The reaction was immediate. Two of the men took a step back without realizing they'd done it. Something about her made the air feel different. She hadn't drawn her sword. She was just standing there, hands loose at her sides, head tilted slightly, watching all eight of them at once the way a person watches a campfire. With complete comfort.
Renji's eyes flickered to her, then back to Tysone. "One woman and you."
"And the others." Tysone said pleasantly.
As if on cue, a sharp crack from Kohta's rifle sent the man on the roof sliding down the slope and off the edge with a thud. Non-lethal, probably. Or maybe not. Kohta's definition of non-lethal had been evolving lately.
Then Takashi and Rei came through the west wall. Rei's spear leading. Takashi's face set like concrete.
Renji made a decision.
He rushed Tysone.
It was impressive, actually. The core gave him speed a normal man didn't have, and he covered the distance fast, his shoulder dropping for a tackle that would've easily put a crack on a brick wall.
Tysone sidestepped it.
Not even dramatically. Just a clean, efficient half-step to the left, and Renji went past him like a confused bull.
Tysone grabbed the back of his neck mid-pass and drove him face-first into the stone path.
The crack was loud.
Renji groaned but pushed himself up, which was the core talking. Ordinary men didn't get up from that.
"You've got some in you." Tysone acknowledged, pulling him up by the collar. "But you're Rank 1, and a quite pathetic one at that too. Can't even gauge your opponent's skill?"
The courtyard erupted.
The remaining seven came in fast, and this was where it got interesting, because two more of them had cores. One gave himself away immediately by moving twice as fast as a human should, blurring between oil drums with a short blade in each hand.
The other barely moved at all, and that was more unsettling. He just walked forward, a steel pipe in one hand, and the pipe bent slightly from the grip.
Strength type. Tysone filed it away.
Speed type went for Saeko.
That was a mistake.
Not because Saeko was fragile. Because Saeko was currently operating at a level that would've been alarming even before the Rank 2 core. And now, with it settled into her bones, she was something adjacent to a natural disaster.
The blade came in fast. She caught the wrist.
Just caught it. Bare hand.
The Speed type blinked, which was a very human thing to do in a very inhuman situation. Saeko looked at him with polite curiosity.
"You're fast." She said. "You're not fast enough."
She redirected the blade into its owner's shoulder, spun him by the wrist, and dislocated his arm in the same motion. He hit the ground screaming.
She drew her katana.
Something changed in the courtyard. The men who'd been charging pulled up short. The fire crackled. Nobody said anything for two full seconds.
The Strength type didn't stop.
He swung the pipe at Saeko's side with enough force to cave in the door of the Apocalypse Mule. She moved back just enough that it caught air, and the momentum pulled him off balance. She was already behind him, her blade pressed flat against his neck.
"Drop it." She said softly.
He dropped it.
Nonetheless, Saeko didn't drop her blade.
Instead, her eyes flicking towards Tysone's, before flicking her wrist. The jugular severed with a red splatter before the man collapsed whilst holding his bleeding throat. She turned around, and with another fluid, effortless movement, beheaded the other guy.
Just like that.
She started trembling in ecstasy, her face blushing, lips parting slightly as she gave an exaggerated panting, her eyes flashing red.
Tysone swore he could've seen some drool gathering at the corner of her mouth before she wiped it away and continued staring at the dead man's corpse.
"Look at her, oh my God..." Kohta mumbled in disbelief over the comm.
Tysone let himself chuckle under his breath. "The new and improved model is...something else." He couldn't say he was entirely surprised by this development. He just hoped that a Rank 3 Saeko wouldn't require sexual release with every kill. No fuck that, that was something one could actually look forward to.
Meanwhile, he was handling the rest of the snakes with ease.
One down, wrist broken. Two pinned against the wall by the halberd shaft across their throats, before he took a page from Saeko's book and slit their throats.
The other two had tried to flank him and were now discovering, at great personal cost, that flanking only works if the other person can't feel both of them coming.
Rei had intercepted the man with the rifle before he got a shot off. The rifle was now in four pieces and the man was very unhappy about this.
Takashi was the last of the five standing when the door to the estate's main building slammed open.
The man who came out was older than everyone else, mid-forties maybe, with silver-streaked hair and a lean, angular face. He looked like a yakuza member, what with his expensive suit and menacing, brutish goons standing guard behind him.
Which, in this case, he kind of was.
His face flushed at the sight of the carnage in front of him, and it was a hateful color. "The hell's this now?!"
"Your hell." Tysone said as he dropped yet another man at his feet, convulsing in a pool of blood. "Your neighbors thought you all might need a helping hand in teaching your boys to grow up and be responsible human beings."
A frown furrowed his already creased forehead. He glanced down at the fallen and the dying. "Did the Rays send you? Fucking pricks. You should know better than to mess with the Serpents."
Tysone placed himself in a raised position to stand as tall and as imposing as he could, shoulders back. "Rays? Who the fuck are them?"
That earned a deep-bellied laugh. "Not them, hm? The who the fuck are you guys?"
"..."
Tysone momentarily blanked because they didn't have a name to give. So far there was nothing to represent them as a cohesive unit, the group. They never discussed this before. What the fuck were they going to be called. Something to discuss later.
"None of your business. You were hunting down three innocents for no good reason. My team decided to intervene and take action."
"HAHHAHAH! So you're just a bunch of wannabe knights in shining armor?" He looked at Tysone, then at Saeko, whose blood-drenched face was an image from a nightmare. He looked at the katana in her hand, and for the first time, a flicker of genuine fear crossed his eyes. "Look what you've done to my property."
Saeko, however, didn't respond. She didn't even flinch. She simply stood there, the blood dripping from her blade onto the stone.
"Knights?" Tysone cocked his head in thought. "No... no I don't think that name fits us, sorry. You're just a stain we're wiping away for the sake of building a proper and safe community. If anything, you should blame yourself for coming all the way here. This is our property."
The older man grit his teeth. "Is that so?"
"That is so."
He rolled his neck, the joints popping audibly. "My name is Hayashi. I built this group from fifteen people who had nothing. I'm not going to pretend we're good people. We're not. But we're alive."
Tysone nodded. "So are we."
Hayashi took off his jacket, throwing it aside to reveal an impressive chest. "You're a Rank 2." He muttered. "And she is too, huh..."
"Scared?"
"Haha, perhaps... though you'll find out that there are differences even in the same ranks."
Tysone laughed as well. "I whole-heartedly agree."
Hayashi drew out his own katana, which didn't take Tysone by surprise considering Japan's deep love for Samurai history, but what did surprise him, and all those present in that tense moment, was the sudden heat that emanated off his weapon.
Not hot enough to ignite the ground, but the air around it shimmered, as if the blade were fresh from a forge.
The tip was glowing red hot.
"As you can see, I'm a special case."
Tysone let out an incredulous chuckle as he spun his halberd. "I didn't think we were the same, after all." He said. "Though I wonder what you'll be able to do with that."
"I'm going to burn your pretty black skin off, and then I'm going to make that girl of yours watch. And then I'm going to keep her."
Tysone's face couldn't get any colder, even with the sheer heat emanating off of him making his immediate area hazy.
Fire slowly began licking up the shaft of the halberd, blackening it but not consuming it.
Hayashi's expression crumbled as he stared at Tysone. "Impossible!"
"Right…?"
The fire around Tysone surged before receding like a tide, and the man himself was speeding like a train towards Hayashi,
Author's Note:
If you're enjoying the story and want to read ahead or support my work, you can check out my P@treon at [email protected]/LordCampione. But don't worry—all chapters will eventually be public. Just being here and reading means the world to me. Thank you for your time and support.