The street was wide, but not wide enough for them to run past Dan. At least one of them would surely be caught if they tried.
Mathew whispered in a low voice,"When I shout, start running."
Then he took a step forward.
"Dan, are you alright? What happened to you?" Mathew asked as the others slowly shifted to the left.
"Do I look alright to you?" Dan growled. "I don't know what you're doing here, but I'll look the other way this once. Now come here and help me walk."
Though Dan's words seemed merciful, Leon could see the suspicion in his eyes.
He saw Mathew preparing to move forward. Leon struggled down from Bear's shoulders and jumped to the ground, grabbing Mathew's shirt from behind.
"Don't trust his words," Leon whispered, barely audible.
Mathew replied without looking back,"I know."
He shook Leon's hand off and walked forward. He stepped under Dan's arm, supporting him from the left, and Dan looped his own arm around Mathew's shoulder.
"Now follow me," Dan said as he began walking with Mathew's help.
The others stood frozen as the two passed by. Just a few steps later, Mathew made a move—he tried to trip Dan's injured leg. But Dan, as if expecting it, dodged the attempt.
In the same motion, the arm around Mathew's shoulder shifted—clamping tightly around his neck.
"Listen, you little shits," Dan hissed, smiling coldly. "Even if one of you runs, this fella here is dead."
Struggling to breathe, Mathew still managed to shout:
"RUN!"
And they did—but not away.
They charged toward Dan.
Bear and the others grabbed at the arm strangling Mathew. Leon joined them. But Dan was just too strong—his thick arm didn't budge no matter how hard they fought. Mathew's face was already turning bright red.
Leon looked around. The street was empty—no one was coming.
He took a deep breath, dashed toward the corner, bent down, and picked up a large rock. It was heavy, but he lifted it.
Bear, seeing him from the corner of his eye, spotted the rock in Leon's tiny hands. A spark flashed in Bear's eyes. He let go of Dan, ran to Leon, grabbed the rock, and raised it high above his head.
Like a wild beast, he charged at Dan and smashed the rock down onto his skull.
But instead of cracking Dan's head open, a faint red light flickered across Dan's body—and the rock shattered into pieces on impact.
Bear and Leon froze in disbelief.
They had hoped to crush Dan's skull. But instead, the rock was what shattered.
Mathew's face had turned purple. His struggles were weakening by the second.
Acting on pure instinct, Leon touched Dan's right leg—the closest to him—and shouted,
"Storage!"
He didn't know whether the system could store living beings or not , he hadn't had the time to test it. But right now, he was desperate. He had to try.
then
A sickening crunch.
A spray of blood drenched his face.
Dan's right leg was gone—vanished. Only a bloody stump remained, gushing blood.
A raw, guttural scream burst from Dan's mouth. His eyes widened in horror as he stared at what was left of his leg.
"Oh God—my leg! What happened? Shit! My leg! Someone—stop the bleeding! Mathew—help me, please! Please!"
At first, he was only shocked. Then the fear of bleeding to death overtook him, and he began pleading desperately.
Mathew collapsed to the ground the moment Dan released him, gasping for air. Lisa dragged him away as soon as he fell.
Everyone stared at Dan, expressions full of horror and fear.
It took Mathew a few moments to catch his breath. When he finally did, he shouted,
"Run!"
He grabbed Leon—who stood frozen, drenched in blood—and dragged him along.
They didn't stop until Dan's screams faded into the distance.
Leon was still trapped in the moment when Dan's leg vanished and blood sprayed across his face. It had been the first time in his life he had witnessed something so violent—and worse, it had been caused by him.
He didn't feel guilty for hurting Dan—not exactly. But his mind was still reeling. The sudden collapse of a fundamental boundary he had always followed—don't kill—was shaking his moral compass. It wasn't as if he had lived a peaceful life before. He could remember being part of countless arguments, even getting into fistfights when he was a teenager. But this—this was something different. Taking part in the destruction of another human body… it felt foreign. Unnatural. His instincts had saved Mathew's life, yet the act itself left a chill in his bones.
He hadn't expected Dan's leg to be ripped off. Hell, he hadn't even expected the system to respond. At most, he'd foolishly hoped Dan would be sucked into storage like some item.
But now the image was burned into his memory—the blood, the scream, the look of utter terror in Dan's eyes.
Leon said nothing, lying quietly on Mathew's shoulders as they ran. His heart was pounding. His body, cold. And his mind… still struggling to make sense of what had just happened.
As the pounding of his heart slowed and the rush of adrenaline began to wear off, a strange stillness settled over Leon.
He wasn't trembling. He wasn't crying. He wasn't even thinking clearly.
He was just… numb.
The rhythmic thud of Mathew's footsteps was all he could hear now, like a distant drum beating inside a hollow cave. Each footfall seemed to echo inside his skull, pushing back the chaos, the screams, the flash of red, the wet sound of flesh tearing, the weight of that one word he'd shouted—
"Storage."
He hadn't even meant it. Not seriously. It had been a desperate thought, a throwaway idea. A joke. Like something out of the dumb web novels he used to read at midnight while eating instant noodles.
But this wasn't fiction. Dan had been real—his screams had been real. His pain. His leg. Gone.
Leon's hands, now cold and stained dark with dried blood, clenched around the fabric of Mathew's shirt. He pressed his face into Mathew's back, trying to disappear into the warmth, the steadiness, the living proof that at least one person had been saved. That something had gone right.
But it didn't feel like a victory.
It felt like something had broken. Inside him.
I didn't mean to do that…
He kept repeating it to himself. Over and over. But each time, it rang more hollow.
Because somewhere deep down, beneath the layers of shock and guilt and denial, there was a part of him that whispered:You knew it might happen. And you did it anyway.
A soft breeze brushed against his bloodied cheek. It should've been refreshing. But all it did was remind him that he was still alive… and Dan might not be.
He had killed someone. Not in self-defense, not even in combat. It had been a command. A single word, casually thrown into the air like he was testing a cheat code.
And the world had answered.
Is this what it means to have power in this world?To be feared? To rip people apart with words?
Leon closed his eyes.
He wasn't ready for this.