Chapter 92 - Episode 11: Death is a Mercenary's Friend
Chapter 92: Chapter 12, Episode 11: Death is a Mercenary’s Friend
He had pathetically dragged his comrades to their death. He couldn’t bear to see Black Mamba again. Even death would put him more at ease.
The captain emptied himself of all hope.
“Oh!”
The captain rolled sideways without his own intent. It was Burimer who had been hidden under the bed by Bell Man. Burimer had used all of his remaining strength to pull at the captain’s ankle. The captain had fallen due to it and rolled to the ground like a desert spider scuttling for cover.
Swoosh—
A menacing fist passed by him with a roar and landed at the place where the captain’s head had been moments ago.
“Shoot, shoot!” Burimer yelled.
“That sly punk!” Mike screamed.
Bell Man, Jang Shin, and Mike were having a difficult time trying to find the right opportunity to shoot. The invader was like a character from a fantasy novel who transported from one place to another in the blink of an eye, and now the captain and Burimer were both intertwined with the target. They couldn’t kill the invader with their comrades in shooting range, so they didn’t dare pull the trigger. Their hearts were just burning in anxiety.
“Ack! A bug dares to interrupt me.” With a strange laugh, the invader spit out these words from his mouth. The anger of his missing punch was now directed at Burimer.
Thud—
“Ack!”
Burimer screamed in agony. The invader kicked Burimer in the stomach, then yelled at the captain.
It was too extensive to explain in detail, but the time it took the invader to break through the wall and yell at the captain was only two or three seconds. The mercenaries’ target locking wasn’t able to catch up to his movements. In their eyes, the invader’s silhouette seemed to be stretching in and out like a rubber band.
The captain, his face pale white, repetitively pulled the trigger.
Shwoop—
The invader split into two, then three, then four. The captain was unable to hit any of the targets. The eight bullets that had been left in the magazine were all gone.
Click—
This was the sound of an empty clip. The captain’s mind went blank. He hadn’t been able to graze a hair, and yet his magazine was already empty. Disappointment and defeat overtook him.
‘Sophie, Daddy’s sorry!’ The face of his daughter waiting for him to return to Marseille flashed clearly in his mind.
It wasn’t yet time for the captain to die. Burimer had constantly met bad luck, while the captain was blessed with good luck.
With a crash, the bent front door fell as it came clean off its hinges, a dark shadow standing in front of it. The shadow had run through the door like a grenade and slammed into the assassin, who had reached out to grab the captain. The assassin was flung out of room 319 through the collapsed wall.
Black Mamba stood there, frowning intensely. The expression on the face of his comrades upon seeing Black Mamba’s impeccably timed arrival was a sight to see. They looked like babies who had just found their mother after being lost at an amusement park.
“Black Mamba!”
The same word shot out of all the mercenaries’ mouths.
“Black Mamba is here! We’re going to escape.”
“Wait!” Black Mamba stopped the captain.
“I’ll take care of him. Bell Man, treat Burimer.”
The captain’s face turned red. Due to his fear, he had completely forgotten about Burimer. If there had been a mouse hole, he would have gladly crawled into it.
Black Mamba let out a sigh of relief. He had made it just in time to stop the attacker. There had been good reason for him to run there like his life depended on it. A person with this sort of skill would have already ended them if he had used a gun. In that respect, they had been lucky.
The monster that had been flung from the room got up and dusted off his clothes.
Only then did Black Mamba observe his adversary in detail. He was a 6-foot-tall blond man built like a Greek statue.
“Who the hell are you?” Unlike his calm voice, the whites of his eyes were full of murderous intent.
Black Mamba flinched.
The sight he saw in front of him was a mass of blood. The man looked as if he had been molded by blood, and he could sense the cruelty and violence emanating from him. The man reminded him of the rough version of himself in his dreams. There was good reason to have sensed him as his doppelganger.
The reason he flinched was not because of the man’s cruelty or evilness; Choi Do Shik was more vicious than this man. Compared to the predatory viciousness emanating from this man, Choi Do Shik’s cruelty was like a weapon that cut up souls.
It was his voice that had caused him to flinch.
The sound of his voice penetrated his brain and shook him. He felt as if he needed to answer him, similar to the effect of Choi Do Shik’s hypnosis technique.
“Ohm mani ban mae hom! Oh ohm!”
Unknown gibberish came out from Black Mamba’s mouth. Chanting in this language was able to rid the world of evil. Although he was unable to use its full potential since he wasn’t fully enlightened, he was still able to spread its power across the room.
Ocelot suddenly felt uneasy. Unlike the sound, something else seemed to have penetrated through his body. His mind seemed to ring, and his thirst for murder was quelled.
‘What is he?’
Warning bells went off in Ocelot’s head.
‘Can a human follow my movements?
‘What is this immense power I sense?
‘What is that strange chant that quelled my lust for blood?’
Question after question ran through his brain. He was unable to resume attacking and instead observed this human carefully, like he was a lion that had met a tiger.
Warning bells sounded in Black Mamba’s head, as well.
‘Could this guy be human?’
The place where his shoulder had collided into him throbbed. Even if he had run into a boulder, it shouldn’t have hurt this much.
The violence emanating from him made his skin crawl. He wasn’t sure if he was intentionally spewing such energy or if he had done it unknowingly, but either way, he was like an indestructible predatory cat. Plus, what was that strange voice?
Black Mamba’s face grew as hard as stone.
It didn’t have much effect on him, but to the average human, he was sure it would have a detrimental effect.
Black Mamba glared at Ocelot.
“Such skill belongs to a mute, what a waste. Ha!”
The invader’s eyes, which were glaring at Black Mamba, grew bigger. His opponent’s eyes glittered, and he realized that he had met someone like himself.
“Oh, you’re a hybrid. A hybrid, but someone like myself. I’m glad I was able to come all this way to meet you. How interesting. How incredibly interesting. Hahaha!”
Ocelot sucked on his lips, which were redder than a woman’s, and smiled without opening his mouth. It was a habit that came out when he became excited. This was similar to the habits of actual ocelots.
“Black Mamba! He’s dangerous. Even guns are no use.”
The captain couldn’t bear to say that Burimer had been attacked. Between Black Mamba and the invader, a tension as thick as fog hovered in the place. There was no reason to cause Black Mamba to waver.
“Captain, he’s not an opponent that guns will be any use against. We have to figure out a defense tactic and figure out a way to block his attacks. We can’t attack first,” Black Mamba warned him in a low voice.
“This is driving me crazy. Is this really Earth? Have we really not just been transported to another world?”
“As I thought, this is a horrid place. How could someone like Black Mamba show up here? It’s the worst.”
“The yankees must have run nuclear experiments here. Only a person exposed to radiation could end up like that, don’t you think?”
Emil and Jang Shin chatted without any sense of anxiety. They truly were the best rookie warrior combination.
The captain exchanged the magazine of his Glock.
“Black Mamba, we’ll help you.”
“Captain, this is a ‘Fogham Zech’ situation. Do not exit the room. Use the bed and the furniture to barricade the door and the balcony. You must not attack first,” Black Mamba warned him again sternly. The opposition was not human. If they attacked carelessly, they would all be swept away.
“Big brother, that guy’s insane. Can you beat him?”
“Of course. I am Mu Ssang, after all,” Black Mamba reassured Jang Shin’s concerns.
He had trained using the thousand-year-old Oh Geun Gong. For him, it was much more disturbing to fight against a martial arts master like Choi Do Shik than the monster in front of him now who only had a massive physical advantage.
Black Mamba pushed his energy into him.
First, he had to stop him from acting unpredictably. Even in the desert where stars showered down from the sky, he had continued to train to achieve enlightenment. He had been able to create an energy field since the day he placed the headstone over Chartres’s grave.
The weak resonance could grow quickly and spread over a wide range.
‘Huh, what is this?!’
Ocelot, who had been running wildly toward him, suddenly lost his balance and wavered. Unlike the unsavory feeling he had felt before, this one felt different, as the wave crashed over and swept through him. The average person wouldn’t have felt it, but Ocelot, with his overactive senses, noticed its power instantly.
He was suddenly put into a bad mood.
“Are you a mercenary, too?” asked the invader again. He spoke English well.
“You came already knowing that.”
“My targets were the eight members of Legion Etranger. A monster like you wasn’t part of the client’s hit list.”
“Hit list?”
Black Mamba was taken aback. A request from a client? Who, and for what reason, would send this extraordinary man? What purpose did a couple of special task mercenaries serve…
He suddenly had a lot to think about.
“I am that mercenary.”
Ocelot put his index finger up and wagged it back and forth.
“Don’t pull my leg. A powerful mutant as a mercenary? The striped hyena will laugh upon hearing this.”
“Mutant?”
“Oh ho, oh dear, are you not aware of your identity?! I’m a demigod. You, too, are like me. Oh dear, my chest is still sore. I am Ocelot. Let’s be friends. Haha!”
Ocelot made the grand gesture of opening his arms out to him as he laughed.
Black Mamba already knew that this man was similar to him. Having inherited godlike abilities from his mother, he, too, had once had the skill to teleport. This skill had been transformed to his spatial perception skill, but the root of the skill remained with him.
The man kept claiming they were the same, but Black Mamba didn’t agree with him. Friends with that crazy lunatic? He’d rather commit suicide with his pen*s in his mouth.
His adversary was blabbering on nonchalantly while Black Mamba was on full alert. He could see the violence burning behind the whites of his eyes. He was smiling now, but he could attack and bite at any moment.
“I am mercenary Black Mamba. Whether you’re a mutant or a new species, you can think whatever you want. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Haha, pathetic fool, an all-powerful being became a mere mercenary and ended up as a civilian.”
“Mere mercenary? Civilian? I don’t think that’s anything that someone who kills the Chinese for a living has the right to say.”
Black Mamba looked for an opportunity as he dragged the conversation on. If he charged after his comrades, he couldn’t control the situation. Even if he was to get into a fight with him, the consequences for those in the surrounding area would be detrimental. That was the reason he had to get him out of the building.
Ocelot was flabbergasted.
He was astonished to think that this man thought he was a mere human.
“The Chinese? Don’t make me laugh. Humans are but the subjects of my hobby. Mutants are the highest predators of the food chain. Murder is the art in which a mutant displays its dominance. I’m different from the bugs that kill for mere pennies.”
The mutant’s words bothered Black Mamba.
A mutant was a deviant, an oddity, a freak of nature. He was no freak of nature, which meant that he was a deviant. Deviant wasn’t a familiar word in the Iran vocabulary.
“I am human. These men are my friends.”
“Look here, hybrid, just as a human cannot live like a cockroach, a mutant cannot live like a human. Do you know how much these clothes you just put a hole in cost? You wouldn’t be able to buy it with three months of a mercenary’s salary. Why would a mutant live like a lowly civilian?”
Black Mamba’s eyes flashed red.
He was disgusted by his words. They all held traces of racism, superiority, and believing in his own superiority.
“Nigimi ppong, you punk! The clothes on your back, your sunglasses, dress shoes, and even that mousse slathered on your hair are all items that were made by the hands of these lowly civilians you talk about. If you think humans are dirty and you hate them, then take it all off and walk around naked, you punk!”
Black Mamba no longer wished to listen to the punk’s frivolous banter. He was beyond insane. He pulled out his Glock and showered him in bullets.
Puh puh puh—
“Oof!” Ocelot, who had suddenly been overwhelmed with bullets, spun like a top. The bullets swept past the place where his head and stomach had been and landed in the wall. The unstoppable three taps whizzed forlornly through the empty air.
“Impressive.”
Black Mamba was sincerely impressed. Ocelot had avoided his unannounced triple shot within a short distance. He was indeed not human.
Ocelot cocked his head in confusion, his beautiful golden hair fluttering. He had the facade of a man that would send any shallow woman head over heels.
“Oh, very nice. You can get rid of the toy now.”
Ocelot was full of confidence. Guns were a joke. Unless it was the new and powerful Berretta, other guns were no match for his physical skills.