While Rorschach was mowing down twenty gunmen inside the plant, his "partner" Tuku was also taking a full baptism in gunfire.
For this operation, he had planned carefully and gathered more than forty shooters.
He personally led a dozen men to intercept one truck, while the rest were split into four teams to hit the other four.
But as soon as the fighting started, the drivers triggered some kind of self-destruct and blew every truck, leaving Tuku's crew stuck in a nightmare with no way forward or back.
Not only was the product gone, half his men were dead too.
"Tuku, we gotta go! The cops are almost here!" The speaker was a fat man just over two meters tall, Tuku's right hand and also his brother-in-law.
"Shut the f*ck up! Even if we don't get the load, I'm taking some of Gus's people with us!"
Blinded by rage, Tuku had no intention of listening. Crouched behind a corner of a wall, he emptied his SMG toward the other side of the street, slammed in a fresh mag, and kept firing.
The picture of a man who would not stop until every enemy was dead.
His men were terrified but did not dare disobey. They could only grit their teeth and keep shooting.
If the cops caught them, the worst-case was prison. If Tuku decided they were traitors, prison would be a mercy.
Luckily for them, before they had burned through many more mag dumps, new gunfire cracked from behind.
Gus's reinforcements, sent the moment he got the call, had arrived.
"Tuku! We have to fall back!"
His brother-in-law grabbed him by the shoulder and dragged him deeper into cover. "Another minute and we're boxed in!"
Tuku listened to the rounds snapping over their heads from the rear lines. One bullet came close enough to spark off the car beside him.
With enemies now in front and behind, even he could not help shrinking his neck, cold fear cutting through the anger.
"Motherf*cker. Let that Black bastard Gus strut for one more day. Tomorrow I'll bring a crew and cut him to pieces!"
Spitting those words, Tuku dove into a car under his men's covering fire.
The engine roared. The car punched through incoming rounds and smashed out through a forming police cordon, vanishing into the dark.
Through the window, Tuku caught a last glimpse of the bodies strewn all over the street behind him, and his fury burned even hotter.
The score was nothing, but his people were gone.
He did not need to ask about the other four trucks. The silence on his phone told him everything—those teams were finished too.
"Fck! Fck! F*ck!!"
He hammered his fist into the seat. Right then, his phone rang.
One look at the caller ID and his face tightened.
Uncle Hector Salamanca.
The old man had clearly already heard about his little war with Gus and was probably out of his mind with rage.
Tuku did not dare pick up. He tossed the phone aside.
"Tuku, where are we going now…" the driver asked cautiously.
"Back to the warehouse. F*ck it. Even if the old man's going to punish me, I'm getting one more good night in first."
His nose twitched; under the crushing pressure of the night, his cravings were clawing up out of control.
Half an hour later, two shot-up cars limped to a stop in front of the stash house.
Climbing out, Tuku looked back toward the faint glow of the city. Even from here, he could feel the weight of blaring sirens and a department on full alert.
"Gus… and that little cop. That bastard didn't even know Gus had escort trucks shadowing the loads. If it weren't for him, we wouldn't have lost this many brothers. Tomorrow I'm finding a way to put him in the ground too."
Still cursing, he shoved the warehouse door open—and a wall of coppery stench hit him in the face.
The interior was pitch‑black, nothing like its usual bright, busy state.
The gunmen who should have been on patrol here day and night were nowhere to be seen.
Smack.
He lifted a hand to block the men behind him from stepping in. After a brief, heavy pause, he barked, "Something's wrong. Fall back!"
He spun to run.
Gunfire erupted.
The Irish brothers burst from cover.
Each with an SMG, catching Tuku's men completely off guard, they emptied two mags and dropped every last one of the survivors in a single sweep.
Tuku had yanked himself back into the warehouse in the first heartbeat and had dodged the initial storm by sheer luck. Now, staring at the bodies of his last remaining crew, he stopped caring about danger and reached for his pistol.
As third‑in‑command of the Salamancas, he had never been this humiliated in his life.
But before he could draw, something cold pressed against the back of his skull.
A gun barrel.
His whole body locked up. Revenge died in his throat, replaced by raw fear.
"What's wrong?"
A familiar voice drifted out of the shadows. Rorschach stepped into view, looking at him. "Seeing your life flash before your eyes yet?"
"You—you…"
The sight of his face left Tuku stammering. "You f*cking pig, you're working for Gus!"
Rorschach frowned, speechless. How the hell had he come to that conclusion?
If he'd been working for Gus, why would he have sold out the shipping routes and set up a street war between Gus's people and the Salamancas?
Sure enough, heavy users always had something scrambled upstairs.
After cursing under his breath, Tuku seemed to recognize how bad things really were.
He stopped trying to puzzle out Rorschach's loyalties and snarled, "If you kill me, the Salamancas will never let you go. We've got endless shooters in Mexico. You'll be sleeping with one eye open for the rest of your life. And your friends, your family, they'll—"
Bang.
The round punched through his frontal lobe at roughly 380 meters per second, wiping out his higher functions in an instant.
Connective tissue and membranes tore apart. When the bullet blew out the back of his head, cerebrospinal fluid sprayed from the cavity it left behind.
"I don't have friends or family."
Rorschach wiped his prints from the pistol and looked down at the body. "And sleeping uneasy is something I got used to a long time ago."
He dropped the gun onto Tuku's chest.
A second later, a bright red stream of light rose from the corpse and flowed into him.
Feeling more than twenty fresh streaks of crimson hanging in his mind, he did not let them sit. He poured them all into Firearms Mastery, converting them into upgrade fuel.
A tingling shock raced through his entire body, like a surge of electricity. He shuddered from head to toe.
In his mind's eye, the text Firearms Mastery (89/100) began to change. The number filled in, ticking up to (100/100).
Then, a new skill surfaced.
Gun-Fu Mastery!!!
(End of Chapter)
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