I Am the Devil of This Hell

Chapter 095

"Kane!" Owen immediately straightened, his posture shifting into one of profound respect as he bowed his head toward the figure emerging from the rooftop stairwell.

Hawkeye?

The two survivors of the Warwolf Division, staggering to their feet amidst the wreckage of their failed ambush, felt a cold shiver of dread lace through their veins. They stared, paralyzed, as the young man approached. His eyes weren't just cold; they were glacial, carrying a piercing, predatory intensity that seemed to strip away their very souls.

This was Kane Adler. The architect of the Shadow Eagle Clan. The beast who had domesticated the most violent predators of the Confinement Death Ward and turned them into his personal vanguard.

When they had read the intelligence briefings back at the Direwolf Syndicate headquarters, they had felt a professional detachment. When they had peered at him through the crosshairs of a sniper scope earlier that hour, he was merely a target—a high-value contract to be fulfilled. But now, standing ten feet away from the man himself, the raw, suffocating aura he projected was overwhelming. It was an atmospheric pressure that made the act of drawing breath feel like a labor. They didn't just fear him; they lacked the fundamental courage to even maintain eye contact.

Kane surveyed the battlefield with a detached, clinical gaze. He looked at the mangled remains of the youth whose head had been pulverized by his own comrade’s sledgehammer, then turned his attention to the two remaining enforcers. They stood huddled together, drenched in a mixture of their own blood and the visceral remains of their fallen "brother."

"The sniper," Kane said, his voice a low, terrifying monotone. "Which one of you pulled the trigger?"

The cold-eyed marksman, feeling the weight of Kane’s gaze like a physical blow, swallowed hard. His throat felt tight, his nerves frayed to the breaking point. "I did..." he managed to wheeze out.

The word had barely left his lips when Kane blurred.

To the sniper, it felt as though the world had suddenly glitched. One moment Kane was ten feet away; the next, a hand as hard as iron was clamped around his throat. The sheer kinetic force of the movement carried the sniper backward, his boots skidding across the concrete until his back slammed into the low partition wall with a bone-jarring thud.

Kane’s right hand, shaped into the lethal Sternum Strike claw, tightened. The pressure was immense, focused directly on the sniper’s windpipe. The man tried to cough, to gasp, but his larynx was being crushed under the relentless grip. His face turned a deep, bruised purple, and small, rhythmic bubbles of b****y froth began to leak from the corners of his mouth.

Seeing his comrade being strangled, the giant Titus let out a guttural roar. He raised a massive, b****y fist, intending to launch a desperate, last-ditch rescue.

But as he moved, the light was eclipsed by a shadow even larger than his own. A massive, calloused hand clamped onto his wrist with the finality of a steel trap. Titus found himself pinned in place, unable to move so much as an inch.

He looked up, his eyes widening as he stared at Bobby, the man they called Bobby. Bobby stood nearly four inches taller than the giant of the Warwolf Division, his frame so broad it seemed to block out the gray winter sky. For the first time in his life, the man who prided himself on being the strongest in the room felt small.

Bobby’s normally stoic face twisted into a dark, predatory grin. "Take it easy, little guy," he rumbled, his voice vibrating in Titus’s chest. "You aren't in the same league as Hawkeye. You don't even have the credentials to breathe the same air."

Little guy?

Titus had never been addressed with such casual derision in his entire career. But as he felt the bone-crushing pressure in Bobby’s grip, he realized with a sinking horror that the term was accurate. He was a child playing at war, and he had just encountered a god of the battlefield.

Still, the instinct for survival—and a flickering spark of loyalty—prevailed. Titus let out another muffled shout and swung his left hook toward Bobby’s jaw, hoping to create enough space to retreat.

However, the previous battle with Owen had taken its toll. Titus was a spent force, his stamina depleted, his movements sluggish and heavy. Bobby didn't even flinch; he simply reached up with his free hand and caught the punch as if he were catching a slow-pitch softball.

"I asked you once to stay still," Bobby said, his voice dropping into a dangerous register. "Do you really have a death wish, kid?"

"Go to hell!" Titus spat, struggling against the two iron anchors holding him.

Suddenly, a shadow flickered at the giant’s side. Owen appeared like a wraith, the broken shard of his Bowie Knife gleaming with a malevolent light. Titus caught the glint of steel in his peripheral vision and began to thrash with renewed desperation, a primal fear of the blade taking over.

Owen offered a thin, chilling smile. Without a moment’s hesitation, he drove the jagged steel downward in a clean, professional arc.

Squelch.

The blade sheared through muscle, tendon, and bone. Titus’s left arm was severed at the shoulder in a single, violent stroke. A geyser of brilliant, hot arterial blood erupted, spraying the rooftop and drenching the concrete in a macabre display. The white, jagged end of the humerus bone protruded from the stump, a grisly testament to the sharpness of the shard.

Titus let out a high-pitched, warbling scream of agony. As his arm hit the floor, Bobby released his grip, stepping back with a look of mild amusement. The giant collapsed, clutching the spurting ruin of his shoulder, rolling across the roof in a frantic, losing battle against shock.

"Does it hurt?" Bobby asked, crouching beside the writhing man. "Or should I help you find the exit to the next life a bit faster?"

"I’ll... I’ll kill you... I’ll kill every last one of you!" Titus wheezed, his face a mask of sweat, blood, and tears. The agony had pushed him past the point of reason into a state of pure, hysterical rage.

"Too noisy," Owen muttered. He stepped over the giant, gripped the hilt of the broken knife with both hands, and positioned the point directly over Titus’s struggling heart.

Thud.

The short blade sank into the giant’s chest as easily as a hot wire through wax. The scream was cut short, replaced by a wet, hollow rattle as the life fled from the massive frame.

The sight of his second comrade’s brutal execution was the final blow for the sniper. Pinned against the wall by Kane’s unrelenting grip, he wanted to scream, to weep, to beg for mercy. But his vocal cords were a mangled wreck. He could only stare at Kane with eyes full of a haunting, spectral terror, trying to etch the face of his killer into his mind for whatever came next.

Kane stared back, his eyes tinged with a faint, vengeful red. "What you did today is beyond the reach of mercy," he whispered, his voice as cold as the sleet falling around them. "You chose to fire into a crowd. You chose to target my Brothers. You forfeit your right to a quick end."

Kane’s left hand moved to the sniper’s shoulder. He gripped the joint and twisted with a sudden, violent torque.

CRACK—SNAP.

The sniper’s left shoulder was instantly dislocated, the humerus snapping under the immense pressure. Blood began to seep through the man’s tactical shirt, staining the fabric a dark, bruised plum. Kane didn't stop. He shifted his grip, his right hand moving to the other shoulder.

CRACK.

Another sickening sound of shattering bone echoed across the silent roof. The sniper’s arms now hung uselessly at his sides, ruined beyond repair.

Kane then delivered two rapid, precision kicks to the man’s knees. The sound of the patellas shattering was like the breaking of dry kindling. Within sixty seconds, the elite marksman of the Warwolf Division had been reduced to a heap of broken meat, his limbs shattered and his mobility erased.

Without the immediate intervention of a surgical team, the man would never walk again. He would be a prisoner in his own shattered body.

"The moment you pulled that trigger, you ceased to be a man," Kane said, tossing the limp, broken figure aside like a piece of refuse. "You became a debt that needed to be collected."

Bobby stepped forward, carrying two heavy industrial jugs of peanut oil he had snatched from the store’s storage area during his ascent. He began to pour the thick, viscous liquid over the shivering, twitching sniper.

Kane pulled a silver Zippo lighter from his pocket. He looked down at the sniper, whose eyes were wide with a new, realization-born horror.

"Take a good, long look at me," Kane said, his thumb flicking the flint. A small, orange flame danced in the wind. "Remember this face. When you wake up on the other side, you’ll know exactly who to look for."

He tossed the lighter. It arced through the gray air, a tiny spark of defiance against the gloom, before landing squarely on the oil-soaked chest of the sniper.

WHOOSH.

The oil ignited instantly, a pillar of orange flame erupting to consume the broken man. The sniper’s muffled, high-pitched shrieks of agony began to fill the air, a haunting, rhythmic sound that drifted down toward the terrified crowds on the street below.

Kane stood motionless, watching the fire. There was no pity in his gaze, no flicker of regret. His face remained as calm and tranquil as the eye of a hurricane, a stillness that was far more terrifying than the screams.

Kane Adler lived by a simple, brutal code: every action had an equal and opposite reaction. If you struck his family, he would strike back ten times harder. In this lethal game of the Underworld Empire, mercy was a luxury he couldn't afford—not if he wanted his Brothers to survive.

He knew his soul was darkening. He knew the body count followed him like a shadow. But he was willing to carry the weight of a thousand murders if it meant securing a future for the men who called him "Brother." He would pay the price in the next life; for now, he had a war to win.

"Brother Kane," Owen said softly, stepping to his side as the first blue and red lights of the police cruisers began to reflect off the nearby glass towers. "The SWAT units are breaching the ground floor. The Criminal Investigation Division is setting up a perimeter. We need to vanish."

Kane took one last look at the charred, unmoving remains of the sniper, then turned toward the rooftop exit. "Tell Dante to extract the wounded. We move to the secondary safehouse. The Direwolf Syndicate wants a war? We’ll give them a massacre."