“Open fire! Turn him into a damn sieve!”
Boris’s hysterical roar shattered the silence.
This Russian crime lord, a man who had spent years clawing his way through the black market, was experiencing a fear he had never known before.
It wasn’t the fear of facing a gun or being betrayed.
It was the primal trembling of a living creature confronting its natural predator—the kind of terror engraved into one’s very genes.
“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat—!”
Jiru’s reaction was only half a beat slower.
He roared out the same order.
In an instant, gunfire erupted throughout the cramped processing plant.
Dozens of assault rifles spat furious tongues of flame.
A dense storm of bullets swept toward the pale man standing in the center of the factory.
Bullets tore through the air with sharp, shrill whistles.
Yet the scene they had expected—blood and flesh flying everywhere—never came.
Just as the first bullet was about to strike Orochimaru, his body bent backward in a manner that defied the laws of physics.
His waist folded almost completely in half, his entire body moving like a boneless snake as he slid along the floor.
The bullets, powerful enough to tear through steel plating, merely kicked up a string of concrete fragments and sparks where he had been standing.
“He dodged it?!”
One of the thugs cried out in horror.
The next second, he could no longer make a sound.
A black blur shot from Orochimaru’s sleeve, leaving a trailing afterimage beneath the dim lights.
It was a black snake, thicker and longer than the ones from before.
It bit precisely into the thug’s neck, its sharp fangs instantly piercing his carotid artery.
Blood erupted like a fountain.
This was only the beginning.
Orochimaru’s figure moved through the hail of bullets like a ghost.
He didn’t even seem to accelerate.
He merely twisted, stretched, and glided through the barrage with an eerie elegance.
His neck could extend to an unbelievable length, his head emerging at bizarre angles to evade lethal trajectories.
His arms stretched like rubber, while his fingers transformed into smaller snakes that coiled around his enemies’ wrists.
“Hidden Shadow Snake Hands.”
He quietly spoke the name of the technique, as though stating a simple scientific formula.
In an instant, even more black snakes surged from beneath his kimono, from his sleeves, and even from his mouth.
There weren’t merely dozens.
There were hundreds—thousands!
They converged into a black tide, accompanied by a bone-chilling chorus of hissing, and surged toward the panicking gang members.
“Ahhh! Monster! It’s a monster!”
“Stay away! Get the hell away from me!”
“Help me! Hel—!”
Screams, pleas for help, the clatter of dropped firearms, and the sounds of flesh being torn apart intertwined into a symphony from hell.
One burly Russian mobster desperately tried to fight back with his rifle.
A black snake suddenly slithered straight down the barrel.
The next moment, the gun chamber exploded.
Jiru stared in terror at the living hell unfolding before him.
He threw down his gun and turned toward the factory entrance, sprinting for his life.
He swore that if he survived, he would donate his entire life savings to the church and pray every single day.
But after taking only two steps, his ankle suddenly tightened.
He looked down in horror.
A black snake had somehow coiled around his ankle and sunk its fangs deep into his flesh.
He tried to scream, only to discover that his throat felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton.
Then a hand burst through the ground in front of him.
It was a pale hand, utterly devoid of color.
It seized Jiru’s other ankle.
Then Orochimaru’s entire upper body emerged from the solid concrete floor, seemingly growing out of it as though the ground were nothing more than a pool of water.
That same researcher-like smile remained on his face.
His golden serpentine eyes observed the absolute terror on Jiru’s face from mere inches away.
“Your fear response is considerably stronger than the others.”
“What an interesting specimen.”
“N-no…”
At last, Jiru managed to force a single desperate syllable from his throat.
Orochimaru raised his other hand and gently placed it on top of Jiru’s head.
“Then let’s see everything you have.”
“Splurt—”
Jiru’s body suddenly convulsed.
The light in his eyes rapidly faded.
Elsewhere, Boris had already collapsed to the floor.
His enormous body shook uncontrollably, while a yellowish liquid ran down his trouser leg, filling the air with a foul stench.
He stared at the demon who had grown out of the ground.
As Orochimaru slowly approached him, Boris repeatedly muttered incoherent words.
“Devil… you’re the devil…”
Orochimaru stopped in front of him and looked down.
He paid no attention whatsoever to the filth beneath his feet.
He merely raised one foot.
For an instant, the phantom of a gigantic serpent appeared behind him, its scales shimmering with a metallic sheen.
“Bang!”
Boris’s head was crushed beneath Orochimaru’s foot like an overripe watermelon, red and white matter splattering across the floor.
Several minutes later, silence returned to the processing plant.
More than fifty corpses lay scattered across pools of blood, every body bearing horrifying wounds.
The air was saturated with the nauseating combination of blood and gunpowder.
Orochimaru stood in the center of the carnage.
Not a single drop of blood had stained his loose kimono.
He slowly raised a hand.
The blood-red panel that only he could see appeared before him once more.
[You have successfully killed 52 civilians and obtained 10,000 Reputation points.]
“Ten thousand…”
Orochimaru stared at the number, his brow furrowing almost imperceptibly.
He looked down at the corpses beneath his feet, then back at the number displayed on the panel.
A trace of analytical confusion flashed through his golden serpentine eyes.
More than fifty lives.
On average, each person had provided fewer than two hundred Reputation points.
That efficiency was far too low.
He recalled the system’s earlier description of Reputation points.
He also remembered the division into the various Factions.
Clearly, this so-called system wasn’t designed to reward indiscriminate slaughter.
If massacring ordinary people could yield enormous amounts of Reputation, the balance of this game would be far too fragile.
Value.
The key lay in the target’s value.
Killing these gang members struggling at the bottom of society was like stepping on a colony of ants.
Their deaths had virtually no impact on the world’s overall balance.
Naturally, the Reputation points they provided were negligible.
By contrast, Perona had merely broken the fighting spirit of two Players and received one hundred thousand Reputation points.
“Players”…
Or rather, the anomalies like himself who had come from other worlds.
Those were high-value targets.
Beyond them, there were presumably also individuals native to this world who possessed extraordinary abilities or wielded tremendous influence.
They should have considerable value as well.
“Hehehehe…”
Orochimaru let out a low chuckle.
He extended his long tongue and slowly licked his lips.
“I see… So that’s how it works.”
“There are other ‘Players’ like me who have arrived in this world…”
“Excellent. Excellent.”
“This world is becoming more and more worthy of study.”
He abandoned his original plan of wiping out the entirety of Hell’s Kitchen to test the upper limit of Reputation points.
That kind of repetitive, low-efficiency labor simply didn’t suit his aesthetic.
He needed higher-level experimental subjects.
Orochimaru’s figure began to blur.
Slowly, he sank into the ground, like a stone dropped into water.
“First, I need a suitable laboratory.”
“Then I’ll find some interesting ‘specimens’ to play with…”
His voice left one final echo in the empty factory.
Then, together with his fading figure, Orochimaru completely disappeared.
Only the corpses and blood remained, silently bearing witness to the terrifying and bizarre events that had just taken place.