The Crow Takes Aim
I stood quietly near the club entrance, watching the flow of people. A group dressed in sharp suits filed in one after another. The security guards around them were no joke either. These weren’t your average street thugs.
‘Well, even if they’re outdated now, they’re still Hounds. No way they’d hand over the goods without checking faces.’
The insider who leaked the information had some serious balls. Dumping a report packed with the corporation’s deepest secrets to civilians just because the tech had become “obsolete”? If they got caught, their head would roll for sure.
I still couldn’t understand why they’d sell those Hounds to gangsters, but if the only buyer they could find through the broker was this crew, it made sense. After all, who in their right mind would use a Hound with a perfectly legible serial number engraved on it?
I shook off the pointless thoughts and focused on the situation unfolding below. Through the scope of my sniper rifle, I kept a close eye on the club. After a while, I heard Darius shouting something from down there. At once, gang members who had been hiding all around burst out and started firing wildly in every direction.
‘Some operation… They’re just charging in like idiots.’
Well, what kind of discipline could you expect from gangsters? The straightforward way was to gather a bunch of guys, spray bullets everywhere, and push forward. Soon the air filled with deafening explosions as the full-scale battle between the Jin Family and Darius’s crew began.
Less than five minutes after Darius’s men poured into the club, an explosion tore through a second-floor window. Then a third-floor one. Then the fourth. Inside must have been a slaughterhouse, but from where I watched at a distance, it was nothing more than a show across the river.
As the fighting grew fiercer, I sharpened my focus and tracked the enemy’s movements.
‘The curtains make it impossible to see inside clearly.’
I pulled the bolt and checked the chamber. The caliber was more than enough. Even the walls of a building like this shouldn’t stop the rounds from retaining lethal force.
‘Then…’
I really hated using this. It always left a bad taste.
“Ugh…”
The moment I activated a specific section of the artificial nerves linked to my brain, my vision flickered with static and a brutal headache slammed into me. Right after, a burning pain spread through my entire body. My nerves were literally frying. In about thirty minutes, my body would be so damaged that even self-repair wouldn’t be able to regenerate it anymore.
‘Good. It’s working.’
But the backlash wasn’t just for show. The view before my eyes changed completely. The opaque walls of the building became transparent, and I could see every person inside like dolls. I was hacking their implants and pulling real-time biometric data. A pure human without any implants wouldn’t be detectable, but who in this day and age didn’t have at least one? Even if it was just for vision correction or hearing enhancement, everyone had something.
Feeling the familiar pain after so long, I gave a bitter smile and pressed my eye to the scope.
‘The group moving up to the fourth floor is Darius… The ones moving stiffly above them must be the Jin Family.’
Who to take out first?
I swept the barrel back and forth, weighing my options, until I spotted a man surrounded by several subordinates. He was positioned perfectly for an ambush. If I left him alone, Darius’s crew might get pinned down.
‘Then he’s first.’
Having made my decision, I aimed at his chest and pulled the trigger.
A massive gunshot roared out. My eardrums and whole body shuddered from the recoil.
“Kgh…”
The bullet tore through several meters of ceramic wall and punched a huge hole in the man’s chest. The impact had been greatly reduced, so his upper body didn’t completely disintegrate, but it was still more than enough. At the very least, he was dead on the spot.
“Ow, ow, ow…”
The recoil had shattered my shoulder and right cheek. It felt like the bones had crumpled. But after waiting just a little while, they quickly restored themselves.
I worked the bolt, ejected the spent casing, and immediately began searching for the next target. The subordinates who had lost their commander were visibly panicking and failing to hold their positions.
‘I can probably ignore that area now.’
The moment I started to shift my gaze elsewhere—
“Kgh?!”
Crackle.
Sparks burst from my eyes and ears. At the same time, a chunk of my nerves burned out completely. I immediately shut down the biometric detection implant and stood up.
‘Someone else is using the same implant as me.’
The biometric detection implant was military-grade. The corporations never leaked it to civilians because it was strictly for military use. Yet someone on the enemy side was using an identical one.
‘Does the other side have corporate soldiers?’
A chill ran down my spine. This job had gone seriously wrong.
I hurriedly began packing up the equipment I’d laid out on the rooftop and prepared to change positions. But then, a bad feeling prickled at the back of my neck. Instincts should never be ignored.
I threw myself forward instantly. The door to the rooftop I had just been standing on exploded violently and flew away.
‘What the hell…!’
Thick iron fragments that used to be the door whistled past my head. Before the shockwave even faded, I forced myself up. This frail body nearly collapsed from nothing more than a grenade blast.
‘I can’t let them close the distance.’
My body was weak, so close-quarters combat was always a disadvantage. The only way I could gain the upper hand was by keeping as much distance as possible.
‘But grabbing the rifle now is too much…!’
Even if I created distance, without a weapon I couldn’t do anything. This situation had gone completely off the rails.
‘Should I run?’
It seemed my top priority of self-preservation had hit a snag. In that case, the logical choice was to abandon Darius’s crew and escape. All I had to do was pull the detonator from my jacket pocket and press the button. It would all be over.
“…Ugh.”
For some reason, I hesitated.
And that single moment of hesitation became the trigger that decided my fate.
“…!”
Someone burst through the cloud of dust. It was a tall woman wearing a black plague doctor mask. In an instant she was right in front of me. She reached out, grabbed a fistful of my hair, and drove her knee hard into my stomach.
With practiced movements, she kept me from flying backward, then followed up with a relentless barrage of strikes. I tried my best to counter, but in a close-range brawl like this, I had no chance.
In the blink of an eye I was beaten to a pulp. My stomach and chest were crushed. I collapsed completely.
My vision blurred. It seemed multiple life-support devices inside my body had simultaneously gone offline, causing a momentary blackout.
‘Goddamn it.’
This body really was pathetically weak. I was supposed to endure and fight back, not collapse like this. I wanted to move, but not even a fingertip would twitch.
The last thing I saw before losing consciousness was the unpleasant crow’s head looking down at me.
When I opened my eyes again, I was inside the club building I had been watching earlier. It seemed to be a reception room on an upper floor. The atmosphere was quiet, and the furniture was elegantly old-fashioned.
The moment I saw the ornate ceiling, I let out a sigh.
‘Darius’s crew must all be dead.’
A voice interrupted my thoughts.
“Why the sigh?”
It sounded like an elderly grandfather. I endured the stabbing pain throughout my body and turned my gaze toward the voice.
There stood an old gentleman dressed in a perfectly classic suit straight out of the late 18th century, leaning on a cane. If not for the fact that the entire right side of his face was mechanical, he would have looked exactly like a gentleman from a history book.
Next to the chair he sat on were five Hound storage cases stacked up.
When I saw them, I laughed hollowly and flopped back down.
The old gentleman asked again.
“I asked why you’re laughing like that.”
“No reason. The whole situation is just funny, that’s all.”
I turned my eyes away from the old man. A well-dressed, affluent-looking man in a gray pinstripe suit came into view. From the circumstances, he had to be the “insider” from the corporation that manufactured the Hounds piled up there. In other words, a traitor.
Standing beside him was the crow-head woman I had seen earlier.
The corporate insider looked down at me as if I were garbage.
“Seeing a sight like this makes me think purging all the Hounds after the war was the right decision. What do you think, Mr. Jin?”
“Hm? Oh, of course I agree. They may have started as humans, but in the end they’re nothing more than soldiers who shed their human shells.”
The old gentleman nodded in agreement.
In a voice that was nearly gone, I spoke to them.
“What the hell kind of deal are you trying to make with those things, you pieces of trash?”
“A deal, a deal! Yes, there certainly was a deal.”
“But it’s not something scum like you need to know about.”
The old gentleman answered, and the corporate insider added on. They seemed to be perfectly in sync, mocking me together.
I no longer had the strength to say anything else, so I simply lay there whether they mocked me or not. My life was hanging by a thread, yet strangely I felt almost nothing. It was as if I had some strange conviction that I would survive this. I calmly assessed the current situation.
Seeing that I gave no reaction, they seemed to lose interest. They began cleaning up and preparing to leave.
The insider smiled brightly and said,
“Well then, since all the worthless gangsters have been taken care of, we can silence everyone here and wrap this up. This concludes our partnership.”
The old gentleman smiled back at him just as brightly.
“Indeed. Then our business here is finished. We’ve gotten everything we wanted, so there’s no longer any need to maintain appearances.”
Something about those words must have felt off. A faint crack appeared on the insider’s face.
The old gentleman said nothing more. He simply gestured toward the crow-head woman.
“…!”
Bang.
Without hesitation, she drew her gun and blew the insider’s head off. Rose-red blood splattered across the elegant carpet. The headless corpse slumped over the chair, spraying blood.
The old gentleman looked at the scene and laughed heartily.
“You should have always watched your back. Your back.”
I could only lie there with my mouth open, staring blankly at the sudden turn of events.