevator shaft that had collapsed under Xenos's control.
"Whoever confesses walks away alive. If you're willing to talk, raise your hand — quietly."
They were already broken. Beaten psychologically as well, drowning in despair at the thought of facing execution once they were handed over. Dangle something sweet, and a few of them were bound to bite.
"Oh, and it's first come, first served."
Flick, flick!
The players loitering nearby made a show of cracking their knuckles, and a handful of terrorists, nerves frayed to the breaking point, cautiously raised their hands.
Bingo.
Hook, line, and sinker.
And so the crisis that had thrown the entire world into an uproar drew to a close. Every hostage had been rescued, and the terrorists' fate was handed over to the British central government.
The mastermind was one Zahir Shu, the man who led the Afghan tribes — the Pashtun people. Through this attack he had intended to raise his nation's players to a new tier, unite Afghanistan and Pakistan, and leverage their enormous population to build a summoning superpower.
That population alone sat at roughly three hundred million... With a wealth of Player Zones at his back, his sights were set on nothing less than a Muslim revival!
"Muslims. Always the problem."
"They do have more than their share of extremism and violence."
"It's their religion and nobody else's — theirs and theirs alone!"
"Be that as it may, you can't just oppress that many players!"
Naturally, the whole world seethed with fury. Britain and its blood-allied nations dispatched troops at once and took Zahir Shu into custody, slapping the offending nation with a massive penalty: a ban from League participation.
And everyone knew it wouldn't end there. The day the Day of Peace ended, the Pashtun armed factions would likely meet a ruinous end — with the world's rankers leading the charge.
"There's truly never a quiet day, is there. Honestly."
Baek Jinwoo and the guild members returned to the VIP hotel.
Flop!
Yoo Jia sank into the sofa of their sprawling suite — well over three thousand square feet of luxury — and buried her face in her hands. Compensation for the suppression operation, League affairs, and the endless stream of calls from the government, their business partners, and the hostages' families...
There was a mountain of work waiting for her.
And then, the biggest problem of all.
"...Who on earth filmed this and spread it everywhere?"
On the phone in her hand, footage was playing of Baek Jinwoo single-handedly mowing down an entire horde of terrorists.