The impact was sudden and brutal.
Lockstep covered the 30 metres distance between them and slammed into the man's side, driving him into the concrete wall. The force cracked the air with a dull thud, dust shaking loose as both of them staggered on the cold floor.
The Psycho hissed, more annoyed than hurt.
"Who the hell are you jerks? And why are you following me, huh?"
Lockstep did not answer. He came up from the stagger low and tight, snapping his fist toward the Psycho's ribs with trained economy. The blow landed cleanly. It should have broken bone.
Instead, it felt like punching reinforced concrete.
The shock ran up Lockstep's arm, numbing his fingers instantly.
The Psycho barely shifted from his position.
His head tilted a fraction with mild curiosity rather than pain.
"…Oh, I see. So you're not with the police."
A fist drove into Lockstep's abdomen with impossible speed.
The air blasted out of Lockstep's lungs in a dry wheeze as his feet left the ground. His body slammed into the opposite wall hard enough to crack concrete, dust and grit raining down as he slid to one knee.
Before he could recover, the Psycho was already there.
A knee came up, smashing into Lockstep's shoulder. Accompanied by the sound of something popping, white pain exploded across his nerves as he rolled aside just in time to avoid a downward stomp that cratered the pavement where his head had been.
The corridor trembled.
Gravewire's voice crackled in the comms, sharp with alarm.
"His output just spiked again. That's not just physical reinforcement. Perhaps his ability revolves around manipulating one of the four fundamental forces because the pressure I'm sensing is insane! He's definitely a Level 4 Psycho!!"
Lockstep spat blood and forced himself upright.
"Tch. Figured out that much already."
The Psycho stretched his neck slowly, with his joints cracking audibly.
"You really should have stayed back. I was having a decent morning."
Lockstep grinned ferally.
"Why would I when I'm just getting started? I'll definitely catch you, you bastard."
He charged again.
This time, he feinted left and swung right, aiming for the jaw. The Psycho caught his fist mid-swing with one hand.
Lockstep felt pressure clamp down instantly. The bones within creaked and his endons screamed.
The Psycho smiled. Then he twisted with considerable force.
Lockstep cried out as he was yanked forward and slammed headfirst into the wall. His vision burst into sparks. Before gravity could reclaim him, an elbow crashed into his spine, folding him to the ground.
The Psycho stepped back, examining his hand as if mildly disappointed.
"Your form's good and your strength is pretty strength too. But c'mon... your attacks are predictable as hell. So predictable that I could almost cry. Even a blind man would have no problem dodging your extremely boring assault. Do something different! Change the channel a little!"
He raised his foot and brought it down.
Lockstep rolled at the last possible second. The impact shattered the concrete where his chest had been. The fragments skittered down the corridor with incredible speed like shrapnel.
High above, Specter-7 sucked in a sharp breath.
"Jesus Christ," she muttered, tracking the chaos through a new angle. "He's really playing with him."
"Lockstep, disengage," Blackglass ordered. "That's not a suggestion."
Lockstep forced himself up anyway, one arm hanging uselessly at his side.
"Negative," he rasped. "If he gets past me, he will reach civilians. Who knows what this bastard can do."
The Psycho laughed.
"That's the spirit, old man. Fight some more. Make this interesting for me!"
He completely vanished from view.
It was similar to a scene change in movies because there was no afterimage left behind as a result of the high speed movement. The uncanny fellow simply moved from Point A to Point B.
Almost like teleportation.
"...!"
Lockstep barely had time to register the distortion before something struck his side. He flew again, spinning through the air like a bamboo copter before he crashed through a stack of rusted crates. His back hit the ground hard enough to steal consciousness for a second.
The Psycho appeared above him, crouched casually on a broken beam.
"Man, you're really boring. Do you work out at all?" he asked conversationally. "In any case, it doesn't matter."
He dropped on top of Lockstep.
"Let's see here. You ruined my morning with all that predictability. My coffee was still hot, you know? And now I have to waste my energy on you."
Lockstep groaned, with blood already trickling from his split lip, His one usable arm strained futilely against the Psycho's grip.
The Psycho's fingers dug lightly into Lockstep's shoulders, holding him down with a pressure that felt impossibly strong without leaving visible bruises. Lockstep's muscles screamed, but the grip didn't relent. It wasn't that the psycho was overwhelming stronger than him in terms of physical strength.
No, Lockstep didn't think that was the case. The problem was something else.
"You see," the Psycho continued with a calm voice that was almost cheerful in tone, "it's not that I personally mind a bit of chaos. I love chaos. But your moves are like a broken metronome. Tick. Tick. Tick. Boring. I like my chaos to be… elegant."
He shifted slightly, adjusting his balance on Lockstep's chest with uncanny precision. Lockstep tried to buck him off, but the man above was as immovable as a statue, his weight distributed perfectly.
Then came the first punch.
It landed squarely across Lockstep's jaw with a sickening crack. The force traveled up his skull, rattling teeth and loosening a fragment of bone. Immediately, he felt exploding pain, and Lockstep's vision swam with red.
"Ugh!" Lockstep coughed, attempting to shove the Psycho off. His knuckles scraped against defined muscle, and the Psycho merely smirked.
"Come now. You can't hurt me that way. You're strong for a human, yes, but I'm… more than that. You're cute when you try, though."
Another punch came, faster than Lockstep could flinch, this one hitting his temple. His head whipped to the side, ears ringing, balance entirely gone. A third, aimed for the ribs, landed with the force of a hammer, and his breath was forced from him in a single, ragged gasp.
Lockstep barely managed to twist his body to absorb some of the blows, but the Psycho adapted instantly, shifting weight and angles like the fight was a choreographed dance. Every time Lockstep tried leverage, the Psycho countered before he could even commit.
The corridor walls rattled with their struggle, dust and debris falling in miniature avalanches. Specter-7 adjusted her scope, her fingers tightening on the rifle. Through the lens, Lockstep looked tiny, beaten down, pinned by a man who now resembled a highschool bully.
He was certainly mean.
Then his fist connected with Lockstep's face again, not a glancing blow but a crushing, precise hit. Lockstep's head snapped violently to the side, his vision shattering into a kaleidoscope of pain, and a trickle of blood slid down his cheek. The Psycho tilted his head, almost apologetically, and punched him again.
"See? This is why I don't bother with amateurs," he wiped the dust from his coat as if the blood on Lockstep's face was nothing more than an inconvenient smudge. "They try, they flail… and yet, in the end, it's just… boring "
With no intention of stopping, he continued to punch repeatedly, again and again, relentlessly mangling Lockstep's otherwise handsome features.
Pap! Pap! Pap! The barrage sent his legs jerking upward, spasming violently like a woman wracked by an overwhelming raw orgasm. Then another punch landed squarely on his right eye, bruising it black and swelling it until it puffed, ballooned and misshapen.
Far away, approximately three hundred metres away, Specter-7's finger hovered over the trigger, her tension mounting with each passing second.
"Blackbird. Do you copy? I have the son of a bitch in my sights. Give me permission to shoot."
"Negative. Hold your fire. Do you want to hit Mr Jin?"
"If I don't shoot, then he's going to die either way! Which one is it?!!" She screamed into the receiver.
Even so, she understood Black bird's concerns.
Her ability Magnetic Acceleration allowed Specter-7 to generate at least between 50,000 and 100,000 volts of electricity from her body. At its most basic level, she could generate and manipulate electromagnetic vectors, tracking electron flow, nudging magnetic fields, and accelerating conductive matter along precisely calculated paths. Fifty thousand volts sounded impressive on paper, but the amperage was low, the kind of output that would stun, scorch, or interfere with machinery. It wasn't something that obliterated anything or anyone outright from the jump.
That limitation was why she wasn't on the Level 4 roster.
And which was exactly why the Lorentz Driver was created just for her.
The rifle rested against her shoulder, matte black and unassuming at a glance, but nothing about it was conventional. The Lorentz Driver was not a firearm in the traditional sense. It had no explosive chamber, nor propellant. Instead, the barrel housed a stacked linear acceleration array: superconducting rails, micro-coils, and phase-synchronized capacitors layered so densely they resembled a solid core rather than a hollow tube.
Every component existed for one purpose: to turn Specter-7's ability into a catalyst.
When her fingers brushed the grip, the weapon synced instantly. Bioelectric signals from her nervous system were intercepted, filtered, and magnified. Her electromagnetic output, which was usually normally scattered and limited, was caught, stabilized, and driven forward through the rifle's rails via a perfectly aligned Lorentz force. The Driver did not generate power on its own. It forced her ability into coherence, compressing and accelerating it until even a non-explosive tungsten slug became a weapon of absurd lethality. Fired rounds didn't just travel fast along a straight line, they followed calculated magnetic vectors, ignoring wind resistance, compensating for gravity, even correcting mid-flight through micro-adjustments in the surrounding field or so.
A coin-sized projectile could punch through reinforced concrete, armored vehicles… or a human body reinforced by abilities far above normal limits.
One hundred times amplification.
For less than a second, her Level 3 ceiling was irrelevant.
In that instant, she became something else entirely.
A pseudo-Level 5 Shifter.
Specter-7 exhaled slowly, her breathing syncing with the rifle's hum as capacitors charged.
In her scope, the Psycho loomed over Lockstep, still smiling and even so arrogant.
One shot.
That was all it would take.
But this wasn't a weapon she could just fire casually like a normal sniper or pistol. Each shot took a tremendous amount of energy out from Specter-7. Her current limit was three shots. For this reason, and this reason alone, her aim had to be as accurate as possible. More importantly, the amount of environmental destruction and casualties that would emerge from a missed or reckless shot... honestly, she didn't want to think about it.
She took a deep breath, washing her away her growing anxiety and waited. She waited, waited some more and continued to wait.
Lockstep's body convulsed under the Psycho's grip, every nerve screaming in protest. The man above him was unfandomably strong, but not infallible. Muscle memory, years of training, and sheer survival instinct kicked in.
With a grunt, Lockstep twisted violently, leveraging his remaining arm and the momentum of the Psycho's slight forward lean. As his shoulder popped free, he rolled hard and kicked off the floor with the strength he had left, sliding across shattered concrete and debris.
Lockstep staggered to his feet and forced himself into a fighting stance, one arm hanging uselessly, the other coiled like a spring. The Psycho raised an eyebrow, almost bored.
"Finally. You're awake. Thought you'd stay down for a while."
"Not a chance," Lockstep rasped, wiping blood from his lip. "You're going down, you sick bastard."
The Psycho tilted his head, then like a predator playing with a particularly stubborn mouse vanished. The corridor went empty for a heartbeat. Then a blur of motion... Lockstep barely dodged a strike that would have torn him in two.
High above, Specter-7 adjusted her scope, heart hammering against her ribcage. Her fingers hovered over the trigger of the Lorentz Driver, each microsecond stretching unbearably.
One shot.
She centered the Psycho in her crosshair, calculating vectors, electron flows, environmental variables. The Lorentz Driver's rails hummed, a high-pitched whine that set the air on edge. Capacitors glowed faintly, magnetic fields coiling invisibly along the barrel.
The Psycho, completely unaware, repeatedly tossed Lockstep around whenever he tried to launch an attack and landed a crushing blow to Lockstep's side, sending him sprawling into a pile of rusted crates.
Just then...
"Do it!" Blackbird shouted from the other end of the receiver.
"With pleasure."
Specter-7 squeezed the trigger. The rifle responded instantly. A microsecond of alignment, a perfect compression of her electromagnetic vectors, and the tungsten slug ignited along the rail with invisible, terrifying force.
Almost like thunder, the noise rumbled in with a slight delay.
BAAAAAAAMMMMMM!!! Accompanied by the sound of a tremendous explosion, the bullet ripped from the barrel and accelerated with such speed that briefly transcended the boundaries of perception. Dust and debris around it warped slightly, bending subtly toward the vector.
"Huh?"
The Psycho's smile faltered upon sensing something was wrong.
As his sense of balance was partially destroyed, he staggered and glanced over his shoulder. At the same time, Lockstep, who was running away from the enemy, stumbled toward cover.
A second later, the shot tore through the corridor like a streak of lightning, carrying with it a fierce shockwave and everything in its path shook. Concrete cracked, metal groaned, and the Psycho's figure blurred, too fast for the eye to track, but even he wasn't completely immune to the laws of physics.
The Lorentz Driver's amplified electromagnetic acceleration meant that even the Level 4 Psycho now faced something approaching a Level 5-grade vector assault.
"...!!"
The Psycho barely had time to register the attack. His eyes widened for a fraction of a second before the lightning lance slammed toward his face. If he had been a normal Level 4, that strike would have ended him instantly.
Fortunately, his already formidable psychokinesis, amplified by the abnormality coursing through his system and the surge of adrenaline flooding his veins, combined with his brain operating at maximum capacity, allowed him to calculate a desperate escape.
Realizing that evasion was impossible, the Psycho pushed his psychokinesis to a threshold bordering on insanity and did the next best thing he could think of.
He redirected the attack at a molecular scale.
Every fiber of his being screamed as he accelerated electrons along his own body's surface, subtly warping the magnetic and electric fields around him. The tungsten slug, traveling along the Lorentz Driver's perfectly tuned vector, didn't simply stop. Its momentum was too extreme. Instead, he twisted the microfields around his right arm, forcing the projectile to graze past him rather than strike him directly. As expected, from the point of impact, the energy didn't disappear but transferred, tearing through bone, sinew, and muscle like a filament of molten iron.
Crazy bastard. Lockstep's eyes widened in astonishment.
The Psycho's right arm jerked violently, bones shattering audibly, sinews severed, and the limb hanging uselessly at an unnatural angle. Even as he staggered, the adrenaline and reflexive control that had saved him from instant death now betrayed him, leaving him maimed and blood spurted across the corridor, a stark contrast to the metal-grey dust and debris swirling from the rifle's shockwave.
Barely deflected, the lightning lance didn't stop and pierced through the wall behind him with an audible noise. The corridor rattled from the displacement of air, a concussive force that made Lockstep's ears ring.
Damnit. That girl really doesn't know how to hold back. Gritting his bloody teeth, he tried to protect his ears from the sound but it was a fulite effort.
"Tch."
Clicking her tongue with displeasure, Specter-7 waited a few moments for her sniper to cool down from overheating before firing again.
The Psycho's breathing was ragged, his maimed arm useless at his side, blood dripping down the corridor floor, but his mind was sharper than ever. Pain and adrenaline fused into a singular clarity, pushing his cognitive processing far beyond normal limits.
The second shot ripped toward him. Looking at that brilliant ray of death, most people would have panicked, flinched, or crumpled. Rather, he calculated the projectile's trajectory in microseconds, factoring in the rifle's firing vector, electromagnetic interference in the corridor, and even the slight deflection caused by the lingering dust and debris.
Instead of brute-force evasion, he manipulated the air molecules, subtly warping the local density and refractive index to nudge the bullet's path just enough. It hissed past his shoulder, grazing his coat and embedding a tiny fragment in the wall. The Psycho's lips curled into a small smile of victory.
Lockstep blinked, momentarily stunned. The bloodied and wounded Psycho moved like a phantom. He sprinted toward the wall beneath the shattered ceiling, using his psychokinesis to pull at the concrete and steel, loosening them at the molecular bonds. Dust rained down as he focused, shifting the ceiling just enough to create a jagged but navigable exit.
With a final glance at Lockstep and flashing a peace sign with his good hand, the Psycho vaulted through the newly formed opening. The first sliver of moonlight illuminated his silhouette as he disappeared above, leaving behind a cascade of concrete and metal shards.
The second shot tore through the air mere seconds later, striking nothing but empty corridor and debris.
Specter-7 gasped in desperation, realizing the Psycho had already vanished beyond her reach.
"Shit! He's escaping! I completely lost virtual on my end! Repeat! The damn psycho is escape!"
"Fuck!"
Lockstep slammed his fist into the floor. Gritting his teeth, he cursed without restraint.
"Shit! Shit! That bastard completely played us. Damnit all!"