The masked man who had quietly arrived in the VIP booth didn’t look like anything special in particular. He certainly carried a heavy, suffocating air of absolute confidence around him, but in terms of his actual body shape, he just seemed like a regular, lean, athletic man.
He wasn’t a towering giant, nor was he an immovable wall of rippling muscle. Although Jett was physically larger than Darius, Darius himself wasn’t small by any means. Looking at the masked man, Vivian could logically see how an experienced brawler of Darius’s size could potentially win a fight against him, but she absolutely could not fathom how this completely average-looking person could ever hope to defeat a monster like Jett.
She honestly thought the wealthy Gilt Rats would have brought someone who looked vastly more imposing when there was so much territory, money, and power on the line.
"I have one absolute request before we proceed with this little wager of yours," Darius said, leaning forward in his leather chair, trying to reclaim control of the room. "We are putting a amount of our hard-earned empire on the line in this bet. We lose absolutely everything by taking it. So, the stakes need to be exactly the same for you. If our champion wins... then it means that we take over and become the head of the Gilt Rats."
Darius smiled a predator’s smile. "This corporate merger happens either way tonight, Ramon. It’s just a matter of who is sitting on the top throne, and who is taking orders."
In reality, this actually wasn’t a fair deal at all. At least, that’s exactly what Vivian thought as she analyzed the negotiation. The Gilt Rats, with all their political connections and vast wealth, were technically being somewhat generous; rather than just ruthlessly and forcefully shutting down their illegal business through police raids, they were offering the Black Hounds a fighting chance.
There was absolutely no logical business need for the Gilt Rats to risk giving up their entire Syndicate on a single cage fight. And yet, Ramon smiled coldly and accepted the terms without a single microsecond of hesitation.
Darius had briefly thought about going down into the ring himself after he had heard how arrogantly confident Ramon was. But although Darius proudly saw himself as an overall stronger, more well-rounded fighter than Jett, the brutal truth was that it was due to the two of them having fundamentally different fighting styles.
When it came down to raw, overwhelming, blunt-force power, Jett was far more impressive and dangerous. This was especially true when they were locked inside a small, claustrophobic steel cage fighting directly against each other, exactly like they would be for this wager.
Down in the blood-stained ring, Skull calmly stepped through the chain-link door to face Jett.
Vivian had always been deeply amazed by Jett’s terrifying physical power. He had possessed an abnormally strong, bone-crushing grip since the day he was born. Even when he was just a small street kid, his grip was incredibly, unnaturally strong. As he grew, he had meticulously built his large, powerful body specifically to support that crushing grip, and to be far more physically resilient when it came to absorbing lethal attacks in the arena. He was a tank.
But what Vivian witnessed next was absolutely unbelievable in her eyes. It defied logic.
It didn’t take long at all. The highly anticipated fight had lasted exactly two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds of surgical, calculated violence.
And then, the invincible Jett was on his knees, gasping for air, his arms hanging uselessly at his sides.
Meanwhile, Skull was standing perfectly upright above him, not even breathing heavily. He adjusted the cuffs of his leather jacket.
"You tired me out quite a bit," Skull said, his muffled voice echoing in the dead-silent arena. "You’re a very strong one."
The fight was definitively over. And due to how completely overwhelming and systematically humiliating the loss was for Jett, the Black Hound leaders sitting in the VIP booth couldn’t say a single word in protest. The trap had snapped shut.
Watching the masked man walk out of the cage, Darius knew immediately with a sinking feeling of dread: even if he had personally gotten into the ring and was the one fighting, he would have violently lost as well.
He just didn’t quite understand what he had just seen. The sheer, effortless efficiency of it. And Jett, who was the one actually fighting for his life in the cage, didn’t understand what had happened to him either.
Back in the present day, sitting in the secure office of the Billion Bloodline building, all of those terrifying memories rapidly flashed through Vivian’s head as she stared at the security monitor.
’Now that someone exactly like him has successfully breached the perimeter and is inside the building... what do we do?’ Vivian thought, her pulse racing as she watched Skull navigate the lobby. ’I guess the best tactical thing is to just let him pass through the lower floors, and pray that all of those elite Rangers upstairs can deal with him by attacking together.’
She bit her lip, looking at the other camera feeds showing the army outside. ’But then... if all the heavy hitters are distracted fighting the ghost, who will be free to hold the line and take on the rest of the Gilt Rats when they inevitably breach? My guess is it won’t be long until Ramon and Darius get frustrated, drop the caution, and order everyone to just blindly charge in.’
Down on the ground floor, several of the armored Billion Bloodline members saw the lone intruder and came charging aggressively at Skull. One of the men in the lead gripped a heavy tactical combat knife tightly in his hand, thrusting it forward.
Skull didn’t slow his walking pace. He simply waited. Then, when the attacker was perfectly close enough, Skull fluidly lifted his leg and kicked upward at the exact, perfect millisecond, precisely hitting the bottom of the knife’s handle.
The heavy impact violently dislodged the weapon, sending the tactical knife spinning high up into the air. Without breaking his forward momentum, Skull charged into the attacker’s guard. He grabbed the shoulder of his disarmed opponent with a vice-like grip, pulling him forward, and then ruthlessly slammed his leather-clad fist directly into the man’s face, shattering his nose.
Right after the man crumpled, Skull casually reached up and snatched the falling knife perfectly from the air by the handle.
Using his momentum, he spun on his heel, dodging a wild punch from a second attacker. As he completed the spin, he seamlessly stabbed the stolen blade deep into the back of the second attacker’s shoulder.
He then violently kicked the screaming person off the blade, still keeping a firm grip on the bloody handle. He instantly ducked under a swinging baton, sliced horizontally across the stomach of a third guard as he pushed his way forward, and finally reached the heavy doors of the main staircase.
Max had smartly ordered the main elevators to be completely shut off and disabled to make it significantly harder for an invading army to quickly make it to the upper floors where the command center was. They had to take the stairs.
As a fourth brave guard chased right behind him toward the stairwell, Skull didn’t even bother to fully turn around. He simply flicked his wrist and threw the bloody dagger backward. The blade flew through the air, burying itself deep into the guard’s thigh, sending them crashing to the ground in agonizing pain.
Every single one of Skull’s movements looked completely effortless, devoid of any wasted energy or anger. It was glaringly clear to everyone watching the monitors that they were dealing with a terrifying, seasoned professional.
Up in the training room, the Rangers watched the massacre unfold on the screens in stunned silence.
"That... that masked guy seems impossibly tough. Does anyone actually want to go up against him?" Joe nervously asked, swallowing hard as he looked at the bloody stairwell feed.
Because Joe surely didn’t. Even with his potent, supernatural healing factor that allowed him to recover from brutal wounds, that specific fight would be agonizingly painful. Furthermore, against a man who fought with surgical precision, it might easily be a fight where Joe would permanently lose his life to a clean decapitation before he could even heal.
As the other elite Rangers turned to look at each other, weighing the terrifying odds, that was when one person stepped forward, already moving toward the training room doors with absolute resolve.
"I will personally deal with this one," Aron said, his face a mask of stoic determination as he cracked his knuckles. "I will make absolutely sure that he won’t take another step closer to you, Max."