A Belated Birthday Present?

War. Is. Cruel.

It is gruesome. It is bloody. It gives hardened veterans PTSD.

No matter how well it is described in books and movies only those who have personally experienced its horrors knew what it was like.

Have you ever experienced a war?

Sebastian Alaister certainly hadn't experienced one.

And that's why he had prepared himself for the worst when he burst out that door.

After all, he was jumping right into the midst of one.

Albeit it was a gang war and not something that involved entire nations.

That didn't mean he could underestimate the situation though.

Gang wars are known to be much crueller since there is no such thing as holding back or forbidding war crimes.

One's threshold for committing unspeakable acts gets drastically lowered once immersed in a life of crime.

Mafias tend to take the cake when it comes to this sort of stuff.

However, no amount of preparation could let Sebastian brace himself for what he came face to.

This wasn't a war at all.

This was nothing but a one-sided Massacre.

The Russian Bratva members were being picked off like flies one by one.

In contrast to their disorganized mayhem, Damien's Familia was a well-oiled machine of slaughter.

The Bratva mobsters didn't even have the energy to spare any attention to him.

Getting out of the warzone was as simple as finding the appropriate cover and using the moments of lull between gunfire to … walk away.

After all, no one was aiming at him.

If Sebastian had just waited a little longer before coming out, the bratva would have been completely wiped out.

Sebastian couldn't help but feel sick in his gut.

Something about this entire situation was wrong and he could feel it.

He just couldn't put his finger on it yet.

He didn't have enough pieces of the puzzle yet.

Why were the Bratva so massively outclassed?

Was this just a simple matter of them being low-level thugs compared to the organized mafia family?

Or was something else going on behind the scenes?

What irked him the most was that if Damien's Familia outclassed the Bratva so hopelessly, why were they unable to save Ronnie in time?

Why did Damien not interfere BEFORE they were forced to play that twisted game?

Was it just a matter of bad timing?

Sebastian refused to believe it.

Considering the fact that Damien had been called away for 'family affairs' the same day they got kidnapped was a major red flag of its own.

Maybe Damien wasn't as innocent as Sebastian would have liked to believe.

Either way, Sebastian needed to contact Damien first.

Since he could just beat the answers out of him, thinking was just a waste of time.

Escaping from the warzone was way too easy.

No, they had LET him escape.

Either way, now that he had gotten out of the warzone, he steadily made his way toward the direction the sniper had shot from.

Having seen the shot for multiple iterations now, Seb had a pretty good idea of the general direction. More importantly, there weren't too many vantage points to look through.

He would surely be able to find the sniper sooner or later.

It was safer to approach the sniper rather than the random mafia members that he didn't even know in the middle of the battlefield.

Moreover, Sebastian felt that Damien would definitely be there.

If he was nearby, there was no way he wouldn't be keeping an eye on his and Ronnie's situation.

And a good sniper spot is an equally good binocular spot.

Sebastian slowly broke out into a run as he increased the speed at which he approached the first vantage point he had decided to investigate.

Perhaps, deep down, somewhere in his numb and broken heart, he was a little excited and hopeful of finally meeting his old friend again.

One that was, as a matter of fact, alive in reality.

In a crazy, twisted kind of way, Damien was the last person tying Sebastian back to his real life.

The life before Ronnie died, everything went to hell, and he decided to enter the tutorial.

He had not even officially entered Purgatory and Sebastian already couldn't recognize his past self.

There was no idea how much he would change once he got there.

Plagued by his messy thoughts, Sebastian eventually arrived at the spot without any obstacles.

It had a clear view of the warehouse and one could easily see what was going on in there through the windows at this angle.

Provided one had binoculars.

Seb looked around.

The place was pretty deserted.

He didn't find Damien or the sniper there.

*Beep*

He found something else though.

*Beep*

It was placed in the middle of the room.

*Beep*

A special present for a special someone.

*Beep*

A timer ticking down to its last seconds.

*Beep*

A cute little time bomb.

*BOOOM!*

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.

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[Attempt 69: Failure]

[Completion Rate: 10%]

[Reason for Failure: Death]

"Reason for death? A bloody explosion!"

"That bastard did me dirty didn't he."

Sebastian couldn't help but curse the moment the loop restarted.

He tried to mentally recall the moments leading up to his death.

There were absolutely no signs of him triggering a trap of some sort.

This must have meant that whoever was in that spot had seen him coming and left behind a present before dipping away.

'Just wait till I get my hands on the one behind this'

'It better not be you, Damien, you don't want to find out what comes next.'

Another thing he managed to notice was the symbol branded onto the bomb.

A skull with cobwebs on it, with a spider crawling out of one of its sockets.

He wasn't sure what that sign meant, but it was either the trademark of an illegal bomb crafter or the logo of one of the illegal organizations present at the scene.

He mentally reminded himself to look for any tattoos or memorabilia on the corpses of the criminals in the warehouse once he was done killing them.

Ignoring all attempts Ronnie made at starting a conversation and asking what the hell was going on with him, Seb decided to remain lost in his thoughts and obediently get captured.

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.

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[... Attempt 75]

Ignoring Ronnie at the start had turned out to be detrimental.

He did not shoot himself and just threw the gun away.

This led to him being alive when Seb decided to rebel.

Not only were the attack patterns completely different, seeing Ronnie getting shot into swiss cheese distracted him from the job at hand.

It wasn't a pretty sight, to say the least.

After wasting another few attempts trying to get back into the zone, Seb managed to defeat everyone in the room once again.

Turns out that training under the constant threat of death and experiencing failure in the form of multiple deaths did wonders in improving his skills.

Pulling off superhuman feats of killing 11 people with 7 bullets required more than just 'skill'.

The so-called 'line of perfect shot' that he grasped to get multi-kills was something he could only see when he was in the zone. A state of hyper-focus.

In addition, the muscle memory of that one fight had been ingrained within him, letting him react to events before they occurred.

Searching up the corpses, Sebastian was able to find tattoos on the back of their necks.

It was a skull with cobwebs on it, and a spider crawling out of one of its sockets.

The same as the one on the time bomb that killed him.

Unknown to even himself, Sebastian let out a sigh of relief.

'It wasn't Damien. It was the bastards of the Bratva who killed me.'

But how?

Weren't all the members of the Bratva either lying dead within this warehouse or in the process of dying to the Familia members outside?

How did a bomb belonging to them find its way somewhere only Sebastian would go looking?

The feeling that there was something else going on behind the scenes only seemed to intensify.

This time Sebastian decided on another tactic.

Instead of going out and searching for Damien, he would wait for him in the warehouse.

At the very least, the Familia members who had saved him this night, in reality, would come in once more.

It might not be a bad idea to just play dumb and ask them what was going on.

Sitting in the middle of a pile of corpses, slowly looking up at their dumbfounded mugs with a bored look on his face, and absentmindedly commenting 'You guys were late' would surely make for a great introduction!