Lohan activated Body Density to the maximum level available in the real world.
His muscles suddenly became as heavy as lead, turning his two-meter fall into a devastating impact.
At the same time, he manifested a thin layer of the Obsidian Exoskeleton only on the skin of his feet and hands to spread the damage received evenly around, ensuring that the shock did not damage his own tissues.
The impact was heavy and brutal.
Lohan landed with his knees on the man’s shoulders; the man didn’t even have time to scream.
The sound of collarbone bones snapping under the weight of a tank-like body echoed through the apartment.
The man collapsed instantly, his face slamming against the metal floor.
Lohan, in a fluid motion that tested his insane reflexes, snatched the helmet out of the air before it hit the ground.
The other four intruders jumped back in shock.
"What... where did he come from?!" the gang leader shouted, pulling out a vibrating knife.
Lohan stood up slowly, feeling the adrenaline surge, but the internal conflict within him continued.
His left hand itched to cast an [Ice Spike], but he knew that manifesting a magical ice spike in front of four witnesses, and producing who knows how much magical energy that could attract even more attention, would be a huge mistake in the real world.
He needed to fight like a human, but his mind was processing the battle like a Slime.
’The human body is too slow... it feels like I’m trying to play with a 1,000 ms ping,’ he muttered mentally, feeling the Mana coursing hot through his veins.
The man with the scar on his mask advanced, thrusting a polymer knife.
Lohan saw the movement in "slow motion" thanks to his Instinctive Perception, but when he tried to dodge, his feet attempted to use Viscous Flow to slide, which nearly caused him to lose his balance on the apartment’s dry floor.
Lohan growled, regaining his footing through Gravitational Anchoring. Seeing that he could no longer dodge, he simply raised his forearm.
CLANG!
The vibrating knife struck the skin of Lohan’s arm, but instead of tearing flesh, it ricocheted with a metallic clang. Beneath his clothing, Lohan had hardened his human skin with hexagonal obsidian plates.
"Impossible! The knife didn’t even scratch it?!" The scout paled beneath his mask.
Honestly, not even Lohan knew how resistant this exoskeleton was in the real world, but he didn’t waste this opportunity.
Lohan didn’t give them a chance to let their fear turn into flight.
Using the Artificial Magic Core Harmonizer, he sent a pulse of mana to his biceps, simulating the explosive contraction of an Explosive Rabbit’s legs.
He landed a straight punch right in the attacker’s solar plexus.
The impact didn’t sound like flesh hitting flesh, but like a sledgehammer striking a concrete wall.
The man was hurled backward, crashing through the coffee table and slamming into the peeling wall with such force that the plaster fell on him in chunks.
The group’s leader took a step back, his eyes dilated behind the visor.
He realized that the skinny kid they’d come to check out, who had indeed become a Player in Elysium, actually had the physique of a true monster!
"You... you’re not human!" the leader hissed, his voice faltering as he tried to deactivate the signal blocker to call for reinforcements.
Lohan smiled, with the same sinister smile he’d used to terrify Gideon in Mythlorien. His blue eyes turned red, glowing faintly as they stood out against the darkness of the apartment.
Lohan didn’t give the leader time for his fear to turn into effective action; the very millisecond he noticed the man’s thumb moving frantically to press the side button on the signal blocker, Lohan acted.
However, it was at that exact moment that his conflicting instincts struck like network interference.
His mind, conditioned by weeks of intense grinding in Elysium as a Slime, expected his body to simply "collapse" forward once more into a viscous, fast-moving mass, ignoring the laws of human anatomy.
He tried to project his will so that his feet would slide across the floor as if under the effect of his accelerated rolling technique, but having a physical body with an immobile membrane and the rigidity of human bones betrayed him.
Instead of a fluid slide, Lohan took a heavy, uncoordinated step that nearly caused him to lose his balance.
The gang leader, seeing the mistake, let out a panicked scream and tried to raise his kinetic weapon.
"Die, you monster!"
Lohan growled, regaining his composure through his enhanced structural stability, forcing his human tendons to function like the biological webs he wove in the other world, bridging the gap between what he possessed in this world and what he was accustomed to in the other.
He propelled his body forward with an explosion of force that made the metal floor creak. Before the leader could fire, Lohan grabbed the man’s wrist.
The sound of bones being crushed echoed through the room.
Lohan didn’t just use brute force; he concentrated his internal energy to make his palm as hard as the black scales he wore in battle as he squeezed that wrist.
The leader let out an agonized scream as the communication device was crushed between his fingers and Lohan’s hand, turning into a heap of electronic scrap and broken plastic.
’Shit...’ Lohan thought as he looked at the broken device and realized it probably wouldn’t block any signals in that state.
At that moment, the other three henchmen who were still on their feet, one of them still recovering from the impact against the wall and the other who had just seen his companion knocked out on the floor, charged forward simultaneously.
Lohan regretted having trained only with physical exercises and not having dedicated time to combat training.
Even though he had tried to adapt the use of his skills to the real world, he had never taken the use of those skills to the extreme for fear of being discovered, and now that caution was taking its toll.