Meters beneath Tokyo. A forgotten bunker complex from the Second World War, its reinforced concrete rotting from subterranean waters. The thick, lead-lined walls trapped the dead air inside, collapsing a claustrophobic weight upon the space.
Jin Kurosawa waited at the mouth of a dark tunnel three hundred meters from the bunker's main entrance, his back pressed against the damp wall. In the pitch-black void, his retinas were irrelevant; his true eyes were fixed on the heavy air currents bleeding from the tunnel's depths. The stench seeping from within the bunker wasn't the scent of ordinary men or street thugs. Every species bore a distinct scent, and the odor radiating from the creatures inside was the aroma of an atrocity that had long surpassed the limits of humanity, bastardized in laboratories: Dense Ammonia, Medical Alcohol, and Raw Meat. V and Tank's hyper-metabolisms burned calories relentlessly, transforming the air around them into the suffocating den of an apex predator.
At the bunker's entrance, four heavily armored Russian mercenaries guarded the massive steel door.
Kaito was perched in a blind spot diagonally across from the ventilation shafts. His eyes practically pierced the darkness, tracking the pulse in the targets' jugular veins second by second. When the muzzle of the VSS Vintorez found its mark, he cut his breath. There were no conventional armor-piercing rounds inside the weapon.
Click.
Following that wet, suppressed mechanical snap from the muzzle, the first round flew at three hundred meters per second and struck the sentry's chest plate. The bullet didn't pierce the armor. It didn't need to. The moment Klara's custom-crafted core shattered against the plate, the liquefied neurotoxin inside surged into the man's trachea and tear ducts as a fine mist.
The soldier's central nervous system collapsed in a mere two seconds. Without so much as a scream, he crumpled to the floor, violently expelling a thick, yellowish foam from his mouth. Kaito didn't pause. Second, third, and fourth shots... A flawless surgical rhythm. The mercenaries' muscles paralyzed, signals to their brains severed instantly, and their bodies slammed against the concrete like sacks of dead meat.
From the head of the tunnel, Jin caught the scent of that fine, acidic Formaldehyde and Biological Collapse mingling with the air. No blood had been spilled, but the freezing chill of death had permeated the atmosphere.
"Exterior door clear," Kaito's voice whispered over the radio. "The cage is closed."
"Move in," Jin commanded, his tone echoless, apathetic, and ice-cold. "We are hunting Tank."
When Baro left the narrow, damp main corridor behind and stepped into the colossal, domed central hall, the sharp crack of a broken piece of concrete under his combat boot severed the heavy air like a guillotine. This section of the bunker was a massive catacomb that hadn't seen a human face since the Second World War. Water dripping from the thick, rusted rebar jutting from the ceiling echoed in the century-old puddles on the floor.
But the darkness in the center of the room wasn't dead. It was breathing.
Even Baro's genetically enhanced, first-seal-unlocked body hesitated for a fraction of a second before the colossal mass resting in the heart of that darkness. Tank was half-crouching on the concrete floor in the exact center of the bunker. Approaching three meters in height, he slowly rose from the shadows, displaying thick, titanium-laced bones that looked ready to burst through his skin, and a grotesque, tumorous muscle mass that utterly rejected the natural limits of human anatomy.
The scent in the air shifted. This wasn't the smell of a man or an ordinary creature. Every species had a distinct scent, and the odor radiating from Tank was the aroma of an engine of destruction bastardized in laboratories, its hyper-metabolism spiraling out of control. The stench that burned Baro's throat was a concoction of Boiling Sulfuric Acid, Rusted Heavy Metals, and Decaying Raw Meat. Every breath Tank took practically siphoned the oxygen from the room, exhaling it as a toxic, scalding vapor.
Two behemoths stood face-to-face. One was Baro, forged into steel by the System's first seal; the other was Tank, Moscow's third-generation lab rat.
Tank roared. It wasn't a shout born from vocal cords, but a physical pressure wave that vibrated human internal organs, akin to the horn of a massive semi-truck. The sheer violence of the roar sent dust cascading from the asbestos-wrapped pipes on the ceiling.
And the giant mutant charged at Baro, accelerating to speeds exceeding seventy kilometers per hour. With every footfall, the thirty-centimeter-thick combat bunker concrete fractured like a sheet of ice, the deafening crunch of crushed stone echoing off the walls. As Tank's massive bulk cleaved through the air, the acrid, tear-inducing stench of Pure Testosterone and Apex Predator Sweat billowed into the atmosphere.
Baro wasn't foolish enough to collide with that immense mass using raw brute force. The street thug was dead; the cold, calculating soldier Jin had carved into his mind was born. He spread his feet shoulder-width apart, nailed his boots to the concrete, and leveled the muzzle of his SPAS-12 automatic shotgun directly at Tank's colossal, armored chest. Even as the distance between them closed to ten meters, then five, then three, Baro didn't flinch.
He crushed the trigger three times in rapid succession. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
What erupted from the barrel wasn't lead to shred flesh or steel buckshot to break bone. That specialized ammunition leaving the muzzle was Magnesium Shells, hand-crafted by Klara. The millisecond the shells made contact with the damp, frigid air of the bunker, a lethal reaction ignited. A blinding, pure white fireball, radiant as a miniature sun birthed underground, tore through the bunker's darkness and detonated against Tank's torso. This terrifying heat of thousands of degrees could not penetrate the giant's bulletproof, titanium-woven outer hide; however, by the very nature of magnesium, it devoured the ambient oxygen within seconds. A momentary vacuum formed in that sector of the bunker.
The magnesium flames created an oven-door effect upon Tank's thick armor. The armor hadn't been breached, but that thousands-of-degrees of external heat began to boil the meat and fluids inside with its own thermal trap. The moment Tank's pupils made contact with that horrifying white flash and instantaneous heat, they liquefied and scorched. His retinas burned away in seconds, plunging him into absolute blindness.
Tank's agonizing roar this time wasn't of rage, but a shriek of pure suffering. Blinded, his lungs scorched by the sudden vacuum of oxygen, he began wildly thrashing his massive arms as if trying to tear apart the air itself. The room instantly filled with an acrid, nauseating stench: Burning Oxygen, Roasted Keratin, Melted Hide, and Boiled Internal Organs. Even Baro was forced to take a step back from the wave of horrifying heat washing over his face; the stench of sulfur and charred flesh clawing at his throat.
But this was the priceless, split-second window Baro had been waiting for.
He hurled the overheated, empty shotgun to the floor. He hauled on the sling across his back and gripped the 50-kilo solid tungsten sledgehammer with both his massive hands. Channeling his entire mass, velocity, and the devastating explosive power granted by the first genetic seal into the hammer's haft, Baro launched himself into the air. Against an impenetrable armor where a cutting blade, a piercing bullet, or brute fists would fail, he dictated the ruthless, undeniable laws of pure kinetic physics.
Whistling a deadly tune through the air, the tungsten sledgehammer crashed down like a meteorite squarely into the side of the blindly flailing Tank's right kneecap.
KRAAAK-THUD!
The flawless armor was not pierced. Tank's gray, calloused hide did not even split. However, the massive kinetic shockwave generated by the swing of 50 kilos of solid tungsten at Baro's superhuman speed passed through the armor like a ghost unhindered by physical barriers, driving straight into the heart of Tank's knee joint. The thick cartilage beneath the kneecap and the synovial fluid supporting that colossal leg could not withstand the terrifying pressure for even a millisecond, detonating from the inside. The sickening, wet crunch of bones crushing into dust and grinding against one another echoed against the bunker walls.
With the internal collapse of his right leg's load-bearing pillar, the giant mutant dropped to the concrete floor with a deafening crash, resembling the collapse of a multi-ton building. The concrete beneath the impacted knee cratered inward.
The second Baro dropped the sledgehammer, he scaled Tank's colossal, smoking back like a savage predator pouncing on its prey. His thick, veined arms coiled around the mutant's massive neck like a python. He applied the flawless technique Jin had burned into his bones during weeks of subterranean training: The chokehold. The moment he locked his arms, his wrists settled against the two main carotid arteries in Tank's neck with terrifying pressure. No matter how superhuman Tank's strength was, no matter how unbreakable his skin or titanium-reinforced his bones were, when the oxygen-rich blood flowing to the brain was severed, the cold laws of biology did not lie.
Tank's massive hands, capable of crushing car chassis like paper, began violently thrashing to tear apart Baro's arms wrapped around his neck, to rip the flesh straight from his bones. The blind mutant, in a panicked bid to dislodge the weight on his back, attempted to force himself upright, and together they slammed into the lead-lined walls of the bunker like a wrecking ball.
BOOM! BOOM!
Tank repeatedly drove Baro, back-first, into the concrete pillars, tearing down the walls. Even Baro's skin, thickened like rhinoceros hide by the first genetic seal, could not endure the immense friction and impacts; it began to tear and shred. His hot blood dripped down Tank's neck and onto the floor. With every impact, the faint sound of Baro's ribs fracturing could be heard. Yet, Baro kept his eyes squeezed shut, clenched his teeth at the cost of shattering them, and didn't loosen the lethal vice-grip of his arms by a single millimeter.
Superimposed over the scent of charred meat and magnesium in the air was now a much more primal, much more feral odor. The sole witness to the life-and-death dance of two giants, to that desperate struggle: Heavy Lactic Acid, Adrenaline, and Fresh Blood. Baro's muscles were screaming, the lactic acid scorching his veins like battery acid, but he did not let go.
Seconds passed like centuries. Ten seconds... Twenty seconds... Thirty seconds...
"Sleep..." Baro snarled, swallowing the blood leaking from his mouth. His voice emerged from the bunker's ruins like the whisper of an angel of death.
With not a single drop of blood reaching his brain through his jugular veins, and his lungs already scorched by magnesium, Tank's world-shattering strength gradually began to break. His thrashing lost its rhythm. The crushing grip of his massive hands tearing at Baro's arms weakened. His legs could no longer support the colossal mass. The giant body began to shudder, to spasm internally. Brain cells were shutting down one by one, like candles blowing out in a dark room.
"Sleep!" Baro roared, tightening his arms another centimeter with his last reserve of strength.
And Tank's massive, invincible body, losing all resistance, collapsed like a colossal meat puppet whose strings had been cut, crashing down with Baro onto the concrete floor into the dust of the pillars he had destroyed and his own blood, as a heavy, lifeless heap.
When Tank's multi-ton body hit the shattered concrete floor of the bunker, the dense cloud of asbestos and bloody dust kicked up into the air had not yet settled. On the back of the giant mutant, Baro finally loosened the lethal chokehold only now, after ensuring the target's consciousness was completely extinguished. His lungs were heaving like bellows, his muscles screaming in rebellion from the lactic acid.
But the very second Baro went to take a breath, a terrifying air current tearing from the deepest, darkest tunnels of the bunker sliced through that heavy dust cloud like a blade.
The bunker's atmosphere shifted instantly. Standing within the pitch-black shadows behind the pillars, Jin Kurosawa's formidable olfactory sensors had read the magnitude of the danger seconds in advance. This approaching scent didn't resemble Tank's heavy, sulfuric acid odor. This stench was a mixture of Friction-Scorched Oxygen, Burnt Rubber, and Pure Ozone. And lingering just beneath this physical smell, a much more toxic, throat-burning scent of Bitter Mustard (Delayed Wrath) was radiating in waves.
V.
With his fourth-tier genetic structure and the gleaming, impenetrable chitin armor encasing his body, V stormed into the main hall like a hurricane. The deafening explosions of the magnesium shells and the terrifying roar of the walls Tank had destroyed while slamming Baro into the concrete pillars had drawn him here from the most remote corner of the bunker, from the very end of those long tunnels. He had run at such incredible velocity that the outer surface of his armor was smoking from air friction, radiating heat into the surroundings. Yet, despite his superhuman speed, he hadn't arrived for the final second when the battle ended.
The dark eyes on V's insectoid, armored face locked onto Tank, lying in a pool of his own blood and vomit on the floor, and Baro still draped over his back.
That 'Bitter Mustard' scent spreading through the air instantly transmuted into the stench of Pure Sulfur (Lethal Vengeance). Faster than a bullet leaving a muzzle, V lunged forward to rip the head off Baro's torso for crushing his comrade. His speed was so horrifying that even Baro's first-seal-enhanced eyes could only process the approaching black silhouette as a blurred streak. He couldn't escape. He couldn't fight back.
But the Panopticon wasn't foolish enough to leave its prey to the muscle power of a single man.
Perched in one of the ventilation shafts on the upper level of the bunker, Kaito wasn't targeting V through the scope of his VSS Vintorez. Shooting at fourth-tier speed with a bullet was like trying to cut the wind with a knife. Kaito's crosshairs were locked onto the ten-meter stretch of concrete floor V was forced to cross to reach Baro. The exact moment V's feet gained that lethal momentum, Kaito held his breath and crushed the trigger in rapid succession.
What exited the weapon's barrel were custom-manufactured polymer capsules crafted by Klara in the lab. The bullets struck the concrete floor across V's running trajectory and shattered.
The 'Ultra-Dense Synthetic Polymer Oil' inside them splashed outward under pressure the millisecond it contacted the hot, blood-scented air of the bunker, coating square meters of the area. The concrete floor instantly transformed into a mirror-like, slick black sheet, its coefficient of friction completely zeroed. The scent that permeated the air was the odor of Heavy Chemicals and Synthetic Polymer. A dense, synthetic breath that numbed even the hairs inside the nostrils, physically scorching the throat.
V's flawless, invincible speed became his greatest weakness. The moment he stepped onto that absolutely frictionless surface coated in polymer oil at a speed exceeding a hundred kilometers per hour, the merciless laws of biomechanics took over. His chitin-armored feet couldn't grip the ground. V's massive kinetic momentum was nullified, and losing his balance, even for a millisecond, he flailed through the air and stumbled toward the floor.
Right at that moment, the shadows split apart.
With his flawless, ice-cold timing, Jin Kurosawa stepped out from the darkness. In his right hand, he held the Void Katana, its dark steel drinking the faint ambient light. But Jin knew the limits of his blade; he knew very well he couldn't pierce a fourth-tier mutant's chitin armor with a sword.
He didn't swing. Instead, his left hand slipped into the inner pocket of his long black coat, retrieving a matte grey metal cylinder barely four centimeters long. His thumb pressed the indentation on the metal.
VOOSH!
A sphere of obsidian flame erupted in his palm, froze instantly, and solidified into the heavy, matte black shape of the barrel-less Obsidian Pistol. He leveled it directly at the mutant's leg joint in the exact millisecond V lost his balance, and pulled the trigger.
No fire or lead erupted from the weapon; instead, a dense pneumatic shockwave compressed under extreme pressure tore through the air and slammed into V's chitin armor. The scent of Compressed Oxygen and Heavy Metal left in the wake of the blast overpowered the acid stench in the room. The armor wasn't pierced, but that horrifying repulsive force completely swept V's legs, already off-balance on the slippery ground, out from under him. The fourth-tier mutant was violently sent crashing onto his back against the concrete.
Jin didn't grant V a single second to recover. With those cold, dead gray eyes, he breached V's personal space. He reached his left hand back into his jacket and drew the heavy industrial shock device, modified in the Kurosawa laboratories to output 100,000 volts, gripping it tightly in his fingers.
V's body might be encased in that unbreakable armor, but he wasn't a robot. He needed to breathe.
The instant his back hit the floor, V hissed in rage, opening his maw wide; exhaling his acidic, putrid breath through razor-like teeth. This was the only opening Jin had been waiting for. The shortest, most direct path to the central nervous system, utterly impossible to cover with any armor.
Without a shred of hesitation, Jin ruthlessly thrust the thick, copper-tipped prongs of the shock device straight into V's open mouth, plunging it directly into the soft palate and larynx.
And he held the trigger all the way down.
100,000 volts of pure, unfiltered electrical current completely bypassed V's chitin armor, discharging directly into his central nervous system, brain stem, and spinal cord. V's eyes instantly bulged as if ready to pop from their sockets. The soft tissues inside his mouth boiled in seconds. That colossal fourth-tier speed and power began tearing itself apart from the inside out through the horrific short-circuiting of his neural networks.
V's body thrashed violently on the bunker floor like a beached fish, the sound of snapping coming from his joints. The room was suddenly filled by the most vile, ultimate scent: Roasted Nerve Tissue, Melted Copper, and Burning Fat.
When the electrical current cut out, a heavy, absolute silence descended upon the bunker.
A thin wisp of smoke trailed from V's mouth and tear ducts. Inside that invincible armor, all that remained was a dead heap of flesh whose brain and central nervous system had been scorched, having lost all biological function.
Jin Kurosawa slowly retracted the shock device in his hand. There wasn't a single stain of blood on him. With his gray, unreflective eyes, he stared down at the fourth-tier mutant lying on the ground. The 'Bitter Mustard' scent in the air had been entirely erased, replaced by the cold, silent, metallic stench of death. The puppet master had cut the most dangerous strings with his own hands.