Night of Confession

7:10 PM

Leonardo dreamed that he possessed the power to overcome anything.

Whether it was the overbearing gang boss, the neighborhood patrol officers who aided evil, or even the poverty of his life...

The power born from his heart made him believe that he would soon win wealth and glory in the underground boxing ring and lead his family out of hardship.

But then he had another terrible dream.

He dreamed that an evil dragon broke into his home, cruelly tore open his sister's chest with its claws, and dug out her still-beating heart.

His mother had also been pounced on by the dragon. She lay in a pool of blood, staring up at the ceiling with eyes too terrified to close.

And he was charging at the dragon, gripping its throat tightly with both hands.

When Leonardo woke from his uneasy dream, he saw neither the dragon's flames nor its wings. He only stared blankly at his unfamiliar hands. Blood stained the scales covering his skin red, and blackish-red traces were embedded beneath his nails...

Fragmented memories surged through Leonardo's mind. The screams of his family made him clutch his hideous face in agony as he wailed like a child, heartbroken and inconsolable.

Leonardo knew he had lost control. He could no longer count how many times he had briefly regained his senses from the chaos.

Because he had injected that drug again.

He had not fought for several days. His debt-ridden family had thus lost its most important source of income, and tonight, the debt collectors had come to his door with guns, intending to take his sister away by force.

And he had returned home badly injured just in time to witness it...

He suddenly remembered how it had all begun.

It seemed that from the moment he injected the first dose and won his first major match, his life had completely slid into the abyss.

He had briefly gained the power brought by Dragon Blood, but lost the soul and belonging of a human being.

The despairing boy collapsed to the floor like a shadow forgotten by the night.

The sharp nails on his hands sank into the ground along with his twitching muscles. The huge wound that had pierced his abdomen had already healed, leaving behind only a layer of pale scales.

The dragon's part of him slowly receded. The Dragon Blood had not truly left; it hid between his bones, quietly burning like a nest of sleeping snakes.

Steady footsteps suddenly sounded in the hallway outside.

This was near the slums. Why would anyone be walking around after dark?

Perhaps a neighbor had noticed the fight here, or perhaps someone had called the police.

Leonardo did not dare turn around to look at the wrecked living room, much less look in a mirror and see that terrifying face that no longer belonged to a human. As if he had given up on living, he staggered to his feet and wanted to open the door to turn himself in at the police station.

But the door was violently forced open the next moment.

It was the "Boss" of the 18th Street Gang, which managed this neighborhood.

The man was both the curse that had driven this family to the brink of life and death and the shackles that constantly urged Leonardo to keep throwing punches in the ring.

The burly man and his two bodyguards blocked the doorway, but the stench of blood filling the room scared them badly enough that they wanted to flee. People who made money this way were always keenly sensitive to danger.

But they really should not have come.

The tiny shred of reason and conscience Leonardo had painstakingly recovered collapsed the instant he saw them.

He had thought waking up meant liberation, but memory was a river flowing upstream. The harder he tried to climb out, the more he was swept back into that night of regret. Those familiar voices, that familiar concern, pushed him back toward the inhuman roar that rolled from his throat.

The next moment.

A pair of Golden Eyes, as blazing as molten lava, flashed before the "guests."

The hand reaching for a gun was torn off, the throat trying to cry for help was ripped apart, and dagger-sharp claws split open hard skulls, taking lives as easily as crushing ants.

The nineteen-year-old Hispanic boy was about to die.

The flames of hatred burned away what little reason he had left. The complex alchemical drugs kept the Dragon Blood in his body boiling, and he felt as though he could turn into a blazing torch at any moment.

The violence of his dragon genes completely occupied his mind. He could no longer make out the outlines of buildings; he could only smell living flesh and hear terrified screams.

A satellite map of Los Angeles filled the entire screen. Red dots densely lit up along an enlarged alley, like a spreading rash.

By now, more than a hundred people had been killed near the target's residence. This was only a conservative estimate based on Norma hacking into the electronic devices of every household.

Schneider asked Norma in a hoarse, desperate voice beside the conference table.

"Has our S-Rank still not arrived?!"

If his body could still move freely, he would have picked up an alchemical weapon and gone to the battlefield long ago!

Norma marked a blue dot rapidly entering the map. Amid the glaring crimson, it represented their only hope.

"Professor Schneider, he has arrived."

The satellite map on the screen changed to a dashboard camera feed.

Li Lin sat inside a white van. He tore off the cover on the steering wheel and forcefully pressed the self-destruct button beneath it.

Then he opened the door, jumped from the vehicle, rolled to his feet, and saluted the van as it charged toward its death.

The First Operations Group's final vehicle sped straight toward the old apartment building that Leonardo had already massacred clean. After an earthshaking explosion, it became a mass of flames, carrying the memories of many Executive Department agents along with the building's flammable composite materials.

A humanoid shape burst from the flames in an instant.

The boy roared as he charged at Li Lin. He could no longer recognize who Li Lin was. Mutated bones pierced through the skin on his back and hung behind him like trembling wings.

Li Lin had already deployed "Word Spirit: Rock Flow." An earthen wall rose from the ground, and as Li Lin thrust his palm forward, the dragonized monster slammed directly into it. Countless fragments of stone suddenly rose around them.

Yet even the snipers lying in wait atop distant buildings heard the thunderous ring of metal striking a wall.

Leonardo's speed, already too fast for the naked eye to catch, surged again. His Golden Eyes shone like a gasoline lamp hurled at the speed of sound—

Fourth-Tier Moment!

Relying on the strength of his dragonized body, he had actually punched straight through the one-meter-thick wall and swung his claws at Li Lin.

At that critical instant, the stones Li Lin had arranged around them had already converged like a vortex, scraping against Leonardo's body and scales in dense showers of sparks and forcibly slowing him down.

The next moment, Li Lin moved later but arrived first, rushing before Leonardo.

As countless rocks spread from his heels to cover his entire body, he launched a swift, fierce, all-or-nothing body slam—the Mountain-Leaning Strike Xia Mi had taught Li Lin through countless demonstrations and instructions.

A true "mountain" crashed into Leonardo!