Hearing that voice that came out of nowhere in his house, Oscar froze.
His heavy head, numbed by drugs, turned slowly toward the voice, and through the chemical fog in his mind, he saw the slender, menacing silhouette.
Even with his face covered, the predatory stance, and the glint in his red eyes, Oscar recognized the boy instantly... the hatred and humiliation he had felt during their previous encounter had etched Lohan’s image into his subconscious.
"You...? How...?" Oscar began to stammer, panic distorting his chubby features.
To prevent the man from saying his name aloud and alerting any listening devices, Lohan moved like a blur, and before Oscar could finish his sentence, Lohan delivered a brutal punch to the man’s face.
The impact, amplified by Body Density and the Obsidian Exoskeleton hidden beneath his clothes, shattered several of Oscar’s teeth in the process, including some cheap gold dentures that flew into the water.
"AAARRRGHHHHH!!! MY FHEEEEFH!!!!!" The man screamed in terror, snapping back to consciousness instantly as his speech became instantly garbled and disjointed, a jumble of muffled sounds and blood.
Suddenly, the health monitoring hologram over Oscar’s eye flashed a deep red, triggering an emergency alert due to the violent spike in his blood pressure and physical trauma.
Instead of cowering, Oscar’s expression ignored the intense pain he felt and shifted from fear to a confident, terrifyingly ugly grin, his mouth bloody and full of gaps.
He knew that the alert from his private terminal was directly linked to his personal security.
A few seconds later, the penthouse’s reinforced door was smashed open with a heavy crash.
Four armed figures, wearing tactical uniforms and infrared combat goggles, stormed the place with a synergy that demonstrated at least basic military training.
They were professionals hired to ensure Oscar’s safety.
Lohan, who was already on the move even before the metal hit the floor, was somewhat surprised by Oscar’s cautious measure, but he did not wait passively.
Using his 360-degree echolocation perception, he mapped the trajectory of the first soldier who entered from the left flank.
The man barely had time to raise the barrel of his kinetic rifle before Lohan, moving with a speed that defied human capability, appeared in his blind spot.
BANG!
The first shot was fired.
Lohan took full advantage of the enemy’s lack of awareness and the element of surprise, ensuring the shot struck the guard’s temple and blew his head off.
There was no scream, just the soldier’s body collapsing like a sack of sand onto the floor.
"CONTACT! TARGET IS A POTENTIAL COMBAT THREAT! FORM A PERIMETER!" The group’s leader shouted, his voice distorted by the radio, while the other three soldiers retreated behind the designer furniture, firing suppressive rounds.
Lohan leaped behind a column of synthetic marble, feeling the heat of the kinetic projectiles pass mere inches from his face.
In the real world, parallel processing allowed him to process the battle on independent tracks, keeping one focus on the enemies’ ammunition count, another on the bullets’ trajectory, and a third on analyzing the environment, while he made the most of every piece of information he could acquire.
To keep his own identity a secret, Lohan avoided using Elysium’s abilities openly as much as possible, so he made do with passive and tracking skills for this fight, while doing his best to appear as just an ordinary, well-trained person.
He realized that these men had changed their approach toward him.
They no longer treated him like a random enemy; they saw him as a true professional assassin.
The guards began using stun grenades to try to disorient his senses, but Lohan, using parallel processing, was able to perfectly calculate the exact moment needed to shut down his own senses and avoid being affected by these tactics, taking advantage of the chaos to dim his own luminosity to blend into the environment and become a ghost in the shadows cast by the pink and blue lasers.
Meanwhile, from inside the pool, his mouth still bleeding, Oscar was experiencing the peak of his descent.
The Mist of Dreams, the heavy stimulant he had consumed, began to react violently with the adrenaline of panic and the pressure of the mana Lohan was exuding.
To the fat landlord, the loud music became a deafening roar of demons, and the neon lights turned into claws of light trying to pull him to the bottom of the heated water like hands from hell.
Oscar was watching the battle through a kaleidoscope of terror.
He saw Lohan kill the first guard, and in his warped mind, the skinny boy didn’t look human; he looked like a mass of bluish shadows with red eyes that devoured the very light of the place.
The blood spurting from the dead guard looked like bright neon paint dripping down the statues, and Oscar felt that the luxurious world he had built was melting into a toxic puddle.
Lohan ran across the rooftop, sliding across the floor as if the marble were covered in oil.
He fired two precise shots with the stolen pistol, hitting the shoulder of one of the guards trying to flank him. However, the third soldier, a veteran with reflexes enhanced by cybernetic implants, managed to land a well-aimed shot.
BANG!
The bullet struck Lohan’s right shoulder.
At the moment of impact, the black hexagonal plates vibrated to disperse the damage, making a sound like metal striking solid rock, dissipating much of the kinetic energy. However, the force of a kinetic rifle at such close range was too massive to be fully nullified by Lohan’s still-unmastered power.
Lohan felt the most intense pain he had felt in the real world since he was transmigrated, and this only further intensified the murderous glint in his eyes.
Although this was the most excruciating pain he had ever felt in his life, a shock that completely overwhelmed the boy, the experiences he had gone through in Elysium, which had served as a shield for Lisa, had greatly increased his resilience, causing this pain to only fuel his anger.