WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 31

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Resistance (6)

The half-destroyed management office was dark. The only light came from the day lights filtering through gaps in the half-collapsed roof, scattered and dimmed by mountains of rubble, an upturned floor, and crumbled walls.

Dark enough, shadowed enough, that anyone hiding with intent would vanish entirely. But step into one of those wandering shafts of light and you'd surface like a ghost taking shape from the air. That was this place.

Clutching the gun I'd taken from the corpse, I pressed myself into the shadows.

One chance. That was all I had. Slip through the dark undetected, drive an armor-piercing round into Kanisen's vitals while his guard was down.

Miss, and there would be no second chance.

Kanisen had once served as squire to a knight of considerable renown, inheriting their time-honored energy techniques in full. The very first thing a knight learned upon gaining their energy was the bullet-deflecting energy technique. With that active, the force of an ordinary arrow or bullet dropped to nothing more than a stinging raindrop.

Even without it, a body trained to that hardness wasn't something a bullet could easily pierce. Miss the vitals, and he'd shrug off the round and come at me with every intention of finishing things.

That was why guns were considered useful but never truly great weapons. Their only real value was putting something, anything, into the hands of ordinary people who had nothing.

I crept carefully inward, sharpening my focus. Thoughts reached me from beyond the rubble. Kanisen was down on one knee, staring at the passage leading underground. Gamma hung from a single rope, inspecting the collapsed sections of the tunnel below.

"Found it!" came Gamma's thought, bright with excitement. "So this is how they built the floor of the Abyss! Then if we plant bombs at just two points, we can bring this whole place down!"

Hey, regressor. Weren't you supposed to hold them off for a year? Looked like these people had figured something out. What now?

I was silently cursing the regressor when I let out a slow breath. Nothing for it. If I wanted to live, they all had to go.

Fortunately, Kanisen's attention was fixed on the passage below. His mind held nothing but the drive to see this operation through. Good. Little chance he'd notice me. All I needed was the right angle and it would be over. I took a careful step.

"Hm? A presence?"

The downside of mind reading was that knowing what someone was thinking didn't make you any better at dealing with it.

The upside was that you could catch someone's suspicion the moment it surfaced.

An instant before Kanisen turned his head, I caught that flicker of unease and dove back into the shadows. His attention swung toward the passage right after. He frowned and stared hard at it.

"Just my imagination...? I'd like to check, but it can't be helped. With Gamma down there, I can't leave my post."

Gamma was the only one who could bring Tantalus down. Without the technical knowledge, Kanisen couldn't do a thing on his own. Above everything else, protecting Gamma came first.

"Still, I set up a simple trap in the passage. If anyone steps on it, I'll know."

Thorough to a fault. Even in a moment like this, he'd thought to lay a trap in passing.

A trap whose existence was already known, though, lost nine-tenths of its danger.

Picking carefully through the rubble, I soon spotted a glinting thread near my ankle. Taut in a way that was anything but natural.

So this was the trap he trusted. Too easy. I lifted my foot and stepped over it.

Jingle jingle.

A double trap?

A double trap.

Damn. I'd read his thoughts too carelessly. For people like him, laying double traps was so routine he barely gave it a second thought, which was exactly why I'd missed it.

"Who's there!"

The bell brought an immediate reaction from Kanisen. He was right there. If he sprinted over, I'd be caught in seconds.

No choice. I thrust the gun around a corner and fired.

Bang!

Kanisen covered his face with both arms and shut his eyes. A textbook response to gunfire. With bullet-deflecting energy spread across the whole body, he was safe as long as nothing hit his face, particularly his eyes.

A knight's way of handling a gun was to wrap the body in the technique and charge straight in without hesitation. Kanisen was following that doctrine to the letter.

That is, until my bullet struck the passage leading underground.

"Ugh!"

Kanisen flinched, and I used the opening to sink back into the rubble.

Shooting at his body was pointless, and I knew it. So I aimed for what would make him hesitate instead: the passage, more precisely the rope stretched across it. To him right now, Gamma's life was worth more than his own.

"Boss?! What's happening!"

"Stay where you are, Gamma. Don't come up."

"What?"

"We're under attack. Stay hidden down there."

"Yes!"

Having given the order, Kanisen rose to his feet. He gathered the rubble piled nearby and stared hard past it.

"The rope tied to the pillar is holding Gamma's weight. If it snaps, Gamma gets trapped underground in those cracks. I have to protect the rope."

Thanks for explaining. All I had to do was cut the rope. Shoot it with this gun, then run. Hitting a thin rope would be difficult, but if I aimed for where it was tied to the pillar, five shots would land at least one.

"Stack the rubble over the rope. Then go after him."

Hey, that wasn't fair.

Kanisen layered broken steel beams and planks over the rope, a makeshift barricade that would stop two or three bullets. Damn. That killed my plan.

"Who are you. Show yourself."

Done with his barricade, Kanisen scanned the room and took one step toward me.

Right. I was done for. That was my carefully considered conclusion.

The bullet-deflecting energy was running at full force. Whether an armor-piercing round would even graze his skin was doubtful. And even if it did, it wouldn't punch through skin defended by that energy.

The gun was little better than a blindfold now. Bullets couldn't touch him.

One option left, then.

"Hello there, comrade. How's the escape plan coming along?"

I murmured it from deep within the rubble. The voice he'd heard only minutes ago, still unplaceable, made Kanisen flinch. A beat later, recognizing who it was, his voice dropped low.

"...You're that laborer. What did you do to Delta?"

"I helped him meet his fate a little ahead of schedule. This gun is all that's left of him. Fired it once, and the shot rang clean. Looks like he kept it well-maintained. Just like his character."

"You!"

Shaking with rage, Kanisen snatched up an iron pipe and swung it hard. A devastating, energy-laced blow. Something beyond the rubble crashed down with the force of it. If that hit me, my spine would snap clean in two.

Still, skilled as he was, he could wreck rubble but he couldn't cleave everything apart the way the regressor could. His senses were sharp, but next to the King of Dogs he was practically deaf. Unlike the vampire, who dominated the space itself, he couldn't hurt me without swinging something first.

Stronger than me, yes. But nothing transcendent. Just a knight-level fighter, a relic of a bygone era.

Plainly strong. That was all.

At that level, there was room to work.

I shifted positions, smiling to myself. No need to hide perfectly. Just stay out of his line of sight, somewhere he couldn't track.

"You didn't come to rescue anyone, and you had no plan to escape. From the very beginning, you intended to bring this whole place down, didn't you?"

"You saw through it from the start."

"Honestly, it was obvious with a moment's thought. Everyone knows the Resistance are moths drawn to flames. Everyone knows the Abyss is the kind of place you don't walk out of once you've gone in. Two things everyone already knows, both right in front of you. If I'd missed them, that'd be on me."

"All an act, then. From the moment you saw me, you had me completely fooled."

Anger bled into his voice. Kanisen moved with every intention of tearing me apart with his own hands.

Not a chance. I fired again. He flinched on instinct, not from any fear of getting hit, but because he knew my target was Gamma and moved to cover that angle.

Good. The bait was laid.

While he watched for shots, I slipped around to the back of the collapsed roof. The room was pitch dark, obstacles everywhere, sound bouncing off every surface. If I stayed quiet, he had no way to pinpoint me.

So Kanisen gritted his teeth and spoke.

"Sending Alpha and Beta off, that was a trap you set too, wasn't it."

"Answer me. Answer and let me find you. That will be the end for you."

Transparent as the gambit was, I played along willingly. I needed to talk too.

"What are you talking about? I didn't set that trap. Alpha, Beta, Delta, they're all dead, and even Gamma won't be far behind. But was any of that really because of me?"

At the sound of my voice, Kanisen strode toward me. Reading his movement, I swung wide in a broad arc and kept my distance.

Same as any gun-versus-blade standoff. Before he could close in on my voice, I had to get under his skin.

The gun? That wasn't a weapon anymore. More like a prop. Something to catch his eye, pull his attention, the way a magician misdirects a crowd.

"You're the one who sent them to their deaths, Kanisen."

My real target was Kanisen's mind. That hard mind of his, solid as stone but cracked and worn from years of being battered by the world.

Bullets couldn't pierce his body, so I'd make holes in his mind instead. That was how a mind reader fought.

"Don't you dare speak my name with that filthy mouth. They spent their lives, and nearly succeeded. Without you, they would have."

"Don't you dare speak of other people's lives with that same filthy mouth. They would have died with or without me. Blowing up Tantalus was a mission doomed to fail from the start, a hopeless cause with nothing to show for it even if it worked. Without you, they might have spent those lives on something worth dying for."

"You know nothing and yet you dare run your mouth!"

I read his line of sight. He was closing in. I controlled my breathing, dropped to my stomach, and crawled under an overturned table. In the dark, Kanisen's gaze slid just past me. Out of danger, I crawled under the collapsed cabinet.

One way or another, I had to bring Kanisen down. No escaping this place otherwise. How exactly, I still needed to figure out.

Then my eyes landed on the cabinet, the same one that had been toppled when I'd come here with Azzy. The one that stored clothing packets, including the instructor's uniform packet.

Something specific was in there. Wouldn't work on the regressor, the vampire, or Azzy. Against Kanisen, though, it just might.

Carefully, I reached inside and pulled out a clothing packet with a slightly unusual shape, palming it in one hand. Square, hard, gray, it sat heavy in my palm like a mahjong tile forged from steel.

All the pieces were in place.

Time to dust off something I hadn't touched in a long while. A skill I'd sealed away ever since I'd found the legitimate line of work called gambling.

Pickpocketing.

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