章節 5: The Culling (2)
Kids, men, women, no matter who they were, if they couldn't take what had just happened right in front of their eyes, all started screaming as they ran with all their might.
Even though the grassy plains looked endless, the few people who started running the second they saw the man's head explode would find out that the endless field was only an illusion.
The second these people who were located on the outermost side of the group ran away from the place they spawned in, they ran into an invisible wall that blocked their way.
And no matter how hard they tried to punch through the wall, the invisible wall didn't budge as it stopped hundreds of people from leaving the area.
The new countdown in the sky kept on going down as people tried running away.
By the time the people realized that there was no way out, the countdown had reached the number 13.
People began panicking once again as they realized that they really had to do it.
There was no way out.
They need to eliminate each other.
They must kill another human being if they want to survive.
Humans were a species that were known to be very adaptive to their environment.
From living near hot barren deserts to living in cold snowy mountains, you can almost find humans living everywhere even in unordinary conditions.
Not only nature's environmental extremes but also social extremes were also conditions that humans needed to adapt themselves to.
Like how a certain society normalized cutting their fingers off when a certain occasion happened and another had a tradition to bathe and clothe their dead relatives' carcasses every year.
The humans living in those groups totally found those customs normal and could live happily with them.
All that could happen because of a human's flexibility to adapt to their surroundings so that they could survive.
In this case right here, the humans were faced with a life-threatening situation.
And the only way for them to survive right now was to take the lives of others.
So, as expected of the humans, that was exactly what they did.
Looking at the countdown in the sky, which had gotten closer and closer to 0, these people started scanning everyone around them.
Searching for someone that they could choose to be their target.
And in a place where there were about 300 people present ranging from young teenage kids to old people past their midlife crisis, there wasn't a shortage of targets to find.
All the kids were the primary targets as most of them were crying, some became frozen still in fear, and only a few realized what was about to happen to them.
And as the countdown reached the number 5, someone finally made his first move.
Looking at a crying boy a few meters away from him, the man started running towards the boy as he prepared to launch his feet.
"I'm sorry kid, I don't have a choice! I can't leave my wife and kids alone!" He shouted as he was a few steps away from the kid and was about to kick the boy's head as hard as he could.
However, before he could lift his feet for the last time before the kick, the man suddenly found himself flying backward after feeling his chest being hit by a car.
The man crashed against the ground head first, but he couldn't even register the pain on his head as his caved-in chest struggled to even take a single breath of air.
His ribs had sunken in, stabbing his lungs and filling them with blood.
Before long, as the countdown in the sky ended, the man finally died with blood filling up his throat.
As the countdown ended, another person rose to the sky, this time a woman, and she also had her head exploding into millions of pieces.
After the second countdown ended, two people died.
One from punishment, and the other from the hand of a high school boy.
Lucas stared at his own hands, still recalling the feeling of the man's ribs broken from his own fist.
He didn't have any plan other than saving the middle school boy from being killed.
But he didn't expect that the basic body strengthening technique would enhance his strength and sturdiness so much that a single punch was all that it took to crumble an adult's chest bones.
Lucas saw with his own eyes how the man flew like a kite from his punch before falling down.
He saw the man's struggle to breathe before he lost all his strength and became unmoving on the ground.
It was his first-ever kill.
The first time he took the life of another human being.
He hadn't intended to do it, but it was what had happened.
And Lucas' first kill also became the start of it all.
Soon, the hundreds of people knew that no matter how crazy the situation they were suddenly thrown into, it was a fact that they had to face.
Adding onto the man that fell under Lucas' fist, the death of the woman, the second person to be eliminated by the punishment, became the final nail in the coffin.
When the clouds began forming the number 30 and started counting down once again, people now didn't have a shred of hesitation as they began throwing themselves onto each other.
Just as before, kids became their targets, and some began stepping up to these kids, fighting the ones who tried to harm the kids instead.
Meanwhile, Lucas spoke to the boy that he had just protected and kept him close.
"Don't leave my side."
The boy looked at him and nodded, but not a single word left his mouth as they were shut tightly from his own fear.
The people who had been present around Lucas when he sent the man flying knew of Lucas' unordinary strength and decided to avoid him.
But as the chaos descended and people started hunting each other, people who came from the outer side of the field and didn't see what Lucas did decided to gang up on Lucas and the boy.
"We're very sorry kids, we don't have a choice, we need two more people so that all of us can survive," One of them said as they circled around Lucas and the boy.
The people who knew that they didn't have the strength to kill others with their own hands began teaming up with each other.
They gang up on a single person and take turns dealing the final blow so that each of them could get a single kill each.
And right now, almost all of the people in the group had blood covering their hands except for 2 people that only had specks of blood on their fists.
They probably hadn't killed a person with their own hands, but they certainly had participated in the beating to help the others kill their targets.
The biggest person in the group then started inching closer toward Lucas and once again said,
"Just let me hit you very hard on the back of your head, it wouldn't hurt as much as if you decided to fight back."
Hearing his words, Lucas only stared at the man in front of him with disbelief.
He couldn't believe what his eyes were seeing.
A bunch of grown-up men and women ganging up on him and a little boy.
He also couldn't imagine what he was hearing was true.
Those people telling him to just let himself be killed expecting him to not fight back and die for their sake.
'Are these guys really people?'
Lucas had been desperate before, in fact, he was desperate even now.
But never had he thought about forming groups and ganging up on kids, telling them to stay still as he killed them.
'Is this how humans truly are?'
The burly man who walked closer to Lucas smiled when he saw both Lucas and the boy were frozen in place.
But when he was a few meters away from reaching the pair, the burly man saw Lucas' mouth move, mumbling something that he couldn't hear.
"You all don't deserve to live…"
That was the last thing that Lucas said to the group before he circulated the mana in his body once again.
Activating not only the basic body strengthening technique but also the coercive figment.
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