[Volume 1 | Chapter 38: Schweißhund (III)]

The warehouse door dissolved into its component atoms as steam coiled through the opening like hungry serpents seeking prey.

Nemesis stepped through with blood vessels pulsing with as his enhanced microglia processed each new substance he encountered. The metal's molecular structure, its melting point, its exact lethal threshold... all of it became mere data points in his endless calculation.

He wondered for a few minutes while in the crater on how he should approach the situation. Cagliostro wanted Acacia preferably alive, but killing him was also an option. However, killing him seemed to be rather annoying with that girl around, Leila Trafalgar. He didn't want to face the ire of Sirius and Eleanor Trafalgar if he killed her, but at the same time, her intelligence and skills could prove irritating.

It was a tough predicament for a man like Siegfried Eisenberg.

There were always options to consider in this situation. For now, his best bet would be to incapacitate them both and then decide whether or not to kill the Irregular. The young girl was clearly running out of prana, and the Irregular had no way of harming him. He had the upper hand in this situation, so he needed to leverage it properly.

That was why his steps were slow and calculated, feet echoing through the cavernous space as if signaling an inevitable doom. His presence warped reality around him, bending light and warping sound in ways that defied physics. Reality itself seemed to recoil from his touch, leaving a wake of desolation in his path.

The warehouse's interior reminded him of simpler times, of war games played with a silver-haired girl and a blonde. The memory brought an almost gentle smile to his face.

He squashed that haphazard thought immediately.

He paused, head tilting as his senses detected movement two floors up. The girl's prana signature pulsed erratically—injury, perhaps, or fear. His enhanced perception caught the subtle shifts in air currents as they moved through the warehouse's steel maze.

They were plotting something.

The thought brought a smile to his face. Even prey could be interesting when cornered. His blood vessels flared brighter as he processed the warehouse's contents—cleaning supplies, industrial chemicals, maintenance equipment.

"I can taste your desperation in the air," he called out, letting his voice bounce off steel walls. "The molecular composition of your fear...did you know cortisol has a rather fascinating lethal dose?" Bloody, gassy, hot steam swirled around him as he began ascending to their level.

His foot came down on the first step, and metal liquefied beneath him. The entire stairwell groaned as his presence rewrote its structural integrity. But something made him pause—a subtle change in the air currents, almost too faint to notice. His enhanced senses detected the girl's position shifting slightly higher, taking up what seemed to be a sniper's perch.

Amateur, he thought, already calculating the exact parameter needed to nullify another [Gran Prana Burst]...but the Irregular's void in his perception nagged at him. That complete absence of prana signature made tracking the boy's movements impossible through conventional means.

And he was hiding his fear, controlling his sweat, very well. Nemesis could not sense it at all. He didn't know where he could be or what he was doing. The boy was simply said, unpredictable, as he much as he was an unknown. Nemesis had no way of knowing his next move unless he could physically see him, and the boy seemed to have a penchant for hiding and waiting.

He took another step up, and his microglia suddenly registered something new. Trace amounts of chemical vapors in the air, too dispersed to identify but present nonetheless. His blood vessels pulsed he began analyzing the compounds, but the mixture seemed... oddly complex.

"Playing with chemicals now?" He laughed, the sound echoing through steel corridors. "How desperate—"

Movement above.

The girl's prana flared as her Contender sang out.

It was a foolish move, he thought, his body already adapting to nullify the incoming spell. But something was wrong. The trajectory was off, the angle all wrong for a killing shot, and the spell wasn't amplified at all. Instead, the [Prana Burst] streaked past him toward…

His senses registered the danger a fraction of a second too late.

The spell struck a container perched above, and his microglia immediately began processing a new threat—hydrochloric acid—spilling from shattered plastic. The calculations started automatically: pH level 1.5, concentration 15%, molecular structure already being mapped by his enhanced cells.

But then the acid hit something below.

Sodium hypochlorite. Bleach. 10-12% concentration.

His eyes dilated as his microglia frantically began new calculations. The chemical reaction was instantaneous. Chlorine gas erupted in a virulent cloud that his cells desperately tried to analyze, but concentrations kept shifting and the gas kept behaving erratically in the warehouse's air currents.

"Clever," he managed through gritted teeth as his blood vessels blazed with effort. "But not enough to—"

A second crash. More containers falling, more reactions starting. His microglia screamed new data at his brain—different concentrations, different heights, different dispersal patterns. Each breath drew in a new mixture that required fresh calculations. The gas was literally in his bloodstream, changing his internal pH faster than even his enhanced cells could adapt to.

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"The little scientists think they're so smart, huh?!" he snarled, but the words caught in his throat as another wave of gas hit him. His blood vessels pulsed frantically now, each one a transmitter on the verge of overload.

"I'll kill all of you—"

The distinctive sound of Novascope being readied cut through the chemical haze.

The sniper rifle's barrel glowed with ethereal light, blue-white energy coalescing around its muzzle like a newborn star. Through the chemical haze, Nemesis's enhanced senses detected something that made his blood run cold... a prana signature that defied traditional analysis. His microglia, already overwhelmed by the shifting pH levels in his system, struggled to process this new threat.

"[Gran Grilletto]."

Reality screamed.

The spell manifested as a fundamental violation of space. A lance of concentrated impossibility that turned the air around it into crystal, leaving trails of distorted spacetime in its wake. Even Nemesis's enhanced perception couldn't fully track its movement—the projectile seemed to exist at its point of origin and impact simultaneously, as if the intervening space had been folded away.

His microglia, pushed beyond their limits by the chemical assault, couldn't adapt fast enough. The spatial distortion struck him dead center, and for the first time in years, Siegfried Eisenberg felt true pain.

It tore a hole through reality. Blood vessels that had pulsed with calculations burst as localized physics went haywire. His precious biological computers, the core of «Deathblossom's» power, found themselves trying to process mathematical impossibilities as space twisted around the wound. His skin warped and melted where the distortion touched, unable to maintain cohesion in the face of such madness. The world tilted sideways as his equilibrium shattered along with the laws of the universe.

He staggered, gasping for breath in a reality that no longer made sense, and then he fell to the ground.

M-my brain, I can't calculate—

The spatial distortion left by [Gran Grilletto] created cascade failures in his enhanced biology. Each attempt to calculate a defense only made things worse as his microglia encountered equations with no solution and patterns that violated their fundamental understanding of reality.

Blood—real blood, not the processed kind that usually flowed through his enhanced veins—oozed from the wound in his chest. His vision blurred as backup systems failed, overwhelmed by the combination of chemical assault and spatial distortion.

And for the first time since he'd mastered «Deathblossom», Nemesis felt his perfect calculations begin to crumble.

Somewhere in the chemical haze above the Bloodhound, a boy who'd out-thought the impossible allowed himself a small smile.

The best weapon against a perfect calculator... is an equation with no solution.

He internally mused as he readjusted a safety mask that he got from the equipment shelf.

Acacia countered «Deathblossom» by turning its own perfection against it. The initial chemical reaction was merely the foundation by creating an environment of constantly shifting variables that forced Nemesis's microglia to perform endless recalculations and recursions. But the true brilliance lay in the timing. He had recognized that Nemesis's power, for all its overwhelming strength, relied on stable conditions to perform its calculations. Each new substance required processing, and each change in environment demanded adaptation. By combining rapidly shifting pH levels with unpredictable air currents, he had engineered a scenario where «Deathblossom's» calculations became a liability rather than an advantage. The warehouse's ventilation system had also played a crucial role, where its natural airflow patterns ensured that gas concentrations remained chaotic and impossible to predict. Every breath Nemesis took drew in a different mixture, forcing his mind to start fresh calculations before it could finish processing the previous ones. It was like trying to solve an equation where the variables kept changing mid-computation, but Nemesis was forced to keep computing them if he didn't want to get poisoned by the chemicals.

Then came Leila's [Gran Grilletto]—the "coup de grâce" delivered at the precise moment when Nemesis's brain was already overtaxed. The spatial distortion represented the perfect counter to an ability based on calculating then creating biological counters to conventional phenomena.

And so, how could enhanced microglia even process the lethal threshold of warped space?

Such an absurd proposition was like trying to divide by zero. It was a mathematical impossibility that crashed the world's most sophisticated biological computer.

Perhaps Nemesis could have somehow solved it if he was able to allocate enough brain power. He was, after all, one of the greatest soldiers the Tachyon Empire had ever produced. However, his brain was processing and calculating the lethal thresholds for the chemicals in his body and the chemicals he had inhaled, so he could not simply calculate both the biological defenses to chemicals and spacetime effects.

In the end, Nemesis's own adaptability became his undoing.

Acacia reached Leila just as her legs gave out, catching her before she could hit the chemical-laced floor. Her body trembled with exhaustion, the aftermath of channeling enough prana to distort reality itself. Blood trickled from her nose once again.

"Hey. Stay with me. We did it." He adjusted the safety mask over her face with his free hand.

Her emerald eyes flickered, struggling to focus.

"Did we... actually beat him?"

"Yeah, it seems like one of the great criminals of Desperado couldn't deal with secondary school chemistry."

She managed a weak laugh that turned into a cough.

They made their way through the chemical haze, Acacia supporting most of her weight as they navigated toward the exit. His mind was already racing, calculating the fastest route to the hostages' location. They'd have to move quickly, as they didn't know for how much longer Apollo would be incapacitated by [Constricta].

"The hostages," Leila mumbled, fighting to stay conscious. "We need to..."

"I know. One task at a time, okay?"

They reached the warehouse entrance before covering half of the complex's clearing, the night air a blessing after the caustic atmosphere inside. For a moment, everything seemed possible.

They'd done it.

They'd actually done it.

An Irregular and a girl who'd grown up in her parents' shadows had overcome one of the most terrifying abilities ever witnessed.

Then they saw him.

A figure stood before them, wreathed in hot pink steam that painted the night in shades of light. Blood ran from numerous wounds where reality itself had torn his flesh, but his smile was wider than ever. His skin seemed harder somehow, taking on an almost metallic sheen where [Gran Grilletto] had struck.

"Now that... was quite a show."

The Head of the Bloodhounds stood once more.

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