The thugs were growing increasingly irritated by Osian's words.
They had planned to drive him away, but now that he was so blatant about it, they were planning on taking proper care of him.
Especially the one who was slapped with the apple was snorting and already clenching his fists.
Now that he'd pissed off the most unobtrusive guy, he was in trouble.
"Hey, don't get in the way. I'm going to fuck that asshole."
The thug stomped off toward Osian.
"One punch and you're dead."
With those words, a fist was thrown toward Osian's abdomen but the punch didn't quite reach its target.
Osian reaches out with a light hand and catches it.
"I'd like to return the favor.""What?"
"Don't get knocked out by one punch, or I won't be any fun."
"What.......?"
He was about to say that when a searing pain in his abdomen forced him to gag.
Osian had just reached out with a light fist and punched him in the stomach.
The gangster's body was bent in a straight line and eventually folded in half. His wide-open eyes looked like they were about to pop out at any moment.
The giant flew several meters, skidded across the floor, and slammed into the wall of the building.
"What, after all that talk, you can't even take a single shot?"
Even though Osian thought he'd hit him with a bit of force, the bastard was still on the ground, drooling profusely.
The disparity in their physical specs meant that what he thought was a light punch was too strong.
All the passers-by around him who were nervous that Osian might be hit were taken aback.
It was the same with the other thugs who had been struck by their companion.
Osian's eyes turned to the four remaining thugs.
The thugs flinched, but then they realized that there were four of them, and they gained courage.
"Don't be silly, he's all alone!"
"All at once!"
The thugs exchanged glances and surrounded Osian, encircling him but Osian hadn't moved from his spot.
Of the four, the one behind him moved.
He kicked him in the back when he didn't turn around.
Osian dodged the kick as if he had eyes in the back of his head, and instead grabbed his leg.
"Uh, uh?"
Osian grabbed his leg and swung it like a blunt instrument.
-Kwajik!
The two thugs who had been lunging at him from the side collided together and hit the ground.
Immediately afterward, one of them swung the gourd he had brought with him.
Osian lightly extended his arm. His fist shattered the gourd into pieces.
"This, this......."
Bam!
The thug's nose snapped down, and his bloody teeth fell out.
The last of them pulled a knife from his waistband and stabbed at Osian and Osian quickly retracted his outstretched fist.
Then, slowly, he punched again at a speed visible to the other person's eyes.
‘Asshole!’
The knife-wielding thug smiled and brought the knife into the path of Osian's fist.
If he continued to punch, his hand would be cut off by itself but the moment Osian's fist and the knife met.
-Changgang!
The knife shattered into pieces and scattered.
"Eh?"
The thug who had lowered the knife doubted his eyes.
His bare fist was supposed to be spattered with blood, but the result was quite the opposite.
The thug was devastated by the shards of the broken knife, but Osian's fist was not.
Boom!
It was a light blow from Osian’s point of view, but to the attacker, it felt like a truck had driven right into him.
The thug finally couldn't take the pain anymore and begged Osian.
"Ma, I'll tell you, Ma, I'll tell you, please don't kill me."
"That depends on what you say."
Osian glared at him and the thug’s complexion turned pale.
*
Jacob Gelin, leader of the Black Snakes, was a veteran, a stranger from outside the city.
His dishonorable discharge from the army left him ineligible for a veteran's pension, and he struggled to find a decent job in the city.
Rumors about him had spread, businesses were reluctant to hire him, and Jacob's options for survival were limited.
Looting and killing.
One by one, Jacob picked off the smaller organizations in the 47th District.
These backstreet gangs were nothing more than a bunch of pretentious bullies.
It wasn't hard to dismantle one organization after another and regroup.
Once he'd established his own faction, Jacob scouted out the neighborhood and raided the trucks coming and going at dawn.
In this way, Jacob and his men made a lucrative profit and grew their ranks.
At this rate, Black Snake would be on its way to becoming a mid-level gang.
"Boss. Is this okay?”
"What do you mean?"
Jacob's subordinate spoke up from his office, his voice gravelly.
"What if we keep doing this and they send someone? I heard they're scared and might send a professional fixer."
Jacob glared at his subordinate for being so stupid.
He wanted to curse and slap him, but he was the leader of the organization, so he exercised as much restraint as he could.
"Don't worry about it. There's no way the fixers are going to come to this backwater anyway. The companies we've robbed aren't that big, and they don't have the money to hire people."
The only businesses that come through the 47th District are small to medium-sized businesses.
The real businesses don't set foot in the bad neighborhoods in the first place.
So even if they did, they wouldn't be tracked down.
Even if they did hire mercenaries or fixers, they were confident they could get away with it.
‘I don't think any of those assholes are worth the money anyway.’
Jacob was a soldier who had seen some action, and he took pride in his skills.
He was confident that no matter who they were, they were no match for him in this alleyway.
He was about to explain that it was okay to keep doing this for a while.
Boom!
Something loud crashed downstairs in the building.
Jacob frowned..
"Some crazy asshole is.......Hey, go check it out."
Jacob flicked a glance at his men and they scurried downstairs.
In other districts, they might not have been able to keep their heads up, but in the 47th District, they had a good head on their shoulders.
No matter who he fought, he'd take them down quickly.
Jacob figured he'd take a look at the honeycombed skulls of the corpses later.
-Pow!
-Tat-tat-tang!
-Aaaah!
The noise from downstairs grew louder.
Gunshots and screams. Tables being knocked over and things flying and hitting dull thuds.
Jacob frowned at the way the fight, which he'd thought would be over in an instant, had gone on so long.
‘Something's wrong, are there more of them than I thought?’
Maybe the bastards he'd driven out when he'd established himself here had joined forces.
‘If any of these sons of bitches dare to bite anyone, I'll kill them all.’
Jacob drew his revolver from his waistband and slowly made his way down the stairs.
With his soldier's alertness cranked up to the max, Jacob doubted his eyes as he took in the scene on the first floor.
"What the hell......."
The first floor was a mess.
Bullet holes in the walls, shattered tables, splattered red blood and broken glasses.
The men lying on the floor, not breathing, were his men who had just gone down.
What surprised Jacob the most was that it wasn't a group that had created this scene, but just one man.
"Are you, Jacob?"
The dark-haired man standing at the center of the carnage looked at Jacob and asked.
‘He knows my name.’
Jacob realizes that the man in front of him has come for him.
Are there any other colleagues around? No. So he's a lone wolf?
The moment he realized that, Jacob pulled the trigger.
-BANG!
The target is the man's vital point.
The double tap, a marksmanship trick he'd learned in the military, unfolded sharply, without missing a beat.
Double tap is not just a technique of firing two shots quickly.
It's a skill that requires everything from the grip on the gun, to the stance to withstand the recoil, to the trigger reset.
It was also evidence that Jacob had been shooting this firearm for a very long time, and a lot.
But the reaction of the man holding the sword far exceeded Jacob's expectations.
Ting! Ting!
He swung his sword around to deflect the incoming bullet.
“You know how to shoot quite well.”
The dark-haired man, Osian, admired Jacob's marksmanship.
Jacob fired two shots in quick succession, controlling the gun's base of motion with pinpoint accuracy.
It was obvious that he had been properly trained, unlike the other men who were just firing away without even opening their eyes.
Jacob, on the other hand, squinted in disbelief.
‘Holy shit, you can deflect bullets with a sword?’
I can't believe he's using a sword as a weapon, but deflecting bullets with it?
It's impossible, unless you have ridiculous vision and the physical ability to back it up.
The first thing that came to Jacob's mind was an enhanced human.
But Ossian's body showed no signs of any procedure.
That left only an enhancement mutant and a very high ranked one at that.
‘Why would a mutant of that caliber......!’
*
Osian stared at Jacob.
His scarred, harsh appearance and the smell of alcohol from earlier.
He had to ask just to be sure, but he recognized Jacob as the leader of the Black Snake gang.
Osian remembered the purpose of the request.
To clean up the Black Snake Gang's recent rampage in the 47th District.
And by cleanup, they didn't just mean dismantling the organization, they meant nipping it in the bud.
‘He's just killing and robbing people anyway. No harm in killing him.’
Jacob recognized the emotion in Ossian's eyes.
It was a look he'd seen time and time again on the battlefield, a look he'd seen many times in enemy soldiers.
The will to kill.
Jacob tried to convince him to stay alive, somehow.
-Flash!
There were a few flashes before Jacob realized he couldn't hear his own voice.
‘Huh?’
Jacob tried to reach out for Osian, but he couldn't.
Red lines began to form across his body, and then his body collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap.
Osian stared down at the red blood soaking the floorboards then glanced around the room and saw that there were no more to take down.
‘Let's grab a few things for evidence.’
Jacob had just come down from the second floor, so his room must be on the second floor.
With that thought, Osian went upstairs and opened the door to Jacob's office, narrowing his eyes at the two men inside.
One was a slender young man, the other quite a large man.
Both wore black trench coats, with iron masks over their faces and bowler hats on their heads.
"Who are you?"
The moment Osian asked, the burly one opened his mouth.
"You're not Jacob. Who are you?"