Chapter 3
The night sky over Crimson City looked like someone had poured tar across it.
On a filthy back-alley wall in the slums, a holographic screen was streaming the Apex conglomerate's flagship interview program to the entire network.
On screen, Victoria was dressed in immaculate white robes, crying for the camera. Her hand was clasped tightly around the arm of the new support, Serena, who wore a perfectly practiced look of innocence.
"Yes... during the C-rank mutation zone incursion, our former logistics member Arthur lost his nerve. He abandoned his teammates and fled the battlefield."
The host's face immediately filled with righteous outrage. "My god — that's a complete betrayal! How did Alpha Squad make it out?"
"Thanks to Serena!" Victoria angled the camera toward the A-rank insignia on Serena's chest. "If not for her advanced healing and tactical coordination, we would have been wiped out entirely. This is what A-rank support actually looks like."
The comment feed exploded:
[B-rank trash is just unreliable!]
[Poor goddess — someone tell Arthur to get out of Crimson City for good!]
[Serena is gorgeous, THIS is a real high-tier support!]
The screen flickered wildly in the acid rain.
Directly below it, in a dead-end alley, I stood with an unlit cigarette clenched between my teeth.
"That's the woman you spent five years protecting like a servant?" Roxie spat blood onto the ground, her expression dripping with contempt.
I didn't answer.
Because all around us, a dozen crimson targeting lasers had already materialized out of the dark.
Nine assassins with optical stealth modules had sealed off every exit — all of them in A-rank individual combat armor, the conglomerate's highest-clearance execution unit.
"Target: Arthur. Elimination order active." The mechanical voice was cold as rain-soaked steel.
"Damn it — stealth plus fire suppression on all sides, we can't fight this!" Stella raised her heavy sniper rifle, palms already slick with sweat.
I didn't so much as lift an eyebrow.
"Relax."
I stepped forward and placed a hand on each of their shoulders — Roxie on the left, Stella on the right.
In the depths of my left retina, the cold blue data-tide detonated.
Target locked: Hound Squad.
Override Rule One — Absolute Evasion (friendly): enemy damage collision probability forced to 0%.
Override Rule Two — Homing Fire: friendly projectile trajectories force-curved to guaranteed lethal points.
"Modifications complete." I withdrew my hands and stepped back into the dark. "Stella — close your eyes and shoot blind. Roxie — walk up and tear them apart. No dodging, no thinking. Just kill."
The words weren't fully out of my mouth before the lasers came down like a monsoon.
"AHHH—!" Stella squeezed her eyes shut and jammed the trigger.
What happened next shattered every assumption those assassins had about the laws of physics.
The lasers — hot enough to melt through steel — bent away from the two of them at a distance of less than half a centimeter, deflected by an invisible, warping field as if the universe itself had rerouted them.
At the same moment:
Crack.
Stella's blind shot ricocheted off three separate walls at angles that violated everything ballistics had ever established, then punched clean through a stealth operative's forehead.
The headless body dropped.
Stella's eyes snapped open. "I — I hit a headshot shooting blind?!"
"I told you," Roxie said, and her grin was the kind you don't want to be on the receiving end of. "We're the boss's dogs now."
She dropped all pretense of defense and walked straight into the crossfire. One of the hidden assassins lunged from behind to put a blade in her back. The Absolute Evasion logic triggered at the base-rule level.
Crack. The assassin's wrist twisted at an anatomically impossible angle, and his own blade drove itself into his chest plate.
"Found you, little rat."
Roxie's smile went feral. She spun, seized the assassin by the throat with both hands, and wrenched outward.
RIIIP —
The scream didn't last long. Ten million credits' worth of A-rank combat armor was torn in half by bare hands. Viscera and acid rain scattered across the alley floor together.
It was a massacre without suspense.
No positioning. No prediction. No aiming required. For the first time, Hound Squad experienced firsthand what it felt like to operate under god-tier support — and the sensation was obscene.
Under a minute.
Bang. The final shot put a hole through the squad leader's knee, and the alley went silent.
The captain knelt in the pooling blood, screaming into his communicator. "Command, do you read — target has concept-level ability! Requesting immediate reinforcement —"
I walked toward him, unhurried, and set my boot on the lens of his helmet camera.
Through that feed, I knew Victoria was watching from the other end of a screen somewhere, eyes fixed and unblinking.
I said nothing.
I just looked down into the lens and let a slow, cold smile cross my face. The kind that doesn't reach the eyes.
Crunch.
The helmet — and the skull inside it — compressed under my heel. The signal cut to static.
Behind me, Roxie, Stella, and Maya looked at my back the way converts look at a saint — utterly gone, past the point of return.
"Clean this up," I said, brushing off my boot. "Then we get to work."
Simultaneously. Top floor of the Apex conglomerate tower.
Crack.
Victoria's grip crushed the ultra-alloy tablet in her hand. Beneath the immaculate makeup, her face had twisted into something unrecognizable — fear and jealousy eating through the composure like acid through foil.
In the last frame before the feed went black, Arthur's expression — that of a man looking down at something too small to be worth stepping on — had hit her like an open hand across the face.
"Nine A-rank executioners... and they didn't even last one minute?"
Her whole body was shaking. If Arthur brought that team back into public view, every lie she'd told would collapse under the weight of a single comparison. The goddess persona — years in the making — would turn to ash.
"Captain?" Serena floated in through the door with a glass of red wine and a bright smile. "The interview went perfectly — Arthur's totally disgraced!"
"Shut up."
The wine glass hit the wall.
Victoria snatched up her private communicator with the look of someone well past the point of calculation, and opened the top-priority line to the Hunter's Guild.
"This is Victoria. I need Hound Squad's task assignment for tomorrow. Immediately."
She stared at the broken glass on the floor, her voice dropping to something that didn't sound like a voice at all.
"I'm invoking S-rank priority override. Elevate their mission to an A-rank high-danger zone. Forcibly."
A beat.
"Tomorrow I'm going in personally. Full global broadcast array. I want the whole network to watch, live, as Hound Squad gets torn apart by the monsters in front of my Alpha Squad and a real A-rank support."
"The first face-to-face between old and new — I want it to be their funeral."
