Encirclement
The moment Alexandre, commander of the PMC hired by Glare, stepped down from the wheeled armored vehicle, he drove a steel stake into the ground nearby.
At the same time, several of the men still aboard the vehicle disembarked and, in less than ten seconds, succeeded in erecting a massive barrier that sealed off the surrounding area.
“Our objective is to capture the enemy leader, Yekaterina. Once we have her, the merger period will end before long and government forces will intervene. When that happens, Leviathan will find it impossible to mobilize a large force to rescue her.”
“Understood.”
“Ignore the other mercenaries. They may have looked down on us because we’re only hitting a single Russian branch rather than headquarters, but at best they’re company-strength. Compared to the military forces I commanded in active service, their numbers are laughably small. The only ones we need to watch are Yekaterina herself and the Gambler who joined this raid.”
Having finished his briefing, Alexandre turned his gaze toward Glare’s Russian branch, where smoke was still billowing as though a bomb had just gone off.
“It’s strangely quiet…”
Not much time had passed since the assault began. Their combat strength wasn’t overwhelming, yet a few veterans of elite units were mixed in among them. If those men barricaded themselves in the armory or panic rooms and put up a fight, even Yekaterina shouldn’t have been able to break through so easily.
Her power was blood-flow manipulation—undeniably one of the most lethal abilities in existence—but in urban combat it had a habit of showing unexpected weaknesses.
Still, the gunfire was far too sparse for a battle still raging. Shots rang out only once every ten seconds or so, more like the methodical execution of remaining personnel than a fierce last stand.
Doesn’t matter. We’ve got five hundred mercenaries. The building layout won’t let everyone enter at once, but if we surround it and pound it with mortars they’ll have no choice but to crawl out.
“Tell the personnel with building-collapse abilities and the mortar crews to prepare for bombardment.”
“Yes, sir.”
At Alexandre’s order his adjutant radioed the subordinate units to ready the barrage, then tilted his head with a puzzled frown.
“What is it?”
“Well… there’s no reply. The transmission seems to have gone through, but…”
A chill ran down Alexandre’s spine.
“What about the ability user in charge of communications?”
“I don’t know. He vanished as if he suddenly needed the bathroom…”
If we waste any more time they’ll notice and counterattack…
Among ability users, those specialized for combat could become monsters who shrugged off ordinary firearms as if they were nothing. S-class heroes and villains in particular were sometimes treated as more valuable than strategic nuclear weapons—tactical nukes with far less collateral damage and the ability to distinguish friend from foe.
Most of the densely populated cities of Korea and Japan fell into that category. Yekaterina herself, even setting aside the private force she had built, was counted among those nuclear-grade threats.
That was why this operation could not tolerate a single mistake.
“Run and tell them yourself. Begin the bombardment. If you see any attempt to break out, fire a signal flare.”
The loss of radio contact was a critical handicap, but the friendly units weren’t far apart. Nothing would go wrong.
Probably.
I sank into deep thought.
The remaining hostiles inside the building had been completely cleared, and we had successfully linked up with Yekaterina and the mercenary unit—only to find ourselves unexpectedly caught in an encirclement.
Security had been airtight; the raid information hadn’t leaked through any hack. It had been a perfect surprise attack; the reactions of the men inside the Russian branch proved that much.
Yet Glare had used the mercenaries they had hired in advance to strike at our rear. That pointed to only one conclusion.
—Bang!
In one corner of the conference room, the head of a man wearing a black hood slammed into the floor.
—“W-what the hell is this…!”
—“I kept thinking ‘no way,’ but there really was a traitor bastard. Did they offer you ten times the commission fee? Or did you just decide that in this underworld where trust is everything you could casually stab us in the back?”
—“D-do you have proof?! Do you have any proof?!”
—“You used the communication line we gave you, on the exact same device, and you thought we wouldn’t notice?”
The decryption code they had handed over had contained a piece of malware too subtle to call a full virus. It was meant as a security measure to check connection logs with other devices and prevent virtual meetings from leaking—yet it had unintentionally flagged the man who had been sharing the meeting contents with Glare in real time.
Ironically, he had avoided using screen-sharing until the very end of the merger period, only to get caught the moment he finally did. By then, however, the situation was already a little too late.
—“I’ll see you when the merger’s over. I’ll show you what hell tastes like.”
A security officer of the Moby Dick stratum—one of Leviathan’s true combat assets—knocked the trembling man unconscious and left him sprawled on the floor.
—“The reactionary’s been dealt with. Lucifer, got a plan?”
“Already working on it.”
I had every frequency generator in the vicinity blasting jamming waves in all directions. It would only buy us time, but simply locking down the enemy’s movements was meaningful enough.
“Communications are unstable, though.”
—“That’s the barrier. They put up a field so we can’t just walk out.”
“So breakthrough is the only option.”
Yekaterina and a number of villains were with us, yet in pure firepower the other side held a decisive edge. We had brought only a handful of armored vehicles; they had multiple mortars.
—“…Can’t you cut the power this time?”
“To black out their vision I’d have to drop the entire city’s power grid… If you’re confident you can handle the aftermath…”
At my words Yekaterina immediately backed off. Even she wasn’t about to take on the Russian government alone.
Matters related to mergers were traditionally overlooked by the authorities to a certain extent, but the moment civilian damage occurred the government stood ready to intervene in force.
“Wait a second…”
Then what about this instead?
“If we deliberately give the government forces a reason to intervene and avoid escalation…”
—“? What? I must have misheard.”
Government forces were fundamentally hostile to us. Whether we operated on the dark web or ran black markets in the real world, we were still criminals, and to them Leviathan was a cancer that needed to be rooted out.
Handing them a pretext to step in would be no different from digging our own graves. That was how Yekaterina saw it.
But if you thought about it rationally, the government forces had more uses than one might expect.
“Those mortars… the government doesn’t interfere even if they bring them?”
—“Uh… huh?!”
Yekaterina finally realized something, clapped her hands, and rose from her seat.
—“Those crazy bastards brought mortars?! This is the middle of a city, even if it is the back alleys! Wait, why didn’t I notice that?”
“…”
So even during a merger period, hauling mortars into the middle of a city and raising hell was apparently a step too far.
—“We just give the government a signal… then punch a hole and get out. We’ve got nothing to hide, and as for the Glare bastards—whether the Russian army stomps them or the Hero Association steps in, that’s their problem.”
That was probably why they had raised the barrier in the first place: to keep the government from learning what was happening inside.
The moment the government found out, Glare would be helpless.
And sending the signal didn’t even require a flare; the hacker unit could simply transmit a message to the military on their own.
“That’s… actually pretty simple.”
All Yekaterina had to do was buy time until then.
If we held out until nearby military units assembled or a hero arrived, attention would shift to Glare and we could slip away—carrying every scrap of Glare’s core intelligence and materials with us.
That alone would accelerate our business expansion over the next year by leaps and bounds.
—“Well then…”
The real question now was how we would hold out.
To keep roughly a hundred people as safe as possible under fire, we had no choice but to fight a delaying action.
“I’ll handle the bombardment somehow.”
At the Gambler’s bold claim, Yekaterina shot him a sidelong glance.
“Oh-ho. Think you can manage it?”
“Haha, if you pad the commission fee nicely, more than enough. Gamblers are the sort who’ll stake their lives on money, aren’t they?”
As he spoke he drew a deck of playing cards from his coat and shuffled them seven times, top to bottom.
At once five cards were randomly selected and flipped face-up in midair.
“Now then—Ālea iacta est. Shall we check the result?”
The cards were the seven, five, six, and four of hearts.
A straight flush.
The moment he confirmed it, the Gambler allowed himself a faint smile.
Ālea iacta est
Straight Flush — Hearts
Effect: For one hour, within a 1 km radius of the caster, the explosive properties of all gunpowder are suppressed.
“What a fine hand! From this moment on, for one full hour, every speck of gunpowder within a kilometer of me will have its explosiveness suppressed!”
Kuuung—!
A deep tremor rolled through the air as a golden vortex centered on him expanded in every direction.
Once the golden swirl had faded completely from sight, he calmly gathered the spread cards.
“With this, the mercenaries become completely irrelevant… so all we have to deal with are the villains, right?”
In a single instant, hundreds of mercenaries and every powder-based weapon among them had been rendered powerless.
It was a result no ordinary person could imagine one man achieving—yet in this world it was the sort of thing that happened more often than one might think.
The moment his work was finished, the remaining mercenaries on our side tucked their firearms away and drew military knives, pushing their personal abilities to the limit.