Opening his eyes, Lohan began to feel sensations completely different from those he had experienced in the previous environment.
He smelled the ozone and rust of a filthy tavern; he felt the weight of the kinetic pistol in its holster and a strange rush of adrenaline coursing through his body. Through the leader’s eyes, he saw the sweaty, enraged face of Oscar, the landlord.
"That brat humiliated me! He’s got a $30k helmet, and now just because of that he acts like he owns the building! That’s my fucking building!" Oscar shouted, throwing a stack of physical credits onto the metal table. "The only thing I want is to never see that brat’s face again, and I want him to be thoroughly ’processed.’ Hand his body over to the Sector 7 lab, they pay well for enhanced tissue."
The memory moved forward.
Lohan sensed the group’s greed as they planned the raid. He confirmed that the leader hadn’t lied about who sent them. However, as Lohan delved deeper into the memories of the other four men to cross-reference the data, a hidden detail emerged like a red warning light.
In the memories of the man holding the signal jammer, Lohan saw a brief conversation before they climbed the building’s stairs."Kenny, you and Bane stay in the car," the leader ordered. "Keep the engine running and your weapons ready. If we don’t come down with the kid or the green light in 40 minutes, come up and sweep everything.
Leave no witnesses in the hallway."
Lohan snapped out of the resonance with a start. His eyes, now back to their normal beautiful blue, focused on the holographic watch.
02:52 AM
More than forty minutes had passed since the group had entered.
In a fluid motion that pushed the agility in that body to its limit, Lohan crossed the room and pressed himself against the side of the window, staying in the shadows so as not to cast a silhouette of his position.
He activated Monocular Telescopic Vision and Thermal Imaging.
Down below, on the deserted street dimly lit by streetlights that flickered, a black utility vehicle was parked haphazardly.
Through thermal vision, Lohan saw two distinct heat signatures emanating from the car. They were burly men, wearing heavy tactical vests.
One of them was carrying what appeared to be a kinetic submachine gun, while the other was adjusting a night-vision scope.
From the way they exited that vehicle, it was clear they weren’t waiting anymore, they were coming to fight.
Lohan saw the first man give a hand signal, and both moved toward the building’s main entrance like professionals, far better than the group of five who had stormed his apartment.
They were coming prepared to face someone capable of handling their group of five brothers, people whose combat capabilities they knew well.
Lohan looked back.
By that point, four bodies had already been reduced to nothing but rags on the floor, which Lohan would digest later, with only one corpse still halfway through the process.
He felt the Mana in his system boiling.
Digesting the first men had given him a small temporary strength "buff," and his Obsidian Exoskeleton was ready to manifest over his skin.’E I was thinking the rest of my night would be easy and peaceful...’ Lohan muttered, feeling his long, dense muscles tense.
"But it seems the garden in Sector 4 still has a few weeds to be pulled."
He wouldn’t wait for them to reach the door.
This time, he would use the building’s dark, narrow hallway as his own hunting ground.
Activating Structural Stability and Viscous Adhesion to cling to the building’s dark, moldy ceiling.
The corridor of the nearly abandoned building was a labyrinth of peeling concrete and exposed wiring, plunged into a gloom that mingled the smell of drugs and terrible mold.
To Lohan, equipped with Thermal Vision, that environment was as clear as day.
He saw the two silhouettes climbing upward, moving with a caution that showed that when these men were prepared, they were just as terrifying as real soldiers.
’Good to see this now, so my confidence doesn’t grow indefinitely... but coming here with kinetic submachine guns in a residential building... you guys really don’t care about attention, right?’ Lohan muttered to himself, his voice vibrating subtly with the Mana circulating in his human throat.
He took a deep breath, activating the Breath of Smoke.
In the real world, the ability didn’t generate a volcanic cloud like in Elysium, but rather a dense, gray, heavy mist that poured from his mouth and began to seep across the ceiling and walls, saturating the narrow hallway in seconds.
The smoke, laden with residues of his Mana, acted as a sensory insulator for human eyes and even for the men’s night-vision goggles, but to Lohan, the enemies were like lightbulbs glowing in the darkness.
The fire door at the end of the corridor swung open with a metallic creak. The two men entered side by side, their flashlights attached to their weapons cutting through the fog.
"What the hell is this? A fire?" the first man whispered, his voice muffled by his mask. He carried a short-range submachine gun, keeping his index finger already tense on the trigger.
"The sensors didn’t pick up any heat from a fire... it’s cold smoke," replied the second, adjusting his night-vision goggles. "Kenny, the leader’s signal’s gone. Stay alert. The brat might have backup."
Lohan, clinging to the ceiling just above them, felt a sinister smile spread across his face.
He waited for them to pass directly beneath his position. The moment the scout named Kenny took the decisive step, Lohan deactivated his adhesion.
He didn’t fall like a human; he fell like a Predator.
Activating Body Density, Lohan transformed his muscle mass into something as heavy as lead, falling directly onto Kenny’s shoulders.
In the millisecond of contact, he used Vacuum Detonation in a restrained manner in the palm of his right hand, directing the suction toward the barrel of Kael’s submachine gun.
PHUT!