I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 57: The Hunting Dogs

If someone ever tells you that the bottom of hell is defined by scorching heat and blazing flames, then know that they have never visited "Sector G" in the city of Elysium on a winter night.

The true bottom of hell is not hot; it is cold, viscous, and reeks of rust, human urine, and absolute despair.

The air here is not breathed, but swallowed like a mass of black sludge that settles in your lungs and refuses to leave.

After we patched up our wounds in Zack’s apartment, which resembled an electronic junkyard, and after Valisera performed that nightmarish spacetime surgery on herself—which still makes me shiver every time I remember the sound of her flesh grinding—the silver demon decided that staying in the apartment meant waiting for death like lab rats in a cage.

We had to move.

We had to be the hunters, or at the very least, choose the battlefield where we would skin those chasing us.

We left the apartment under the cover of darkness.

I walked at the rear, my torn black coat clinging to my body due to the suffocating humidity.

Ahead of me walked Zack, my idiot friend whom I had dragged into this cosmic inferno.

He wore a bulletproof vest far too big for him—Damian had stolen it from an FBI warehouse—and carried a massive backpack filled with jamming devices, laptops, and electrical wires. In his hand, he held an etheral shock device that trembled so violently it nearly shocked his backside twice.

My God, what have I done to this poor guy? I thought to myself as I watched his left eye twitch at a speed rivaling the wings of a dying fly.

He used to live a quiet life, eating cold pizza and cursing the government online, and now he was walking with the most wanted terrorist squad in the world. I am the worst friend in human history.

Ahead of Zack walked Aiden, who was still silently mourning his retirement fund and the bullying tweets about his face.

Then Sia, moving with the lightness of a wild cat, her daggers glinting under the dim lights of the broken alley lamps. And Damian, covering the front, his heavy machine gun aimed forward, his arm—healed by potions—still slightly stiff.

And at the very front, walked Valisera.

Despite her body being torn from the inside, despite the fact that she had literally "folded" her flesh back together, she walked with a perfectly straight back, her steps confident, harsh, carrying not a trace of hesitation.

Each step struck the wet asphalt with her heel, producing a sound like the ticking of an execution clock.

She refused to show any weakness, because she knew leadership is not given to the weak in a pack of wolves.

"Sector G is too quiet tonight..." Damian whispered, his eyes scanning the dark balconies of the crumbling residential buildings surrounding us like the walls of a concrete prison.

"No vagrants, no gangs. Even the prostitutes and corrupted ether dealers have disappeared. I don’t like this silence."

"They smell death, Damian," Sia said in her icy voice.

"Street rats know when to hide. The area has been evacuated. Someone, or something, is coming for us."

Suddenly, Zack stopped in his tracks.

A small device in his hand began to emit a faint hum, and a red indicator started flashing wildly on the screen.

"G-guys..." Zack stammered, his face turning paler until it resembled spoiled milk.

"My biological ether sensor is picking up signals... too many signals."

"How many?" Eva asked, lifting her heavy sniper rifle to her shoulder, her black eyes narrowing with lethal focus.

"I... I don’t know! The signals are overlapping! They’re moving incredibly fast! They’re not human... the ether coming off them is distorted... red... metallic!"

Zack backed up until he collided with my chest, nearly falling if I hadn’t caught him.

"Prepare for engagement," Valisera said coldly, her voice breaking bones.

She didn’t even turn around. She slipped her hands into her torn coat pockets. "Alexander has sent his dogs."

Shh... tik... tik... KRAAASH!

The sound didn’t come from in front of us—it came from everywhere.

From the rooftops of the decaying buildings, from behind rusted garbage containers, and from the open sewer mouths on both sides of the narrow alley.

They were not ordinary grey dogs.

Nor were they stone ghouls.

What emerged from the curtains of darkness and falling rain were nightmares designed specifically to exterminate the awakened.

Creatures that made your stomach turn just by looking at them.

"Steel Hunting Dogs." That’s what intelligence calls them in their top-secret files.

They stood on four limbs, each the size of an adult lion.

But they were not animals.

They were a grotesque, sick, sadistic hybrid of human flesh and etheral metal.

Their bodies were made of muscular human torsos, their skin completely flayed to reveal pulsating red muscles.

But they were bent unnaturally to walk on all fours.

Their limbs—once human arms and legs—had been severed at the joints and replaced with steel blades and hydraulic pistons pumping viscous green and black fluids.

On their backs, thick glass tubes had been implanted, driven directly into their exposed spines, pumping raw, corrupted red ether straight into their spinal cords, causing their muscles to convulse and swell violently.

And their heads... my God, their heads were the worst.

There were no faces.

The upper half of their skulls had been removed and replaced with a metallic dome containing thermal and etheral sensors blinking with intermittent red light.

And the lower jaw... was a massive mechanical metal jaw filled with rotating serrated steel teeth, dripping yellow acidic saliva that melted asphalt on contact!

"W-what is that abomination?!" Aiden screamed, his eyes nearly popping out of their sockets.

"Were those... were they human?!"

"Saint Ilarious Hospital experiments..." Eva whispered, disgust and horror coating her tone.

"They sent them to hunt us."

There were at least ten of them.

They surrounded us from all directions, standing on vertical walls thanks to their blades embedded in the concrete, their red sensors locking onto us as biological targets.

"Grrrrrr... hssssss..."

Their sound wasn’t a roar—it was a mix of muffled human groans and the grinding of unlubricated metal gears.

Their stench was a blend of burnt flesh, spoiled oil, and pus.

Alright, I thought to myself as I swallowed hard and stepped back, half-hiding behind a large trash container.

The golden rule of the Black Joker: in a fight involving cyborg monsters that melt asphalt with their saliva... let the elites do the dirty work, and pretend you’re about to piss your pants in terror.

"Kill these defective wastes!" Valisera shouted, her eyes blazing with crimson fire.

The alley exploded into death.

Three steel dogs lunged at once from the right building’s roof, their blades extended to slice Damian apart.

"Shock Shield!" Damian roared, not retreating an inch. He pumped lightning ether into his heavy machine gun and raised its barrel upward.

He didn’t just fire—he released a concentrated electromagnetic wave that formed a blue dome around him.

BAM! KRAAASH! ZZZZT!

The three dogs slammed into the shield.

The hydraulic pistons in their limbs shattered from the recoil, and Damian’s lightning ether surged through their metallic frames, electrocuting the living muscle tissue within.

Their bodies convulsed violently, black smoke rising from the ether tubes on their backs before they collapsed to the ground, paralyzed.

But they didn’t die! Their serrated jaws kept spinning, and they began crawling toward him using their jaws to drag their paralyzed bodies!

"What pitiful willpower!" Eva shouted from behind.

She had leapt with superhuman agility onto a metal fire escape, her sniper rifle unleashing a symphony of armor-piercing rounds.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Eva’s shots were precise as a surgeon’s scalpel.

She didn’t target the muscular bodies—she targeted the glass tubes embedded in the dogs’ backs.

SPLOORT! BOOOM!

The tubes shattered, and the corrupted red ether exploded, dissolving the dogs’ spines and turning them into puddles of melted flesh and molten metal.

"Nice one, Eva!" Damian shouted as he turned his machine gun toward two more dogs charging from the left passage.

But the most spectacular—and most brutal—display belonged to Sia.

This blonde girl with an angelic face, who was always as calm as a doctor in a waiting room, turned into a walking massacre.

A massive steel dog, its jaws dripping acid, lunged at her, aiming to bite her upper half clean off.

Sia didn’t dodge.

She slid beneath it at the last moment, dirty water splashing around her.

She raised her daggers, glowing with searing golden light, and drove them straight into the dog’s exposed belly as she passed underneath.

SLAAAAASH!

With a sound like heavy fabric tearing, Sia split the dog open from throat to tail.

The dog collapsed on top of her—but not entirely. Its distorted human intestines, swollen with black blood, spilled out of its open abdomen like a waterfall of writhing snakes, completely covering Sia’s face and white clothes!

Any normal person would have vomited—or gone into shock.

But Sia?

Sia rose from the intestines, blood dripping from her blonde hair, and... laughed.

A sadistic, clear, deeply sick laugh! She licked a drop of blood from her lips, her eyes gleaming with killing ecstasy.

"Who’s next?!" Sia shouted, lunging at another dog, driving her dagger into its red sensor and spinning around its neck to slice it off with a dancer’s grace—a bloody ballet.

New mental note, I thought as I trembled behind the container.

Sia is more terrifying than Eva. Never, ever, ever provoke the healer who enjoys bathing in her enemies’ intestines.