Riyan's POV
The mana-infused bullets arrived in three distinct waves.
First came the pistol round—a single projectile moving at roughly 400 meters per second, its trajectory calculated to punch through my center mass. The mana core embedded in its copper jacket created a distinctive violet shimmer, leaving a faint trail of ionized air in its wake.
The shotgun pellets followed milliseconds later—twelve buckshot rounds, each the size of a marble, moving slightly slower but spread in a devastating cone pattern designed to eliminate any possibility of evasion. The buckshot glowed a sickly green, their mana saturation so high that they were already beginning to destabilize mid-flight, the energy fighting against the metal's structural integrity.
The rifle shots came last—three precise rounds, cold blue in color, moving fastest of all. These were anti-personnel rounds, designed specifically for enhanced targets. The mana had been integrated into the projectile's core during forging, making them far more efficient than the hastily-prepared buckshot.
I was already moving before the pistol fired.
My darkness affinity responded to pure instinct, flowing through my channels like liquid obsidian. The Yunling Spear became an extension of that darkness, its crimson blade drinking in the shadowy energy and transforming it into something that could bend reality's rules.
I didn't twirl. Didn't spin in circles. That was theater.
Instead, I used precise, economical movements—rotating the spear in a figure-eight pattern that aligned with each projectile's trajectory. My perception, enhanced by my consciousness pulling from two timelines' worth of experience, had already mapped out the incoming fire with mathematical certainty.
The pistol round hit the spear's shaft first. The impact should have driven the mana bullet through my body, but instead, the darkness affinity around Yunling's surface absorbed the kinetic energy like quicksand accepting a stone. The bullet's copper jacket crumpled, the mana core detonating in a localized explosion that I channeled safely outward, away from my body.
Ping.
The shotgun pellets came next. Twelve separate trajectories, each requiring its own counter. I angled the spear to present maximum surface area, letting the darkness affinity bleed across the weapon's length. The first four pellets hit simultaneously—their impacts creating a pressure wave that ran down Yunling's shaft and into my arm. My bones should have shattered under the combined kinetic force. Instead, the darkness distributed the pressure along my entire skeleton, converting brutal impact into something my body could endure.
The second group of four pellets I actually intercepted, the spear tip moving with surgical precision to clip their trajectory by mere millimeters. Without direct contact, the mana cores destabilized faster, detonating mid-air in a cascade of green fire that illuminated the corridor in sickly phosphorescence.
The final four I simply let pass, leaning my body with minimal movement. They screamed past my ear, so close I could feel the heat from their detonating mana cores.
The three rifle rounds were the most dangerous. Anti-personnel mana ammunition moved at approximately 900 meters per second, and the mana integration meant they'd punch through most conventional defenses. I brought Yunling horizontal, creating a barrier of pure darkness affinity that extended three feet in either direction from the spear's blade.
The first rifle round hit that barrier and detonated on contact. The mana core's explosion was meant to bypass defenses—instead, my darkness affinity fed on the released energy like a predator catching wounded prey. The second and third rounds followed in rapid succession, and I absorbed them the same way.
By the time the entire barrage ended, less than two seconds had passed.
I stood in the exact same position, breathing steady, Yunling held lightly in my grip.
The woman's eyes were wide. Processing.
I didn't give her the chance to process further.
Darkness wrapped around my feet, propelling me forward in a controlled burst. The movement shouldn't have been possible—humans couldn't accelerate from standing to full sprint in a single step without shattering their own skeleton. But I wasn't fully human anymore, and my skeleton had been rebuilt twice over from the trauma of my previous life.
I crossed the distance in the space between heartbeats.
The woman tried to pivot, tried to raise her pistol for a second shot. Professional instinct, muscle memory. But her nervous system operated on meat-time. Mine operated on something faster.
My left hand closed around her wrist—the one holding the pistol. I didn't squeeze. Just held. My grip was a cage of muscle and bone and absolute certainty.
I felt the moment she understood she was dead. It registered in her eyes first, that sudden dilation of the pupils, the involuntary release of adrenaline. Her mouth opened to scream or shout or do something, but I was already moving.
The Yunling Spear rose smoothly, its crimson blade catching the emergency lighting. I drove it forward with the efficiency of a surgeon, not a warrior. The blade entered between her ribs at precisely the right angle—not through the sternum, which would cause the spear to bind in bone, but between the ribs, threading the needle through to reach the heart.
The impact was surprisingly quiet.
Her breath left her body in a single, surprised oof. Blood flooded her lungs immediately, dark and arterial, spilling from her lips before her body fully registered what had happened. Her eyes met mine for an instant—that moment of absolute betrayal that only the dying truly understand—and then I withdrew the spear.
She collapsed like her strings had been cut.
Four down.
"You bastard!" the leader roared, his voice cracking with rage and desperation. "All of you—kill him! Now!"
The remaining four charged.
The wiry dual-dagger wielder came at me from the left, his movements fast and precise. The shotgun-wielder charged from the right, his weapon already pumping another shell into the chamber. The rifleman took position behind them, providing covering fire. The leader came straight down the center, his sword wreathed in crackling blue mana.
It was a coordinated assault born from countless operations together. Professional. Textbook execution.
I could see the weakness in it. The assumption that volume of fire and coordinated strikes would overwhelm me.
The rifleman fired first—three shots, rapid succession. I didn't bother deflecting. Instead, I gathered darkness around my body like armor, letting the mana bullets detonate against my skin and dissipate their energy uselessly into the shadows.
"Second Move," I whispered, raising Yunling.
"Whirlwind Dive."
The move was taught as a devastating frontal assault. What the instructors didn't mention was the internal mechanics—the way it required channeling your affinity through your entire skeleton, the way it transformed the spear into a conduit for pure elemental force.
I'd modified it. Pushed it further than the technique was designed to go.
The Yunling Spear began to glow. Not the faint luminescence of normal mana channeling, but a genuine inferno contained within the blade's physical structure. The ruby gemstone at the spear's heart blazed like a miniature star, its surface temperature climbing past the boiling point of water, then steel, then into ranges where the air itself began to combust.
I thrust forward.
The explosion was immediate and absolute.
A colossal burst of thermal energy erupted from the spear's tip—not a projectile, but a shockwave of superheated air expanding outward at the speed of sound. The mana infused into the Raging Fire Spear Art transformed physical force into destructive heat, creating a literal vortex of flames that filled the entire corridor.
The air temperature spiked from 70 degrees to approximately 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit in the space of a heartbeat.
The wiry dual-dagger wielder was closest. The inferno hit him first, and the results were immediate. His skin didn't burn—it charred instantly, the outer layers carbonizing before his nervous system could even register pain. His muscles contracted in the intense heat, his body convulsing as the proteins denatured. His daggers melted into slag, the steel becoming liquid and dripping from his hands even as his flesh followed.
He lasted perhaps three seconds before heat stroke claimed him.
The shotgun-wielder was next. His massive frame made him an even better conductor for thermal energy. The ammunition in his bandoliers detonated in chain reaction, the propellant igniting from the ambient heat. The explosions were contained within his body—internal detonations that ruptured organs and scattered his remains across the corridor walls in a fine mist of char and bone.
The rifleman tried to backpedal, tried to escape the inferno. It didn't matter. The heat was omnidirectional. His lungs, filled with superheated air, cooked from the inside out. His blood began to boil in his veins, steam escaping from his eyes and mouth as his body literally came apart from internal pressure.
All three were dead within five seconds.
But the leader—the leader had prepared.
A desperate, final-moment activation of a defensive mana technique. He'd driven his sword tip into the corridor's floor and channeled every ounce of power through it, creating a fragile dome of mana-infused energy. The barrier was transparent, barely stable, oscillating as it fought against the inferno's thermal output.
It held. Barely. For approximately one second.
The Whirlwind Dive was too much. The barrier shattered like glass, spiderwebbing cracks racing across its surface before it detonated in a shower of dissipating mana particles. The shockwave of that secondary explosion threw the leader backward, slamming him against the corridor's wall hard enough to crack the concrete.
I let the inferno dissipate, allowing the ambient temperature to drop. The corridor now reeked of charred flesh, boiled blood, and the acrid stench of burning hair and fat. The walls were blackened. The emergency lighting had fused into useless slag.
The leader was still alive.
Burned, broken, but alive.
I approached him slowly, Yunling still hot enough to cause the air around it to shimmer. My footsteps echoed through the ruined corridor, each step deliberate, giving him time to fully comprehend his situation.
His eyes snapped open as I closed the distance. Rage and desperation warred across his face.
"Impossible," he gasped, pushing himself upright despite his ruined body. "B-rank... you're just B-rank... how..."
He lunged.
His sword was still in his grip, battered and scorched but functional. He drove it upward in a wild, desperate slash that was more panic than technique. His remaining mana flared around the blade's edge, weak and stuttering but present.
I raised Yunling to meet him.
The sword connected with the spear's shaft, and the impact sent a visible shockwave through the corridor. For a moment, we were locked together—his blade pressed against my spear, his eyes wide and desperate and searching for some explanation that made sense.
Then I twisted the spear smoothly, disengaging his sword. He tried to recover, tried to reposition, but his burned body wouldn't obey his commands fast enough.
I drove Yunling forward.
The spearhead pierced through his weakened mana defense like paper. His armor, reinforced by expensive materials and mana-weaving, offered no resistance. The tip penetrated his chest cavity, sliding between ribs with an audible crack, and buried itself in his heart.
His eyes went wide. Blood flooded his lungs immediately, dark and arterial, spilling from his lips in a river. His body convulsed, muscles seizing as his nervous system finally understood what had happened.
"Ri-Riyan... De-Descartes..." His voice was barely a whisper, confusion and recognition warring in his expression. "Why... we didn't... the Descartes and Maris families..."
I said nothing, simply looking at him with the detachment of someone observing a lab rat.
"We just wanted... money..." he continued, blood bubbling at his lips. "Why would you..."
"You chose to betray Sirus," I said quietly, my voice devoid of anything resembling emotion. "You chose to sell weapons to Nexus. You chose to take hostages. Those choices have consequences."
His eyes held mine for another second, searching for something he'd never find. Then the light in them dimmed, consciousness slipping away like sand through an hourglass.
I withdrew the spear. His body collapsed, joining his comrades in permanent silence.
Five down.
Three remaining.
The fourth floor awaited, and with it, the final three traitors. The strongest always positioned themselves closest to the hostages—it was basic tactical doctrine. If these five were elite, the final three would be something more.
Something that might actually be worth noting.
I moved toward the stairwell, my shoes crunching on ash and bone, and prepared myself for whatever waited above.
[Word Count: 2,247 words]
Q&A CORNER
Questions for Readers:
What do you think of Riyan's combat style? The combination of Spear Saint talent and Raging Fire Spear Art is proving devastating!
The leader recognized Riyan despite his infiltration. How will this impact the mission if word gets out about the Descartes family's involvement?
Three traitors remain on the fourth floor. What rank do you think they are? Will they be stronger than B-rank?
When will Riyan use "Nemora" for the first time in actual combat? What kind of enemy would require such overwhelming power?
How close is Sia Crimson's team to arriving? Will they witness Riyan's capabilities?
Share your theories and predictions below!
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The final three traitors await. The strongest opponents yet. And perhaps... a surprise that will change everything.