Chapter 20 - Payback Time (II)
Not long, Maxmillan arrived before one of their nests, which was an inn called Heartwood Inn, an inn that thugs in the area visited to wine, dine, gamble eternally and party to no end. It was their go-to place for relaxation, chat and to have pleasurable sexual activities with abundance of voluptuous and curvaceous, alluringly beautiful women. It was like their lair, a lair specially built for them by someone with lots of resources.
Once Maxmillan arrived before the inn, after easily recalling it to be one of the many inns that he was discriminately dealt with in the most cruel and vicious way, simply because they disliked his presence in their vicinities and sometimes took out their anger of lost bets on him by unleashing severe and inhumane beatings to relieve themselves of their exceedingly painful losses, he shouted at his highest, "Damned bastards, come out here to your death!"
Immediately his loud voice which brimmed with coldness and wrath rang out, the numerous thugs within the Heartwood Inn who gambled and exchanged punches with one another due to small grudges of unpaid debts between them, became stupefied before producing indignant and vicious expressions in their faces.
"Who dares to interrupt our pleasurable activities?" One of them shouted back in anger and prepared to head outside to see who had the courage to come to their infamous lair and cause trouble for them.
"Chill, Gareon. I am guessing it must be the father or some furious brother of a girl that one of us pleasurably harassed and have come here to cut us all down like unwanted, unsavory weeds in their exotic garden of flowers. Hahaha. Or, it could be someone who possibly thinks he has now grown strong enough to face all of us for the nefarious evil acts of brutalization that we delightedly carried out on them. Hehe." Another thug in the inn said, not even thinking in the direction of Maxmillan, as they had beaten too many people and snatched numerous eye-catching items from them which they turned to theirs.
They had simply committed a lot of atrocities that most people, that is common casters as Maxmillan regarded them, wanted them dead or everlastingly banished from the city to dangerous wildernesses where they would pay in blood and life for their unbridled and unrestrained assaultive feats on their daughters and wives, and then their fearlessly bold, daylight criminal acts towards the people that lived in different parts of the city.
"Everyone, let's head out and see the face of the courageous bastard that dares to make trouble for us. And after passing him around amongst us, where his mouth is filled with liquor that would discharge out of our pipes, we will then lock him up in one of the rooms where he will be tortured by Butcher, who after torturously killing him, will dispose off his horrifyingly slashed and heavily pierced corpse in the wilderness where he will be consumed by anyone of the Astra beasts that live there." One of them said really harshly with a glow of sinisterness emitting from his clouded eyes. While the others upon hearing that, cackled in anticipation of the terribly wicked things that they would do to Maxmillan who patiently waited outside for them all to emerge.
One after the other, the thugs appeared outside to look at the face of their excessively bold and admirably fearless challenger.
But upon noticing a masked figure that stood tall and strong, they couldn't help but have their eyes gleam in great astonishment, as Maxmillan had a completely rare body type that radiated strength, inimitable toughness and might, and had a noticeable aura of unparalleled exertive dominance around him. Also, his eyes possessed fieriness and emitted a light of unequaled battle preparedness, making him seem like he was some soldier ready to take on the world all by himself.
"What a tall and powerful-looking figure. But when did we offend this kind of person? Or have any of you gone to do crazy things out there to someone's wife or daughter? Hahaha!" One of them asked and cackled. While the others joined him in laughing in a rather hilarious manner.
"Well, since you are here, just surrender to us and have your puny life spared, or you will die a most regrettable, miserable death." That person said with a frightening cold light of harshness radiating off of his eyes and began to exude a churning purplish aura of Astra Mystralis which partially enshrouded his figure.
Maxmillan who impatiently listened to the vexatious utterances that left their glib mouths, suddenly dashed towards one of them with a burning indignant aura furiously exuding from his figure.
Bang!
He gave the person a powerful uppercut which instantly sent the person flying for more than twelve feet into the air. Then when the person would land back to the ground with a loud heavy thud, which was immediately accompanied by a cloud of dust that announced his solid impact with the bare brown earth, the person landed as a corpse with a fully obliterated jaw that oozed out blood like it were a broken large pipe.
Maxmillan had packed a lot of crushing power in that punch!
Seeing how brutally decisive Maxmillan was, the thugs immediately engaged Maxmillan in a bloody chaotic battle that instantly attracted a lot of common casters around who then quickly hurried off in fear and terror to prevent becoming casualties to stray magical discharges which could impact them and kill them in an instant.
The thugs who were average-level to high-level casters of Astra Mystralis and were once part of heavily trained groups led by Astra Spellcraft Commanders in battle against numerous evil-scheming or plot-machinating criminal masterminds at different points in time (but were relieved of their posts and sent away after serving really harsh punishments because of their corruptness, avariciousness and maliciousness), were dozens of times skilled in battle and spellcasting than the carriage drivers and therefore gave Maxmillan a tough fight that he could really see why the difficulty of the mission was a shocking 7/10, after all the bestowment of rewarded weapons and peak-state body upgrade.
The thugs were simply trained soldiers like him, but possessed average-level to high-level magical prowess and were formidably proficient in spellcasting. Besides, their teeming numbers increased their level of offensiveness by a whole tier and made battling them very difficult. Furthermore, they were highly organized that they worked in perfect conjunction with one another and skillfully unleashed magical attacks that put a non-magic powered Maxmillan in a really tight and annihilatory spot.
'Are these guys skilled deployable warriors? The hell are they so good in battle? Ugh!' Maxmillan asked within himself as he struggled to stand to his feet from the dozens of feet that he was knocked to by a furious fire-bound magical attack that was decisively launched at him by one of the thugs, which impacted him with a large amount of force in the chest and sent him flying for many feet.
At the moment, he had sustained numerous injuries that racked his senses and whole body. But Maxmillan who had a great threshold for pain, which was one of his strongest attributes and was further enhanced to a great level by the anatomy-altering Bionites, simply ignored the seriously aching, burning and stinging pains that afflicted his whole body and continued to fight with the aura of incomparable savagery, unmatched brutality and unequaled viciousness emitting from his tall and powerful muscular body.
Suddenly, space warped around Maxmillan's spread hands, while a long-range flamethrower immediately appeared in them when the spatial warping effect ceased a second later.
Then with a baleful glow of ruthlessness flashing in his penetrative cold eyes, he unleashed a terrifying long stream of searing-hot flame at some of the thugs who had executed magically-enhanced high jumps in the air to pelt and impale him all over with both razor-sharp and spear-like solid-energy constructs that were swiftly formed out of their harmonious convergent links with Astra Mystralis.
However, Maxmillan skillfully dodged the annihilative projectiles hurled at him using a slick aerial maneuverability skill and then dowsed the thugs that jumped in the air to attack him with short explosive bursts of of earth-melting flames when he landed back to the ground.
But the flames were instantly removed by their colleagues who attracted the flames to their hands using their magic-based elemental control ability, before changing them into furiously revolving, tremendously-hot fireballs that rapidly grew large in size through infusion of Astra Mystralis and were abruptly sent flying with a lot of crushing impact force towards Maxmillan.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!...
As the large, raging balls of solidly-condensed fire shot towards him like blazing gigantic cannonballs, Maxmillan immediately slid on the ground to evade the volley of rageful fireball attacks.
Then with space warping around his hands as he evasively slid on the ground to avoid the incoming, large heavy balls of blazing fire, a pump-action shotgun instantly appeared in them which he used to unexpectedly unleash powerful bangs that released shockwave-emitting bursts of high-speed shrapnels at the heads of the thugs one after the other, which then immediately resulted in their heads and necks violently scattering off their shoulders and leaving behind fountains of bright red blood that furiously shot out towards the distant cloudy horizon.
The shotgun immediately vanished and was instantly replaced by a .45 magnum pistol which Maxmillan used to make see-through holes in the heads of the thugs who didn't understand the kind of frightening weapon that he previously conjured to his hands, and so, couldn't dodge on time but be struck by the fast-speeding bullets that fired off from the quick-barrage heavy-piercer pistol.
So, out of forty thugs that emerged from the inn, nineteen of them had been killed off by Maxmillan through impeccable headshots alone. Then coupled with the one that Maxmillan broke off his jaw with a powerful roof-collapsing uppercut, he had killed twenty of them in number.
Seeing that the weapons switching in Maxmillan's hand were both formidable and dreadful, as they didn't have time to either block or dodge before having their heads go off into countless pieces that were immediately accompanied by thick mists of blood, they immediately switched from offensive modes to defensive modes, exactly where Maxmillan wanted them to be.
Therefore, they began to manifest impenetrable walls of magical energy around their bodies to protect themselves from Maxmillan's fearsome attacks. While Maxmillan who saw that they had produced protective barriers of energy around themselves and wouldn't be able to do anything to him anymore, broke a cruel vicious smile in his face and immediately switched from the .45 magnum pistol in his hand to the long-range flamethrower once again. And this time, he increased its flame discharge output from Low Power Mode to Max Power Mode. Then from it Diverging Spray-Mode to Focused Spray-Mode.
Whoooshhh!!
Abruptly, a line-focused stream of exceedingly-hot flame that was only 5 inches wide and carried with it an astonishing amount of penetrative force due to the efficient flame-compression and kinetic amplification technology within the flamethrower, immediately expelled from its projector muzzle and heavily impacted one of them that was fully encased in a densely compacted shield of magical energy.
After directing the kinetically amplified, concentrated stream of searing-hot, steel-vaporizing flame at the shield for sometime, with the intense flame rapidly eating away at the protective magical shield and causing it to quickly thin out before becoming fragile like a thin structural mould of wet paper mixed with starch, Maxmillan produced his .45 magnum gun once again and aimed at the head of the terrified thug.
Bang!
The thin fragile shield immediately shattered to countless pieces and reverted to numerous wisps of Astra Mystralis that rapidly dispersed in the atmosphere. While the thug that was encased in the shield, fell with his back to the ground with a hole that reached all the way to the back of his head, such that one could see what was behind him through the hole. Also, blood began to furiously spurt out of the bullet hole where it formed into a thick reddish pool around the thug's corpse.
Once Maxmillan took care of the thug, he directed the compacted stream of hot flame emitting from the projector muzzle of the flamethrower at another who immediately developed a ghastly, terrified expression in his face.
"Everyone, fall back! Let's retreat. We can't beat this person. He is tough and well-equipped with powerful exotic weapons." The person shouted in horror and began to slowly walk towards the inn to escape Maxmillan's wicked onslaught, whilst trying his utmost best to endure Maxmillan's seemingly unceasing, energy-devouring flame.