Chapter 13
Thoughts flew beneath my skull with inhuman clarity and speed. My brain calculated the situation like never before in my life. And the seriousness of this situation was also like never before.
They didn't shoot, trying to examine me in more detail while they had the chance. I didn't move, so as not to provoke the start of active actions prematurely.
Options arose in my head one by one and were immediately crossed out. There are too many of them! There are simply too many of them. One mage and all this small fry with machine guns—bad, but tolerable. Two mages—bad, but not fatal. Three mages—critical, everything depends solely on luck. But SIX mages—beyond the limit. No luck will help here.
No matter how I struggle, the options differ only in the number of enemies I can take with me.
Take where? To the "next world"?
And here the real "options" begin. And everything rests on that asshole Issei. If... when he identifies me, that's when it will be a complete disaster. This bastard knows almost more about the properties and structure of my body than I do. And when he identifies me, he will also know what is currently known only to me—how I survived.
To the rest, I am just a half-animal with unusual properties. Which means I arouse interest. Which means captivity and experiments.
You can escape from captivity. You can endure experiments. Especially since they don't know about my real capabilities, acquired during my study of martial arts. But if Issei gets down to business, he won't let me escape. And he will bring the matter to its logical end.
It turns out that out of the whole crowd, only he is critically dangerous to me.
It takes a long time to write all this out. In reality, these thoughts flew through my head in less than a second.
The target is determined, the method... And there is only one single method: kill him with the very first strike, right now, before he says anything to the others. While he is still squeamishly examining me, without showing a drop of recognition.
And I even know how. Seventy years in Tibet. Over these years, even a dummy like me would reach the level of internal energies. And I reached it. Body strengthening, abruptly shifting perception to a qualitatively different level, working at super speeds, ranged strikes—I mastered all of this. But there was a problem with all this. A serious problem: the more I used internal energy, the more and stronger the animal rage flared up. And my control dropped.
But right now, it didn't matter. It played right into my hands. And I rapidly pumped my body with Qi. It boiled in my blood like liquid flame. My gaze narrowed, removing everyone from my field of vision except for one single target. And even that one twitched through a bloody haze. A growl started to bubble in my chest all by itself. Quietly for now, but in the complete silence hanging in the hangar, it sounded ominous and threatening.
I slowly, demonstratively slowly, lowered the machine gun to the floor and pushed it away from me.
And then I snatched the dagger from its scabbard and threw it at the one single target that interested me right now.
The mage's kinetic shield, although with difficulty, began to dampen the speed of the blade flying into it...
But the fact was that the dagger throw was a decoy. A distraction. The real strike was delivered slightly before the knife slipped from my fingers. And it went through. A Qi strike. A ranged attack. The very same one used in circus demonstrations for tourists to extinguish the flame of a candle standing in another corner of the room. Only, executed at full strength by a master (even if I don't qualify for a Master with a capital letter, I can fully count as a master), it won't just knock out the flame; it will punch a hole in the wall behind it. No, not like that. The wall will remain intact. It will kill the person standing behind this wall without leaving visible damage.
And the dagger, which had begun to slow down, jerked forward, piercing the throat of the already dead mage. Severing the spine and plunging into the wall, coming out from the back of the neck. Right through.
And then everything started spinning: shots, my crazy jump onto the nearest balcony, claws tearing the enemies' flesh to pieces, bullets painfully stinging my body, the madness of rage, a bloody haze...
They bound me quickly. I couldn't reach the second balcony, where the mages had actually settled. And it wasn't even about magic. Naturally, the remaining five contributed to my defeat, but the most basic nets turned out to be the main factor. Nets woven from chains a finger thick, spat out from hand-held net guns.
One such net seems like a trifle to me. And two, and three, and five... But twenty or thirty is already serious. So "bound" is literal. Towards the end, when I could no longer move, I reminded myself of a silkworm during pupation. The only things visible from under the chains were my eyes. Crazy, with burst blood vessels that continued to burst and immediately regenerate. And my growl.
Blood and something else incomprehensibly brown oozed from the tangle of chains (I attacked quickly and in a crowd, and they shot nets at me, not sparing their own. Many ended up trapped along with me, where a quick death awaited them. More and more chains literally crushed them, and my jerks completed the job).
The rage born of powerlessness slowly began to lose its intensity. The bloody haze faded away, clearing my vision. And maybe it would have been better if it hadn't. I saw him—Urduliy. Mage Urduliy. The very same one who was in the group I destroyed. The very same one who turned out to be smarter than the rest, having fled the front. And even here, he hid behind backs and didn't stick out. A cautious piece of carrion.
And most importantly, Urduliy knew me both from the "Battle" and from Issei's laboratory. And this meant that I had lost. I had calculated the situation incorrectly and now I had lost. I'm not sure how well he knows the results of Issei's research, but I'm sure he knows the key points.
And by his eyes, I could see that he recognized me. And his eyes were laughing.
I looked into these eyes, and despair crashed down, crushing the remnants of my control beneath it. And as soon as control fell completely, the animal rage overwhelmed my mind. The Beast broke loose.
I didn't growl, didn't thrash. I just choked on the power, the flame that overwhelmed me. And Urduliy caught my gaze again and smirked nastily.
And suddenly, it was as if a border collapsed. A border that was the surface of my eyes. And the Beast rushed into the formed void. Along the gaze from my eyes into Urduliy's eyes.
And immediately I became instantly calm, like an iceberg, without applying any effort. It was strange and unusual.
And what was happening outside was wrong and illogical. Urduliy, growling and spraying saliva, rushed at his own people. More precisely, at those who stood closer. He attacked with magic, bluntly and furiously, without any imagination or creative approach, but very, very fast.
But the enemy still had four mages left, and they wanted to live. Urduliy couldn't handle four at once and died less than ten seconds after the start of his outburst. And a freezing spell flew into me, turning the lump of chains with my body into a solid block of ice. After that, I saw nothing more.
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