Chapter 1523: Hopeful
He turned to the carriage.
BADUMP
BADUMP
BADUMP
He had already deactivated his Martial Heart, yet he could feel his heart beating harder than it ever had before.
He was finally here.
After nearly eight years, he had finally reached this point. He almost couldn't believe it. He had dreams about this moment more times than he could count.
He took off his mask, tossing it away.
"Huff..." He took a deep breath, before forcing open the carriage door and surging in with his hand stretched out, his arms reaching out.
CLASP!
He caught a hand.
A hand that held a detonator to a bomb.
A bomb in a man.
"Not so fast..." Rui whispered. "Deacon Vernes..."
There he was.
His expression crumpled with rage. Fury had turned his eyes bloodshot red. His nails drew blood from how hard his fists were clenched. He looked older than Rui had realized with Riemannian Echo. His skin had grown paler and aged. His hair had greyed significantly in the many years since their last meeting, leaning more towards salt than pepper.
"Time hasn't been kind to you, has it?" It was spontaneous, yet he had already uttered it before he realized it. He didn't know what to say.
Or rather, he had too much to say; he didn't know what not to say.
Deacon opened his mouth.
Yet no words escaped.
Instead, he stuck out his tongue before biting down with every ounce of force he could muster.
CRACK
Rui shoved the detonator between the man's teeth, jamming his suicide attempt.
"Even if you cut your tongue and bled out, your heart would not stop beating immediately. A Martial Senior like myself could effortlessly clear ten kilometers before you actually die," Rui informed with a calmness that surprised even himself.
The man's eyes widened with infuriated shock at the fact that Rui knew about his secret measure.
For a moment, there was silence as the two of them beheld each other.
"Even if I gave you the opportunity to get your last words out, you would just use it to try and kill yourself, knowing you..." Rui sighed. He turned back to the man. "You know, I've always wondered what I'd do when I got my hands on you. Would I chop you up into little bits, or would I try some of the torture methods that were practiced during the medieval age back in previous life? I was never able to decide. Yet, I was always certain I would make you suffer."
His eyes softened. "Yet now that this moment has actually arrived, I don't feel even the slightest shred of rage, fury, or hatred."
Rui glanced at his hand. For some reason, he was unable to muster up any desire to torment the man that he thought he hated with a venomous intensity. He delved within himself, trying to understand himself. Naturally, his senses were at peak alertness. Every twitch the man made, everything within dozens of kilometers of Rui was within his inspection. Nothing was allowed to interrupt this moment.
"When I was too weak, I hated you more than anything. Yet, now that I am strong enough to act on my hatred, I don't feel anything..." Rui murmured as he gained a deep understanding of himself. "I see..."
It was his own weakness that he hated more than anything. His inability to eliminate a threat to himself and his family. That was the true source of his hatred.
And now it was gone, to a large degree.
Rui pulled out the detonator from the man's mouth.
The man gritted his teeth. "Yo-"
THWOOM
Rui fired off Death's Sympathy. Yet this time, he hyper-focused the projectile like a scalpel rather than a bullet. It plunged into the man's skull, crushing only his cerebral cortex and nothing else.
It annihilated his consciousness forever.
His heart, however, kept beating.
Yet Rui was not satisfied with just that.
He stepped outside of the carriage, taking one last look at Chairman Deacon's living corpse, before activating his Martial Heart and taking off.
In just a second, he was more than ten kilometers away. He turned around inhaling deeply.
THWOOM!
He fired a single sound bullet, annihilating the carriage, and preparing himself.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Yet when it arrived, it arrived at a speed that beggared Rui's mind. BOOOOOM!!!!!
An eruption of raw power that exceeded anything else he had ever come across blinded him. It was as though a fragment of the Sun had descended upon this world.
RUMBLE!!!
The world around him shook, unlike anything he had ever seen before.
WHOOOOOOOOSH!!!
A tremendous gust of wind and shockwave, the likes of which Rui could hardly believe, emerged as a result of the titanic power of the explosion. THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!
Rui defended himself with a tier-five Transverse Resonance clashing with the portion of the shockwave that was going to crash into Rui.
It took a minute to subside.
The crater left behind was enormous, large enough to fill a fragment of the Shionel Dungeon.
"This is supposed to be quasi-Master level..." Rui muttered. "Sheesh."
It was a shame that Rui could not afford to admire the destructive power of the bomb. Such an enormous explosion would not go unnoticed, and would certainly not be treated normally. There was a good chance that a Martial Master would be deployed within an hour at the very most.
"Time to get the hell out of here," Rui drank some potent potions, restoring his stamina as he activated Neo Godspeed and Greater Phantomind Void, racing off with Gale Force Breathing and Outer Convergence at an extreme speed that far surpassed his conventional limits. By the time the initial deployments arrived, he would be thousands of kilometers away. The assassination had not been as clean as he hoped, considering the eye-drawing explosion, but it was the best he could do with what he had at the time.
A long chapter of his life had finally come to an end, and a new chapter of his life was to begin.
As Rui raced away, a small smile emerged on his face as he felt more hopeful for the future than he had in the past eight years.