At Victor's signal, he left Morgan under everyone's watchful gaze and descended the stairs to the center of the hall.
He took a pistol from one of the guards, then walked up to Heros and asked, with a hint of hesitation:
"Child, are you sure you want to do this?"
"Ah." Heros nodded expressionlessly, then urged him on with a trace of impatience:
"If you can't bear to do it, give me the gun. I'll do it myself."
"If you insist, then don't blame me."
Victor naturally couldn't hand the gun to Heros, so he could only apologize before pressing the muzzle close to Heros's forehead.
He placed the fingers of his mechanical right hand on the trigger, steeled his heart, and pulled it.
"Bang~—!" The gunshot rang out.
"Clang~... clatter~...~."
The sound of the shell casing bouncing across the floor echoed through the spacious, empty hall, drawing everyone's gaze toward Heros.
More precisely, toward Heros's forehead.
The scene everyone had imagined—a bullet blowing Heros's head apart—never appeared. Instead, the expressionless Heros remained standing where he was.
The 5.56-caliber bullet had been completely unable to pierce Heros's skin. Combined with its powerful kinetic energy, it had instead been flattened to roughly the size of a one-yuan coin.
The flattened bullet slid down from Heros's forehead and fell onto the hard floor with a crisp ting~!
From beginning to end, Heros hadn't even blinked.
"This! How is this possible?!"
Seeing that Heros was unharmed, Charles the Blond was the first to become utterly stunned. Victor hadn't even had time to say anything after firing, and Charles had already lost the composure he had shown earlier.
Charles wasn't the only one. The others also displayed varying degrees of shock; they simply hadn't lost control as badly as he had.
!
Morgan, who