"Get him! He’s just a kid, no matter what he looks like!" The man with the scar shouted, trying to ignore Lohan’s terrifying appearance, as he drew a vibrating knife that emitted an even louder hum.
Lohan swiveled his neck, and his red eyes tracked the trajectory of the three attackers. Thanks to his instinctive perception, he could see the men’s erratic heat signatures and their vulnerable centers of mass in the dark with great ease, just as if it were daytime.
But the limitations of his human body remained a burden.
As Slime, he would have projected ten tentacles to immobilize them all at once, whereas as a human he had only two arms and two legs.
The man with the scar delivered a side thrust.
Lohan tried to twist his torso in a way a normal human couldn’t, hoping his ribs were as pliable as jelly. The sharp pain he felt when his spine protested against the unnatural movement made him hesitate for a split second.
And that split second was enough for the vibrating blade to slice through the shoulder of his shirt and cut a shallow gash in his skin.
Lohan felt the heat of the blood trickling down, but before the pain could even set in, his body reacted.
Despite the biological differences that still existed between the human body and Slime’s body, Lohan felt the energy circulating in his veins begin to act at the site of the cut, neutralizing any toxic residue from the blade and initiating accelerated clotting.
The wound, which would make an ordinary man flinch, served only to activate his full combat mode.
Then he felt that energy boil.
It was as if the "blood" from another world were trying to break through his skin.
Lohan landed a straight punch right in the face of the man with the knife.
But this wasn’t just a simple punch to the nose; at the moment of contact, Lohan activated a sudden compression of energy in his knuckles.
BAM!
The impact was so violent that the visor of the man’s mask shattered.
The attacker was thrown backward, his feet leaving the ground as his body traced a parabolic arc before crashing into the broken refrigerator.
The appliance crumpled under the weight of the impact, and the man collapsed, unconscious even before hitting the floor.
The other two mercenaries paused for a moment, terror finally overcoming their greed.
They watched their 100-kg comrade get thrown like a rag doll by a punch from a boy who didn’t even seem to be exerting himself.
Lohan was panting, but not from exhaustion. His lungs were purifying the heavy air in the room, minimizing the extreme adrenaline he felt as he regained the perfect control he had over his own body.
"Who are you...?" The leader, still clutching his broken wrist, asked in a choked voice.
Lohan didn’t answer with words. He concentrated his energy into his feet and used Explosive Steps sparingly so as not to shatter his own bones. The result was an audible shift of air, and in the blink of an eye, he appeared in front of one of the remaining henchmen.
The man tried to raise his arms in a guard, but Lohan executed an air-sucking maneuver as he struck the void near his opponent’s chest. The atmospheric pressure fluctuated for a millisecond, pulling the attacker’s body forward, straight into Lohan’s knee.The sound of the impact was muffled and terrible.
The henchman doubled over, losing consciousness instantly as the air was forced from his lungs and his nervous system collapsed from the shock.
Only the leader and the last man remained, the latter frozen by the door. The man, realizing that the mission to "process" the boy was actually a collective suicide, tried to flee.
He turned the doorknob desperately, but Lohan had no intention of letting him leave to tell what he had seen.
Lohan extended his left hand, and extremely fine, almost invisible threads, saturated with a bluish energy, shot from his fingers.
They weren’t as resilient as they were in Elysium, but in the real world, where no one expected to be hunted by biological webs, they were lethal.
The filaments wrapped around the fugitive’s legs, and with a sharp tug, the man was knocked face-first onto the cold metal floor.
Lohan walked over to him with ease and delivered a precise blow to the back of the man’s neck, knocking him out.
Since Lohan wasn’t sure of the technique required for that blow, he compensated by using greater force, making the pain the man felt before losing consciousness intense.
Finally, he turned to the group’s leader.
The man was cornered against the wall, staring at Lohan, at his bloodstained shirt, at his red eyes, and at the bloodlust that now filled the tiny room.
"Let’s make this quick. You know the only way you’re getting out of here alive is by telling me who sent you, and don’t bother trying to lie, since I can tell the truth." Lohan whispered, his voice sounding even deeper, vibrating with the mana circulating in his throat.
The gang leader swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing on his sweaty neck as he looked at his unconscious companions and then at Lohan.
He tried to muster a shred of his usual audacity, but his voice came out shaky. "No one... no one sent us, kid. We just... heard you were raking it in at Elysium. Pure greed, ya know. Lower Zone stuff, you know how it is, right?"
Lohan didn’t blink.
The red glow in his eyes intensified, reflecting a thirst for blood he had cultivated after killing hundreds of creatures and Players in the other world.
He saw through the lie immediately via the erratic fluctuation in the man’s heart rate and the unstable heat signature, picked up by [Instinctive Perception] and [Thermographic Perception].
"Wrong answer," Lohan muttered, walking calmly over to the man he had knocked out first.
Lohan crouched down and took the unconscious man’s hand.
The leader watched, paralyzed by terror, as Lohan closed his own hand around the man’s index finger.