Inmate 217 stepped forward, the thick steam swirling around his massive, scarred frame as his crew fanned out, completely trapping me against the row of fogged-up glass mirrors.
"Hey, you bastard, I know exactly what you did down on the third level earlier. You think you're just going to slip away from us after what you did to Luke?"
Maintaining my fiercely unyielding protagonist persona, I didn't back down. I tilted my head, letting a cold, mocking smirk pierce through the mist. Instead of offering a pathetic plea for mercy, I gathered a thick, nasty ball of phlegm in my throat and spat it directly onto his bare, calloused foot.
Inmate 217's face twisted into a mask of pure, unbridled rage. He looked down at his foot, then snapped his glaring eyes back up to me.
"You arrogant piece of trash... Boys, kill him! Don't leave a single piece of him intact!"
On his command, three of his heavily built enforcers lunged forward, throwing heavy, synchronized punches straight at my face.
Because we were back on the second tier, the 10-stat suppression matrix was gone… our baseline attributes had completely reset to 100 stats. However, this presented a grueling mathematical stalemate. Since the prison's secondary chains locked all of our baseline stats at an identical 100 parity, our raw kinetic output and physical defense matrices were perfectly matched.
Using my superior S-rank combat experience, I gracefully slipped beneath the first enforcer's wide hook. Ducking into his blind spot, I channeled my full 100-stat strength into a brutal counter-punch straight into his solar plexus.
THUD.
My fist connected perfectly, but because our defensive attributes were perfectly scaled to match my offensive power, the blow dealt practically negligible damage. The enforcer merely grunted, absorbing the kinetic impact with his hardened abdominal muscles, and immediately geared up to swing again. Standard hand-to-hand combat was a statistical waste of energy; at this rate, they would slowly wear me down through sheer numbers before my 7:00 PM twilight escape.
"I need a weapon," my mastermind instincts screamed.
My sharp eyes rapidly scanned the humid perimeter, filtering through the chaos until they locked onto a nearby bench. Sitting right there was an unused, rock-hard bar of industrial prison soap and a spare, coarse cotton towel.
An old, lethal street-combat blueprint flashed in my mind.
Feigning a retreat, I executed a fluid, low-profile slide across the slick, wet tiles, dodging beneath a second guard's desperate grab. As I cleared his reach, my hand shot out, scooping up the dense bar of soap and the heavy towel in a single, lightning-fast motion.
The soap in this citadel wasn't a soft luxury; it was cheap, chemically compressed lye… hard, heavy, and structurally identical to a clay brick. I rapidly dropped the solid block into the center of the towel, twisting the fabric tightly around it to create a makeshift, high-velocity slungshot.
I gripped the improvised handle of the cloth, a dark, sinister grin breaking through my brooding expression as the weapon hefted perfectly in my hand. In a 100-stat stalemated brawl, concentrated blunt force trauma would bypass their defenses entirely. Luke's execution squad thought they had me cornered in a cage, but they had just handed me the perfect tools to dismantle them.
I didn't give them a single second to reform their perimeter. Channeling my full 100-stat agility, I whipped the improvised soap-in-a-towel slungshot through the thick steam, the heavy lye brick slicing through the humid air with terrifying velocity.
CRACK.
The solid weight slammed violently against the skull of the first enforcer. The blunt force trauma bypassed his 100-stat defensive baseline entirely, short-circuiting his nervous system and sending him crashing face-first onto the wet tiles, out cold. I kept the momentum flowing, spinning on my heel to drive the weapon into the second guard's temple, then the third.
CRACK. CRACK.
One by one, the hardened criminals of the third level dropped like severed trees, their skulls bouncing heavily off the concrete. Because this was the deep interior of the communal bathhouse… a highly volatile zone where prisoners were strictly naked or wrapped in towels… the institution's armored guards rarely patrolled the interior. No official reinforcements were coming to save them.
Inmate 217's eyes widened in sheer disbelief as his entire execution squad was dismantled in a matter of seconds. Realizing his raw hand-to-hand parameters wouldn't cut it, he let out a guttural roar, locked his thick arms around a heavy brass shower fixture, and violently ripped it straight out of the masonry. A high-pressure torrent of scalding water spewed instantly across the room, filling the air with a blinding, deafening spray.
With an unhinged scream, 217 lunged forward, swinging the jagged metal pipe in a lethal, sweeping arc meant to cave my chest in.
I stood my ground, my sharp protagonist reflexes tracking the trajectory perfectly. I raised my twisted towel, catching the metal pipe squarely with the rock-hard center of the soap brick.
BANG.
The impact vibrated through both of our 100-stat frames, locking us in a tense, grinding parry. As we pushed against each other, 217's eyes instinctively flicked toward the fogged-up glass mirror directly behind me to gauge his leverage… and his face instantly morphed into a mask of pure, absolute terror.
The glass reflection showed the spray of the water, the fractured pipe in his hands, and his own hulking frame. But where my body was supposed to be, there was an absolute void. He was locked in a life-or-death struggle against an invisible ghost.
"What... what the hell are you?!" he stammered, his psychological focus shattering into a million pieces.
The mirror anomaly was the ultimate, accidental distraction. Seizing the micro-second his guard dropped, I slipped beneath his stance and drove my boot upward in a merciless, high-velocity kick straight into his groin.
THWACK.
The sheer biological trauma of the strike bypassed his defensive stats instantly. Inmate 217 let out a strangled, high-pitched screech of absolute agony, his eyes rolling back into his head as he collapsed heavily into the pooling water, completely unconscious.
I let out a low, cold breath, unwrapping the towel and letting the cracked bar of soap drop onto his chest. Four of the tier's most dangerous hitmen were now completely neutralized, snoring in the steam. I rapidly checked my towel, ensuring the classified map of Carcaka and the blood-stained spoon containing Luke's DNA were still perfectly secured in the fabric.
The coast was temporarily clear, but the ticking clock wouldn't stop. I needed to move fast, get dressed at Locker 345, and vanish back into the Citadel before the rest of the syndicate discovered the carnage I had left in the water.
I stepped away from the steam-filled shower stalls and walked toward the threshold of the locker room, my towel still securely concealing the map of Carcaka and Luke's blood sample. As I approached the main doorway, a group of the bathhouse's most notorious predators and opportunists blocked the exit. These were the same intimidating, predatory men who had been lingering in the shadows earlier, actively hunting for weak prey to dominate.
By all standard prison metrics, Keane's relatively frail and scrawny host body should have made me a prime target for them. Yet, as I drew closer, none of them made a single move to touch me. They didn't view me as someone they could force into submission. Word of my absolute dominance had spread through the tier like wildfire… I was the undisputed king of the cellar, the monster who had broken Inmate 123 and just single-handedly dismantled 217's enforcement squad.
Instead of looking at me, the men's eyes drifted past my shoulders, locking onto the four unconscious, bruised bodies of Luke's hitmen sprawling across the wet, steaming tiles. A sinister, hungry glint lit up their eyes as they realized the tier's apex enforcers were completely defenseless and ripe for exploitation.
Maintaining my cold, detached protagonist persona, I didn't care about the morality of the situation. In this hellhole, wolves eat wolves. I paused at the threshold, casting a sideways glance back at the predators.
"They're all yours, good luck, boys."
With a subtle, knowing wink, I stepped past them into the locker corridor.
A massive, chunky inmate at the front of the group let out a low, guttural chuckle, cracking his knuckles as his crew began walking past the threshold into the steam.
"Boys, this is gonna be a lot of fun."
I marched straight to Locker 345, pulling open the iron door. As I rapidly threw off the towel, carefully transferring the classified syndicate map and the blood-stained spoon back into the secure, hidden inner lining of my orange prison jumpsuit, the heavy acoustics of the stone bathhouse carried the sudden, chaotic sounds of the aftermath.
The blunt force trauma from my soap-slungshot had begun to wear off, and Luke's men were waking up… only to find themselves pinned down against the wet tiles by a pack of ruthless predators. High-pitched, horrified screams of absolute agony and desperation echoed through the vents as 217 and his enforcers were violently violated, their pride and bodies completely shattered by the very prison ecosystem they used to rule.
I calmly zipped up my uniform, adjusted my collar, and threw my dark bangs over my face. The distraction was absolute, the squad sent to assassinate me was utterly ruined, and my tracks were entirely covered. Without looking back at the echoing screams, I slipped out of the locker room and melted back into the shadows of the Citadel, the 7:00 PM twilight escape window drawing closer by the minute.