Chapter 70: Party

Reinhard sat comfortably in the chair he had pulled from the side of the room, one leg resting over the other as he looked around at everyone gathered inside the mansion.

The atmosphere had changed completely.

Only moments ago, they had been discussing Emily as though she were nothing more than an objective.

Now every person in the room was staring at him like he had personally insulted their mothers, which, to be fair, he was about to.

Rufus looked the most disturbed, having never expected Reinhard to walk directly into the meeting room after avoiding their detection for so long.

Big Boss, however, looked amused.

Reinhard adjusted his sunglasses and smiled. "As you know, my name is Reinhard Ashcroft." He said it the way other men said their net worth. "I’ve been hearing that you’ve all been very interested in my wife."

Nobody answered. "So I’m here to give you all some advice. Run back to wherever you came from and leave my beautiful wife alone."

His smile remained pleasant, the kind that should have made everyone in the room nervous. "Otherwise, your organizations are going to need a lot more body bags. And considering how this place is decorated, I don’t think you’ve budgeted for that."

Silence filled the room.

Then Big Boss started laughing.

"Hahaha! You’re funny!"

Several Collectors laughed with him, while even some of the Baal guards looked amused by the absurdity of it. Reinhard let them have their moment. He was a generous man like that.

Big Boss wiped the corner of his eye and grinned. "I like you, bug."

Reinhard’s smile disappeared.

"Bug?"

Before he could say anything else, Big Boss’s chair exploded beneath him. The massive man launched himself forward, his fist already pulled back as he crossed the distance between them.

"You’re funny," Big Boss said, his grin widening. "But I’ve got a lot of questions for you, bug!"

His fist came crashing down.

BOOM!

The impact shook the entire room. The table split apart, chairs flew backward, and the floor cracked beneath Big Boss’s fist as dust and fragments of wood filled the air.

Several subordinates shouted.

"Boss!"

"What are you doing?!"

Big Boss slowly raised his fist, then blinked. There was a body beneath him. Not Reinhard. Rufus, the old butler, blood already spreading across his damaged clothing.

Big Boss stared down at him. "What?"

Then he felt something land on his back, a man’s weight settling comfortably across his shoulders. Reinhard was sitting there, one hand resting against Big Boss’s shoulder while the other adjusted his sunglasses.

"Don’t ever compare me to a bug, you oversized gorilla."

Big Boss’s eyes widened. "What the—"

Reinhard smiled. The moment Big Boss charged, Reinhard had distorted his perception. He had never been attacking Reinhard at all. He had been attacking Rufus while believing he was looking directly at his target.

Reinhard’s eyes brightened as he looked through Big Boss’s body at the dense, violent mass of mana inside him, built almost entirely around raw physical power.

"So that’s his Gnosis." He whistled, unbothered, like a man admiring a car he had no intention of buying. "Big. Loud. About as subtle as you look."

Big Boss suddenly threw another punch. Reinhard simply stepped aside, and the fist tore through the wall behind him.

At the same time, his enhanced perception mapped the battlefield.

Collectors, surviving Baal guards, and several powerful Gnosis signatures moved through the smoke. Two stood above the rest, Big Boss and Purple Light, both peak B-Ranks.

Two more B-Ranks moved through the room at a noticeably lower density, and the rest were mostly C-Ranks and D-Ranks, dozens of them spread throughout the mansion.

Reinhard looked around.

"Oh well." He snapped his fingers and smiled, the kind of smile a man wears when he already knows how this ends. "Now then, let’s start this party."

The floor beneath them erupted.

BOOM!

The explosion tore through the meeting room, sending debris and people flying in every direction. Big Boss was thrown upward with Reinhard, who immediately grabbed his shoulder and pulled himself behind him.

"Sorry," he said calmly. "You’re going to be my shield for a moment. Think of it as rent for the chair you broke."

Big Boss’s enormous body absorbed most of the force. When the smoke cleared, Collectors were recovering while the Baal guards stood behind glowing defensive relics.

Purple Light hadn’t moved, purple flames swirling around his body, absorbing the explosion without even damaging his clothes.

Reinhard looked at him.

"So you’re the dangerous one." He said it almost fondly, the way a man picks out the one card worth keeping from a losing hand.

Purple Light said nothing. The flames around his body brightened.

Reinhard pushed away just as another fist came rushing toward him, opening a tear in space to swallow it and letting it emerge behind one of the Collectors instead.

BOOM!

The Collector went flying. Big Boss stared at his own hand.

"What?"

Reinhard drove a fist into his ribs. The impact pushed the massive man sideways. He barely moved.

"Yeah. Peak B-Rank," Reinhard said, more seriously now, like a man checking a price tag and deciding to buy it anyway.

Big Boss grinned.

"Got you!"

His mouth opened, mana gathering inside, and a concentrated beam erupted and tore through the mansion. Reinhard landed on a pillar as it continued through another room.

"He can fire Mana Blast from his mouth too?" He sounded more offended than scared, like the man had broken some unspoken rule of fair competition.

"And his fists," Big Boss said, firing another blast from a raised hand.

Reinhard disappeared before it could reach him, and his eyes shifted toward Purple Light, whose purple flames had already gathered black bones around his arm, launching them like spears.

Reinhard redirected them through another tear in space, sending them back out above Purple Light himself.

Purple Light calmly moved his head aside.

"So you redirect attacks."

Reinhard smiled. "Sometimes. Depends on my mood, and right now my mood’s great."

The bones curved mid-flight, bending around the tear and attacking from three directions instead. Purple Light was controlling them through the flames, not just launching them.

"Oh, that’s troublesome."

Reinhard raised a barrier. The first bone shattered against it. The second pierced through. He twisted aside, allowing the third to pass.

Then a Collector appeared behind him with a relic blade, followed by another, then three more, all jumping him together rather than waiting their turn.

Reinhard’s smile returned.

"There we go." Finally, something that felt like effort.

A spear exploded against him on contact and threw him backward, and a talisman came next, a restraint relic he recognized and redirected back beside its own owner instead.

The Collector’s expression changed.

"Wait—"

The talisman activated, locking his body in place. Reinhard appeared in front of him.

"Thanks." His fist slammed into the man’s stomach and sent him through the wall. "I’ll be sure to return the favor sometime."

Another B-Rank arrived, faster than the others, his weapon wrapped in blue lightning. He swung. Reinhard blocked, and lightning spread across his arm as the barrier cracked, but the relic around his body reinforced him, and the damage came through noticeably weaker.

Reinhard smiled.

"That’s useful." He drove his fist into the man’s chest with enough force to send him through two walls, only for Big Boss to come crashing through the same walls right behind him.

"Found you!"

A fist descended. Reinhard opened a tear. The punch disappeared, then came back out behind Big Boss himself. He crossed his arms and blocked his own attack, and the floor beneath him shattered from the force.

Reinhard appeared above him.

"Let’s see how you handle this."

A barrage of ice tore downward, most of it shattering against Big Boss’s body, and he roared. Reinhard landed behind him and snapped his fingers, flames erupting across his back.

BOOM!

Big Boss stumbled forward. Reinhard expected him to fall. He didn’t, turning around with a grin instead.

"That tickled!"

"That’s ridiculous," Reinhard said, with the deep, personal offense of a man whose combo just got shrugged off at a bar.

Big Boss charged again. This time, Reinhard didn’t retreat. Power surged through his body as his strength and speed climbed, and when the punch came, he caught it clean, the floor cracking beneath both of them.

"Better." He drove his knee into Big Boss’s stomach, followed with a series of reinforced strikes, and when Big Boss’s mouth opened for another blast, Reinhard was already a step ahead, redirecting the beam out beside Purple Light instead.

Purple flames exploded as Purple Light blocked it, forced backward for the first time.

Big Boss stared.

"You redirected my attack at him?"

Reinhard smiled.

"You’re catching on. Took you long enough, considering how much mana you’ve got stuffed in that mouth."

Purple Light’s expression darkened. Black bones erupted from the ground, chasing Reinhard through the air while several Collectors attacked from the side. He threw three relics in response, one exploding, another releasing a shockwave, the third forming a barrier that split the attackers apart, and moved through the opening it created.

But the attacks were no longer coming only from the people in the room. A B-Rank burst through the ceiling, another through the western corridor, and more fired from the staircase and from behind. Reinhard’s body reacted almost before he understood what was happening, but there were simply too many of them. A blade cut across his shoulder. Lightning struck his side. A fireball exploded against his back. He was thrown through a wall and crashed into another room.

He rolled across the floor before slowly standing. Blood ran down his shoulder. He looked at it, almost personally offended that there was now a tear in a very specific jacket he happened to like, then at the dozens of enemies beginning to surround him.

"Okay. This is getting serious."

Big Boss came through the wall. Purple Light walked through the smoke, black bones floating around him, purple flames dancing across his body. More B-Ranks and C-Ranks and D-Ranks filed in behind them.

They weren’t fighting him one at a time anymore. They had finally realized that doing so was pointless. They were attacking together.

Reinhard reached into his Inventory, and a small black chain appeared around his fingers.

"Let’s see how useful you are."

He flicked his wrist. The chain shot across the room and anchored one of the B-Ranks exactly in place, no matter how hard the man tried to escape through space.

"You’re staying there. Consider it a timeout."

Big Boss charged. Reinhard opened a tear, and the punch disappeared, reappearing behind the restrained B-Rank instead.

BOOM!

The B-Rank took the full force of it and was launched across the room.

"What?" Big Boss stopped, staring.

Reinhard was already beside Purple Light, catching the flames on a barrier and redirecting the bones that followed so one of them cut clean across Purple Light’s own cheek.

Purple Light touched the thin line of blood, then looked at Reinhard, who only smiled.

"Looks like I can make you bleed too. Guess the flames don’t cover everything."

Purple Light’s flames surged, swallowing the entire room in purple light.

"That probably wasn’t the right thing to say," Reinhard said, serious now.

The flames pushed him backward even through his reinforced body, and when Big Boss attacked from behind in the same instant, Reinhard opened a tear to swallow the punch, only for Purple Light’s flames to strike the tear itself. Space warped, then shattered.

"They can interfere with each other’s attacks." That was bad. Very bad. Because they were starting to fight as a team.

Reinhard moved above the battlefield. Below him, Big Boss and Purple Light were already coordinating, the other B-Ranks joining them while Collectors and Baal forces poured in through the collapsing corridors.

The mansion was barely recognizable, walls down, floors cracked, fire and smoke filling every hall.

They were no longer trying to capture him. They were trying to kill him.

Reinhard raised his hand, mana gathering around his body, his blue eyes burning brighter.

So this is what eight B-Ranks and nearly ninety other Awakeners feels like.

He smiled. No wonder they thought I needed to be surrounded. Can’t say I blame them. I’d be worried too, if I were them.

Big Boss launched himself upward. Purple flames surged from below.

Lightning crossed the room, and specialized relics fired from every direction.

Reinhard moved, space twisting around every incoming attack as he stepped between them. Then redirecting strikes into other enemies, anchoring a fleeing B-Rank in place, and using the collapsing mansion itself to break their formation.

He never stayed in one place long enough for them to surround him, slipping through a collapsing wall and redirecting a lightning strike into the floor.

Then vanishing before Big Boss’s fist reached him, ducking through the smallest gap between the flames filling the corridor.

Two Collectors attacked from opposite sides. He caught one blow on his reinforced arm and kicked the other away without slowing down.

Reinhard finally landed on the remains of a staircase and looked across the battlefield.

Big Boss stood below him.

Purple Light’s flames spread across the room, the two other B-Ranks recovering, the Collectors regrouping, more enemies approaching from the other floors.

Reinhard wiped the blood from his cheek.

Then he smiled.

Good. Now we’re getting started.