33. Four Seconds

"Huff, huff, huff..."

Taking a ragged breath, Karl felt the warm trickle of blood constantly running down his forehead and could only feel grateful that he was still alive.

Before the ACPA pilot pulled the trigger, he had anticipated the possibility and already begun evading. As a result, he didn't take a direct hit from the 20mm round that could have torn him cleanly in two; the injury he sustained was instead caused by flying debris kicked up by the impact.

Ripping the undershirt exposed beneath his ballistic vest, Karl wiped the fresh blood from his head with his left hand and used a strip of cloth to wrap a makeshift bandage around his forehead, preventing the bleeding from obstructing his vision in the imminent fight.

"This is genuinely life-or-death now."

Karl mentally calculated the time. His eight-minute time limit now had less than seven minutes remaining, meaning he had to take down that ACPA within seven minutes and deliver the target to the Aether Tower...

'What a lovely dream that would be.'

What did Karl have on hand right now?

Monowire, a Kenshin tech pistol, and a few grenades. He was going to use these trinkets to deal with a two-meter-tall ACPA whose arm armor was nearly as wide as his entire body?

Damn it, this felt way too much like a Souls-like game—a hitless speedrun challenge, huh? Could he please get a chance to reload and try again? He'd aim to clear it in under ten attempts.

As he pondered what combat strategies he could cobble together with these tools, Karl heard the ACPA he had just blown down with his grenade stirring again on the lower floor. The machine's mechanical groans were far too heavy to miss.

Then...

...Why did it suddenly go quiet?

Karl listened intently. Aside from the background noise of panicking receptionists screaming as they fled, he no longer heard the slightest sound of mecha activity.

Something was wrong.

The thing that had been desperately hunting him down just a moment ago, only for him to blast it downward, had suddenly gone completely silent. Anyone would realize something was amiss.

And then, Karl immediately understood why the opponent had stopped.

Because the opponent no longer needed to come up.

"Found you."

The ACPA pilot wore a grim smile inside his helmet. He raised his autocannon, aiming from the ground floor straight at Karl, who was positioned diagonally above on the second level.

The only connections between the second and first floors were the escalators and the emergency stairwell in the corner. Since he could no longer rely on a simple leap to assault the second floor, he would just change tactics.

He didn't need to go up; the target had to come down.

As armor specifically designed for precision battlefield strikes, its sensory systems were more than capable of detecting a rough location for Karl on the second floor. All he needed to do now was perform a surgical, precision "cutting" strike on that exact spot.

The roaring autocannon shattered the footing beneath Karl. Before he could execute any defensive maneuver, the surgical excision was complete, and Karl fell right along with a slab of the surrounding floor.

***

Good news: he was lucky, and his opponent was unlucky—not a single autocannon round had hit him.

Bad news: the autocannon fire was so densely concentrated as it blasted a complete circle around his six-foot perimeter that he had nowhere to run and fell right along with it.

'Lucky bastard.'

Realizing that he had stripped away a floor section based on a rough estimate, and that the guy happened to be standing right in the absolute center of the excised area without taking a single hit, even this ACPA pilot—who currently detested Karl to his core—had to admit that this street mercenary had some seriously good luck.

Still, forcing him to face him head-on was precisely what he wanted anyway.

Otherwise, what he really should have done was indiscriminately sweep the detected area with gunfire; the probability of hitting him that way would have been vastly higher than drawing a circle with a surgical cut.

The ACPA pilot possessed the capital for arrogance and the capability to vent his rage, and right now, Karl had truly fallen into his grasp.

The disparity in their equipment was simply too glaring—so glaring that any struggle Karl put up was, in the eyes of the ACPA pilot, a futile effort easily resolved with a moment's thought.

'Looks like your struggling is over, rat.'

The ACPA pilot's autocannon aimed at Karl, but before he could raise his arm, Karl had already clenched his fist and whipped out a length of monowire caught between his fingers.

Monowire could slice through many things, and it was undeniably sharp, but those things did not include an ACPA whose material was already comparable to a 2075 main battle tank.

The monowire bit about a centimeter into the ACPA's outer layer and wrapped around it. When Karl tried to pull taut, however, he realized his entire body's strength probably couldn't match a single finger of his opponent.

'Oh well, looks like I'm definitely dead this time.'

Watching the ACPA pilot—who didn't stop his slow, deliberate arm-raise for even a second, maintaining that condescending, arrogant scrutiny even as he let Karl attack—Karl listened to the monowire on his arms twanging and pinging. The mechanical screech of the metal stretching to its absolute limit was teeth-grating, and Karl knew he was asking far too much of the monowire.

You've worked hard.

Still, help me out one last time.

Even if it was utterly ungraceful, he still wanted to struggle just a bit more.

'Witness my struggle.'

Karl smiled.

That smile of Karl's left the ACPA pilot slightly bewildered. What he wanted to see was the other party's utter failure, whether it was resentment or tearful weeping—as long as it was displayed, his inner self would achieve immense satisfaction, and the lingering sense of elite glory would return to him once more...

Defeat should never wear a smile.

Just a street mercenary...

"Thanks for underestimating me."

The monowire wrapping around the ACPA pilot began to glow.

Monowire was something that could be charged, and the desperate, all-or-nothing burst of power released after a full charge...

***

"Bzzzt!"

The sound of electric current crackled across the ACPA's armored hand, and the current- and heat-infused monowire instantly became even sharper. In that single instant, it sliced a full ten centimeters inward in one breath. Beneath the severed, slightly melting metal cross-section lay human flesh and blood.

Pain, for the very first time since the ACPA pilot had donned the armor, descended upon him.

This agony wasn't merely physical; his psyche, too, suffered a heavy blow.

As a transcendent being standing above ordinary humanity, he had actually been injured by a mortal born of flesh and blood.

Had the 'god' been angered?

Who could know?

Karl yanked on the ends of the monowire wrapped around his arms, whipping them across his own wrists. The razor-sharp monowire sliced through Karl's palms as effortlessly as a hot knife through butter.

What a surgical cut.

Truly worthy of monowire.

As the severed palms remained firmly attached to the monowire dangling from the ACPA mecha, Karl fell backward. Relying on his backward momentum and the pulling force of his handless wrists, he ripped the remaining monowire out of his arms, trailing the severed ends still connected to the palms. Amidst a gushing fountain of blood, half of the arm's internal mechanical structure, accompanied by peeled-back flesh and tissue, connected with the monowire on the palms.

The cyberware had fulfilled its duty; now came Karl's own responsibility.

Handless, with his forearms reduced to bloody cross-sections, Karl fell backward. What he saw was light.

The light of the second floor, filtering down through the gap, shone upon him at an angle. In this gloomy ground floor whose ceiling lights had been obliterated by the autocannon, it was so bright, so radiant.

It was just like looking up at a clear sky.

Karl collapsed. And the ACPA pilot, still reeling from the pain, barely had time to recover before he saw the two palms hanging from his body by the monowire pop open.

Clutched tightly in the centers of those detached palms were two grenades with their pins already pulled.

Let's recount that—how many seconds does it take for a pin-pulled grenade to detonate?

Four or five seconds.

And how many seconds had passed by now?

Just right. Neither more nor less.

Four seconds.

"Boom!"