Weak Class of Anti-Hero
Chapter 46: The Original Sin

Chapter 46: The Original Sin

His demented laughter subsided, replaced by the exhilaration of pure, mad genius.

"Do you want to know the truth, Ji-Hoon? The real truth? Not the fairy tales I tell the others?"

He spread his arms wide, like a director unveiling his masterpiece.

"The Fertile Burst... it wasn’t the Creators. It was me."

My mind went blank. It was impossible.

"Decades ago," he continued, savoring my shock, "I discovered their existence. I understood the threat they represented. So I began to collect the DNA of every creature from the breaches I could find. I ran experiments. To make us stronger. To evolve humanity."

He tapped his chest. "I injected myself with extremophile bacteria found on the corpse of an Abyss Lord. I acquired their physiology. My astral body is no longer a mere consciousness. It can divide. Millions, billions of times. Like bacteria. As long as a single part of my soul exists somewhere, I am immortal."

He wanted to create supermen, modified humans capable of fighting the Creators.

"But I made a mistake," he admitted, without the slightest regret. "A genetic miscalculation. I tried to create a virus that would target and enhance humanity. But the virus mutated. It became unstable. It escaped."

He smiled.

"On August 15th, twenty years ago, that virus reached critical mass and spread across the entire planet in a silent wave. The event you call the ’Fertile Burst’. It wasn’t an attack. It was a lab accident. My accident."

He looked at me, his eyes shining with a twisted pride.

"I didn’t create heroes. I created uncontrollable chaos. And I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to fix my mistake. Trying to regain control."

I looked at this man, this monster who had played with the fate of all humanity, and I felt nothing but disgust.

"You’re completely insane," I said, my voice calm despite the shock. "You’ve lied to everyone. You’ve sacrificed innocents. You’ve created monsters. All of it, just to fix your own mistake."

I shook my head. "You’re no different from them. From the Creators you claim to fight. You want control. You think you have the right to decide for others."

The Director’s face twisted in fury. My insult had struck a nerve. His scientific calm vanished, replaced by the rage of a god who had been dared to be defied.

"SILENCE!" he roared, his voice vibrating through the airlock. "YOU UNDERSTAND NOTHING! I AM HUMANITY’S SAVIOR, NOT ITS DESTROYER!"

He raised his hand. And the world around me changed.

It wasn’t an energy attack. It was more subtle. I saw lines of code, equations, probability percentages appearing in the air.

"My power isn’t combat! It’s Accounting!" he screamed. "I see the laws of physics! I see the probabilities! I can calculate the outcome of every action before it even happens!"

I tried to attack him again. I launched an Aura Blade.

But just before I launched, he took a step to the side. My attack hit the wall where he had been standing a millisecond earlier.

I tried to strike him in close combat. He dodged every one of my moves without even looking at me. He wasn’t reading my muscles. He was reading the future. The immediate future.

It was the ultimate power. How do you fight an enemy who already knows all your moves in advance?

I understood. That’s why he was so calm, so confident.

In his world of numbers and calculations, my defeat wasn’t a possibility. It was a mathematical certainty.

The fight, if you could call it that, was one-sided.

I tried everything. My speed. My strength. My powers. Nothing touched him. He was always one step ahead. He wasn’t even attacking me. He was just dodging, parrying, letting me exhaust myself, showing me my powerlessness.

He was completely dominating me with this single ability. It was clearly a Super-Skill, one of those that rewrite the rules of the game.

"You see?" he said, effortlessly dodging one of my attacks. "It’s useless. I’ve already calculated millions of scenarios. You lose in every single one."

He was right. I was losing.

But he had forgotten one detail. One tiny detail.

When I had sliced him the first time, it wasn’t just an attack. It was contact.

And my dagger, my power, my ’Absolute Evolution’... it had touched his essence.

I didn’t need to activate anything. It was passive. My power had tasted his.

And it had learned.

I stopped attacking. I stood in the middle of the airlock, my eyes closed.

"Giving up?" he asked, a smug smile on his face.

"No," I said, reopening my eyes. "I’m calculating."

And my world changed too.

The lines of code. The equations. The probabilities. I could see them. I could understand them.

It was a stalemate.

He saw the change in my eyes. His smile vanished. He understood.

"Impossible..."

"You’re not the only one who can count," I said.

He attacked. A surprise attack, calculated to be inescapable.

I moved at the same time he did. Our movements were mirror images. We dodged in the same way, at the same instant.

The fight was no longer a slaughter. It was a dance. A perfect dance between two opponents who knew each other’s every step in advance.

We were evenly matched.

Our deadly dance lasted for what felt like an eternity. Every attack was nullified by a perfect parry. Every dodge was anticipated. We were in a total deadlock.

But the Director had decades of experience with this power. I had only had it for a few minutes.

He began to change the rules.

He didn’t just read the probabilities. He began to "influence" them. To cheat.

He made his own ability qualitatively superior to mine. The lines of code I saw began to blur, corrupted by his will. My calculations became increasingly difficult.

He started to dominate me again.

He managed to hit me. A strike of pure energy that sent me flying against the wall. Then another. I was losing again. It was only a matter of time before he found the perfect calculation to annihilate me.

I was on my knees, trying to catch my breath. He approached, his hand glowing with the energy of victory.

"The game is over, Ji-Hoon. I admit, you’ve been the most interesting opponent I’ve ever had."

He raised his hand for the finishing blow.

And that’s when another voice rang out. Not in the airlock. But from everywhere at once, as if broadcast through every speaker in the base.

A calm, familiar voice, full of infinite contempt.

"Jae-Wook."

The Director froze. It was his real name.

"I’m gone for a few years, and you become a real hell of an asshole, you know that?"

An electric blue portal opened right behind the Director.

My father stepped out, his black combat armor glowing with a threatening light.

And he wasn’t alone. Behind him, a dozen elite soldiers, the best of his organization, emerged from the portal, their weapons aimed at the Director.

The game had just changed. Drastically.

The Director, Jae-Wook, turned slowly. His face didn’t show fear. Just a deep irritation, as if a private party had just been crashed.

"Min-Ho," he said. "You always were good at ruining important moments."

My father didn’t answer.

He vanished from where he stood.

And he reappeared right in front of the Director. His speed was instantaneous, defying all logic.

He grabbed Jae-Wook by the collar of his lab coat, lifting him off the ground. The intensity in his eyes was terrifying.

"I heard everything, Jae-Wook," he said, his voice low and filled with contained fury. "I hacked your communications as soon as I sensed the base’s activation."

His gaze hardened. "So, if I understand this correctly... the Fertile Burst. The DCC. Her illness."

He brought the Director’s face close to his own.

"Is it because of you that my wife is dead?"

Before Jae-Wook could answer, my father struck.

It wasn’t an Aura attack. It was a simple punch. Brutal. Primal.

The blow hit the Director square in the face. There was a dull thud, the sound of a bone breaking. Blood spurted from his nose.

The great immortal genius, the master of probabilities, was bleeding.

Like any other man.

My father let go of the Director, who fell heavily back on his feet, wiping the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.

He didn’t take his eyes off me. He spoke to me.

"Ji-Hoon. Go get Dr. Thorne. He’s in the control room, at the back. He’s the one who controls the containment protocols. Stop him from blowing everything up."

It was an order. But it was also an act of trust. He was letting me handle part of the battle.

"Take care of him," I told my father, gesturing towards the Director.

"Don’t you worry about me, kid. We have an old conversation to finish."

I slipped out of the airlock, now that my two jailers were busy.

My father took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it, taking a long drag. His charisma was overwhelming, even in the midst of this crisis.

He blew out the smoke, looking at the Director with a deadly calm.

"We can’t fight here, Jae-Wook," he said. "If we both go all out, we risk weakening the local multiversal structure. We don’t want to accidentally create a new breach, do we?"

The Director smiled, a bloody, demented smile. He understood.

"You’re right, Min-Ho. As always. We need a bigger playground."

He raised his hand. Not to attack. He tore reality itself, opening a black, silent breach next to him.

"I invite you," he said. "Into a subspace. A void where reality doesn’t exist. There, we can truly see which of us is stronger."

My father threw his cigarette to the ground and crushed it.

"After you," he said.

The Director stepped through the portal. My father followed him.

And the breach closed behind them, leaving the base in a sudden silence.

The battle of gods had begun. Elsewhere.