Chapter 9: The Hunt Ends

The enormous drill descended from the sky. There was no dodging this surprise attack to either side, because once the drill entered the sea, it would inevitably churn up a tremendous whirlpool, dragging the surrounding water toward its center. The only way to escape its effects was to dive straight down into the depths.

Paper Hero had considered all this before making his move. His opponent was chest-deep in the icy sea, with little purchase in the water. Taking the attack head-on would be a poor choice, while dodging it would mean sinking beneath the surface anyway, leaving him on the defensive. Paper Hero knew full well that his opponent might outrank him. He was already staking everything on this attempt. Only by building one advantage upon another could he hope to find an opening for victory.

Blood Owl was entirely different. The response others considered a poor choice was exactly the one he most wanted to make.

With less than two meters to go before it reached Blood Owl's head, the drill suddenly accelerated downward. Though this gigantic paper drill had a base fifteen meters in radius, its tip was exceptionally sharp, aimed squarely at Blood Owl's eyeball.

Blood Owl raised both arms, brought his palms together, and clamped down. In that instant, the drill, spinning at no fewer than two thousand revolutions per second, actually stopped dead.

Only the stronger party can affect the other's motion. By rights, Blood Owl should now have been spinning with the drill in his arms, or being ground into pulp from the top down, starting with both arms. Instead, he simply floated on the sea, stopping a drill nearly a hundred times his own volume with his bare hands.

"He can do this with arm strength alone. Is the gap in strength really that enormous…?" Paper Hero thought. He had reached a conclusion, but continued to analyze the situation with perfect composure. "He's too fast for me to see. As for strength, my paper weapons are as hard as gold. I increased the volume to build up mass, added gravitational acceleration and rotation, and he stopped it as easily as pinching a paper pinwheel… My only advantage now is control of the air, but even that doesn't guarantee my safety… This really is the worst possible situation. How does someone get this powerful?"

Just then, the paper drill burst apart into countless sheets that floated in the air. They joined together again to form an enormous flat surface, like a vast carpet, covering a square kilometer of sea above Blood Owl's head.

"Blocking my view?" Blood Owl sneered. "What's brewing up there? Some kind of killing move…?"

Sometimes, animal instinct is more accurate than a reasoned conclusion. Paper Hero was indeed preparing something. His ability was powerful, with almost no restrictions, but a person's stamina and mental energy were finite. In the heat of intense concentration, the drain might not be obvious, even to the person himself. But once he suffered a physical injury, or his resolve slackened slightly after fighting too long, all that exhaustion would suddenly come crashing over him like water through a breached dam, more deadly than his opponent's attacks. Paper Hero knew that drawing this out would work against him. In a battle of endurance, his opponent would certainly not be the first to fall. Even the best outcome would be his own death in battle, followed by a terrifying strike from the combined land, sea, and air forces that would annihilate everything in this stretch of sea. Better to use his ultimate move now.

Blood Owl whistled as he waited patiently. He was in no hurry to kill Paper Hero. This was a hunting game, and enjoying the process mattered. The one who decided when the game ended, and how, had to be the hunter, never the prey.

The paper carpet was only a flat surface and took relatively few sheets to form. All the remaining paper gathered high above, gradually taking the shape of some serpentine creature. In less than a minute, the sheets screening Blood Owl's view overhead scattered too. Apart from the paper wings Paper Hero used to fly, every sheet in the sky had joined the creature's body.

An immense silhouette loomed among the clouds, with a tiger's whiskers and a maned tail, a long body like a snake's, scales like a fish's, antlers like a deer's, and talons like an eagle's. This great dragon assembled from paper was lifelike in both spirit and form. Even the wind over the sea now seemed to carry its deep, mighty rumbling.

"An imaginary creature… Interesting." Blood Owl watched the great paper dragon wheel through the sky, his expression growing more excited.

As the saying goes, dragons have no divine power; people give it to them. This flying dragon was Paper Hero's trump card. Using his ability to imitate a living creature might seem rather pointless, less useful than forming an enormous sword or over ten thousand paper darts. That wasn't so. The principle was much like serving the same dish two ways, one bright and appetizing, the other shaped like shit. They ought to taste exactly the same, yet whoever ate them would still think the first tasted better. To give a more normal example, a puppet wearing clothes can perform in a comedy, while a naked puppet generally has to settle for horror films.

The Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms ought to come with a dragon's roar, the Dog-Beating Staff Technique just has to use a staff, the Melancholic Palms ought to be practiced by some miserable cuckold, and the Six Meridians Divine Sword damn well has to shoot out of your arteries. Only when form and spirit become one do you reach the highest realm.

Paper Hero sent the great dragon swooping at Blood Owl. The powerful wind it raised disturbed the sea even from far away, and its open mouth was just large enough to swallow him. In the blink of an eye, half the paper dragon's body had entered the water, and Blood Owl had vanished, presumably into its belly.

The Adriatic Sea had an average depth of less than 500 meters, and Venice stood on a shoal, with even shallower water near the shore. Paper Hero knew that even if he dragged Blood Owl all the way to the bottom, his paper dragon could easily withstand the pressure, so naturally Blood Owl would have no trouble either. With no chance of winning by brute force, his only option was to drown him. Surely the bastard couldn't breathe underwater?

The original plan was to have the paper dragon swallow Blood Owl and curl into a ball, then rearrange the paper inside it, wrapping him tightly in wet sheets before adding seamless layer after layer around the outside. It would be like gradually filling a mummy's coffin with cement. Even if you rose from the dead, you'd have to die all over again.

What was actually happening underwater, however, was that Blood Owl had planted himself in a wide horse stance, feet braced against the dragon's lower jaw and both hands supporting its upper jaw. Its mouth simply would not close.

"So it really is more than a change in shape. Even underwater, its bite is far stronger than that drill was," Blood Owl thought.

The farther Blood Owl got from Paper Hero, the weaker his power became. He was struggling more and more to hold on, and as the water pressure increased, his lungs began to buckle under the strain. The paper dragon's enormous mouth was about to close. Blood Owl looked like Pangu insisting on carrying on with his work after taking a laxative. At this critical moment, an opportunity arrived. There were people nearby!

At first Blood Owl thought it was Faru, whom he'd thrown into the water earlier, but on second thought that couldn't be right. The man must have regained consciousness and sneaked ashore long ago. A human who stayed in the sea this long would probably have drowned ten times over. Then… anyone in a place like this had to be military. There must be an HL submarine nearby.

Whoever they were, people were all he needed. Strength began to surge through Blood Owl again, and with a mighty effort, he tore half the dragon's head apart. Free of its grip in one stroke, he swept his arms through the water, churning up a powerful current along the seabed. He shot straight toward the surface, swimming at the astonishing speed of a shark.

Once Blood Owl lost contact with the paper, Paper Hero could no longer determine his position. At night, it was impossible to see anything beneath the sea's surface with the naked eye. With the situation now unclear, Paper Hero could only recall the paper dragon to the sky before deciding what to do next.

Blood Owl surfaced and took a couple of breaths, thinking irritably, "This man has too little negative emotion. What a nuisance. It wouldn't matter on land, but in the sea, it puts me at too much of a disadvantage. Enough playing. I'll just kill him." With that thought, he struck the surface with his palm and actually sprang several dozen meters into the air.

Paper Hero had spotted Blood Owl by then, and the dragon's head was fully repaired. He sent the great dragon swooping at Blood Owl again, intending to repeat the same trick.

A broken piece of ice floated at the point where Blood Owl's downward arc would end. It was only a meter square, but that was enough. The water's buoyancy, and the little purchase the ice could give his feet, would allow him to launch a terrifying attack into the sky.

The flying dragon swept down at an angle from the heavens, while Blood Owl leaped up from below to meet it. This time, the paper dragon truly did swallow him. Then it began coming apart from the head onward, bursting open layer by layer from within, leaving a shattered cylinder of paper trailing across the sky.

Blood Owl tore through the dragon without losing any momentum, heading straight for Paper Hero. The instant the paper dragon collapsed, Paper Hero felt his chest seize up and found himself briefly unable to move. Having the construct he was controlling with such intense concentration suddenly shattered by force had taken a considerable toll on him.

Blood Owl finally reached Paper Hero, twisted around, and drove an elbow at him. This time, Paper Hero's paper wings did not wrap completely around him. Instead, they piled up in front of him, putting everything into absorbing the blow.

The scattered paper drifted slowly down like feathers, while Paper Hero's body flew toward the docks like a cannonball and plunged into the wreckage. The seawater where he landed exploded upward as though it really had been struck by artillery.

"That paper really can take a beating…" Blood Owl thought there was a very good chance Paper Hero wasn't dead. He'd done experiments a few years ago. Even someone whose shattered ribs had pierced their internal organs could still be saved.

Blood Owl dropped back into the sea and couldn't help sneezing. Soaking in water this cold for too long would actually leave the body dehydrated. He felt awful and was already considering whether to swim ashore, dig Paper Hero out of the mud and sand, and finish him off.

But a dozen or more infrared aiming dots changed Blood Owl's mind. Those wavering red points meant concentrated fire from mechanized troops, so he immediately drew a deep, sharp breath and dived. Two seconds later, countless machine guns began hammering the spot he'd just left from several directions, keeping up their fire for a full minute. Water flew everywhere, but no blood rose to the surface. Apparently, not a single shot had hit.

Blood Owl could swim faster than a submarine, and radar couldn't pick up a human being, so he escaped unharmed, bringing this chaotic night to an end.

…

In the days that followed, reports poured out through every kind of media. The official explanation was an armed terrorist attack by Steel Commandment against civilians. In a sense, that wasn't wrong. Blood Owl was indeed a civilian, and the bearer of the Holy Cross, Holy City Inspector Bottrini, had originally come to kill him.

The white cross documented in numerous eyewitness accounts and photographs was described as a special kind of firework. The subsequent small tsunami, explosions, and other phenomena were likewise explained away, one by one, as the effects of conventional military combat.

Some agnostics uploaded their own blurry video clips to the internet, loudly promoting claims about a "white whirlwind and a giant dragon." These voices were soon drowned out by comments such as "Is this a game promo?" "A movie trailer?" "Could that look any more Photoshopped?" and "Honey, come quick, God's here!" Their claims dwindled into a series of dull rumors and gradually faded into silence. All told, the incident made quite a stir, but it died down quickly too.

Paper Hero was sent to the hospital, while Faru became a hero. After being stunned by a single punch, the man had quietly fled and scrambled ashore in disgrace, yet he still managed to collect the credit afterward. This was also one of HL's ways of reassuring the public. The government was invincible. The glory ought to belong to an HL lieutenant colonel, whose brilliant command of our ever-victorious military had protected the people.

And you would never know that an odd policeman had played any part in it.