The Martial Art of Extreme Range

The moment Xiang Shan saw the drone, his first instinct was to shoot it down.

But the instant he leaped up, Xiang Shan realized something was terribly wrong.

—Bullets...

If they were propelled by gunpowder, their muzzle velocity might reach three thousand meters per second. If electromagnetically propelled, seven or eight thousand meters per second was possible—no, this era might have improved on that, perhaps making them even faster. But the enemy had chosen to use drones for targeting assistance, which meant he might be using "Extreme-Range Sniping."

That guy was near the horizon. Five to seven kilometers away.

—Where...

His two prosthetic eyes independently scanned the surroundings. A bullet traveling at two thousand five hundred meters per second was indeed fast, but compared to light traveling at three hundred thousand kilometers per second, it was practically "motionless." If there was a muzzle flash, he would definitely see it.

—Where...

The bullet would take roughly one or two seconds to get here.

One or two seconds... For a cybernetic martial artist, that was practically an "eternity." But that assumed he could locate the muzzle the instant the enemy fired, then evade.

And the enemy was also a martial artist. At the very least, he understood "prediction"...

—Couldn't find him...

—If that guy had read my movements in advance, then there would definitely be a bullet waiting at my planned landing spot... By now, that bullet should already be on its trajectory...

He could not land at his original destination after destroying this automaton. That would mean certain defeat.

Xiang Shan was in midair, seemingly without anything to push off from. But for a cybernetic martial artist, as long as there was "air," there was something to leverage.

Xiang Shan's legs abruptly unleashed their force at top speed.

The atmosphere was a fluid, like water. But "fluid" was merely a concept imagined by humans, a classification on the level of mechanics. Nature had never labeled objects as "fluids" or "rigid bodies."

Some substances that appeared fluid would not have time to "flow" if force was applied quickly enough, and would instead display the properties of a "rigid body."

In a high-speed world, water was not "the softest thing"...

Neither was air!

A long-forgotten sensation of touch. Xiang Shan felt as though he were thrusting his legs into mud and kicking through it.

The Martial Arts Algorithm of the Bionic Fist Technique readjusted his prosthetic body's center of gravity. Xiang Shan used the realm of supersonic speed as leverage with his legs...

Stepping on air...

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Two explosions rang out almost simultaneously. Xiang Shan ran through the air, and the blasts from his prosthetic legs threw the propeller-driven drone off balance, sending it spinning down toward the other side.

The other two explosions came from the ground... Two small craters suddenly appeared, molten metal flowing within them with a dim red glow.

"Hahahahaha!" Enoch laughed like a madman. "Boss, that's it, that's it! Kill him! Kill him!"

"Gunfire Way..." If Xiang Shan still had facial muscles and skin, his expression would surely have been ugly.

He had just remembered something.

He did not like the Gunfire Way.

In an age where information technology was monopolized by totalitarian powers, transmitting an idea or emotion to another person was exceedingly difficult—more difficult than in the era when knowledge was passed from mouth to ear. Those sinful capitalists did not necessarily have to ban the truth. As long as they buried truth beneath countless genuine but meaningless messages, mixed with falsehoods, they could control people's thoughts.

That was why Knight-errantry had been designed as the power to "keep resisting even when you stand alone."

But Xiang Shan loathed "dragging unrelated bystanders into it."

The blades and fists of cybernetic martial artists were no more powerful than bullets from the old era. But compared to "bullets," "blades" and "fists" had one advantage.

The instant a bullet left the barrel, it was beyond control.

You could not interfere with a fired bullet, nor could you guarantee that no one else would be in its path. A gun's range made it all too easy to harm innocents.

In this regard, even "poison" was less likely than bullets to implicate bystanders.

The earliest modern firearms had not needed to consider such things. They appeared only on battlefields, places where there were assumed to be no "unrelated people."

But clashes between martial artists of equal rank often developed into cycles of "evasion" and "probing." Could anyone truly guarantee that bullets which missed during that process would not strike an "unrelated person" in the head?

And now, there were two of them here...

The instant Xiang Shan landed, he rolled, touched the ground with his toes, and leaped low across the ground again.

A bullet landed behind him.

—There are two unrelated people here right now...

He evaded two more bullets.

—The bullets are already in flight. Based on this trajectory, his strategy will be...

Xiang Shan rolled across the ground to evade the third bullet.

He was closing in on the mayor and Yulia.

"Pressure," from the Three Powers Form of Gunfire Way. This was the fundamental template for all Gunfire Way strategies: a set of tactics premised on "missing," guiding the opponent toward a zone where they could no longer evade.

—So, following this trajectory...

Xiang Shan dodged twelve bullets in succession, flipped in midair, and used the rotating mechanism of the ball joint at his hip to kick the mayor's thigh [a visible prosthetic limb that would not cause major injury], flinging the mayor away.

Then Xiang Shan planted his prosthetic leg against the side of Yulia's vehicle body.

Since awakening, this was the first time the man had felt "despair."

He could not kick her away.

The difference in mass between him and Yulia's prosthetic body was simply too great. After being fitted with the power mechanisms of numerous martial artists' prosthetics, Xiang Shan's burst strength exceeded that of Yulia's industrial prosthetic body, but absolute mass could not be changed.

F = ma.

Action and reaction forces were equal in magnitude and opposite in direction.

Those two facts had already determined the outcome. The result of his full-force flying kick at Yulia could only be himself rebounding far away. Yulia's prosthetic frame would be damaged, but her position would barely shift.

Xiang Shan crashed into a pile of garbage like a cannonball. Scrap parts, plastic, and synthetic fabric were flung into the sky.

Before the trash could fall back down, orange fire burst from Yulia's side.

"Ha ha ha..." Enoch's laughter abruptly caught in his throat.

Then a string of explosions erupted within the garbage heap.

—Is he trying to find me?

Xiang Shan, who had silently rolled three times already, lay prone on the ground and watched the shots strike where he had just been.

"The garbage that flew up did block his line of sight. If his vision can be blocked by this trash, and judging from the bullet trajectories..."

Xiang Shan calculated mentally.

Over these past days, he had rested and recovered in this garbage mountain, absorbed his enemies' memories, and deepened his understanding of this world. While traveling, he had also used his prosthetic eyes to map this area.

A three-dimensional map of this garbage dump was stored in his chip.

He knew the enemy's approximate position.

Taking the terrain into account... There were four different sniping positions, each suitable for firing, at distances ranging from four to ten kilometers.

He could refine the estimate based on the movements of the drone swarm and the bullets' trajectories.

If the enemy's firing rate remained constant, then along the way, he would only need to evade fewer than a thousand bullets.

But one question snagged in his thoughts.

—After the seventh bullet, he became certain I would protect others... So the fourteenth bullet had originally been aimed at the mayor, and the fifteenth at Yulia?

—Forcing a knight-errant to protect civilians has actually become a mature tactic? It was even written into martial arts game theory?

His neurons seemed to be burning. Xiang Shan felt that the old era's instruments of violence, even when reduced to the claws of unfortunate tyrants, had never been so vile... The enemies he had faced before...

Why did these so-called thugs trample human lives like this?

The fans in his shoulders began spinning rapidly, pumping air into his chest cavity. The fuel in his lower abdomen, used to adjust his center of gravity, was pressurized and surged upward into the power system.

The internal combustion engine taken from Will Grand Dog roared, like a violently pounding heart.

He lowered his body.

—People... Those are people...

Blinding blue light seeped from the cracks in the paint on Xiang Shan's legs. The artificial muscles were already filled with power.

—How can they treat human lives so cheaply?

The next instant, the only mayor still conscious widened his eyes.

It was as if he saw a hurricane pass through.

—An expert.

Geliad felt a tremor he had not experienced in a long time.

The first two shots, intended as an "assassination," had been broken by the opponent's midair footwork. That was the last image transmitted by the drone that had been blown away. There were no other drones nearby, so he could only use his own prosthetic eyes together with distant drones to suppress him with "Pressure."

All thirteen bullets of "Pressure" had missed. Though "Pressure" was a martial art whose tactics were built around "missing," the web of death woven from bullets was undeniably real. During "Pressure," any single bullet could take a life.

On the eighth... no, it should have been the seventh shot, Geliad had judged the opponent's character. This guy might be a stodgy knight-errant. That was why the fourteenth and fifteenth bullets had been aimed at other people.

There seemed to be a woman that the newcomer wanted... But that was unimportant.

What mattered was forcing this expert to reveal his power. That was her value.

"Still a light prosthetic body..." Geliad thought as he watched the fire burst from Yulia's vehicle body.

Although he had acquired Leif's prosthetic body, that martial artist had not chosen to mount his head on it.

The flying garbage blocked Geliad's vision. So he fired a string of shots.

But that guy should not die from this, right?

Then he saw the "blast wind."

He was coming.

He was coming.

That guy wanted to defeat him in close combat.

Geliad was not skilled at close-range fighting. With full armor, he had once narrowly defeated Silver Drive Shaft Leif using Apocalypse Tank Way from the Military Martial Way, but only that once. He was not strong in this area. If Xiang Shan was better than Leif at close combat, then Geliad would surely be in grave danger.

His chance of victory lay on Xiang Shan's charge toward him.

This was an excellent opponent. He was a master of Outer School combat, and he also understood the Gunfire Way. He knew its strengths and weaknesses, and understood its tactics...

This was no longer using an information advantage to cruelly torment the weak... This was...

—Only by defeating a combat martial artist who understands the Gunfire Way can I prove my path!