Chapter 25: Duel x Storm II

Her bulging eyes gave her shock away. There was a rumble in the distance.

“… My name…?”

“I know everything… I see everything. The only thing… that escapes my eyes in this world… is that which… cannot be seen to begin with. So, stop acting so high and mighty… little princess.” coughed the criminal through the dark, grinning mask. “... So what if you own a gang? So what if you own the whole city? As far as I’ve seen, you barely even own yourself… You’re just another disposable piece to use up on the game board. And now… you’re going to answer me, nice and slowly. For starters…”

She heard dry steps to her right, along with a few quiet growls. And then more steps to her left. After that, the growls had started to grow, both in number and volume, and soon they’d been surrounded by a group of disfigured, heavily weakened, yet still standing Phantoms.

“Damn it…” the masked figure staggered.

A bitter grin returned to the pale girl’s face. The rumbling became stronger. Louder. Its fury would be known.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you gonna take ‘em? You looked really damn confident just a few seconds ago. So, go on! Kill me, or maybe one of them, who cares? If you can even fight properly, that is. Otherwise, I’m sure someone will grab you and turn you into beef in just a moment.”

He checked the case on his back. The rumbling was becoming louder and louder by the second, deafening thunder threatening the land from above. 

“Well, well… It seems I’ll have to cut this little meeting short. But I won’t forget that taunt, Griffith. We’ll meet again.”

He brought out the shotgun again and shot the girl twice in the face, leaving her to writhe loudly on the floor, then spun around and gunned down as many of the others as he could. He withdrew the blade and darted past the would-be barrage of Phantoms, stumbling toward the edge of the roof.

Amid her wild screeches, the girl still managed to force herself up from the floor and shout through her tattered hood with all the air left in her lungs:

“Everyone, after him!! Don’t let him escape!”

He leapt right off the building, leaving behind his final flash grenade to blow the pursuers’ senses away one last time.

Her features now a bloody, quivering mess, lips split in half, nose and right eye completely gone, she sprang forward a few feet only, then inevitably coming to a stop, unable to continue.

Her body was covered in wounds… Bullets, pellets, stab wounds. All dripping and burning as though she’d been plunged into a hellish fire.

Not that they were all the same…

The bullet and pellet ones were reacting about as well as would be expected, slowly closing up and vanishing as they should. Although those generally took the longest, about five minutes, and caused her noticeable pain anytime she moved.

Any melee-inflicted cuts, however, those were still there, just the same, even ones she recalled from the beginning of the altercation. Those wounds just wouldn’t go away.

Each stab, each gash remained on her, unchanged, burning insufferably in continuous, tortuous throbs. The regular workings of her organism had been tampered with. Somehow.

She knew it was foolish to continue.

He was pathetic. He was a coward who relied on shadows and deception to operate, but at the same time, inexplicably, he had power beyond anything she’d ever seen, and the best move at the moment was undoubtedly to fall back and regroup. Yet, likewise inexplicably, something seemed to propel her forward. A formless, invisible force that prevented any clarity or reason from reaching her.

Safety shouldn’t be that big of a concern, should it? All she needed was a little incentive to keep going. Regrets were for the weak, after all.

Begrudgingly, she took another fistful of plastic tubes from her jacket and jammed it in her mouth, crushing the hard objects with her tusks and swallowing the contents in a lone gulp. She then spit out the mashed pieces of plastic like mere chewing gum and pulled back up what little was left of her hood, obscuring most of her face as she felt her features oddly change once again.

They slowly crooked and twisted themselves on a whim, remolding their form and structure as though made of clay. The pain on the shot wounds subsided and they started to heal at a faster rate. As expected, the blade slashes still remained unchanged, but little did she care for them at that point. So long as she knew the cause, she could brush it aside as a problem to be solved later.

No one was supposed to take in such an extreme amount of haema. Not even the most terminal of addicts would have gone that far…

That was, however, far from being one of her priorities at that moment.

The girl kept her head down and headed toward her subordinates at the edge, hiding her face under the slowly withering piece of cloth, turning around only for a short moment to roar a few wrathful words:

“What the hell is wrong with you, you idiots!?”

You are reading story Crimson Phantom at novel35.com

She was barely able to hear her own voice as she let her arms down from her face and ran past them, as the utter lack of response only served to madden her further.

The Phantoms simply stood there, lost in thought, as their leader’s features seemed to change more and more, to the point they could barely recognize her anymore.

Some were exhausted, battered, heavily weakened by the venom. Others had simply lost all morale, and thus any energy left to continue the fight.

She grit her sharp teeth, berating them further as she moved.

“He’s getting away! Do I have to do everything here!!??”

And right then she jumped off, heavy throbbing in her eardrums.

Following in his general direction, she soon found herself leaping over the Urban Center’s main connecting avenue, as the blinding street lighting made it hard to see into the footing down below. Still, she squinted her eyes, dead set on…

“Found you!”

She fell several meters down and landed on her feet atop a low roof. Her knees reverberated slightly, but the bothersome stabbing soon let up.

He was now far ahead, on about the same altitude level as her, running and jumping hastily as he moved farther and farther away from her and the building they’d been in.

But she couldn’t let him escape. The White Lady darted forward at once, covering several meters in a mere fifteen seconds, while the returning roar of thunder once again began to echo from behind and all around her. The incessant raindrops hit her hands and face, frigid.

It wasn’t long before the initially timid drops had turned into an utter torrent, of a frozen shower. It was a thin, yet utterly piercing feeling. The downpour now befalling her felt colder than even her own hands on such a late night. As time went on, the increasing humidity had made the paving she now ran through feel increasingly slippery as time went on, and she considered the risk of making a mistake and falling down below.

Even though she’d gone down several levels after their fugitive, it would, nevertheless be a quite long dive from where she was, and the possible concussion she’d be getting from it could very well manifest throughout many more weeks in the form of a grueling headache as well. She knew from experience.

Plus, the now continuous streams of rain in front of her, lit by the sky-high lamps and billboards, glowing even stronger as though intending to challenge the relentless lightning in the horizon heavily hindered her vision, became ever noticeable as the minutes went on. It was all starting to block out much of what she could see, all while giving her the faint illusion of her target’s vanishing little by little in front of her, farther, ever farther ahead.

(Shit… Concentrate. You’re almost onto him!)

But none of it mattered. She pressed forward. A single jump more and she could cut several meters between the two, allowing her to finally reach him. She was grinning again.

Oh, what should she do? Break his legs? Amputate his arms? Maybe decapitate him? Those were all rather extreme methods of capture, but she was running out of time and especially out of patience. Anything would do.

What could the fastest, most efficient method be? She was sure she and her allies had already rendered him out of any more trump cards, so this was the best chance she would ever get at nabbing him. Wasting it was not an option.

The rumbling thunder kept on. The gap was shrinking, one meter at a time, and soon the fleeting scoundrel would be within her grasp. She could see his back with the large case strapped on it and his moving legs much more clearly now, wildly splashing around along the incessant downpour than now threatened to swallow him whole. First the right leg, then the left. And then his arms came into sight as well, just like so. First his right, flailing about aimlessly, and then the left one, repeating the same motion–!!

Wait. It wasn’t flailing. Rather, it wasn’t even moving at all. It seemed almost frozen solid, bent and turned backwards in some strange position. Though she couldn’t see any of it from the elbow down.

Her eyes widened from below her stained rags.

The rest of his arm was inside the bag.

The black mask turned around to face her. Neither the hissing winds nor the cascading rain seemed to deter its lethal, impenetrable stare. Those eyes pierced through it all until they reached hers.

(Shit!)

As if made of hard rubber, his left arm suddenly pulled all the way out in an unorthodox stroke, and a fistful of a pistol was pointed at her in the blink of an eye. Before she could blink again, another round of gunfire had blared out as one more black hole appeared among the few others in her jacket, and she stumbled forward, losing speed.

Words could barely describe what exactly she’d felt in that instant.

Was it fear? Rage? Shock? Indifference? She wasn’t sure, but perhaps something along those lines. Her focus had been solely on what she’d seen. That guy… He hadn’t even taken aim with the damn weapon in hand. Those corpse-like eyes had done all the work before.

You can find story with these keywords: Crimson Phantom, Read Crimson Phantom, Crimson Phantom novel, Crimson Phantom book, Crimson Phantom story, Crimson Phantom full, Crimson Phantom Latest Chapter