Failure

Central City, Lower City.

Under the clear night sky, the autumn wind carried a chill. The round moon cast its soft glow slantwise over the old buildings of the Lower City, illuminating the decay and ruin of this old district. Beyond the reach of the other half of the moonlight, everything seemed even darker.

In a dark, damp alley, discarded food scraps had piled up together, giving off a nauseating stench. Flies buzzed overhead in figure eights, preparing to enjoy their feast.

Gunshots and the sound of footsteps racing across rooftops shattered the quiet that had only just settled after dusk. They also ruined the flies' dinner, sending the startled swarm into the air.

Danton Black stumbled frantically into the alley. With a clang, he accidentally kicked away a mud-covered soda can. It rolled and bounced into a corner, ringing sharply before slowly rolling deeper into the alley.

He felt as if his heart were about to explode, pounding violently enough to leap out of his chest. His legs were numb and heavy as lead, barely able to move. Sweat drenched his entire body, large beads streaming down his face. His terrified pupils were wide, his face flushed, and he gasped for breath in huge, rapid gulps.

He braced a hand against the pockmarked black wall, pressing so hard that the skin around his nails turned white. Bent over at the waist, aching to the marrow, he struggled to support himself. His legs had gone weak, and the soles of his feet felt as though their skin had been torn open from running. More than twenty minutes of nonstop, all-out sprinting had made his legs feel like they no longer belonged to him.

Danton Black panted, his sweat-soaked hair plastered tightly to his forehead and temples. A chill and fury rose within him.

He and his duplicates shared a mental local network. Within a certain range, he could clearly sense their actions and control them.

Only a few minutes after ordering all his duplicates to flee, they began dying one after another. At first, he thought a large group of police had been lying in wait, hunting down and killing his duplicates.

Later, after more than twenty duplicates had died, the visual and sensory information relayed through the mental network told him there were no other police officers. There was only one person, endlessly sprinting across the rooftops and chasing his duplicates. Whenever that person caught sight of one, a gunshot rang out, and the duplicate died.

So far, more than seventy of his duplicates had died. Sixty of them had been caught and shot dead by that mysterious person on the rooftops.

In fact, starting with the death of the forty-seventh duplicate, that person had run out of bullets.

Danton Black had thought that without a gun, he could contend with him. Who would have expected things to go even worse? In only two moves, the man's killing techniques, skill, and superhuman strength made it impossible for any duplicate to withstand him.

Fortunately, after running out of bullets, his killing speed plummeted. Alex had to jump down from the rooftops into the alleys to kill the duplicates. Though it only took an extraordinarily fast move or two, jumping down, climbing back up, scanning the distance from the rooftops for more duplicates, and then chasing them wasted considerable time, allowing Danton Black to flee farther away.

"Does he have superpowers too?"

The figure racing across the rooftops was like the Grim Reaper looking down at him from above, making Danton Black's heart tremble with fear. He had never seen a human with such inexhaustible stamina. Not even professional climbers or elite athletes could have chased him across rooftops for more than a dozen streets, until his bones seemed sore to the marrow and sweat covered his whole body.

Ever since gaining superpowers, he had felt that his body was stronger than an ordinary person's. Yet even he could not compare to the man who had been relentlessly hunting him across the rooftops.

Was he a superhuman too?

Tap, tap...

The rapid sound of feet striking concrete suddenly reached his ears.

He recognized those footsteps. Someone was racing across the rooftops, swiftly crossing from one building to another.

Every time one of his duplicates died, those footsteps had drawn near.

By the time he heard them, it was already too late.

Tap, tap...

He could imagine it. In just two seconds, the person on the rooftops had crossed another building and arrived directly above him.

Danton Black's breathing tightened. That single second seemed to slow, and the air around him seemed frozen. He could clearly hear his own frightened heartbeat, hear the sweat sliding down his cheeks and dripping onto the ground.

Danton Black turned his head up in panic, his pupils contracting. Above the alley, a black figure leaped from the rooftop and entered his sight.

The figure grew larger on Danton Black's retina as it fell from the patch of sky above the alley. Suddenly, it kicked off the opposite wall, sending dust flying. Borrowing that force, the figure nearly spun one hundred and eighty degrees in midair before driving a piercing kick down into Danton Black's chest.

The entire sequence was impossibly fast. Before Danton Black could react at all, his chest had already caved in beneath the kick. He screamed miserably and flew into a pile of garbage, scattering trash everywhere and startling the uneasy flies into a buzzing frenzy.

Alex did not pause in the slightest. After kicking Danton Black away, he landed on both feet, stepped forward rapidly, and reached toward Danton Black in the garbage pile.

His hand clamped around Danton Black's throat like a snake striking into the garbage, biting down tightly before violently hauling him out of the heap.

"Urgh... cough, cough..."

Danton Black's face turned red from suffocation. Food scraps kept falling from his body, and white foam spilled from his mouth. Alex held him aloft by the throat, yet his eyes were filled with mocking contempt. He kept coughing, as if trying to speak, but with his throat clenched, he could not force out a single word.

All of a sudden.

Alex felt the hand gripping Danton Black's throat go limp. Danton Black's entire body became like melting wax. His face began to dissolve, his features twisting and melting into something horrifying in the blink of an eye, while wisps of smoke rose from his body.

Within seconds, Danton Black had electrolyzed. His skin, cells, and bones turned into acidic liquid that splashed down from Alex's hand into the garbage pile, sending up wisps of vapor from the electrolyzed acid.

"Failed."

Alex's breathing was somewhat rapid. He slowly exhaled, calming the agitation in his body. A light sheen of sweat had formed on him, and the hair on his forehead and temples was damp with sweat, sticking tightly to his skin.

Constantly running up and down, crossing gaps between buildings, and using the Desert Eagle to shoot Danton Black with complete focus—all of it had been done at high speed over uneven terrain. Even Alex's body at its limit found it somewhat strenuous, and his breathing had quickened considerably.

He had already taken out every duplicate within the area that he could locate with the naked eye. This had been the last one; the others could no longer be found. After chasing them across more than a dozen streets, over thirty duplicates had vanished into the maze of interconnected alleys in the Lower City.

And the real body was among those thirty-odd duplicates.

Alex steadied his breathing, feeling a faint sense of regret. Even after all that, he had failed to catch Danton Black. He flicked the acidic liquid from his right hand, glanced with a slight frown at the smoking acid, then turned and walked out of the alley.

He reached into his pocket and took out his glasses. One corner of the lenses was covered in cracks, broken by his overly intense movements on the rooftops.

He gently touched the cracked lens. It felt sharp and gritty beneath his fingers. The glasses were broken.

Expressionless, he put on the glasses with the spiderweb crack in one corner and walked out of the alley. Moonlight once again draped itself over him, while the reflection from his lenses carried a cold gleam.

It was time to settle the score!