By the time Leon got back to his own world, the quest reward popped up right away.
[Quest Complete.
1000 points earned.
Special reward from this world incoming.]
[Ding — special reward delivered.]
[Skill acquired: Mahoraga’s Power — Adaptation (Beginner)]
[Effect: The holder’s resistance accumulates with each instance of damage taken, up to a cap of approximately 10%.]
Leon swiped back and forth over the screen a few times to confirm, then thought it over.
As for Omni, he decided the complaint he’d already withdrawn clear off Earth needed to be pushed even further out — all the way to Mars.
Right now, he was practically begging for some big incident to lure a hero out for a proper, satisfying brawl.
Talk trash about the beaten-up hero online all you want, but in real life, who wouldn’t want to panic-transform into Mark and get the snot beaten out of them, only to walk away a hundred percent stronger for it?
Keep it up, Omni — show me your limit!
If it could get me all the way to no-limit levels, I’d be perfectly happy settling for Space Rift too!
“Sir, is something the matter?”
The boss beside him rubbed his hands together and asked.
He couldn’t see the System, of course — all he saw was this big-shot passing through town read some intel, mutter the word “Chicago,” and then his expression suddenly turn dead serious.
Could there be some old enemy of his over there?
Well, good luck to whoever that was.
As someone in the information business, the boss had naturally handled plenty of intel on superhumans.
Even the demon detective, Damien Darkblood, had paid him a visit once.
Naturally, he’d built up a perspective on all this that went far beyond your average internet power-scaling debate.
In short — when it came to the level a superhuman operated at, this boss knew exactly what he was looking at.
Someone like Leon, who walked through solid walls the way most people take a stroll, wasn’t in the same league as Elephant Guy.
To reliably beat someone like that, you’d probably need someone up at The Immortal’s tier.
Get on the radar of a guy like that, and even if you survived, you’d come out skinned alive.
Then, seeing that Leon hadn’t answered and was starting to gather up his files to leave, the boss eased in carefully.
His tone dripping with eagerness:
“So, sir, is there anything else you need from me?”
“No, you’ve already done more than enough.
Have a wonderful day, all of you.”
Leon gave a nod to the room full of people too scared to so much as twitch, and left the place amid a flurry of scattering papers.
Just then, the bouncer who’d been knocked out cold finally opened his eyes — right into an incoming fist.
“Goddammit!”
The boss cursed.
“I never told you to just stand there acting cool and unbothered around a guy like that — you were supposed to keep him calm!”
“Good thing he wasn’t the bloodthirsty type, or neither of us would be walking away from this!”
His gaze locked on that pitch-black hole in the wall, still shaken to his core.
Jesus, and this guy has super speed on top of everything else…
Machine Head was your textbook elitist villain.
Protection money from Chicago’s gangs, enhancer trafficking, a handful of massive financial frauds — every last dollar of profit eventually funneled its way back to him.
As the head of the operation, he’d never once bothered hiding where he was. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
Chicago.
The glass of its skyline glittered under the sun.
Blending into the sky itself, it looked, at a glance, like sunlight rippling off water.
At the top of the tower, behind reinforced bulletproof glass.
Machine Head sat in his office chair, talking with a goateed subordinate in a suit.
Isotope.
His power: teleportation.
“I want an update on where those chips ended up.
↑ Any progress?
↓”
The cyborg, his face shaped like a wrestler’s mask, spoke with a built-in electronic buzz.
“Alright, boss, everything’s on track.
I’ve already got a solid lead.”
“I don’t want to hear excuses~ I want results!”
Just as he was about to press further on Isotope’s slacking off, he noticed the man’s gaze had drifted, frozen on the window.
He turned to look — and there, sixty floors up, hundreds of meters in the air, a hooded young man hovered outside, rapping his knuckles on the glass.
“Hello~”
Casual as anything, as if he were just knocking to invite a friend outside.
A whole squad of ex-military patrolled this floor.
The window sensors had picked something up, and they came swarming in fast.
Dozens of gun barrels, black and hollow, all trained on Leon.
He wasn’t remotely fazed.
He pressed a finger gently against the glass and slowly added pressure.
At first, a single white point bloomed under his fingertip, then rapidly spread outward.
Once the spiderweb of cracks grew larger than his own silhouette, Leon pulled his hand back and crooked his index finger.
One last knock.
Crash!
The window shattered with a roar, and he stepped through a rain of glittering shards to hover right above Machine Head.
Give the man credit — as the boss controlling half the city’s underworld, he wasted no time getting his security out of there the second he clocked Leon’s strength.
Legs crossed, he grumbled:
“You have any idea how much that window cost me?”
Leon spread his hands:
“Call it a housewarming gift, seeing as we’re about to be friends.”
“Plenty of people want to be my friend~ Who the hell are you, exactly~”
Machine Head’s tone turned sour, and Leon repeated himself, calm as ever:
“No, think about it.
You have no choice but to think about it.”
“Sure, go ahead, see if I ↑ think ↓ about it or ↑ don’t ↓.”
With a snap of his fingers, Isotope beside him activated his teleportation.
While whisking his boss away from Leon in an instant, three sheets of green light snapped up in front of them as a barrier.
A handful of superhumans on their payroll stepped out from behind it.
Magnattack, Titan, Multi-Paul.
At their boss’s word, all three charged Leon at once.
Leon licked his lips and touched down on the floor.
“That’s the plan, is it.”
This would be his first real fight against an Earth villain.
The anticipation gave his smart-atoms a small nudge — he let them idle for a moment, just a touch of momentum.
The strongest of the three was Titan, so naturally he took point.
The hulking Black man’s arm swings grew more and more exaggerated as he charged, rock plating forming over his body as he ran.
An unstoppable, man-shaped tank barreling forward, he threw the first punch at Leon.
A blow strong enough to flip a truck landed in Leon’s palm like a kid tossing him a baseball.
Before Titan could even pull his fist back for another swing, it was already caught in an iron grip.
Cracks bloomed under Leon’s fingertips — if he could crack bulletproof glass, a rock shell rated for rifle rounds was no different.
Leon hauled him up, arm raised overhead, and slammed him down hard onto the floor.
Bam!
Bam!
Bam!
Three times in a row, rock chips flying everywhere, incidentally smashing a few of Paul’s duplicates in the process.
Finally, he flung Titan sideways, a spray of organs grazing past Machine Head’s face before the body embedded itself in the wall, unconscious.
The other two were even easier.
Paul’s infinite duplication was cute, but his physical stats weren’t much above your average person.
Magnattack wore armor made of interlocking metal plates and could manipulate them as weapons — but none of it could so much as scratch Leon’s guard.
With one hand tucked behind his back, Leon threw a single sweeping kick that cut down most of the duplicates like a scythe through wheat, spraying a mess of organs in its wake.
As the sheets of metal came flying at him, his left hand moved too fast to see, catching dozens of the plates and crushing them into a ball in his palm.
As for the last one, he simply turned his body, letting the curve of his shoulder do the work.
Amid a shower of sparks and a screech of scraping metal, the plate sliced clean through the head of a duplicate trying to sneak up on him from behind, and lodged itself straight into the door.
Blood dripped from it onto the floor.
Finally, Leon flickered behind Magnattack, grabbed him by the head, and slowly lifted him off the ground.
Ignoring the man’s struggling, he turned to look at Machine Head.
“Hey!
My Italian maple door!
You’re paying for that!”
Machine Head figured it was about time to call this off.
If he still couldn’t read the writing on the wall after all this, he didn’t deserve to be running this outfit anymore.
If anything, he should’ve called it the moment he saw this guy pick Titan up with one hand.
“Screw your mother.”
Leon got to swear in his mother tongue for once, and man, did it feel good.
“Screw yourself — you think I can’t understand Chinese?
So, what the hell do you actually want?”
“Can’t you tell?”
Leon raised an eyebrow and said, incredulous:
“I’m this young, obviously it’s because I need to go to school.”
To be continued…