Chapter 4: What a beautiful day! (But not the dark)

It was a beautiful day in Vale. The sun was high in the sky, and no clouds blocked the warm rays from reaching the city's people. It was the kind of picturesque weather that appeared on "Wish you were here!" postcards.

On a day like this, even those who prefer indoor entertainment like clubs or computers would consider strolling outside.

But even the almost physical aura of positivity did not seem to affect the people guarding the Cerberus gang's warehouse.

Cerberus was a powerful, mid-tier gang with nearly forty aura-unlocked members and even three proper huntsmen at the helm, making them a power that not even top-tier gangs could easily dismiss.

If you managed to become a part of this crew, people would respect you no matter where you went, yet today, every member of this powerful gang wore such reluctant expressions one would think that they were forced into joining.

The reason for such a mood started last week when the first gangs began to disappear.

The first ones to fall were all small-time gangs, the types to rise and fall by themselves in a manner of weeks, so even when the others noticed the destruction the next day, they wrote it off as bad luck and moved on.

But while the criminal underworld remained oblivious to the truth, the gangs continued to disappear.

Time continued to pass, and gangs continued to disappear until two days later when the first mid-tier gang became a victim.

Nobody cared about the small timers, so the situation until that point was equated to a sudden shower of bad luck. It appeared quickly, and everyone thought that it would stop just as fast. However, with the fall of a mid-tier gang, the metaphorical weather only got heavier.

With arrogant ignorance giving way to fear, everyone scrambled to find the ones responsible, and when their solo investigations yielded no results, everyone started flooding information brokers with requests. It was an absolute mess where even the big shots got involved in the search.

The whole criminal side of Vale had joined hands to uncover the ones behind the massacres. But even with this uncharacteristic act of camaraderie, it was not enough.

There was no sign of any troops moving, no politicians starting a campaign against crime and no other gangs looking to expand their territories.

It was as though the one hunting them was a vengeful ghost.

Like that, the killing continued until now.

Over twenty small and nine mid-tier gangs were gone, with some rumours saying the body count was close to a thousand, all in the span of a week. No small-time gangs were left while the Cerberus was the last of the mid-tier gangs still standing.

"Sigh..." Josh, one of the gang members guarding the first floor of the warehouse in which the gang had bunkered down, sighed.

"What's wrong?" his patrolling partner, Markus, asked when he noticed his friend's mood.

"Nothing, just..." he tried to find the words to describe his current feelings but quickly gave up "this whole thing sucks."

Knowing that there was only one thing Josh could be talking about, his partner could only nod, "yeah..."

The building they were in used to be a large shopping mall, later abandoned and converted into a warehouse. It was currently filled close to capacity with smuggled cargo containing all sorts of things ranging from guns to simple alcohol.

They were supposed to have shipped them out days ago, but that would require a large workforce to transport them and even more people to protect that transport. Neither of which the gang was willing to spare at the moment. This situation meant that the large and open warehouse, where only a couple of guards were usually enough to oversee, became cluttered and now required a dozen guards to patrol it.

They were using the buddy system, but there were still six groups patrolling, so, despite the size of the building, they would often meet up with other patrols.

Or at least they used to.

The whole reason why almost a third of the gang was assigned guard duty was the possibility of a stealth attack, so now that Josh finally noticed the abnormality, he instantly became suspicious.

"Hey, Mark," he turned to ask his partner, "hasn't it been a while since we last saw-!" just in time to see blood splatter forward from a newly formed bullet hole in the center of his head.

Although Josh's training wasn't up to Huntsman standards, he's been using aura for a few years now. So that experience, along with his earlier suspicions, allowed him to pull up his aura just in time to avoid the same fate that befell his partner.

Josh felt a spike of pain at the back of his head as a bullet tried to go through it, causing him to stumble and fall forward.

As he lay on the ground, thoughts flashed inside his head as he realised that the reason he hadn't seen anyone in a while was that they were all already dead.

His dizziness was mostly gone by now, but instead of picking up his weapon and fighting a completely unknown enemy by himself, he made the sensible choice and grabbed his walkie-talkie instead.

"THEY'RE HERE!"

~O~

"THEY'RE HERE!"

"Ah, crud," I cursed while giving the last guy a few more taps to the head, "looks like I got way too cooky there."

Since unlocking my aura a week ago, I have been training it every chance I got through combat. Send aura to the muscles for strength, send aura to the skin for defence—the more specific the place and the more concentrated the aura, the better. Spreading it throughout the whole body raised my speed, strength and endurance to levels I couldn't even dream of before.

Still, since my starting aura amount was at the level of a preschooler, I couldn't maintain that super-state even for a minute. The opposite is also true, where instead of concentrating aura, it is possible to dilute it, and while the effect is much lesser, the aura consumption is also much lesser.

That is the basics of aura manipulation, and I had no problem picking it up.

On the other hand, an advanced application of aura would be to apply it to weapons, increasing their durability and "weight", for lack of a better term, allowing them to hit harder and cut deeper. But while it still sounds relatively simple, the difficulty of using aura outside your body is great.

A level above that would be applying aura to projectiles. While the difficulty isn't much different from the previous application, you must apply it from scratch on every bullet you fire instead of simply maintaining the aura enhancement on the body and weapons.

The ease of employing aura on melee weapons and the difficulty of using it on bullets reflected this world's strange choice of weaponry, where guns became a secondary and melee the primary loadout for most people.

At first, my technique was so inefficient that I exhausted my reserves after only a few shots. But even after I got the hang of it and was able to fire a full, sixty-bullet magazine, I still retained the mindset of saving these shots for the huntsmen.

After all, why waste precious aura when the grunts are no different from normal humans when you catch them unaware?

"To be fair," I think when the radio in the dead guy's hand becomes filled with loud chatter from the now alerted gang, "this strategy worked perfectly well until now."

If there were a silver lining to all this, it would be that I messed up with the last guy on the floor, which meant I still had a bit of time before the rest of the gang got up here from the basement.

Since I had already toured the entire place from hunting down the patrols, I knew that it only had one way downstairs, and with a quick sprint, I arrived at the wide double doors leading to the staircase.

The place was still empty, but soon the rest of the gang would come to hunt me down.

From what I gathered, Cerberus consisted of forty aura-unlocked thugs and three huntsmen that acted as leaders, so even if I already took down twelve guys, more than thirty still remained. Coupling that with the lost element of surprise would make any sane person retreat and regroup.

"Yes," I mused while taking out my sticky bombs, "a sane person would do that, wouldn't they?"

I start hearing voices coming from downstairs, so I quickly stick a few bombs around the door frame and withdraw to take cover behind the shelves.

I trained my rifle to the doors, and without waiting for very long at all, the first gang members came bursting out.

"WHO'S THERE?!"

"YOU'RE DEAD, YOU FU-!"

BANG BANG

Since I had already raised the alarm, the thugs were all channelling their aura, but since I also used generous amounts of it on bullets, they fell just as quickly as ordinary civilians.

The thugs came sporadically and without order, so picking them off as soon as they came proved no problem at all, and it was only after eight of them had fallen that they stopped blindly coming out.

"Okay, twenty left, plus the three big boys." I held the detonation switch in hand and hid behind cover again.

Not long after, the doors slammed open to reveal more thugs. Only this time, they came with a muscular huntsman holding a greatsword at the helm. I was stealthily peeking at them from cover, so when they came out, all they found were the bodies of those who came before.

"AAARGH!" the huntsman was furious at the sight of his dead comrades, but since he couldn't see me, he could only shout into the void, "I'LL KILL ALL OF YOU!"

Even though he was standing right in the blast zone, I hesitated to detonate the bombs because, besides the huntsman, only a few grunts would also be affected.

"What are you lot doing?!" The man started barking orders at his underlings while continuing to scan the surroundings, "FIND THOSE F*CKERS!"

""YES!"" The thugs obeyed and started coming out of the staircase.

With the bombs planted and the trigger in my hands, I needed to determine when to press it.

"Five... eight..." I started counting how many thugs were in the blast zone, "ten... twelve..." they were coming out and slowly beginning to spread out, almost coming out of the blast zone, "fourteen... fifteen!"

When the first thugs got right to the edge of the effective explosion radius, I no longer hesitated and pressed the button.

BOOM!

Hidden behind cover, I put away the rifle, took out my Assault Shotgun and rushed out as soon as the shockwave passed. And unlike just a few seconds before when the entrance to the staircase was almost crowded, now it looked practically empty.

Only if you were to ignore the many bodies littering the floor, that is.

Since I had a lot of experience using explosives, I knew I had caught everyone I wanted in the explosion. But what wasn't within my expectations was that nearly half of them survived and were even groaning in pain.

Besides the eight from earlier, I counted sixteen new bodies, including the huntsman, before me, which meant that there were still six grunts and two big boys left.

To my surprise, I looked at the survivors and noticed that the huntsman who stood practically at ground zero of the explosion was among the living.

While I was marvelling at the toughness of huntsmen, my hands were not idle as I gave each survivor a shotgun shell for their trouble.

I knew there was very little time before the rest of the gang got here, so when someone eventually did interrupt my cleanup, I was ready.

The only warning I had of the attack was the slight rustling sound of a foot stepping on the loose rubble scattered from the explosion.

A man with a saber charged me with incredible speed with a thrust aimed at my head.

I dodged to the side and tried to aim my gun at the new arrival, but unfortunately, the swordsman recovered faster and slashed at me first.

I send my aura towards the gun, but this time, I strengthen it instead of applying it to bullets.

Now armed with a weapon that wouldn't be sliced through with one slash, I raised it to block the blade coming at me.

The impact felt like a heavyweight champion swinging a sledgehammer at me, but with gritted teeth and plenty of aura in my limbs, I deflected his blade to the side and smashed the butt of my gun on his jaw in the same motion.

Usually, even without aura, such a strike would knock someone out or outright shatter their jaw, but with a huntsman involved, it only left him dazed.

"But that is plenty."

BANG

With the man's inability to focus, a generous helping of aura sent to the shotgun shell and the gun muzzle literally touching his head, it didn't require a second shot to put him down.

"Dominic!" a shout suddenly came from the staircase, and when I turned to look, I saw a large man, easily two meters tall, wielding an equally large hammer and glaring back at me.

In some places, his clothes were dirty and singed, which tells me that he only appeared now because my detonation timing was apparently luckier than expected. I was a little ways away from the staircase, so I couldn't see the bottom, but I suspect that the last few grunts were also caught in the explosion and blown back downstairs.

"They- they're all dead..." the man looked devastated at the sight before him, but the moment his eyes locked onto mine, they gained a dangerous glint to them, "YOU!"

The man didn't waste any more time and transformed his massive hammer into a slightly shorter but nevertheless enormous gun. And while I didn't recognise obviously the custom design, I could still tell when a machine's purpose was spewing out a lot of bullets.

Knowing that the man was outside my effective shotgun range and I was in his, I immediately ran for cover, which meant the many rows of shelves in the case of the warehouse.

"You. Are. DEAD!" I heard the man shout before a hail of unsuppressed bullets deafened out any other sound.

There were a few shelves between the two of us stocked with boxes filled with a random assortment of goods, but the only effect it seemed to have on the huntsman, was obstructing his vision.

The man was spraying and praying in my general direction since I broke line of sight, but his bullets were powerful, so a few lucky shots still managed to hit me despite all the obstacles between us.

I was channelling my aura into defence, so I only lost aura instead of getting hurt. Thankfully, the man's gun had too high a fire rate for him to enhance his shots.

I dropped low to the ground as the bullets flew wildly above me and waited.

The man continued firing wildly, but the only thing that he managed to accomplish was destroying the warehouse.

After a good ten seconds of firing, with a click, the gun finally ran out of ammo, and I took that chance to get up, switch back to my rifle and get out of cover.

The man was trying to reload, but when he saw me come back out in the open, he gave up and transformed his weapon back into a hammer, glaring at me with the same determination as someone on a suicide mission.

The current situation mimicked the one just before, only now, I was the one with the better range. And in this case, it didn't look like the man would go for cover.

I aimed my rifle at him, which seemed to signal him to rush at me, but unfortunately for him, by that point, it was already too late.

After sending plenty of aura into a bullet, I calmly aimed at the charging man's head and took the shot.

BANG

The man immediately stumbled, interrupting his charge, but surprisingly didn't fall, much less die.

Of course, that didn't prevent me from firing more shots, so it didn't change anything, but I couldn't help but marvel at the man's toughness.

BANG

With the second shot, the huntsman could no longer hold on and fell, but he was still clearly alive.

BANG

The third shot broke his aura, and after a few seconds of waiting, it seemed that the man would no longer be moving.

Breathing out a sigh of relief, I lower the gun and take a moment to think back on what just happened.

My successful attacks against the gangs this past week clearly made me complacent, which led to me making such a mistake. If not for the stupid building design with a single staircase and the luck I had with the explosives, which took out most of the aura-unlocked thugs, this fight could have just as easily gone the other way.

ugh...

My self-reflecting was interrupted by weak moans of pain coming from all around me, which reminded me that I was in the middle of cleaning up before the huntsman with the saber decided to introduce himself.

I shake away the distracting thoughts with a smile and raise my rifle because, from cleanup to looting, there is still a lot of work to do.

~oxoxo~

Sorry for dying on you all, but I finally crawled out of my grave, and I will continue writing this!

Thank you for commenting btw, I love reading your thoughts!