Black Hand Yang Jia

Outside the docks, seven or eight towering motorcycles had gathered on the street at some point. Their riders had brazenly lined them up across the middle of the road. The men sitting atop them wore strange hairstyles, leather jackets, and filthy leather boots. Their gleaming studs made them look like hedgehogs. Even with the motorcycles stopped, they kept their headlights on, their dazzling beams shining far down the road.

Forget pedestrians— even approaching vehicles sensed that something was wrong and steered clear from a distance.

Huang Mao excitedly went up to meet them. In front of the leader, a man in his thirties with a pink mohawk, he bowed and scraped, grinning obsequiously.

The man impatiently waved him aside, telling Huang Mao to stand away.

Huang Mao immediately folded his arms across his chest, looking extremely pleased with himself. In the eyes of the workers coming and going, he raised his head proudly.

Under the gazes of the crowd and the glare of the headlights, Xiao Xiao finally walked out of the docks. With his backpack on his back, he faced the dazzling lights as though confronting a group of roaring, crouching monsters.

"Fewer people than I expected, but barely enough..."

Xiao Xiao saw that the instant he came out, Huang Mao pointed at him and shouted something several times.

The men on the motorcycles immediately began to sneer. Some flickered their headlights, while others pressed their horns hard.

The man sitting on the motorcycle in the very center crooked his finger at him from afar.

A faint sense of nervousness rose from the depths of Xiao Xiao's heart. He had always been a good student, and after graduating, he had stayed home for four years without going out much. He really was a little afraid of these people...

But he still kept calm and silently walked toward them with his backpack on, constantly persuading himself:

"It's for studying. Nothing to be ashamed of."

"..."

These earnest thoughts gradually steadied his gaze. He slowly crossed the more than thirty meters between them and arrived among the vicious-looking gangsters. He saw Huang Mao's arrogant face, as well as the tall man sitting in the center, who was looking him up and down with a contemptuous smile at the corner of his mouth. The man suddenly raised his voice, leaned forward in a practiced move, and said, "You're the little punk who messed with my brothe—"

Xiao Xiao raised his hand, swung his right arm in a full arc, twisted halfway around, and viciously slapped him across the face.

He hadn't fought people much, so he didn't know the rules.

You could just hit them directly, right?

"Smack!"

The leader's head was knocked sharply to the left, his neck cracking audibly. His vision filled with stars, and blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.

More importantly, the blow had stunned him. For a long while, he couldn't recover.

The surroundings instantly fell silent. It was as if even the motorcycles had been frightened; not a single horn sounded for quite some time.

"Holy crap, holy crap..."

Only after two or three full seconds did the surroundings erupt into chaos. The crowd came to its senses and leaped up furiously.

But by then, Xiao Xiao had shaken his stinging palm, stepped back twice, then used the momentum to leap into the air and kick the leader of the Biker Gang off his motorcycle.

Following through, he swung a punch into Huang Mao's face as Huang Mao stood there blankly, at a loss.

Once Xiao Xiao had made up his mind to act, he didn't hesitate in the slightest. His entire body was caught in an excited tension, and time seemed to slow down with it.

He could clearly see the gangsters cursing furiously as they grabbed their weapons. There were baseball bats, iron chains, and even gleaming daggers as they charged forward.

Shaking figures filled the surroundings, along with furious faces everywhere he looked.

It was dangerous.

But Xiao Xiao had considered this beforehand. In theory, as long as he paid a little attention, he should be able to handle them.

Thus, he abruptly kicked out, making the ankle of a gangster who had rushed in front of him crack loudly. Then, as if he had eyes in the back of his head, he dodged the baseball bat swinging toward his head.

When he turned back, he seized the man's joint and lifted it upward with the motion. The man howled and released the baseball bat, stumbling backward.

Xiao Xiao caught the bat and spun around, smashing it down.

"Bang!"

The Biker Gang leader had just crawled up from the ground when the bat struck him across the face. His vision filled with stars again, and he crouched down howling.

At that moment, Xiao Xiao's face was covered in a smile.

He had already entered the Mind Burst state. In his vision, the snarling Biker Gang members looked like a group of sluggish puppets.

As long as he remained calm and kept thinking, he could always plan how to dodge before their attacks struck him, as well as the route he would use to counterattack.

This made his movements in the chaos look surprisingly relaxed.

With a step forward and a shift backward, movements that were clearly ordinary always caused the clubs swinging around him to miss. Then he would suddenly kick or throw a punch, invariably making one Biker Gang member clutch his crotch or cover his nose and crouch down, howling in tears. To the onlookers, his relaxed expression even carried a hint of playful ease, as though he didn't care about his life at all...

Faced with such a violent and bloody scene, he moved with the elegance and composure of a dance, completing this exchange of flesh with them through the most effective and brutal methods.

"Bang!" "Bang!"

Xiao Xiao took two hits during the fight, one baseball bat slamming into his back.

A sharp dagger also narrowly slashed his right arm, and blood instantly soaked half his sleeve.

But Xiao Xiao only staggered slightly. Then he lowered his head to look at his arm, and to everyone's surprise, delight appeared on his face. His eyes grew brighter and brighter.

He threw himself even more deeply into the brawl. The more injuries he suffered, the more fun the game seemed to become.

"Is this guy insane?"

The Biker Gang members were already lying all over the ground. Even those who remained standing felt increasingly cold inside, their arms going limp. They no longer had the courage to step forward.

Good grief, this guy was not only skilled and vicious—he actually got more excited after being injured...

People who mixed around on the streets had seen plenty of tough guys eager to prove themselves, but how many became more excited at the sight of blood? And nobody present was blind. They could tell that Xiao Xiao was genuinely excited, practically about to laugh.

Who the hell would want to fight someone like this...

"Of course I'm excited."

At that moment, Xiao Xiao's thoughts were extremely simple. He really was just about to laugh aloud.

I found it.

He had spent a day and a night thinking over his choice of path, unable to make the final decision. But this sudden arranged fight had finally given him the answer.

He wasn't excited by the process of hitting people. He wasn't a pervert—how could he find hurting others fun?

But those few blows he had taken, especially the slash, had struck the exact point that excited him. So this is what I was missing.

In theory, with the Mind Burst ability and a body strengthened by the Violence Factor, he could deal with these sluggish puppets without being injured at all. Yet during this brawl, he had still discovered his weakness. In the chaos, some attacks always came from beyond his expectations or outside his field of vision. As a result, he couldn't calculate them effectively or think of a timely plan to dodge or counterattack.

His ability to think wasn't the problem. His ability to gather information was.

That slash, and the searing wound it left behind, had instantly helped Xiao Xiao understand what he had been struggling with. How could he not be happy?

The fight ended within three minutes. A group of gangsters lay sprawled across the ground, groaning, while the motorcycles had fallen over in a heap.

Xiao Xiao stood amid the chaotic crowd and shook the blood dripping from his palm.

He sighed in satisfaction, forcibly restraining himself from looking too excited. Then he picked up his backpack from the ground. After all, he still had to catch the subway.

But after walking some distance, he suddenly remembered something. He turned back toward the Biker Gang members lying on the ground, smiled, and said sincerely:

"Thanks..."

"..."

"He actually thanked us..."

The Biker Gang members felt like crying without tears. The leader, who was the most seriously injured yet hadn't even had a chance to fight back, took a long while to recover.

Looking at the miserable state of his brothers and the mocking gazes of the onlookers, he immediately grew furious. He viciously hauled up Huang Mao, who had already received special attention, and slapped him hard across the face twice.

"This is the little punk you were talking about?"

"This is the kid you said would cry from fear if you just stamped your foot?"

"..."

"This kid's kind of interesting..."

Of course, neither the Biker Gang members, who had recently been tormented into despair, nor the analytical and satisfied Xiao Xiao noticed that a pair of red eyes had been silently watching everything from start to finish.

Like a hunter lurking in the darkness, he greedily stared at his prey. "Brutal, vicious, and seemingly enjoying the pleasure brought by pain..."

"Where did Yang Jia find such a madman? He doesn't treat those people as human beings at all. I'd say he sees them as toys. I wouldn't be surprised if he killed these gangsters."

"But that feeling of being excited while striking, yet carefully afraid of breaking his toys, makes me rather fond of him..."

"..."

"Deal with him quickly and come back."

Another voice in the earpiece reminded him, "Remember, don't let Yang Jia notice any traces of your attack. Even if this is the Black Forest's commission, it doesn't mean we need to fall out with her."

"Afraid?"

The voice in the earpiece suddenly laughed. "You gather intelligence. Don't you understand what kind of woman Yang Jia is?"

The man with the Red Eyes paused slightly. "I know she seemed to perform well before, but..."

"Using the words 'perform well' means you still don't take her seriously enough."

The man in the earpiece gave a cold laugh. "This girl called Yang Jia really isn't very old, and she has only been in the Dante Organization for three years. But you'd better not underestimate her."

"She was one of the fastest-rising newcomers in those four years, and her mentor just happened to be the one whom everyone in Black Gate City respected before."

"Heh, Black Hand Yang Jia..."

"Do you really think you can earn that title just by chance?"

"She was a woman who once bloodily wiped out an entire Prayer Secret Organization without even blinking..."

"After resolving those troublesome people in Black Gate City, we accidentally lured this woman, who had already settled in the north, back to Black Gate City to help them rebuild. That was already our mistake. Now we all know that she wants to rebuild the former Black Gate City organization. If we still haven't learned to take her seriously and fear her, then all our efforts might truly go to waste."

"..."

The man with the Red Eyes hadn't expected him to speak so gravely. After a long silence, he asked in a low voice, "Then what should we do?"

"What should we do?"

The man in the earpiece gave a cold laugh. "Get rid of her!"

"But do it cleanly. With your current ability, there shouldn't be a problem, right?"

"..."

The man with the Red Eyes froze for a moment before laughing quietly.

"If I can't even deal with someone strengthened by at most two hundred points, then I really have no face to follow Shepherd..."