In one insignificant moment of time, Chris felt and experienced more than in all nineteen years of his previous life.
The unceasing ring of gunfire tried to drown out the panicked retreat of the Irish mob's higher ranks. Perhaps they'd hoped for a quick getaway, but unfortunately for them, Chris felt absolutely everything.
He felt the hundreds of bullets that every second tried to punch through his body. Desperately, but completely without result. Not to mention that sometimes he could feel bullets hitting him directly in the eyes. A rather peculiar sensation, but one blink was enough to brush away the unpleasant tickle.
He felt his foot — bare now that his cheap shoes had torn apart — stepping over broken glass and shell casings. And this little stroll caused him zero discomfort.
Unceasing muzzle flashes, cursing, screams of pain...
It all felt as if it was happening somewhere else, to someone else.
"Mad Surge" truly did strip away sanity, but Chris felt as though — by accident, or perhaps by fate — he had found a perfectly ideal balance.
Every centimeter of his muscles — frail in appearance but containing incredible strength — was ready for action. One thought, one single hint from his mind, and...
"AAAGH!" A random gangster screamed as Chris, in a movement invisible to those around him, snapped both his legs. One simple sweep had almost crippled him for life.
The automatic rifle the screaming man had dropped, Chris caught in midair as well. But he didn't know how to shoot and had no intention of learning right now.
Swinging the weapon like a baseball bat, Chris took aim at a man standing not far from him, screaming hysterically.
BOOM!
Chris had never liked baseball. Or any other sport, honestly. He'd never been good at any of it. But...
The literal throw of the rifle came out perfectly. Precise, measured, and brutally painful. For whoever Chris was aiming at, of course.
As if in slow motion he watched the weapon spin through the air several times before the hard stock connected with the unknown man's face. A broken nose, knocked-out teeth, and likely broken facial bones would put the gangster out of commission for a long time.
And all of this happened in a matter of a few seconds.
Chris had never felt so... alive. He felt like an actual god.
Every movement of these Irish gangsters was laid out before him like an open book. Their faces frozen in grimaces of panic, clenched teeth, sweat soaking through their clothes and streaming down their foreheads. Nothing could hide from his gaze.
Their every movement, every bullet. Nothing could hurt him.
The blows, carrying all the accumulated rage Chris had stored up, simply... destroyed. Broke.
Killed.
And Chris couldn't exactly say he felt no guilt — it was just that his upbringing had left an indelible mark on him.
Yes, in everyday life Chris tried to keep his head down and stay invisible. But that didn't mean the naive young man didn't know what death was.
Chris was crying. He was sobbing with every part of himself, trying to hold back the streams of snot with his hand. The sight of him and his wailing was so pitiful that under any other circumstances someone would certainly have tried to comfort him. Especially since Chris was only nine years old. He could be forgiven for this.
Except every even marginally responsible adult had no attention to spare for him. Just as they had none for the other children who were crying alongside Chris, staring at one moaning body on the ground.
"Ha..." The Black teenager exhaled in incredible pain, pressing his hands to his bloodied stomach. "Ooouh..."
"Ray of Hope Orphanage!" Julia, an older Black girl who was responsible for watching the younger children, screamed frantically into her phone. "We have a gunshot wound! Please come as quickly as you can!"
Chris, like the children around him, cried even harder.
"He..." A peer of Chris's began murmuring something through his sobs. "He g-got caught in a cr-crossfire between g-gangs..."
"Don't lie," a bitter older girl, around fourteen, contradicted him. "He's been hanging around the local gang for a long time now..."
And Chris cried and screamed even harder, though it seemed impossible to cry harder than he already was. Simply because in that moment Chris realized that...
The ambulance wouldn't make it in time. It never did.
"NO! PLEA—"
Chris's hand struck another gangster and sent his broken body rolling across the asphalt.
And Chris didn't particularly care whether this representative of the criminal world survived. If he was lucky, he'd live — if not, well... Chris wasn't going to cry over it.
Because he had a particular relationship with death.
Breathing deeply, Chris realized that at some point the gunfire had simply stopped. Because...
There was no one left to shoot.
The greater part of them had already piled into their SUVs and driven to the docks, to their operational base. Others were either unconscious, or... would never wake up.
"And that's it?" Chris whispered, straining slightly. "My revenge ends here?!"
The fury wasn't clouding his vision, but it made its presence known every single second. And Chris had no desire to let such a powerful impulse go to waste.
Narrowing his eyes, Chris realized that his vision had also received an incredible boost. He could clearly see the gangsters fleeing from him in panic. And immediately understood that he had no intention of letting them go.
"I'll catch them," Chris grinned with a hint of madness. "I'll run them down and finish every last one!"
Crouching into a sprinter's pose, Chris's toes effortlessly sank into the hard asphalt. Tensing every bone in his body, Chris...
Jumped.
"For crying out loud!" Jumps of five or more meters, followed by the landings, had never agreed with Jessica.
First, not that you'd know it from looking at her, but she wanted to come across as at least a little cool. And her clumsy, brief "flights" didn't look cool from any angle.
Second, flights like that drew attention. And drawing attention was something Jessica disliked in any form whatsoever.
But due to a growing knot of panic and anxiety, combined with the deep night — practically no transport running — she was forced to resort to the only method of accelerated movement available to her.
Meaning "simply" large jumps, which let her get up onto low buildings and then hop across rooftops.
Having made another jump and landed on the ground, Jessica listened for the gunshots. The gunshots that seemed to have stopped. Even though she was close to the presumed location of the "little war."
In the next second a whole column of black SUVs rolled onto the road. It was clear that all the vehicles had not only a "criminal" character, but also a very compelling reason for a panicked retreat.
"Watch where you're going, you complete idiots!" Jessica exploded when one nearly ran her down.
Seeing off the fleeing — almost certainly gangsters — with a murderous glare and a few muttered curses, Jessica was about to continue on her way, but...
A brick landed right next to her, falling straight from the sky.
"What the hell?" Jessica muttered. Realizing she needed to look up, Jessica's eyes nearly fell out of her head. "WHAT THE HELL?!"
Because up above was... Chris, freaking Biggie Smalls, mister "I can die nine more times," Wallace.
And he was...
Chasing, for crying out loud, the column of cars. And the way he was doing it!
Dressed in nothing but jeans — which at this point resembled shorts thanks to their many torn sections — Chris was simply plunging his hands into brick walls. As if they were made of clay! The young man had suddenly acquired completely unreal reaction speed and coordination, letting him push off from any surface.
In one moment he made an incredible leap — far larger and more graceful than anything Jessica could manage — off a wall, then grabbed onto a fire escape.
The next moment Chris caught onto a smooth wall, creating holes on the fly and latching onto the gaps he'd just made.
And the speed of his movement was simply staggering.
Jessica hadn't even recovered from the shock before she realized that Chris was actually catching up to the cars.
"TARZAN!" Jessica bellowed with the full force of her lungs, trying to get Chris's attention. "Tarzan raised in the urban jungle, damn it! Chris, you idiot!"
Zero response.
Chris paid no attention to her screams, nor to the fact that he was kind of, right in the middle of the city... demonstrating his abilities.
Realizing she wasn't going to get through to him by yelling, Jessica stepped into the middle of the road and stopped the first taxi she saw with her own body. Fortunately there were plenty of those in the city even at night. Though they were refusing to drive toward "the place with the shooting." But right now Jessica was firmly determined to "convince" the driver, whoever he might be.
"Hello," the driver was a cheerful Indian man. "My name is Dopinder..."
"Don't care!" Jessica cut him off. "See that guy up there who's leaving a trail of dust and falling bricks behind him?!"
Dopinder looked up and swallowed nervously.
"No?"
"Don't give me that!" Jessica jabbed him in the shoulder quite painfully. "Follow him! I'm paying double fare!"
"But I don't want to..." Dopinder bleated.
"A thousand bucks!"
"I'll get you there in style!"
"How was I supposed to know the old man had some unkillable killing machine up his sleeve?!"
Having arrived at the operational base — one of many warehouses in a port district — the Irish mob boss ordered everyone to prepare for the arrival of a guest.
Because it was hard to miss a half-naked kid who was literally pushing off walls and rooftops. Very hard. Especially when in one of his maneuvers he dropped like an aerial bomb onto the last car in the column, completely obliterating its front end and then causing it to flip.
"HE'S HERE!"
Everyone present began firing frantically, practically in a panic, at the figure that had descended from a rooftop on a nearby building. The fire of around forty men proved to be an obstacle even for the unkillable Chris, but he still advanced, centimeter by centimeter, toward them.
Step by step, Chris's figure took on a downright demonic character in the eyes of the panicking gangsters. Crazed stare, bloodied hands, streaks from countless bullet wounds. He didn't need to add anything — people's imaginations filled in the details on their own.
And it was no surprise that at a certain point some of them simply... ran. And the first "deserters" triggered a genuine chain reaction of rifles dropped on the ground and hands raised in the air.
"We surrender!"
BOOM!
Chris's hand, having crossed ten meters in a single lunge, punched clean through a gangster's head.
And over the next several minutes Chris silently and methodically destroyed the remnants of what had once been a decent gang. His blows were merciless and every other one ended in a fatality. Bullets couldn't touch him, and the occasional grenade only sent him into a brief flight. Cars that men were hiding behind were flipped over onto the shooters with a single strained heave.
It wasn't Chris who carried out this slaughter.
It was... the Berserker.
Once again the gunfire died on its own. And Chris found himself standing among heaps of broken, groaning bodies.
Breathing deeply, Chris tried to process what he had done.
Under the influence of emotion and rage, he had destroyed an entire gang without a trace of hesitation. And even as the effect of "Mad Surge" began to subside, Chris, though shocked by his own actions, didn't particularly regret what he'd done.
"DIE, YOU PIECE OF—!"
With wide eyes Chris saw, in the warehouse doorway, the only surviving member of the gang. The boss himself, who had on his shoulder...
An RPG.
BOOM!
The RPG round hit him square in the chest. The explosion was so powerful that his eardrums burst, and his body was flung into the bay at incredible speed — the bay on whose shore the Irish gang's base was located.
An explosion of that magnitude nearly killed Chris once again. The consequences of his many wounds were multiplied by the exhaustion of both body and mind. All of it culminated in Chris, bleeding freely, slowly and inevitably sinking to the bottom.
And only the last silhouette — one that had leaped straight in after him, arms reaching toward him — brought warmth to Chris's drowning mind.
"Jessica, thank you for pulling my ass out of the fire one more time..."
After that, Chris's mind refused to keep him conscious any longer.
SYNCHRONIZATION: 39%