Chapter 55: Death's Last Stand
Several days passed in a blur, and during that time, the entire United States descended into chaos.
To maximize Death's workload and run this hellish bureaucrat into the ground, Chris spared no effort.
In just a few days, he'd traveled through more than a dozen states, helping dozens of Fortune 500 companies with their "executive transitions" and permanently extending the lifespan of their corporate restructuring plans.
Every time Chris finished with a company, he could feel Death's hatred intensifying.
It wasn't until news of these financial titans and corporate moguls dying broke nationwide—and after several days of media frenzy—that Chris suddenly stopped sensing Death's malice entirely.
Standing atop the Empire State Building, Chris gazed out at the iconic skyline he'd seen in countless movies, wondering if Death was cooking up another extinction-level event.
After finishing a Cuban cigar, Chris crushed the butt, casually flicked it over the edge, and watched it disappear from sight.
He took a deep breath of the frigid air, then headed back inside the building.
Whatever Death was planning, Chris was prepared to continue with his own agenda.
The two of them were already locked in a fight to the death. He'd been put through hell, and it wasn't something that could be resolved with a simple apology from some cosmic entity.
No longer dwelling on Death's intentions, Chris turned and entered a nearby conference room. To the bewildered expressions of the old executives inside, he casually snapped their necks before strolling back out.
As he left, Chris glanced at the nameplate in front of the old man who'd been sitting at the head of the table and was mildly surprised to find this one was also named Anthony.
It reminded Chris of that sharp CEO from the Marriott Building. Real shame that guy hadn't been cautious enough—Chris really would've liked to keep him around to help analyze Death's patterns.
Chris sauntered out of the conference room, took the elevator down, and pondered where he should strike next.
By now, every major corporate player in America knew that some kind of monster was systematically slaughtering them, and anyone with half a brain had already fled the country for safer shores.
Those who remained were either mid-level executives who couldn't afford to leave or stubborn old bastards too proud to run.
These dinosaurs always thought Chris was no different from the mob hitmen of decades past—just another two-bit crook looking for a payday.
They'd survived the ninety-four percent tax rates of the Eisenhower era—would they really be afraid of some no-name killer in this new millennium?
What a joke!
That was the mindset of these fossilized old men. They were eternally obstinate, convinced this was just a minor inconvenience.
So for Chris, these guys were even easier targets, since they'd only arranged for their bodyguards to carry dinky little pistols—and Chris didn't even bother dodging when the bullets pinged off him.
Recalling the executives he'd eliminated over the past two days, Chris sneered and muttered, "No wonder American industry's been stagnant for decades. Turns out their leadership's already brain-dead!"
Click-clack, click-clack!
"What the hell is that noise?"
Hearing the sudden sound, Chris looked up at the elevator ceiling where the noise originated. Then he heard a sharp snap, and all the steel cables holding the elevator severed simultaneously.
The sensation of freefall instantly registered in Chris's brain. Sensing the elevator's descent speed, he chuckled in exasperation. "A meteor couldn't kill me—you think this will?"
The moment he felt the elevator was about to impact, Chris jumped with force, directly smashing through the elevator ceiling and leaping clear of the rapidly compressing death trap.
The instant Chris escaped, the entire elevator slammed into the ground with a thunderous crash, instantly flattening under the force of gravitational acceleration.
Looking at the elevator's mangled remains, Chris scoffed. "That's it? That's all you got?"
However, in response to Chris's taunt, Death made no further move—as if this incident truly had been just an accident.
Seeing this, Chris climbed out of the elevator shaft, pried open the doors on the ground floor, and walked out of the Empire State Building amid the shocked stares of people in the lobby.
The moment Chris stepped onto the street, a nearby steamroller suddenly went berserk and charged directly at him, while a cement mixer that had been pouring concrete suddenly tipped over, flinging its load into the air to rain down on Chris's position.
"Can't you come up with something new? These moves are ancient history!" Chris taunted while casually sidestepping the cement.
"Also, are you maybe exhausted from dropping that meteor? This is pathetic! If I wasn't worried about ruining my clothes, I wouldn't even bother dodging!"
Then, as the steamroller closed in, he simply reached out and flipped the entire machine onto its side like it was a toy.
This was a road construction steamroller weighing at least twenty tons, but Chris's explosive strength before getting hit by the meteor had already exceeded a hundred tons.
Under life-or-death pressure, even more potential had been unleashed, and Chris's strength had surged again, making it trivially easy to flip this thing over.
However, before Chris could continue taunting Death, he felt as if someone had violently cracked a Louisville Slugger against the back of his skull, causing his entire body to stagger forward.
Chris reached back to touch his head, then felt a thick, sticky liquid and a small, hard object.
He brought his hand forward to look—his palm was covered in crimson blood, with a deformed bullet resting in the center.
"Huh. It's a bullet! I genuinely thought someone nailed me with a baseball bat!"
At that moment, Chris heard a gunshot like a thunderclap echoing across the cityscape.
Before the sound even registered, his body swayed again, and another deformed bullet dropped from his skull.
He'd been thinking—with his current superhuman physique, how could any human with a baseball bat possibly make him stumble?
Turns out someone was shooting at him with a high-caliber sniper rifle!
Realizing he'd been sniped, Chris turned his head toward where the bullet originated, and then he heard the second rifle report.
Following the trajectory, Chris spotted a guy wearing a black beanie on a distant rooftop, staring at him in absolute horror.
Chris could even read the man's lips forming the words 'fuck, fuck, fuck' in panicked repetition.
Locking eyes with the sniper, Chris flashed his perfectly white teeth, then mouthed back: "I see you."
Then Chris vanished from the man's field of view.
Watching a monster that had just taken two armor-piercing rounds to the head and was still smiling at him, the mercenary immediately dropped his Barrett .50 cal and bolted toward his pre-planned escape route.
"Monster. Absolute fucking monster! What the hell did those businessmen do to deserve having something like THAT sent after them?"
"Oh, wow! What did I just hear? You were actually hired by those old fossils? I thought they only had those bodyguards with peashooters!"
"What?!"
The mercenary spun around to see Chris casually leaning against the wall behind him.
'Jesus Christ, how can he be that FAST?!'
The mercenary's shocked thought had barely formed when his well-trained body was already raising a submachine gun and opening fire on Chris.
However, the mercenary didn't actually believe this firepower could kill a monster capable of flipping a twenty-ton steamroller with his bare hands and shrugging off armor-piercing rounds to the skull.
His current goal was merely to suppress the target for a moment—create enough chaos to give himself a fighting chance to escape.
However, his hopes were shattered when the bullets—which weren't even as fast as Chris's hands—were simply caught mid-flight and then redirected back at him.
Dozens of rounds flew back even faster than they'd been fired, and the mercenary was instantly riddled with holes.
Looking down at the fallen contractor, Chris chuckled. "I didn't expect you to even recruit human assets into your plans. Seems like you're scraping the bottom of the barrel!"
"But if you can do this, why not bring in the National Guard too? Oh wait—you can't, can you? HAHAHAHA!"
Amid Chris's gleeful laughter, Death made no further moves.
Perhaps, as Chris suggested, the entity no longer had the energy to do anything else.
Including this mercenary in the plan had already been Death's final desperate gambit—and it had clearly failed just like everything else.
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