Chapter 11: Guilty (11)

“Damn…”

While the customer was looking out the window, the owner of the café was also looking out with a worried look.

Although he was looking at someone a little differently.

“Damn. Why at this time…”

At least, they were the ones who had never come in while he was serving customers.

His uneasy intuition was correct.

The gang member did not run away to another place, but strode into the café where he was.

“Do you still have the will to do business?”

Although they were openly carrying guns, no one stopped them in this area.

If you reported them, the police would show up, but they wouldn’t be guarding the shop for the rest of their lives.

“Why are you here again? If you’re not here to drink coffee, then get out.”

The store manager briefly considered taking out the gun he had hidden underneath, but after much thought, he stood in front of them naked.

“I told you. You seem to be making a lot of money. I told you to pay protection money. Our gang already took over this area.”

Like it or not, those living in the slums of this city had to be strong.

They had to be strong.

Wearing better guns and armor than others, or increasing your toughness through bio-implants.

The easiest way was to create a gang.

A human wearing proper implants is strong enough to treat lead bullets as BB bullets, but such people would never show up for such petty crimes in the first place.

Guns are a weapon that gives the advantage to the first person to shoot.

Even if you are an adult male who has trained for years to lose blood and built up muscle and body, you will die if you are shot first by a twelve-year-old juvenile criminal who has fired a single magazine.

Of course, physical strength is not meaningless in combat.

It allows you to withstand a few stray bullets, and it drastically reduces the time needed to move, aim, and control recoil.

Even so, guns were more advantageous for offense than defense.

The best way to secure protection against guns in these slums was to increase the number of people.

Expensive bulletproof equipment and armor were hard to obtain, and it was difficult to always carry them.

But if you bring along a few “friends you like”, even if one dies, the others can shoot you.

It wasn’t necessarily to hurt someone, but it was also essential for survival.

“I told you, don’t do it.”

“f*ck, do you think this gun is funny? Do you want to see people die in the store?”

“The guy who was just filling up the gas station, and now he’s pretending to be a gangster…”

“This guy… So you think we’re funny now? Do you think he wouldn’t lose if he got shot by a fake gangster?”

There were people with ordinary jobs here, too.

Nurses, people who run bars or restaurants, day laborers, and part-time workers at convenience stores.

However, the gun-wielding thugs didn’t treat them well.

If you were walking down the street at night unarmed, two thugs on a motorcycle would come up to you, point a gun at your head, and demand all the money in your wallet.

So, anyone who had even a little bit of money in this city would arm themselves first.

That’s because it gave them a little bit of stability for their lives and property.

However, arming costs money.

The cheap guns that the thugs who entered the cafe were holding must have been expensive to buy with their meager salaries.

When he heard that a nearby gas station had closed recently, the manager also felt sorry.

That was until he heard that the young men who worked there had gathered together and formed a gang of thugs.

“If I give you money, the real gang here will try to kill me.”

Who they gave money to was a very important matter to the gang.

It was also a battle of pride.

Aside from the taxes that they had to pay to Stella City, the gang considered it a betrayal for a store within their territory to give money to another gang.

The logic was that they were providing military funds to another gang and ignoring their territory.

“In the first place, if they were such exemplary citizens, shouldn’t they not have given money to the gang?”

The thug’s words were not necessarily wrong.

The reason stores in these areas wanted the help of gangs instead of the police was because the gangs were faster than the police.

If an all-out war broke out, there was no reason for the police to lose if the gangs fought each other.

Of course, if they fought the entire gang instead of just one, it would be a different story, but that was basically it.

However, the police were slow.

They didn’t patrol well, and they didn’t respond to the flood of reports.

In the end, if they wanted to escape the pain of the gangs that were harassing them right away, they had to bow down to the gangs.

“f*ck, you make a lot of money. Are you really that upset about handing over a few pennies?”

“As I said, it’s not about giving or not giving money!”

“It’s none of my business. If you don’t want to hand over money, there’s another way.”

The thugs started to harass the customers little by little.

“No, that won’t do!”

“If you try, hand over money.”

“The gangs are really going to kill me!”

“We can kill them too.”

Their target was a strange customer who looked rich.

He wasn’t wearing a nice suit like someone from a company, but his actions and face gave off a sense of confidence.

Even in this situation.

“You’re a little bit of money? What are you doing?”

Because of your f*cking things, the danger seems to be able to take it as if you were frowned upon?

She didn’t seem nervous either.

On the contrary, she looked like she wanted to kill them.

She was glaring at them as if she could kill them at any moment.

Like a fierce dog about to pounce.

“Let’s not make a fuss for no reason. It’s annoying to both of us.”

“This damn kid… Just die!”

Fire poured out from the gun in the thug’s hand.

They were characters from an animation based on a game.

Leaving behind their unfortunate pasts, they ran endlessly toward their lofty goals, and eventually died.

Those people.

My feelings were mixed.

Fortunately, they were still walking down the street, seemingly fine.

There was still a lot of time left, so it made sense.

It was definitely her.

She was exactly as I knew her.

I didn’t accidentally fall into a world where ‘companies and place names appear in a game.

If Doris exists, then there are others.

There are colleagues and villains from the original game, and there are incidents that happened there.

I was able to pull myself together.

The main character will appear someday.

In order to protect what I have, I must not neglect my preparations.

“Let’s not make a fuss for no reason. It’s annoying to both of us?”

The disappointing thing was that even at this moment, a criminal with a gun was harassing me.

I was paying close attention to myself.

If I stare at her too much and our eyes meet, I can’t be sure what kind of relationship we’ll have later.

It’s best to make her a client-employer relationship.

I can get involved with her to some extent, and I can use her overwhelming power.

I don’t want her to think of me as a stalker or a street thug.

In the worst case, she might be wary of me.

It’s not to the extent of blackmail, but if she feels like, ‘Hansan is watching her. Hansanwoo himself’

That’s the worst.

The only good thing is that she’s wearing sunglasses, so she can’t see my gaze.

‘Hmm?

For a moment, I felt a sense of discomfort.

She was running toward me.

Doris was running toward me with an urgent face.

Did she get caught?

No, no matter what, is it right for her to run like this just because I gave her a glance?

No.

Maybe I was mistaken.

I’m the representative of the Hansan faction in this city, and she had a lot of hostility toward Hansan.

But, it’s strange.

If you were going to kill me, you could have just shot me from that distance.

‘Wait…

The sense of discomfort wasn’t because she was running toward me.

The world had stopped.

It wasn’t a rhetorical statement like ‘The moment she ran toward me, the world seemed to stop…, but the world really stopped.

I tried to turn my head, but my body was moving too slowly.

As if I too had stopped.

What?’

Even my mouth was moving too slowly, so I had to give up talking to myself.

Even moving my mouth to pronounce ‘what’ was slow.

In that stopped time, she was running toward me.

‘Why?’

My body didn’t move, but my eyes kept rolling.

After checking every object in my field of vision, I could only then realize that the thug’s finger was pulling the trigger.

She wasn’t running toward me to kill me.

On the contrary, she was running toward me to protect me.

It was excessive kindness.

I thought we would fight to the death if we met Doris, but I didn’t think she would protect me.

But in the end, I didn’t realize why time had stopped.

The world couldn’t have really stopped, and there was some reason for it-

‘Aha.

On the contrary.

It wasn’t that the world had stopped, but that she and I had become too fast.

I knew why she was fast.

It was a body accelerator.

An implant that was too powerful to roll around in this slum, turning humans into monsters.

However, it put a great burden on me.

There was no way my body could withstand moving at several times the speed that human muscles and minds could withstand.

Even though I didn’t have any mechanical implants, I was able to cope with this situation.

Perhaps in response to the traces of the accelerator she had activated, the accelerator attached to my body had automatically activated.

To prevent side effects, only for consciousness and senses.

Hansanwoo’s knowledge told me that a certain action was needed to accelerate my body as well.

It was like turning on a switch, but-

I didn’t have time to continue my thoughts.

She had just broken through the transparent glass window and come in, hugged me roughly, and rolled around on the cafe floor.

A hollow laugh escaped me.

I had thought that hugging a woman would be softer and sweeter, but her arms were filled with glass shards.

“Are you okay?”

The sound of a single gunshot rang out, louder, longer, and more sinuous than a single shot.

I had thought it would be dangerous if they made a fuss, but that wasn’t the case.

My secretary had shot five times in an instant, blowing up the heads of the thugs.

“… What a pity.”

I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them.

After all, depending on your perspective, they were probably victims too.

However, it was impossible to mourn their deaths.

People can sometimes disobey and endure, but to shoot them out of the blue.

“I’m sorry! Are you okay?”

“Why should you be sorry? I was the one who told them to stay still…”

While I was trying to calm my secretary down, I heard someone slapping my back.

“Why are you so calm in this situation!”

It was Doris.