Boss Fight (2)
At this rate, if he stayed put—
“I’m gonna shooot yooouuu.”
“You’re deeeaad.”
-he’d die.
...The instant that thought flashed through his mind, time around him seemed to slow almost to a stop.
The survivors’ eyes.
The direction of the gun muzzles.
The fingers squeezing the triggers, the flex of forearm and arm muscles.
All of it rushed into view at once.
Before he could even decide what to do, his body moved on reflex.
He kicked off the ground and sprang upward, spinning through the air.
Bang-! Baaang-!
Thunk! Thunk!
The fired bullets tore through the air, drawing multiple lines of trajectory.
It sounded insane, but Youngho could see every round flying toward him.
Or rather, it was more accurate to say he felt them.
Realistically speaking, there was no way he could visually register twenty-one bullets in flight.
In any case, Youngho sensed the danger bearing down on him, and that strange instinct he’d felt while hunting zombies guided his body in the right direction once again.
Twisting midair, Youngho landed and immediately dashed toward a nearby car, vaulting over the hood to put it between himself and the others.
The survivors had each fired anywhere from three to as many as six rounds, but when they saw him escape unscathed, they gaped in stunned silence, too flustered to keep shooting.
Youngho had indeed pulled off a miraculous dodge, but he wasn’t exactly fine.
“Ghk—ugh!?”
A splitting headache hit him like his skull was being split open with a hammer.
He lay face-down on the ground, drenched in cold sweat, enduring the pain for several seconds.
Then, little by little, the ache began to subside. Taking a deep breath, Youngho sat down hard where he was.
What was that? My head hurt like hell... No, that’s not even the issue. What the hell was that movement just now...?
Looking back on what he’d just done, none of it made the slightest bit of sense.
He’d somehow sensed where the bullets would come from, how many there would be, and jumped to avoid every single trajectory?
That was the kind of thing superheroes in movies did.
Even if this was a game, he didn’t think there was any special compensation like that.
Is it a bug? Some kind of engine error...? I mean, VR may be advanced now, but it’s still a game in the end. Bugs and glitches should still happen, right?
That was the conclusion he came to for the moment, since the phenomenon was too hard to explain any other way.
Maybe he hadn’t actually dodged all the bullets—maybe some sort of error had occurred instead.
And maybe the headache was a side effect of that.
“Grrrraaaah!”
“Damn it, this isn’t the time for this!”
“Move, move!”
He didn’t have the luxury of getting lost in thought for long.
Even if the survivors had turned hostile toward him too, the one thing that was unquestionably the enemy was the boss, Big Mouth.
For now, let’s avoid fighting the survivors and focus on the boss.
Since they’d said relationships changed based on actions, maybe if he beat the boss first, he’d still have some chance to recover from this mess.
The survivors had to watch out for Big Mouth closing in while also staying wary of Youngho, who was using the vehicle as cover.
So rather than attack him further, they hurried to pull away and get out of there.
And in that opening—
As Youngho ran toward the boss, he met the creature’s eyes.
There was only one emotion in those pupils.
The ferocity of that murderous intent felt like it might freeze his body in place, but his feet never stopped.
Before long, Big Mouth was within range. It roared and swung an arm at him.
“Gwaaaah!!”
Crash—!
The slapped-down hand shattered the asphalt, sending fragments flying.
It had enough power to crush a human being in one blow, but the Youngho Big Mouth had aimed for was already gone.
Its strength is monstrous, but not so fast that I can’t avoid it.
Charging straight in, Youngho decided to exploit the brief opening created by the boss’s attack and target the large wound he’d first noticed on the creature’s abdomen.
His plan was to worsen what looked like a weak point and make the thing spill its innards out completely.
The chat box lit up with negative reactions to his move.
He didn’t have the luxury of reading them.
As he closed to within a few steps of Big Mouth, Youngho instinctively realized something was wrong.
The same warning he’d felt when the survivors focused their fire on him.
At the same time, the place he’d assumed was only a long slash of a wound split open like a mouth, and the tentacles bursting from the boss’s abdomen shot toward him like arrows.
The name Big Mouth hadn’t been given for nothing.
What looked like a severe wound on its abdomen was actually a giant, gaping mouth that doubled as an attack method.
If you charged straight in without knowing that, the tentacles bursting from inside would tear you apart in an instant.
That was why everyone watching had assumed Youngho, who’d been fighting so well, would die because he lacked information.
Ki-gigigik-!
Using that familiar sixth sense, Youngho read the attack and threw his body backward while bending his knees.
He had no time to leap sideways, so this was all he could do.
It was almost like a soccer player dropping into a knee-slide celebration after scoring a goal.
As he skimmed over the asphalt, letting the stabbing tentacle slide upward past him, the viewers stared in disbelief and began typing furiously.
If he hadn’t done anything, his knees would’ve been shredded against the asphalt and he’d have suffered a wound bad enough to keep him from walking.
But the moment he dodged the tentacle, he slammed the field shovel beneath him to shield his knees.
Using the shovel like a board, Youngho slid between Big Mouth’s legs and burst out the other side, then immediately sprang up and adjusted his stance before swinging the shovel blade wide.
He was aiming for the calf wound, where the flesh was already ragged and torn.
I got tricked by the abdomen, but this one is the real weak point.
Skrk!
A precise slash that dug into the muscle, which would have otherwise been protected by tough hide.
Big Mouth had just turned to pursue the opponent it had missed in front of it when its already injured leg was struck again.
Unable to support its own weight, the boss lost its balance, dropped to one knee, and toppled forward.
“Hup!”
Seeing his opening, Youngho shouted and charged.
He stepped on the back of the hand Big Mouth had braced against the ground, kicked off its forearm, and climbed all the way up to its shoulder.
Since even ordinary zombies died instantly if their necks were taken off, he planned to bring the boss down the same way.
He brought the shovel blade down toward the clearly exposed back of its head.
“Gwoooaaargh!?”
Big Mouth let out a scream of pain and violently twisted its body, forcing its upper half upright.
Unlike the other zombies, it was so massive that chopping through its neck in one blow wasn’t easy.
Slashing won’t do it. Then—
He couldn’t afford to miss this perfect chance.
Just before he lost his footing and fell, Youngho reversed his grip on the shovel and drove it into the back of the boss’s head with all his strength.
“Yaaahh!”
Since he’d already opened a wound there, the blade sank deep with almost no resistance.
And then, at last—
Thud.
The sound of that enormous body crashing to the ground rang out, signaling the end of the fight.
But their shock lasted only a moment.
Those who’d witnessed this firsthand had only one thing left to do.
Donations poured in.
Youngho, sitting on the ground and sucking in ragged breaths, couldn’t make sense of the chat window that was flying upward so fast he could barely follow it with his eyes.
“Aaaah! Boss cleared! Mission accomplished! Daddy’s the best!”
His daughter’s excited voice rang out in delight.
Daddy’s the best... how long has it been since I heard those words?
He was so exhausted he felt like he’d just collapsed after a full-speed sprint, and his head had begun to throb again for some reason.
And yet—
“Pfft... ha ha ha!”
Because his daughter was so happy, laughter slipped out of him on its own.