In the whole game of wits between Ryan and Pisces, there was one enormous advantage Ryan had held from beginning to end.
The enemy stood in the light; he stood in shadow.
He'd guessed nearly every card in his enemies' hand, while they, in turn, had always treated him as a weakling fully under their control.
That underestimation was about to cost someone their life.
...
Right up until the very second his ankle was seized, the assassin lurking in the ceiling had remained utterly confident in his own stealth.
As far as he was concerned, fooling a rookie he himself had personally trained was child's play. Days of uninterrupted surveillance, and the kid hadn't noticed a thing — proof enough of that.
Besides, Wolf felt he knew everything there was to know about Ryan. Bottom of the class in the training cohort's evaluations, barely scraping by on every basic skill. And he'd only just awakened as a Transcendent a few days ago, taking the Trickster gene serum...
Overall assessment: some green kid who could maybe last two or three exchanges against him at best.
And this supremely confident man was about to eat dirt in the very next instant.
...
Ryan, naturally, recognized the assassin who'd just come crashing down from the ceiling.
A flash of dark amusement flickered, unmistakable, in his eyes.
Wolf Birgi, captain of the Weasel Bandit Gang's 19th Squad and one of the instructors at the recruit training camp — responsible for teaching stealth, tailing, and intelligence-gathering skills, an Infiltrator-type Transcendent.
In truth, Ryan had already worked out this man's identity from certain small details days earlier. So none of this came as any surprise to him now.
Wolf, on the other hand, utterly blindsided, was gripped by pure terror.
Being seized precisely by the ankle and yanked down from the ceiling meant only one thing: his supposedly flawless stealth had been within this kid's perception the entire time.
Wolf stared at the icy, murderous look in Ryan's eyes, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.
Part of it was sheer shock at being ambushed by a rookie. But more than that — he had no idea how he'd been exposed in the first place!
Even granting that this 9527 had awakened as a Transcendent — the Trickster serum was a stealth-assassin-type serum. How could it possibly grant this kind of absurd strength and perception?
He'd assumed he was dealing with a lamb he could squeeze at will, only to find himself facing a starving wolf hidden beneath the wool.
The killing-intent-drenched 9527 in front of him bore no resemblance whatsoever to the barely-there nobody he remembered from training.
*What in the hell is going on?!*
...
Ryan paid no mind to Wolf's shock. Having slammed him down onto the floor, he gave his wrist a sharp flick, and a razor-sharp scalpel appeared in his grip.
The Weasel Gang's assassins were all desperate men through and through; even with a shattered leg and unable to stand, a veteran bandit who'd clawed his way up from the corpse piles could still land a vicious counterattack in his final moments.
"Hmph! Brat — don't forget who taught you to even hold a blade in the first place!"
Sure enough, terrified as Wolf looked, his hands moved without the slightest hesitation. Even as he fell, he'd already drawn the cold-gleaming dagger from the sheath at his waist.
Striking back in the face of mortal danger — a veteran assassin's essential skill.
The dagger cut through the air, its angle vicious and unnatural, sweeping in from Ryan's blind spot — Wolf's signature killing technique.
He was confident: this strike would leave the rookie with nothing but regret.
Ryan, meanwhile, felt his ear twitch faintly, his expression grim, though not a trace of panic showed on his face.
He caught the enemy's movement instantly, and silently registered a single thought: *next move — left-handed blade, reverse cut to the ankle.*
What followed was almost eerie.
Wolf, as if bound by some spell, executed the strike exactly as Ryan had "predicted."
The gleaming dagger spun a flourish in his left hand, his own body shielding the blade's true trajectory, before reversing to slash straight at Ryan's ankle...
That whole intricate sequence of motion boiled down to exactly seven words: left-handed blade, reverse cut to the ankle.
With the move already predicted down to the letter, there was no way Ryan would be caught by it.
The instant the blade swept in, Ryan simply lifted his foot and stomped down hard, and with another sharp *crack* of breaking bone, Wolf clutched his shattered left wrist in agony, the dagger clattering from his grip to the floor.
"How is this possible..."
Wolf gasped in pain, his face draining of color.
Struck down twice in a row by the very recruit he himself had trained, he felt, all at once, as if Death's own scythe had settled against his throat, every hair on his body standing on end.
*What in the world...*
*How could this kid possibly have predicted his moves?*
...
Once could be coincidence. Twice meant something was seriously wrong.
Wolf could accept that this rookie's strength was absurdly high — but even so, only on par with his own. Ambushed as he'd been, even with a shattered leg, he'd been confident he could hold out several rounds against him purely on the strength of hard-won combat experience. By then, surely Pisces would have noticed the commotion...
But now — his arm broken too, in the blink of an eye?
He knew, then, that his own death was close at hand.
The heightened perception of a Perception-type Transcendent, the raw power of a Fighter-type, the neural reflexes of an Assassin-type, and that uncanny predictive ability on top of all of it —
Was this really something a freshly-awakened Awakened One could possibly achieve?
Was this really something an assassin-type Transcendent could master?
In his final, desperate moments, countless questions flashed through Wolf's mind. And in the next instant, one thing became certain to him.
This 9527 hadn't awakened as a Transcendent through the Trickster serum at all — because he himself was a Superior Black Iron-grade Awakened One!
A vague suspicion crept into Wolf's mind. As one of Pisces's close collaborators, he was, naturally, aware of the whole business surrounding Baron Morin's inheritance...
But at this point, whatever the truth actually was, it no longer mattered.
The instant that thought crossed his mind, the look in Wolf's eyes as he stared at Ryan shifted, in a heartbeat, from terror to despair.
*So this whole thing... was under that kid's control the entire time.*
Heh. He'd thought he had the whole situation firmly in hand — and it turned out the boy had been putting on an act for their benefit the entire time?
*What terrifying cunning...*
...
Wolf still tried, in his final moments, to fight back — but with his lead already lost, one hand and one leg broken, there was nothing left he could do that would matter.
Ryan said nothing, only cold indifference in his eyes, the killing motion in his hands never once slowing.
This instructor had, in fact, drilled with him countless nights in the dream world. Left-handed, favored a reverse ankle-cut backstab, always spun the blade with a reverse grip, a slight shoulder-blade twitch giving away every thrusting attack...
Every one of Wolf's habits and technique flaws, Ryan knew inside and out.
Having shattered Wolf's wrist, Ryan gave the enemy no chance to strike back at all — a single pivot of the hips, and the scalpel swept across the man's throat in a clean, crescent-moon arc.
The basic assassin technique — Throat Slit.
In an instant, flesh split open, and a torrent of blood erupted from the severed artery. Having studied the fundamentals of anatomy, Ryan now understood the structure of the human body inside and out.
This strike left no chance of survival.
Wolf felt his life draining away in a powerful rush, tried to fight it, but his consciousness receded like a retreating tide.
In his final moment, he finally understood — he hadn't lost unfairly. That washed-out rookie had executed a Throat Slit no less flawless than his own. There likely wasn't a soul left in the entire Weasel Bandit Gang who could have done it any better.
Wolf thought bitterly, his eyelids sinking shut, powerless to stop it...
...
The entire ambush had gone exactly as planned — a close call, but no real danger.
"Phew... finally, that's done."
Having killed Wolf, Ryan let out a long breath.
Had this come down to a straight fight, even holding some strength in reserve, going up against Wolf fresh off his own awakening would likely have been close to an even coin flip.
But the surprise attack had paid off — one crushing blow followed by a relentless finishing strike had left this veteran assassin dead in a pool of his own blood before he'd even managed to use a fifth of his real skill.
From the burst of motion to the kill, the whole exchange had taken no more than three or four seconds.
Ryan glanced once at the corpse lying in the pool of blood, didn't linger, and turned to bolt straight out the door.