Since he had already cut off the man’s head, Leon did not hesitate for even a moment.
He shoved the still-stunned Hiroshi forward and threw himself together with him behind a nearby vehicle wreck.
Blood sprayed from the headless body like rain.
The man who only a few seconds earlier had been arrogantly threatening and insulting them did not even manage to understand what had happened before he died.
The hand holding the pistol gradually lost its strength.
The weapon slipped from his grasp.
The body collapsed to the ground and remained completely motionless.
At that same moment, automatic gunfire erupted.
The Tyger Claws finally reacted, raised their weapons, and began shouting furiously.
Bullets poured into the abandoned vehicle, but they failed to injure the two hiding behind it.
Everything had happened too quickly.
Leon’s attack felt as though someone had smashed them directly in the head with a hammer.
And when they finally came to their senses, rage overwhelmed them.
Rage can take away a person’s fear, but it can just as easily take away their reason.
The Tyger Claws wildly held down their triggers and showered the wreck with bullets.
Within only a few seconds, almost all of them had emptied their magazines.
As the enemies began reloading their weapons, one hand appeared from behind the vehicle.
A black Smart pistol was in it.
Without carefully aiming, Leon simply pointed the barrel toward their position and opened fire.
Projectiles equipped with micro-guidance flew toward the heads of the remaining Tyger Claws like venomous snakes lunging for the throat of their prey.
Fast.
Precise.
Deadly.
In the next moment, three Tyger Claws failed to get out of the way.
The projectiles corrected their trajectories in flight, curved, and struck them directly in the head.
Large wounds opened across their foreheads and around their eyes, and their bodies immediately collapsed lifelessly to the ground.
“Smart weapon! The kid has a Smart weapon!”
One of the Tyger Claws was the first to realize what was happening.
The remaining gang members immediately grabbed helmets from the motorcycles, put them on, and searched for solid cover.
The automatic guidance of Smart weapons was powerful, but its basic purpose was still trajectory correction.
That did not mean you could fire straight into the sky and expect the bullet to turn 180 degrees and then hit an enemy on the ground.
In addition, the more a projectile changed direction and made sharper corrections, the more kinetic energy it lost.
Because of that, a high-quality helmet was often enough to prevent instant death.
And if someone also had subdermal armor or other protective implants installed, ordinary Power projectiles could already have trouble penetrating, and Smart ammunition even more so.
That was why one of the basic rules when fighting Smart weapons was simple:
Protect your head first.
Then find solid cover, hide your body, and prevent the weapon from properly locking onto you as a target.
That way, you drastically reduce the chance of taking a lethal hit.
Of course, all of that was relative.
For the fragile human body, even the weakest Smart weapon was still more than deadly enough.
Leon used the opportunity to change magazines.
Hiroshi, whom Leon had knocked to the ground with him moments earlier, rolled over and leaned against the other end of the wreck.
He was breathing heavily.
His heart was pounding so hard that he felt as though it was trying to pump all the blood out of his body.
Images from the previous few seconds kept repeating in his head.
Leon had suddenly moved.
In a single blink, the man in front of them had gone from completely alive to a headless corpse.
And then Hiroshi himself had ended up on the ground, hit his head, and remained completely disoriented for several moments.
How is this kid so fast?!
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Gunfire erupted beside him again.
Hiroshi looked up.
Several Tyger Claws who had just tried to peek out from behind cover immediately took hits to the head.
The bullets struck their helmets.
The protection barely saved their lives, but the force of the impacts still knocked them back behind cover.
Fuck…
How does this kid react so fast?!
Kerenzikov?
Or Sandevistan?
He definitely has some kind of neuroreactive cyberware or speedware installed!
The two sides then entered a strange lull.
No one wanted to be the first to raise their head and instantly take a bullet through it.
Click.
The quiet sound of a grenade pin being pulled could be heard.
A grenade flew from the direction where the Tyger Claws were hiding.
Before it even had a chance to touch the ground, Leon fired.
BOOM!
The explosion thundered in the air, and the shockwave swept through the passage.
Leon’s gaze sharpened.
He briefly looked toward the flash of the explosion, then pulled his hand back behind cover and leaned against the wreck again, occasionally checking the situation outside.
The moment an enemy appeared…
The A-22B Chao would fire immediately.
“What now?”
Hiroshi looked at Leon.
After everything he had just seen, he had completely discarded his earlier arrogance.
He now spoke to him with much more respect, treating him as an extremely capable, if somewhat unusual, fighter.
Hiroshi had survived on the streets for years.
He was no naive beginner.
The strength this young man had just displayed was so obvious that his age had stopped meaning anything.
The youthful face was only a mask.
A predator was hiding beneath it.
One should always show at least a minimum of respect toward people stronger than oneself.
Hiroshi now felt somewhat ashamed of his earlier contempt.
And at the same time, he was glad that Leon was obviously not the type to hold on to such trivial things for long.
“These guys are using Arasaka Nowaki and Shigure.”
Leon briefly examined the enemy weapons.
“Assault rifle and SMG. Both have a very high rate of fire, but their raw stopping power is nothing special.”
Then he turned toward Hiroshi.
The aggressive energy of Blood Rush was still burning in his eyes.
“You have basic subdermal armor, right?”
“I need you to go out and draw their fire.”
“Create an opening for me!”
Hiroshi stared at him in shock.
Leon continued: “If this drags on, I can’t guarantee they won’t pull out heavy weapons or some Tech gun with serious penetration.”
“We can’t sit here forever!”
It took Hiroshi a full second to process what he had just heard.
“Fuck, little brother, do you think subdermal armor means I’m fucking bulletproof?!”
“If I take a few more hits, no matter how durable I am, I’ll leave my bones here!”
But then he remembered his sister, whose fate was still unknown.
He gritted his teeth.
“Fine!”
“But let’s make one thing clear in advance.”
“I’m giving you five seconds at most!”
The moment he finished speaking, without any further hesitation, he stepped out from behind cover.
With his right cyberarm, he held the D5 Copperhead and began pouring bullets into the enemy positions like a walking machine-gun platform.
The burst pinned them behind cover and prevented them from raising their heads.
“Come on, scum!”
“Get out of your holes!”
Thanks to the tremendous strength of his cyberarm, Hiroshi controlled the rifle’s recoil with one hand without any difficulty.
With the other, he raised his forearm across his forehead to at least partially protect his head from stray bullets.
At the same time, Leon burst out from behind the wreck.
He lowered his body and sprinted almost hunched over, reducing his profile as much as he could.
His movements were fast and precise, like a special-forces soldier who had spent his entire life training for exactly this kind of maneuver.
Since Hiroshi had drawn most of the enemy fire, only a few stray bullets passed beside and behind Leon.
None of them hit him seriously.
His Reflexes were already at the very limit of human capability.
The muscle stimulant had temporarily raised his Body by another 2 points.
And on top of all that…
[Blood Rush] was currently giving him a total of 30% greater speed!
The combination of all those factors pushed his current maximum running speed above ten meters per second!
The remaining Tyger Claws finally noticed his movement.
Several gun barrels immediately turned toward him.
Bursts of gunfire filled the space.
The air was filled with the smell of gunpowder.
Leon could feel projectiles whistling past and behind him.
As though death itself were chasing him.
Its hair was already brushing against his neck.
One random hit to a vital area would have been enough to send him straight to the grave.
The entire distance lasted maybe two seconds.
But to Leon, it felt endless.
When the Tyger Claws finally exposed their positions enough while trying to hit him, Leon jumped.
In midair, he twisted his body to the side.
He pulled the G-58 Dian close to his chest.
The barrel aligned toward the enemies.
And then he opened fire.
Burst!
Landing.
Roll.
Crouch.
Aim.
Another burst.
He kept firing until the magazine was completely empty!
Smart projectiles raced through the air like snakes changing direction in flight.
Their trajectories corrected precisely toward the remaining Tyger Claws.
Since they no longer had proper cover and were standing almost directly in front of him, the projectiles did not need to make many trajectory corrections.
The loss of kinetic energy was minimal.
The gangsters could only stare in shock.
One after another, they fell under the impacts.
They did not even have time to accept the fact that they were dying.
Leon breathed heavily.
Adrenaline raced through his veins.
His heart hammered like a sledgehammer, and his blood felt as though it were boiling.
He had still not fully come out of combat mode.
He inserted a new magazine into the G-58 Dian.
Then he cautiously approached the fallen Tyger Claws.
He checked them one by one and finished off anyone who still showed signs of life.
Only after that did he turn toward Hiroshi.
Since he had drawn an enormous amount of enemy fire onto himself, Hiroshi was now leaning against a metal barrel.
His body was covered in bullet wounds.
Blood ran down his clothes.
Fortunately, none of the hits had been instantly fatal.
The subdermal armor had prevented most of the projectiles from penetrating deeply, so the internal damage was considerably less severe than it looked from the outside.
“I think… you can still save me…”
Hiroshi was breathing heavily and rapidly.
He weakly looked at Leon approaching him.
Leon stopped in front of him.
He looked at the man he had worked with for the first time today.
He hesitated for several moments.
In the end, he sighed.
He pulled an injector from his gear.
Then, without warning, stabbed it directly into Hiroshi’s chest.
“Fuck!”
Hiroshi’s eyes widened.
“Rapid Hemostasis Nano-Injection Mk.3?!”
“Leon, where did you get this?!”
He felt a surge of warmth spread from the area around his heart through his entire body.
The bullet wounds almost immediately began to itch unpleasantly.
Advanced coagulation agents rapidly went to work on the open injuries.
The bleeding began stopping at an incredible speed.
“I just hope this fucking job ends up being worth everything I’m spending,” Leon complained.
He straightened up.
He looked down at Hiroshi.
The flames burning around the destroyed vehicles illuminated his face with reddish light, almost like the final rays of sunset.
Leon extended a hand.
Hiroshi grabbed it.
With Leon’s help, he pulled himself back to his feet.
“What the fuck happened here?!”
Rapid footsteps sounded from the direction of the street.
The gunfire from the previous battle had finally attracted the remaining Tyger Claws from the restaurant.
“You can still move, right?”
Leon turned his head toward the passage exit, which was also the only real entrance.
A smile appeared on his lips.
“With what you just injected into me?”
Hiroshi smiled as well.
“I think I could run a hundred meters right now.”
He bent down, picked the D5 Copperhead up from the ground, and skillfully changed the magazine.
Leon slowly drew Black Unicorn.
He did not feel like spending any more money on Smart ammunition.
Several Tyger Claws rushed into the passage.
But the sight in front of them stopped them instantly.
It was as though their hearts froze for a second.
A battlefield lay before them.
Fire.
Wreckage.
Corpses.
And facing them, a loaded rifle ready to fire and the blade of Black Unicorn.