“Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang—!”
The dense hail of steel buckshot was like a violent storm, crashing frantically against the surface of the stainless steel surgical table.
Blinding sparks erupted in the rainy night, illuminating the distorted, utterly horrified face of the Rat Gang leader, Fith.
The three-hundred-pound solid metal base absorbed the full kinetic energy of the Remington at close range, remaining completely motionless.
Fith’s pupils shrank to pinpricks.
His Adam’s apple bobbed in the center of his throat, but he couldn’t make a sound.
A surgical table?
Appearing out of thin air?
In the half-second while his brain was completely stalled, the air beside the surgical table suddenly distorted in an eerie fashion.
The thin silver blanket was whipped aside.
William lunged out like a long-dormant Black Panther, staying close to the muddy asphalt.
The distance between the two was less than two meters.
Driven by a gangster’s instinct, Fith tried to pull the pump-action forend to eject the shell and chamber another round.
But a hand wearing a black Kevlar cut-resistant glove gripped the Remington’s scalding barrel like a hydraulic clamp.
Rain hit the hot barrel with a “sizzle,” and white smoke rose instantly.
Fith yanked back with all his might.
It didn’t budge.
This sickly-looking Asian Doctor’s arm seemed to have steel rebar buried inside it.
Before Fith could let go, a dark gray afterimage slashed through the rainy night without warning.
The high-carbon titanium alloy blade from Osborn Corp sliced into Fith’s right wrist.
There was no resistance from bone.
The blade glided with absolute precision into the carpal tunnel, severing the median nerve and flicking upward.
All nine flexor tendons were severed in one clean sweep.
“Splat.”
Blood splattered, mixing with the rain.
Fith didn’t even feel the pain yet; his right hand became like a piece of rotted wood that had suddenly snapped off, instantly losing all grip.
The heavy Remington shotgun fell into a puddle with a “clatter.”
Immediately after, the blade traced a tiny arc in mid-air and backhanded into his left wrist.
The same anatomical position.
The same clean, decisive nerve severance.
Two seconds.
Two cuts.
The Rat Gang leader’s hands were completely ruined.
“Aaaah—!”
The delayed agony finally surged along the nerve endings and into his cerebral cortex.
Fith’s knees buckled, and he fell heavily into the mud.
Holding up his two wrists, which were spraying blood frantically, he let out a shrill, pig-slaughtering scream.
William let go of the barrel and stood up, looking down at him.
The remaining Rat Gang thugs in the alley watched their leader get crippled in an instant, then looked at the surgical table blocking the road.
Their psychological defenses completely collapsed.
“Monster—he’s a monster!”
Someone screamed, and the rest dropped their thompson submachine guns, scrambling and crawling out of Lake Street to disappear into the East End night.
William didn’t give chase.
Small fry couldn’t cause much trouble.
He lowered his hand, letting the torrential rain wash the blood off the titanium alloy blade.
“You—you can’t kill me!” Fith knelt on the ground, the blood from his severed wrists staining the puddles beneath him red.
He looked up, his face covered in mud and cold sweat from extreme terror.
At the threshold of life and Death, he roared frantically as if grasping for a final lifeline.
“I work for the Falcone Family!
The Underground Organ Black Market in the East End—the middleman there is a Falcone Family executive!” Fith shrieked, attempting to use Gotham City’s most massive Mafia empire to crush the underground Doctor before him.
“If you dare touch me, Lord Falcone will skin you alive!
This shitty clinic of yours, and that woman inside, will all be stuffed into cement barrels and dumped into Gotham Bay!”
William didn’t even blink.
The titanium alloy blade flipped nimbly between his slender fingertips.
“Falcone?” William chewed on the name.
The Roman, the underground emperor of Gotham’s old era.
Fith thought William was afraid, because in Gotham, no one wasn’t afraid of Falcone.
A hideous grin, uglier than a crying face, squeezed onto his fleshy features: “Yes!
Falcone!
Let me go, and I’ll act like tonight never happened—”
“On my operating table.”
William interrupted him.
His voice wasn’t loud, yet it pierced through the roar of the rain with extreme clarity.
“Whether you’re Mafia or the Mayor of Gotham City,” William took a step forward, his leather shoe crushing the reflection in the puddle, “you’re all just carbon-based organisms made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
One cut to the carotid artery, and even Falcone’s blood can only spray two meters high.”
The smile on Fith’s face froze.
In those black pupils, he saw something colder than Death.
William’s left hand grabbed Fith’s leather jacket collar, hoisting the nearly two-meter-tall brute up by force.
“You kidnap homeless people and harvest their organs for the black market.
This severely violates my medical ethics.” William’s voice was as cold as a morgue freezer.
“Death is too cheap for you.
I want you to live in fear and conscious agony for the rest of your life.
Consider it a bit of interest paid for the innocent people you disassembled into parts.”
Before his voice finished echoing, the scalpel in William’s right hand lunged out.
Target: the back of the neck.
This was the human body’s forbidden zone for life.
William’s wrist turned slightly.
The blade avoided the respiratory center of the medulla oblongata but cruelly and accurately severed the spinal motor nerve bundles below.
“Click.”
A very faint sound of cartilage being sliced.
Fith’s eyes instantly bulged to their limit, his eyeballs becoming bloodshot in a heartbeat.
His mouth hung wide open, but he could not make a sound.
Because from the neck down, he had completely lost control of his body.
His sphincters relaxed instantly, and pungent urine mixed with the rainwater flowing down.
William let go.
Fith collapsed into the puddle like a pile of rotted mud with its bones removed.
He could still breathe on his own.
His eyeballs could still roll frantically.
His brain was perfectly conscious, feeling the cold touch of the rain hitting his face.
But he couldn’t even move a pinky finger.
High-level quadriplegia.
From now on, this wicked Rat Gang leader would be imprisoned for life within his own flesh, unable even to commit suicide.
William wiped the blood off the titanium alloy blade onto Fith’s clothes.
With a thought, the blade was retracted into his Storage Ring.
He turned around, his gaze scanning the dark alleyways of Lake Street.
Over a dozen bodies of Rat Gang members lay scattered in the mud.
The scent of blood was too strong for even the storm to wash away.
If left untreated, GCPD (Gotham City Police Department) cruisers would have this place cordoned off by tomorrow morning.
William walked to the nearest corpse.
He removed the Kevlar glove from his left hand.
The dark silver ring at the base of his index finger touched the corpse’s cold forehead.
“Whoosh.”
The corpse on the ground vanished into thin air.
The corner of William’s mouth curled into a satisfied arc.
A hundred-cubic-meter Sub-space.
Stowing a dozen corpses wouldn’t even fill a corner.
He walked toward the next corpse.
Falcone Family?
Organ black market?
William stuffed the corpses into the ring one by one.
He had been worrying about where to get a large quantity of illicit medical equipment.
Since the Falcone Family executive was involved in organ smuggling, they must have a perfectly established underground medical supply chain.
This was a high-quality supplier delivered right to his door.Loving Book So Far?