Chapter 105

Unsung Heroes 11

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The fighting style Theo learned from Miss Samantha was a combination of psychological attacks and the good old fashion ‘put as much lead into your enemy until he stops twitching’.

Psychological attacks came in many forms, but most of them were meant to force enemies to feel emotion that wrecked their focus.

An angry opponent was reckless, thus making it easier to land a lethal hit

A scared opponent would probably just run and get shot in the back.

A depressed opponent was too busy being an emotional wreck to care if you blow his head off.

An opponent that was in love with you would most certainly hesitate to fight you.

The list goes on and on, but the core principle was clear.

The mental and emotional state of an opponent directly affects their performance.

And at the moment, Theo was up against extremely angry opponents.

Theo ran through the sewers, occasionally firing his pistol at the scary furry things that was chasing after him.

“Get back here you coward! Stand and fight!” roared the squirrel who was sporting the dual daggers

“4 against 1? Yeah. That sounds so fair.” replied Theo in a mocking manner. “At least your master fought me 1 on 1.”

“YOU BASTARD!” the squirrel with the nunchucks lunge at Theo, only to be met by pistol fire.

The nunchuck squirrel skillfully deflected the bullets by twirling his weapons at high speed.

Yeah… talk about unfair.

While Theo could use his Super Shotgun to punch through the squirrel’s weapon defense, he decided not to…. For now.

Now you’re probably have two questions in your head.

‘Why did Theo not fight against the elves’

and

‘Why is Theo running from the squirrels?’

The answer to the first question was to conserve his energy.

Theo wanted his revenge. He oh so wanted to rip the elves to pieces.

However, Theo was someone who prioritized efficiency and meeting his goals over revenge and emotional satisfaction.

Theo had 2 difficult battles ahead of him. He needed to conserve his stamina if he wanted to win.

As such, his personal vendetta will have to take a backseat for the sake of the success of the mission.

He’ll have to make do with the heads the Eisenmadchens will be collecting for him.

Now for the second question, it was 2 folds.

The first reason was to move to a designated area where he could use his ‘contingency plan’.

He accepted the painful reality that he will be too exhausted to fight 2 high level battles one after another.

The contingency plan was not exactly meant for him to ‘win’ perse, but more on allowing him to escape.

The second reason was to limit the spread of information about his Eisenmadchen unit.

The only ones that has seen the Eisenmadchens was the elves and the squirrels, both of which were about to die.

Dead men tell no tales.

Theo ran for about 2 minutes. He occasionally stopped and fire a couple of pot shots and even went to a little melee combat before resuming his light hearted jog through the sewers.

Eventually he reached the designated area.

It was smaller than where his Eisenmadchens and the Elves clashed, but it was still fairly large.

It was a vertical tunnel with a cylindrical shape where a fair number of sewer paths ended.

There were some pipes that acted as bridges, but it was mostly a waterfall of filth all around.

Theo stopped in the middle of a long sewage pipe and turned his gaze skywards.

There he could barely spot the ceiling amidst the pipes far above. Hidden in the shadows of said ceiling was a spydrones the size of a standard car that was carrying a powerful supercomputer

“Perfect”

And right on que, the 4 squirrels arrived on the scene.

“Tired already?” asked the dual swordsman.

“Not really. I’m just waiting for you 4.” replied Theo as he faced the squirrels with both his pistol and his super shotgun at the ready.

“Good. I’m sick of chasing your ass.” said the dual knife. “So. Ready to face justice?”

“Yes. But before that, I’d like to say something. Don't worry, it won't take a lot of time.” said Theo

“Out with it then.”

“Straight to the point then.” said Theo in full seriousness. “I know you guys will never believe me, but I apologize for the death of your master. Our meeting was an accident and our fight was a result of a misunderstanding”

“Oh? Do explain?” asked the staff guy, which gained him accusing looks from his fellow squirrels

“Based on the last words of your master, apparently he thought I was a minion of some guy named ‘The Grinder’. Do you guys know who this is?” asked Theo.

The squirrels cringed but remained silent.

It seemed that he was right

“Personally, I never heard of him, but whatever. As for me, I live in an environment were mutants such as yourselves won't hesitate to bite my head off. Thus both of us mistakenly identified each other as threats and proceeded to eliminate one another. It was only a few days after that incident that I discovered who your master was, who you 4 were and the unfortunate crime that I commited. That is the truth” continued Theo.

After a few moments of silence, the dual swords spoke.

“And you expect us to believe our master, one of the wisest individuals in the world, made such a big error?”

“Nope. I have no illusions that you 4 will believe anything I say.” replied Theo.

“Then why bother telling us?”

“It’s because I am about to kill 4 truly good people. At least when you go to the great beyond, you know the truth. Whether you believe it or not is of no consequence.” replied Theo.

“Hah! Cocky bastard aren't you? What makes you think that you can kill any of us?” the dual dagger rudely asked.

“Attack me and find out.”

Theo calmly began walking backwards.

And as he expected, the dual daggers lunged at him first.

Impatient, aggressive and moves before thinking.

Theo’s favorite combination.

Theo open fired with his pistol, but the dual wielder skillfully deflects the bullets.

As dual dagger closed the gap with relative ease, Theo pointed the super shotgun at him and, for the first time in actual combat, activated the function of his left eye.

After his last remaining eye was ripped out during the Valkyrie incident, Theo crafted a brand new one that looked exactly like a normal one.

Unlike the extremely versatile terminator eye on his right eye socket, the one on the left had, aside from functioning like a normal eye, only one other function.

Theo connected to the spider drone, and almost immediately, he could see a transparent shadow similar to the dual dagger guy indicating that he was about to dodge roll to the left.

Theo overclocked his brain for an instant and fired his pistol towards the shadow’s leg.

Not a millisecond later, the dual dagger did roll to the left in order to dodge the supposed shotgun blast, only to receive a bullet to the leg.

Before the dual dagger could scream in pain, his mouth along with his head exploded like a tomato after being at the receiving end of a bullet from the super shotgun.

The 3 squirrels who tried to provide backup, stopped in their tracks as they stared in disbelief at their brother’s headless corpse resting at Theo’s feet.

“I did warn you.” said Theo as he reloaded his guns.

Theo’s right eye was called the ‘Seer’, a ‘Theo original’ experimental analytic engine that could somewhat predict the future. Ironically, it was inspired from an anime.

Why ‘somewhat’?

This was because the eye ‘predicted’ the future by observing the opponents body temperature, muscle contraction, pupil direction, etc, etc.

It was similar to weather prediction but in real time and done as quickly as possible.

The best it could do was predict about 1-2 seconds into the future.

Naturally, there were massive downsides to the Seer System.

First was the massive amounts of computation required for the predictions. The computations were almost as bad as a haphazardly executed midas transmutation.

While Theo’s brain could handle the load, he rather not be mentally handicapped in a fast paced fight.

And besides, he couldn't overclock his brain if he had to do the Seer computations on top of it. His gray matter simply could not take it.

As such, he relegated the computations to the supercomputer spy drone hidden nearby.

Naturally, having those car sized drones following him was impractical.

All in all the Seer System, was a powerful experimental weapon with a lot of downsides.

Such was to be expected of a prototype.

Another flaw Theo recently discovered was that the sudden burst of computations were generating too much heat. The hardware has already began breaking apart.

While he expected such a thing and placed powerful cooling mechanisms on the drone and it to avoid radiating any heat, he underestimated the price one needs to pay to see the future.

As such, he decided to save the Seer for the next encounter.

Dealing with the squirrels all by himself was doable.

Fueled by rage and grief, the 3 remaining squirrels rushed at him from all sides.

Theo fired his pistol at the dual swords to his front. Annoyingly enough, the bullets were being deflected as he approached. It didn't stop the dual swords, but it did slow him down a bit.

Theo tried to shoot the quarterstaff who was closing on his left side, but the nunchucks threw one of his weapons Theo’s shotgun, thus making him miss shot.

Capitalizing this, the quarterstaff threw a thrust right into Theo’s gutt.

There was just one problem.

Theo’s power armor was designed to withstand a direct hit from an RPG.

Getting hit by a stick was laughable in comparison.

Theo let go of his super shotgun, grabbed the oversized stick and violently pulled it to him.

This caused the quarterstaff squirrel to be thrown off balance and fall forward.

Before the suirrel coud even attempt to recover his footing, an archon battery powered left arm went into his head, completely shattering the spine, lungs and even the stomach before exiting the body through the lower back.

Quite simply, the quarterstaff squirrel was now dead.

“BASTARD! YOU BASTARD!” roared the dual blades as he lunged to take Theo’s head.

Theo used his left arm to block the scissor-like slash from the dual blades.

Before he could act, the nunchucks knocked him off balance with dropkick into his side

One of the backweapon arms fired its grappling gun into the nunchuck’s chin, temporarily dazing him in the process.

At the same time, Theo fired his pistol into dual sword’s gutt.

Dual swords desperately dodged this with a backflip.

This was a bad idea.

As the squirrel was recovering his stance, Theo was able to use one of his mech arm grappling guns to fetch his super shotgun.

Theo immediately fired the last of the 2 bullets in the chamber at the unprepared squirrel.

The dual blades was able to block the shotgun slug with his swords, but the exploding round shattered his blades and sent shrapnels into his eyes and face.

“My eyes! MY EYES!”

The dual blades screamed and rolled in agony as his face bleed profusely.

Theo quickly reloaded his super shotgun and fired both bullets into dual sword’s chest. His upper torso flew a meter away while the rest of him simply collapsed on the spot.

Theo had absolutely no intention of making them suffer any more than they have to.

“DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!” roared the nunchucks as he lunged at Theo in bestial rage.

One of the back weapon grappling guns fired and wrapped around one of nunchuck’s legs.

It then drags the squirrel towards Theo, who then fired the grappling hook of the super shotgun into nunchuck’s face.

The squirrel’s head slammed into the ground, once again dazing the poor guy.

Theo reloaded the super shotgun.

And before he could put the squirrel out of his misery, he transferred the super shotgun to his right hand, quickly turned around and caught a shuriken that was shaped like a crow.

After looking at it for a second, he crushed it without much thought.

“I’ve been waiting for you guys. Crow, Vulture and Sparrow. I welcome thee with open arms.”