Chapter 62: Returned in Full

"Bang."

Following an unheralded gunshot, Sean felt a powerful tug on his right hand. The digital video camera he had been holding steady was blasted away, and fragments of the device burst in all directions, embedding themselves into his skin.

In the distance, Hesta stood with a pair of guns. The muzzle of one was already trailing wisps of blue smoke—a mixture of unburned gunpowder, gun oil, metal shavings, and soot.

By the time he realized the danger, the second gunshot had already rung out—

"Bang."

Sean finally slipped into bullet time. This instantaneous shift became excruciatingly protracted in his perspective—

The casing of the first bullet struck the ground and bounced, landing right beside Hesta's feet, while the second empty shell was flying diagonally out from the upper rear of the chamber.

And that high-velocity, dark gold bullet had already reached a point directly in front of Sean's chest. He could even see the tip of the bullet pressing a shallow indentation into his leather jacket...

Finished.

There wasn't time...

The terror of impending death gripped Sean's soul; in the end, his bullet time could only serve to prolong this single moment of dying.

This moment was both fleeting and agonizingly long.

A sharp, violent pain stabbed at his heart, and Sean fell backward.

After a dull thud, Sean collapsed onto the ground. Staring at the pale, glaring lights overhead, his features twisted from intense pain, and a overwhelming wave of weakness swept through his limbs and bones.

Was this... death?

Sean heard the clear sound of approaching footsteps—it was Hesta's soft leather heels stepping on the stone floor of the base.

She stopped beside him, looking down at his face expressionlessly, as if gazing at an ant.

"No wonder Miss Chiba said earlier that I was making things complicated," Hesta holstered her gun unhurriedly. "Turns out this was so easy..."

Shocked and filled with hatred, Sean reached out toward Hesta in vain, wishing he could crush her to pieces.

However, that was, after all, impossible.

Was this... the very last moment of my life?

Sean stared fixedly into the eyes of the person before him, filled with reluctance and bitter resentment.

Soon, half a minute passed.

Sean finally realized something was amiss. His glare at Hesta slowly shifted from hatred to astonishment and doubt—the bullet had pierced his heart so long ago, why wasn't he dead yet...

Sean wanted to look at the wound on his chest, but he was far too weak—so weak that he couldn't even manage to lift his head.

Hesta suddenly raised her foot and stepped directly onto Sean's face.

She looked down, expressionless.

"Look at you now, Sean."

"You... what have you... done..." Sean's voice was completely hoarse, and he spoke intermittently. "Why..."

"The one that hit the camera was a 19mm Parabellum round. But the one that hit you was a rubber bullet."

Hesta held a black cartridge casing between her index and middle fingers, bringing it right before Sean's eyes.

"To kill you with it, the stopping power is a bit lacking, but making you drop out of bullet time? More than enough."

With that, Hesta casually tossed the casing aside. It dropped to the ground, rolling clatteringly toward the wall.

Sean stared in shock at the cartridge casing, veins bulging on his forehead.

Hesta said softly, "Honestly, I think you're a freak of talent. People always tend to rely too much on their specialty once they master it, I understand that feeling... But such reliance is dangerous, because you never know when it will make you so inflated that you forget your own weaknesses, turning into your obstacle, right?"

Sean, who had already entered the restriction period, was still struggling, but despite all his effort, he could only writhe flat on his back.

His face was still being ruthlessly stepped on by Hesta—she was doing this for real, and the back of his head grinding against the floor ached as if it were about to split open.

In the span of just a few minutes, Sean had pieced together the entire sequence of events:

Hesta had lured him here under false pretenses. Her first shot shattered his camera, forcing him into bullet time; simultaneously, the second bullet was aimed at his chest, with the sole purpose of exploiting his fear of death to shatter his will to resist, thereby knocking him completely out of bullet time.

—And she had succeeded.

But, how could this be possible...

How could she be so precise to this degree...

When did she practice her marksmanship?

...Wait, where did she even get a gun?

"You... you're finished..." Sean forced a ferocious grin. "Wait... wait until the others get here..."

"Don't speak yet. Listen."

In the silence, a continuous series of metallic crashing sounds echoed from the distant corridor.

Realizing something, Sean's eyes widened in utter astonishment—he knew all too well what that sound was; it was the compartmentalization mechanism installed in the underground architecture of every base.

Accounting for all extreme scenarios: external armed invasion, internal chelate escapes, spies or other dangerous personnel accidentally entering the base... there was a backup door every twenty meters here. The door panels were all solid steel plates seventy centimeters thick, normally retracted into the walls. Once extreme invasion activity was detected inside the base, all partition devices would activate automatically according to a preset algorithm.

And "someone armed breaking into the base's underground hospital" obviously fell squarely into the "extremely severe" category.

"The others will take time to get here too, you don't need to rush."

Under Hesta's gaze, Sean shuddered and grew completely still.

The girl squatted down, grabbed a handful of Sean's hair, and lifted his head off the ground.

As their eyes met, Hesta's expression grew intensely cold.

"Remember? You said before that I looked like a flower. I thought about it later, and maybe you were right. In Short-Song Alley, at Saint Anne's Monastery, and here at the base, I've always managed to encounter people who treated me with sincere care, tending to me as carefully as one would tend a flower.

"When I was sick, someone stayed by my side without stepping away, someone kept vigil for me, prayed for me, begging God to ease my pain; someone taught me to read, taught me to sing. For my happiness, they were willing to take risks, and even in moments of crisis, some of them willingly traded their own lives for mine... There were always people who regarded me as far more important than their own lives."

Hesta looked down at Sean. "Have you ever been loved like that, Sean? Has anyone ever done those things for you?"

Without waiting for Sean to answer, a disdainful smile surfaced on Hesta's lips.

"How could they? Do you deserve it? You don't," she said softly. "A creature like a maggot, a rat—anything lacking humanity—no one cares about. Because cowards, bastards, and shameless liars like you are destined to be scum trampled underfoot for the rest of your lives... And you still harbor delusions of climbing upward? You only deserve to live in a stinking gutter."

Sean couldn't speak—some of the very vocabulary in those words were things he had once said to Galvin, though he had no idea where Hesta could possibly have heard them.

Yet Sean could no longer afford to care about that now. His jaw trembled slightly, his chest heaving violently, his eyes bloodshot from anger, and bulging veins pulsing from his neck all the way to his temples.

He remained completely silent, staring fixedly at Hesta.

No one had ever... insulted him like this before.