Chapter 112: Knights
"Hey! Why are you running away?! I thought you were an SSS-RANK Awakened!" Juliana yelled, her knuckles white as she held her seatbelt tight while Asher pushed the heavy Escalade across the bridge.
"Look around you! There are many innocent people around. If we fight here, there will be many casualties!! I need to take them somewhere else," he said, expertly weaving the vehicle through traffic.
"Oh, alright! Once you get off the bridge, head east. At the very end of the street is an abandoned junkyard—there aren’t many people there!" Juliana instructed, pointing toward the dark industrial horizon.
"Alright!"
Asher spun the steering wheel with practiced ease, sliding through the sea of civilian cars with the five pursuing vehicles hot on their tail.
"How is he so good at driving?!! Sniper, keep shooting!" Grayson yelled from his driver’s seat, violently turning his wheel to keep pace.
"Boss! What about the other drivers?" the sniper asked nervously over the comms.
"I don’t give a fuck!! That guy humiliated me! He must pay!!" Grayson snapped, his face contorted in rage.
"Alright, Boss."
The sniper aimed down his scope again, but because the Cadillac was constantly drifting sideways across lanes, he couldn’t get a clean shot. Not only that, his instincts made him hesitant to cause massive civilian collateral damage on a public highway.
Grayson noticed his subordinate’s hesitation and gritted his teeth in disgust: "Get back inside!" He snapped. But a second later, he blinked in surprise as Asher took a sharp right turn off the main bridge ramp.
"Huh?"
He yanked his steering wheel, following right behind them: ’Where is he going?! This route ends in a junkyard... Wait, does he actually plan to fight me there?!! What a foolish kid!’ He slammed his foot on the accelerator, his convoy surging forward.
___
[Junkyard. 12:20 AM.]
"How is that car so fast?! We lost it in this place," Grayson muttered, stepping out into the cold night air and looking up at the clear moon hanging in the sky.
"Boss, I can’t locate anyone," the guy with the sniper rifle reported over the radio, sweeping his scope across the massive hills of rusted metal.
"Go and find a hidden spot, keep an eye on us," Grayson instructed. The sniper nodded, quickly rushing up a nearby tower of crushed vehicles, while Grayson and his remaining ten men walked deeper into the labyrinthine junkyard.
"Hey!! Patriarch of an Ancient Family!!! Why are you hiding from a commoner like me?!" Grayson yelled, his voice echoing loudly across the silent scrapyard.
SILENCE...
"Boss, should we search?" the man standing directly behind him asked, pulling a Desert Eagle from his holster.
"Why are you bringing out a gun?! Do you think that will be effective against an SSS-RANK Awakened?!" another subordinate asked with a heavy frown, turning to the man.
"Of course I know that, I just want to scare him!!" the man snapped back, raising the gun above his head with a foolish grin: "I just need to shoot it, and one of his wives will scream in fear! Do you know women are scared of guns?" He boasted with a proud smile.
WHOOSH!
"....?!"
Grayson froze, the hair on his neck standing on end as he sharply turned around toward his ten men: "Watch out!!"
WHOOSH!
The two arguing men froze mid-sentence. In the very next moment, their heads slid clean off their shoulders, falling hard to the dirt before their headless bodies collapsed right after.
"....?!!"
"Damn it!! He is an Assassin with a high stealth ability!" Grayson yelled in panic. A long, glowing Divine-Tier sword instantly manifested in his right hand, followed by a full set of gleaming Divine-Tier armor equipping over his body.
WHOOSH!!
Two more men dropped to the ground, dead before their nerves could even register the fatal strikes.
"....?!"
Grayson was utterly stunned, frantically sweeping his gaze all over the dark junkyard. He couldn’t see a single outline; he could only feel the faint gust of a passing breeze, and in the next moment, another one of his elite men would drop dead. In less than one minute, all ten men lay motionless on the ground, dead in pools of their own blood.
All the while, Grayson’s advanced sensory perception detected absolutely nothing.
"How dare you sneak around!! Show yourself!!!" he screamed, his eyes turning pitch-black as his aura flared in sheer rage.
He stared ahead as the deep shadow beneath a rusty shipping container shifted. From the darkness, a tall Black Knight stepped forward, a bloody greatsword dripping in his grip.
"You see, from the very start, I wasn’t the one attacking."
"...?!"
Grayson snapped his head upward toward a massive pile of scrap metal, seeing Asher sitting comfortably at the top, looking down at him with a casual smile.
"You can’t even fight my summon, and you want to face me? Look at your men—only SS-RANK, and you, only one SSS-RANK... So disappointing," Asher added, his voice laced with mild amusement.
"Impossible! A summon can never be this powerful! Its stats and strength... it shouldn’t be this strong!" Grayson stammered in shock, his confidence crumbling a little.
"Why? Have you checked its stats?" Asher asked with a slight frown.
Grayson blinked, quickly opening his Awakened system interface to appraise the Knight standing before him.
[Name: Asher’s Personal Knight.]
[Rank: S-Rank.]
[Class: Normal Boss.]
[Agility: 1,061,000.]
[Energy: 1,061,500.]
[Defense: 870,000.]
[Health Points: 961,500.]
[Physical Attack: 570,500.]
[Magical Attack: 570,500.]
[Skill: Shadow Merge.]
"This! Even an SSS-RANK Awakened doesn’t have such high stats!!" Grayson yelled in horror, backing away from the shadow figure.
"You are truly a fool... My Knight copied all the buffs on me. Before I summoned one, I activated every single buff from my gears to my abilities, so it copied 100% of my total power... Look at that Knight. Do you really think you can defeat it?" Asher asked with a cold smirk.
Grayson watched in sheer dread as the darkness around him rippled again. Three more Black Knights materialised from the shadows, bringing the total to four—all four locking their burning red gazes directly onto him.
"This...?"
"Alright, Grayson. Defeat my knights, and prove to me that you’re worthy to be my dog," Asher said with a dark grin.
BANG!!
A high-caliber gunshot instantly echoed through the night air as a specialized anti-material sniper bullet whizzed toward Asher’s skull with insane, supersonic speed.
".....?!"
BOOM!