Chapter 388 - 388: Honour among thieves
The air inside an abandoned manufacturing warehouse on the East Side of the city was thick with the smell of cheap cigars and illegal stimulants. A dozen members of a local gang were busy loading crates of stolen weaponry into a hover-truck, completely unaware of the shadow looming in the rafters above them.
Without a sound, Jayden dropped the roof.
He landed perfectly in the center of the group. Before the first thug could even register the sudden appearance of the masked figure, Jayden moved. He blurred into a streak of motion, his fist colliding with the nearest man's jaw with the force of a battering ram, sending him crashing through a stack of wooden crates.
"It's the Phantom Vigilante!" one of the thugs screamed, scrambling backward and drawing a plasma pistol.
"What?" Another stared in disbelief. "Are you insane?! There's a five million credit bounty on your head, and you're still out here?!"
"Yeah. You should have crawled up into a hole by now!" Another thug added.
"Trust me, I'm not the one who should be hiding," Jayden replied coldly, his voice modulated by the mask. Then he activated Intangibility.
At the same moment he did, a volley of plasma fire phased harmlessly through his chest, singeing nothing but the air behind him. He stepped forward, grabbing the shooter by the collar, and violently hurled him across the room into a steel support beam. He systematically dismantled the rest of the gang in under thirty seconds, utilizing nothing but his baseline speed and brute strength, leaving them groaning and unconscious on the concrete floor.
But this was only the warm-up. He wasn't done making his statement.
Two hours later,
The salty, freezing breeze of the Emerald City docks whipped against Jayden's jacket as he crouched silently atop a towering shipping crane. He's spent the last 120 minutes beating up thugs and dismantling gang operations in the city.
Fifty feet below him, illuminated by the harsh glare of industrial floodlights, a local syndicate faction was hard at work. Roughly fifteen gang members were moving heavily reinforced crates of illegal kinetic-stimulants onto a rusted cargo vessel. They were armed to the teeth, their eyes constantly darting toward the shadows.
These were his next victims.
Jayden stepped off the edge of the crane. He didn't use his telekinesis to soften his landing; instead, he let his strength absorb the impact, his boots hitting the concrete with a heavy, resonant thud that echoed across the pier, grabbing the attention of the men.
Every smuggler froze, turning their weapons toward the sound.
"Evening," Jayden said, his voice a low, modulated hum beneath the featureless black mask.
"It's him!" one of the gang members shrieked, racking the bolt of a heavy plasma rifle. "The vigilante is here!"
"I hear he's worth five mill," the leader of the operation rumbled. "Light him up!"
A storm of plasma bolts and solid-slug rounds tore through the air.
Jayden casually stood intangible. The deadly crossfire passed harmlessly through his chest and head, striking the shipping containers behind him in a shower of sparks.
Then he moved. Tapping into his speed, Jayden closed the fifty-foot gap in a fraction of a second. He materialized solidly right in front of the leader, driving a devastating palm strike into the man's sternum that sent him flying backward into the ocean.
Two thugs rushed him from the flanks, swinging crackling stun-batons. Jayden ducked beneath the first swing, swept the man's legs out from under him, and used his telekinesis to violently yank the second thug forward, pulling his face directly into Jayden's rising knee.
Bones crunched, and the man dropped like a stone.
"Spread out! We have to catch—" another man yelled, before Jayden dashed behind him, applying a precise, sleeper-hold nerve pinch that rendered him instantly unconscious.
He dropped the man's body and pushed forward with his relentless assault. He moved like a ghost through a graveyard, a seamless blend of intangibility and blinding speed. A thug tried to blindside him with a heavy wrench. Jayden let the metal phase through his shoulder, solidified his arm, and delivered a spinning hook that shattered the man's jaw.
Within three minutes, the entire operation was dismantled. Fifteen men lay groaning or unconscious on the wet pavement, their weapons twisted into useless scrap metal by Jayden's telekinesis.
Jayden exhaled, wiping a smudge of dirt from his jacket. A decent warm-up. He was about to leave when—
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The slow, rhythmic sound of an applause cut through the ambient noise of the crashing waves.
Jayden paused, his eyes narrowing beneath his mask. From the deep shadows of the stacked shipping containers, eight distinct figures stepped out into the pale moonlight, forming a wide perimeter that completely surrounded his position.
They wore high-end, military-grade tactical armor. Their weapons hummed with energy, and their postures screamed elite combat experience. These weren't street thugs. They were mercenaries.
"Gotta say, man, you've got some serious guts," the leader of the group called out. He was a towering man, his hands practically vibrating with contained, crackling red lightning. "We tracked you from that warehouse you hit on the East Side. Tricky little route you took, but we've been on your tail the whole time."
Jayden remained perfectly still, his eyes darting between them, letting the System passively scan their threat levels.
"Don't speak like we're a team, thunder boy. We all trailed him separately," a woman holding a staff that condensed ambient moisture into swirling rings of water muttered to the leader. "But now that we're all here, I say we just jump him together. We catch him, we split the five million evenly. Nobody goes home empty-handed."
"Sounds like a deal," a heavily armored brute agreed, his skin rippling unnaturally beneath his tactical vest.
Jayden scoffed. "You're going to turn on each other the second you have me," he stated smoothly. "There is no honor among thieves."
The leader chuckled, a dark, raspy sound. "Kid's got a point."
"You're absolutely right." The woman said with a sharp grin. "We'll definitely try to kill each other for the full bounty once you're dealt with. But before then... we're going to kill you first."
"The bounty said to capture him," a mercenary wielding dual laser sabers frowned.
"Don't be an idiot," the leader scoffed. "I bet the EVA would pay triple the amount for his corpse in a body bag. If they didn't secretly want him dead, they wouldn't have plastered a five million credit bounty for the whole world to see. They knew exactly what kind of people this money attracts."
The other mercenaries exchanged glances before slowly nodding in agreement. A deadly, bloodthirsty aura settled over the docks.
"Dead it is, then," the brute grinned.
In that moment, Jayden's dragon eye scanned the last mercenary. From what he'd seen, every single one of them were above level 40, with the brute and the leader sitting at level 51 and 53 respectively. They were all pretty strong.
But Jayden wasn't fazed. To any standard combatant, this was a guaranteed death sentence. But to him, who had spent the last few weeks surviving Pioneer-level threats, Ancient-class beasts, and military strike teams, this was nothing but a warm-up.
Jayden dropped his stance, his muscles coiling like springs. "Ready when you are," he muttered, stretching his neck.
The mercenary with the laser sabers attacked first, his boots igniting with thrusters as he closed the distance instantly. He swung the blinding purple lasers in a deadly X-pattern aimed at Jayden's neck. Jayden phased, letting the superheated light pass through him.
But as he phased, the Hydro-kinetic woman struck. She whipped her staff forward, unleashing a hyper-pressurized beam of water—thin enough to cleanly slice through titanium. It didn't aim for his body; she swept it in a massive circle, trapping Jayden inside a swirling, high-velocity dome of cutting water.
"Solidify, and you get diced into ribbons!" she mocked, shrinking the dome to force him into a smaller space.
Jayden didn't panic. He solidified his body for a microsecond. In that instant, he slammed both hands against the wet pavement, channeling the heat in his veins. He didn't just summon fire; he flash-boiled the ambient moisture in the air and the ground.
BOOM!
A massive shockwave of superheated steam erupted outward, instantly breaking the water dome's surface tension and violently scalding the Hydro-kinetic. As she shrieked and dropped her staff, Jayden blurred forward, unsheathing his Lycan claws, and slashed cleanly through the Laser mercenary's chest plate, taking him out of the fight. Then he delivered a skull-shattering blow to the woman's head, dropping her to the ground instantly. Then he faced the others.
"Shit! We can't let him phase again!" The leader shouted from the back.
"This should stop him!" a mercenary in heavy tech-armor muttered as he slammed a spiked device into the concrete. Then—
WUM-WUM-WUM.
A localized, high-frequency sonic wave blasted across the docks.
Jayden's vision vibrated. The frequency violently disrupted his molecular structure, ripping him out of his intangible state.
He was locked back into physical form.