Walking a Hundred Miles with Broken Legs

Leon Collins.

That was Leon's name now.

In his previous life, he'd been one of the countless masses, living like any ordinary person: an ordinary job, an ordinary life, an ordinary single dog, an ordinary spectator eating popcorn.

Now, beneath moonlight breaking through the clouds, he stood there making two armed burly men tremble in fear.

"Who are you?!"

One of them asked timidly.

Clap!

Leon clapped his hands. "Great question~!"

Like a terrible magician, he gave an opening bow, adjusted his wide-brimmed top hat, and paced as he spoke. "As you can see, fundamentally, I'm a person wearing a mask, and the face beneath it clearly doesn't want anyone else to know what it looks like."

He stopped walking and continued, "That's what masks are for, isn't it?"

Ignoring the subtle looks the two exchanged, Leon suddenly spun around and began putting on a show. "Oh! Sorry, I seem to have misunderstood the key point of the question."

He straightened a nonexistent bow tie. "You may call me: V!"

"I am a doctor!"

The two Black guys looked utterly baffled. What?!

This guy had probably just escaped from a hospital...

Forget all that!

One hand reaching behind his waist, the man who hadn't moved until now prepared to shoot this crazy masked man in the face while he wasn't paying attention!

Sure, the man calling himself Zhazha Hui had seemed perfectly fine after taking several bullets earlier. He'd even gotten back up and delivered a stand-up routine!

But that had to be because he was wearing a bulletproof vest or something!

His body might be bulletproof, but the Black guy didn't believe that a thin layer of cloth over his face could stop a bullet!

Though somewhere in his heart, he vaguely suspected that the mask whose patterns kept changing wasn't ordinary at all. Maybe...

There was no other choice!

Behind the two men, unlucky Susan was still trying to recover. She had watched the freak descend from the sky in a manner neither scientific nor physically possible, watched him collapse after being shot, then watched him rise as if nothing had happened and ramble endlessly about incomprehensible nonsense. If her pants weren't still wet, Susan would have suspected she was dreaming!

That man was drawing a gun!

A huge black gun!

From where she was, Susan saw the not-so-subtle movement.

Watch out!

She wanted to shout it, but for some reason, she didn't.

Maybe she knew why.

Turning her head slightly, Susan looked through the gap between the two Black guys and saw the freak still gesturing dramatically while saying things no one could understand.

I'm sorry...

I'm sorry, I'm sorry...

Susan repeated it silently, then shakily pushed herself up from the ground. She glanced at the masked freak, then...

Turned around and ran!

"Huh? I remember that being a dead end?" Leon looked in the direction the girl had fled, utterly puzzled.

Forget it. It was her own life; she had the right to decide everything. If she died, it had nothing to do with me.

Just as he cocked his head toward the direction the woman had gone, the Black guy suddenly flung out his right hand from behind his waist!

Ready to fire!

Then...

Bone, muscle, blood vessels.

A perfect, smooth cross-section.

Though it existed for only an instant before being covered by dark-red blood.

"Why bother? What was the point?" Leon sighed.

One Black guy clutched his severed arm and cursed loudly. The other held a gun with no bullets left in it and trembled as he scooted backward on the ground, until his back hit the damp, cold wall.

Leon kicked away the hand still clutching the gun on the ground, then gave another bizarre aristocratic bow. "Gentlemen, have you heard of Auldey?"

"Allow me to grandly introduce the physical manifestation of my childhood: Mr. Spider King!"

Amid a buzzing sound, a toy four-wheel-drive car with a white body crisscrossed by blue stripes dove down the vertical wall.

[Spider King Four-Wheel-Drive Car]

Grade: White

Quality: Excellent

Effect: Can emit air blades while moving.

Note: Guide wheels, motor, tires! Childhood!

Note 2: Full voice-control mode. Go fast when I say fast, go slow when I say slow. Lose? As long as I can still shout, I haven't lost! Charge!

Though Leon's actions made him seem somewhat stupid, as stated before, he was a very cautious person.

Even though nothing he did had anything to do with the word cautious, he truly was a very cautious person!

The first sign of caution was knowing his own strength, evaluating it, and allocating it properly.

Through self-harm (?), Leon had roughly estimated how much his strength had changed after adding points, and he also had a rough guess about the 20 in parentheses.

That should be the peak value for humans.

So his 14 points of Strength probably didn't make him any kind of expert.

His best stat, Agility, was only 16. Even a slightly stronger high school team would leave him no room to rule supreme.

So how was he supposed to hunt those who had fallen into darkness?

The answer was to tank the hits!

Most of the things he'd drawn were garbage. They seemed like defective products cobbled together by some unreliable author from assorted memes, but that didn't mean they were completely useless!

While studying his stats, Leon discovered that he had 5 points of physical resistance even without system equipment. Rorschach's Mask and Fishmonger Qiang's Coat together could give him an additional 20 points of physical resistance!

What did 20 points mean?

Round it up, and that was a hundred million!

By an imprecise calculation, it was like having four meat shields identical to himself standing in front of him whenever someone attacked him! (Correct!)

That said, the rigorous Comrade Leon had still used rigorous testing—meaning self-harm—to roughly determine what 25 points of physical defense meant.

Street criminals probably didn't carry anti-tank rifles or RPGs around, right?

So, dodge if he could; tank it if he couldn't! Then use all kinds of items to ambush them...

And just like that, Leon had preliminarily decided on his combat style: no style, strike unexpectedly, then... cheat!

Just charge in and be done with it!

The initial victim had already run away, but Leon didn't feel that life was no longer worth living.

Whatever.

It wasn't his first time, anyway. Most of the time, Leon acted even more like a villain than actual villains did—flamboyant and crazed, full of neurotic unpredictability...

As the saying went: villains usually died from talking too much. Leon? He talked even more than villains.

What a terrible "hero"...

He wasn't trying to uphold justice in the first place. He just wanted to survive—to grow stronger, strong enough that he wouldn't die so easily. A very simple idea.

Maybe he had the ability and the potential to become a standard righteous hero: great, radiant, just, self-sacrificing. But he didn't want to. Carrying too much would eventually tear him apart.

So he didn't care about any of that. If it weren't for Purification Points, he wouldn't save these ungrateful people at all.

Saving people? Just an extra service attached to judging who's evil. If they really wanted to die, please allow me to go buy a bucket of popcorn.

"Now, it's just us left."

At this moment, Leon was once again acting like a villain who wasn't quite right in the head, walking step by step toward the two pitiful criminals.

"Please... please!"

"You don't have to do this! That woman wasn't hurt, was she?! I promise I'll never do something like this again!"

"I... I have a family! I have children! You... you can't do this!"

The men who had inflicted violence three minutes ago were now on the receiving end. Without hesitating for even a second, they began weeping and expressing their regret.

They even used the exact same lines.

Both of them realized that this man who called himself a doctor apparently didn't intend to let the law punish them...

Leon gently placed the [Spider King Four-Wheel-Drive Car] on the ground and slipped his hands back into his coat pockets. "You don't regret it."

"You're just afraid."

"That's all."

"You know how much it hurts to punch someone, because you've enjoyed doing it more than once. You swing blades at those weaker than you. So, do you know what it feels like to have your legs broken? To have your skull smashed in?"

He gave a short whistle, and the motor's buzz sounded again.

"As they say: walk a hundred miles with broken legs, and stay conscious with a brain hemorrhage!"

For the third time, Leon placed a hand over his chest and bowed. "Choose one yourselves!"