Harper’s voice carried a kind of almost pathological calm, while the Geiger counter’s beeping had long since merged into a desperate wail, sharp enough to nearly pierce the eardrums.
The air was thick with an invisible yet deadly scorching heat, radiating from the storm of high-intensity radiation frantically leaking out of Elin’s body.
A viscous, oil-like substance continuously seeped from her eye sockets, mouth, and nose, flowing and dripping onto the floor with faint corrosive hisses, leaving behind charred marks that smoked faintly.
Her body hunched slightly, emitting an inhuman, sandpaper-like growl, as though the entire room’s light was being swallowed and twisted by the surging darkness.
“No! No! Stop her! Shoot! Shoot now!”
Leighton completely collapsed.
Dragging his mangled, bloody leg, he scrambled backward like a terrified maggot, shrieking in despair.
At that critical instant—
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Several explosive bursts thundered almost simultaneously.
The living room windows shattered as if they were made of paper, glass shards riding the shockwave and flashing fragments rained into the room like a storm, while dense clouds of tear gas instantly spread through the air.
“Leighton! Come out! The prosecutor’s heard about you. If the hard drive’s gone, you’ll pay for it with your life.”
A black special-ops team, heavily armed and lightning fast, stormed in through ropes from the second-floor windows like demons bursting out of hell.
They wore thick body armor and gas masks, their assault rifles glowing with deadly red light in the smoke.
With a single hand gesture from the leader, the squad fanned out, growling orders as they began sweeping the small rooms one by one.
The overwhelming radiation instantly warped the nearby electronics, even the lightbulbs.
As they pushed forward and cleared, they kicked open a door—
Tactical lights locked instantly onto the figure in the center of the room, wreathed in ominous darkness and radiation: Elin.
Clearly, they had come to deal with Leighton… but what they saw before them—something beyond human comprehension, a vision straight out of hell—took even these trained killers off guard.
“Turbo suka! Target abnormal! Target abnormal! High radiation! What the hell is that?!”
Their comms erupted with half-stifled shouts, while every Geiger counter on their vests screamed in alarm.
In the smoke, Harper’s lips curled upward.
“What a performance…”
And in the split second when smoke surged in, lights blazed, and the squad hesitated under the radiation warnings—
The figure at the center of the room, wrapped in black matter—moved.
No—more than moved.
It was like time itself fractured.
With the supernatural form spiraling out of control, Elin—locked in the “Elephant’s Foot” state—had her consciousness devoured by vengeance’s shadow, yet her body surged into an unprecedented, super-physical realm.
Her senses stretched and accelerated infinitely, while everything around her—
The drifting smoke, the glass shards suspended midair, the wobbling beams of tactical lights on soldier helmets, even the arcs of incoming tear-gas canisters—
All slowed into crystal-clear fragments, frozen like amber.
Even through her nonhuman vision, smeared by pure black ooze, her supernatural sight caught something more—silhouettes shaped from the radiation of their souls.
No aim.
No hesitation.
Not even thought.
In the domain of absolute speed, Elin’s body twisted in a motion beyond human perception.
She didn’t even lift the heavy AS Val rifle properly—her movement was so fast it resembled teleportation, leaving only a blurred afterimage and the rippling air it tore apart.
In that instant, faint, airgun-like thuds echoed in the fissures of frozen time—shots from the AS Val, the engineer’s perfect design: precise, cold, efficient.
To the soldiers, time seemed to pass in only a blink.
They saw only a shadow flicker in the smoke—then, at the same time, blood erupted like grotesque crimson lotuses from the backs of their visors, their carotid arteries, and their hearts.
Blood and brain matter splattered inside helmets, seeping out through the cracks, as their heavy bodies collapsed like puppets with severed strings—rigid, helpless, slamming onto the floor with dull thuds.
Tactical lights swung erratically across ceiling and walls before dying out.
The gas still billowed, but the room had sunk into an even deeper, more dreadful silence.
Six fully armed, battle-hardened operatives were reduced to fresh corpses in less than two seconds after breaching.
Blood quickly spread across the floor, mixing with the black slime oozing beneath Elin’s feet, releasing a nauseatingly sweet metallic stench.
The slaughter was so fast that Leighton’s scream hadn’t even finished, and Harper’s smile had only just begun to rise.
The runaway Elin slowly straightened her body, the barrel of her AS Val still faintly glowing with heat.
Her face, coated in black slime, turned toward Leighton’s terror-stricken stare and Harper’s grim but excited gaze.
“Wait, Elin! Listen to me! You’re not the only victim. If the hard drive’s gone, the prosecutor, the mayor, the politicians—they’ll all come after me! I won’t survive… I’ll pay you, whatever you want, just let me live!”
Leighton was already scared out of his wits.
What he had witnessed far exceeded his comprehension, and all he could do now was repeat his pleas, clinging to the faintest hope of survival.
“Save your breath, Principal Leighton. The Elephant’s Foot means a brain completely overtaken by the supernatural, linking the body to the very entity that spawned it.
You’d be better off meeting death with some dignity.”
Harper sneered, mocking Leighton’s pitiful begging in the face of death.
“…Alright.”
Elin closed her eyes.
The storm engulfing the room suddenly stilled.
Even the Geiger counter’s furious screeching calmed down.
“Wha… what?!”
Harper froze in disbelief.
Not even when Elin became the Elephant’s Foot had he ever looked so shaken.
…
Collapse, huh.
Elin drew in a deep breath, feeling the agony inside her like organs being shredded in a meat grinder.
The moment the supernatural burst out, killing six men, her consciousness seized that exact node—
And with a violent wrench, she ripped back control of her body.
So… what had just happened?