I Possess the SSS Skill: Future Sight-Chapter 7: The Distraction Operation

- Jackson Reed’s POV -

I left those kids bleeding in the front room. They had to learn the lesson the hard way: the world doesn’t spare the weak, even when they’re elite.

I pushed the massive steel door with my bare hand.

I didn’t need a key — the aura around my palm melted the magnetic locks like butter.

I stepped into a long corridor lit by sterile white fluorescents, a harsh contrast to the filthy sewers above.

I walked slowly, my eyes scanning every inch. There were no insignias — no guild, no government stamp, not even the name of a corrupt pharma company. The walls were made of reinforced arcane titanium that costs millions per square meter.

I reached a huge glass hall.

What I saw inside — and I’ve seen the slaughter at the first gates — made my stomach turn.

Rows upon rows of aquatic cylinders stretched into infinity.

Inside them weren’t monsters. They were hybrid abominations, horrifying and grotesque.

I saw children with bat wings stitched to their backs, their eyes gouged and replaced with fire cores. I saw pregnant women, their bellies grotesquely swollen and alive with creatures whose claws shredded uteruses only to heal and tear them again. The walls of the hall weren’t purely metal — they were sheathed in living, pulsing human flesh that breathed and secreted a vital fluid feeding the cylinders.

This is not the work of a rogue guild, I muttered. My mind calculated the scale of the crime. The funding for this... the tech, the synthetic Eitra — they’d exposed an entire base. Impossible this was out of the sight of higher intelligence. This is global treachery...

Before I could finish that thought, the alarm went off.

It wasn’t a sound alarm.

It was a fundamental shift in atmospheric pressure.

Gravity in the chamber spiked tenfold in an instant. The titanium floor cracked under my boots.

"Entity of S-rank detected. Deploying specimen: Zero-Absolute." a cold AI voice announced.

The fleshy ceiling above split open, and something dropped out — something no nightmare could contain.

The creature landed before me, and its impact triggered a microquake that shattered dozens of nearby glass cylinders.

I stared at it and tightened my grip on the gun — the Abyss Cannon.

This was no gate-creature. It was an abomination.

Its torso resembled a massive silver gorilla’s trunk but flayed completely — red and white muscles exposed, pulsing in the open air and suffused with a black-violet radiant Eitra. It had no feet; its lower body was a writhing mass of interlocked human spines, hundreds of bony serpents coiling and moving like tracked wheels.

Worse was its head. It had no face.

The head was a giant circular maw, like an earthworm’s mouth, ringed with thousands of rotating blade-teeth. Around the rim of that disgusting mouth were dozens of human eyes, different colors, staring at me in blind terror — the victims’ eyes fused into the monster yet still conscious in their agony.

Jesus, I spat out my cigar.

The beast screamed — not a roar, but a compounded human shriek: hundreds of voices — men, women, children — howling in pain at once. The sound wave itself was saturated with Eitra and slammed toward me like a physical hurricane, tearing at air and walls.

"Silence!" I roared and pumped my Eitra. My eyes went white-hot.

I unleashed an S-rank halo. Pure crushing force radiated from me and hit the scream, turning it into a violent gale that shredded my leather coat.

I didn’t wait. I raised the Abyss and pulled the trigger three times.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Three rounds of concentrated white Eitra — artillery-sized — tore toward the monster.

But specimen Zero-Absolute moved like lightning.

Using that spine-mass as legs, it dodged the first two rounds, which hit walls and vaporized the titanium. The third round struck its left shoulder and tore it open; black blood sprayed, burning whatever it touched.

It didn’t flinch. Instead the maw spat a torrent of purple acid at me.

I launched myself high. The acid hit the spot where I’d been standing and melted the reinforced titanium in seconds, leaving a smoking crater.

While I was airborne, the beast lunged, its remaining arm having mutated into a giant bony blade.

We collided in midair.

I used my Eitra-infused forearm as a shield to block the bony blade.

The impact sent a shockwave that shattered every glass cylinder in the hall. Yellow fluid and malformed corpses rained down.

Pain ripped through my forearm. The bone blade had pierced my Eitra defense slightly and sliced into flesh and bone. Hot blood ran down my hand.

"You stubborn bastard!" I howled.

I grabbed the monster’s bony blade with my left bare hand, ignoring the agony shredding my palm. With my right hand — the one holding the gun — I drove the blazing muzzle straight into the center of that tooth-and-eye-filled maw.

"Eat this!"

I pulled the trigger.

Boom!

The explosion detonated inside its belly. The concentrated white Eitra ruptured its intestines, shredded organs, and turned half the upper trunk into charred, smoking gore.

We fell together. The beast convulsed, spines thrashing, black blood gushing from its ruined mouth.

I thought it was dead. I rose, gasping, blood smeared across my face and torn clothes.

Suddenly the monster’s shredded stomach split open and dozens of malformed human arms burst out.

They lashed like whips, wrapped my legs and waist, and yanked me toward the maw with brutal force. The arms exuded acid that ate through my clothing and flesh.

"You won’t die easy, huh?" I roared, fury taking over.

I dropped the gun. When the fight reaches this point, firearms become burdens.

I focused every scrap of Eitra in my body — in my muscles and bones. My body became a glowing mass of absolute power. I lunged at the beast’s remains.

The arms tried to crush me, but I ripped them apart with my bare hands — flesh tearing, bones splintering.

I planted my boots on what was left of its chest and plunged both hands into the split that the arms had come from, grabbing thick flesh and warped ribs.

I let out a roar that echoed like thunder in the ruined hall and, with sheer, pristine force, pulled my hands in opposite directions.

Rip!

I tore the creature clean in two along its length.

The sound of tearing flesh, snapping vertebrae and exploding organs was a symphony of pure violence.

Burning black rain cascaded over me, covering me in the guts of specimen Zero-Absolute.

I tossed the two shredded halves onto the floor.

I gasped for breath — my chest heaving. I looked at my hands, covered in blood, my body lacerated in dozens of places.

"This... was a beast approaching S-rank terrors," I spat black blood onto the floor and steadied my gun.

I didn’t stop. Pain is an illusion. I had to find the mastermind.

I pushed on through the blasted hall, stepping over a sea of glass, dead flesh, and corrupt blood.

At the far end stood a giant circular door like the hatch of a nuclear vault.

I didn’t waste Eitra this time.

I kicked the door with pure physical force. Reinforced steel tore from its hinges as if it were cardboard and smashed into the inner wall.

I entered.

The room was silent. Too silent.

Only huge screens glowed around the chamber, displaying complex data, genetic codes and a map of the city with red points blinking everywhere.

In the center, seated in a swivel leather chair behind an elegant glass desk, was a man.

He wore a pristine white coat with not a drop of blood on it. His black hair was neatly combed and he wore thin spectacles. He sipped tea from a porcelain cup with an infuriating calm, as if sitting in a high-end café rather than the heart of a destroyed nightmare lab.

He stopped sipping and looked at me. His eyes were cold as death.

"Oh my," he said in a calm, mocking tone, setting down the cup. "Jackson Reed in the flesh! Hero of the Eternal Blade, the intelligence’s faithful dog. I must admit — unexpected. I thought specimen Zero-Absolute would take you longer than ten minutes."

I leveled the Abyss between his eyes. Smoke still rose from my body; my eyes burned with anger.

"Hands up. Slowly," I said, my voice low and dripping threat.

The doctor smiled a wide, disturbingly perfect white-toothed smile. No fear at all.

"No need to shout, Jackson," he said in a sickly friendly tone. "We are civilized men, aren’t we? Science requires sacrifices, and you, of all people, should understand. Look at the power... don’t you want everyone to have it?"

"I said, hands up, you madman, or I’ll reduce your head to dust."

I eased my finger on the trigger. White Eitra pooled at the gun’s muzzle.

The doctor raised both hands slowly, keeping them level with my sight.

"Alright, alright. I surrender. You ruined years of my work, Jackson. I’m truly sorry."

I stepped forward. My combat boots left black-blood prints on the luxurious white rug beneath his desk. I wanted him alive. He had information that could topple governments and guilds. I needed to know who funded him, his goals, why they turn humans into monsters.

I closed to within two meters.

"Stand up," I ordered.

The man smiled again — but this smile was different now. It was the smile of the victor who set a trap and snapped it shut.

Hidden in the hollow of his raised right palm — the one I hadn’t seen — he held a minute remote control. With a movement of a millimeter, he depressed a tiny button.

"By the way, Jackson..." he said, his eyes gleaming with devilish cunning. "The human-conversion project isn’t their endgame. It’s merely... a distraction."

Click.

A faint mechanical sound issued from beneath my feet.

In an instant the glass floor under his chair opened wide.

Not a simple hatch — an endless maw, a vertical shaft drilled into the earth’s crust.

The chair and the doctor fell into absolute darkness.

I lunged and tried to grab him, reaching into the void, but I closed on empty air.

"Goodbye, commander!" the doctor’s voice echoed from the depths, followed by a cold, insane laugh that faded into the abyss.

Then — crash!

The steel hatch slammed shut as if it had never opened. I slammed my fist on the glass and steel, shattering the surrounding fixtures, but the lower tunnel had already sealed with meters-thick compressed titanium gates.

I stood slowly in the silent room, breathing hard.

The mastermind had escaped. The monsters were dead. The lab was destroyed. I felt no victory.

I looked up at the giant screens still blinking with red points all over the city.

"A distraction?" I murmured, a chill seeping into the bones I’d burned to a crisp in combat.

If all this hell, these beasts, and this obscene funding were merely a diversion... then what are they trying to hide? What true objective lurks on the horizon?

I thought of the cosmic catastrophe the prophets and lunatics whisper about. I thought of the dark that grows in the Cursed Forest.

I lit a fresh cigar from the ember of my Eitra-glowing finger and blew blue smoke into the cold ceiling, watching the blood that coated my hands.

For the first time in years, I — Jackson Reed, the S-rank commander who rarely feared anything — felt something I hadn’t felt since I was a frightened child.

I felt true fear.

The storm is coming, and we’re all just autumn leaves waiting to be crushed.