300

Their journey did not take long, the explosion was only a kilometre away. Hikaru and his team departed from the truck. Smoke was rising from behind the house. The smell of burnt rubber was everywhere

*Boom*

They saw a big flash of light through the windows. A couple of parasites from another team leaned against the walls beside the front door. Hikaru asked for an explanation and they told him that there was an old man in there with guns and earlier he blew up a van with a bomb.

"Got it. Clear out, I'll handle this."

They stared unblinkingly and nodded. There have been enough casualties. It's suicide to send any more men in. However, Hikaru's main concern is to test himself against an opponent with firearms. He didn't care about casualties on either side as he wanted to destroy the world.

Now that the existence of aliens has been confirmed, he had realised that he had been thinking too small. The world? No. He wanted more. The universe? Yes. The multi-verse if that existed. If it was possible, the existence of everything.

He was eager to attain the alien's space travel technology. He would travel to other worlds and consume planets. Acquiring higher technological prowess enough to squash any resistance. If there were spirits and magical beings, he'd kill them all. If there were gods, they would suffer the same fate as their creations.

Hikaru felt a sting of fear. If they were monitoring this tiny planet, would they notice his plans? Would they fire a powerful beam from space and wipe him off the planet? Nothing happened. Hikaru's blasphemous thoughts were still intact inside his brain.

"Hmph."

*ratatatatat*

A guy riddled with bullets went down in front of him. He decided to go another way. Up. Hikaru jumped to the balcony and went through the sliding door.

*Click*

Hikaru had snapped a wire. He looked down and saw a grenade duct-taped to the leg of a bedside drawer.

*Bwoom*

Hikaru shot out of the balcony with his tentacles curled up into a shield in front of him. He was cushioned onto a tree branch. He found a footing during the fall and stood ontop the tree.

His tentacles were bleeding from the shrapnel attached to it. He squeezed them out with mass manipulation and let scorched bits of flesh fall to the ground.

Then regenerated his wound by reforming his tentacles through disassembling the broken bits and assembling new parts from his reservoir. He healed in an instant.

Previously, Hikaru tried to heal wounds by increasing cell division. Now he simply replaced dead cells or missing cells with healthy ones. By "healing" via reformation, it was almost instant. The only downside was that he needed a stock of parasite cells which could deplete.

He would have to use biochemical energy to produce the cells via cell division which would take time. He had discovered some important clues during his training. When he dislocated his arm from the shoulder joint by lifting a car, his cells could sense its surroundings and give him a detailed infrastructure data.

His ability to migrate and distribute cells around his body relied on his cells' unusual extra-sensory abilities to give him a 3D spatial reconstruction of the environment in his mind.

Another clue came from when Genkei touched the skin of his neck and his cells sensed that he wasn't human. As far as he knew, human cells weren't capable of that.

He discovered that his whole body has been replaced by parasitic/alien cells that could mimic cell types of its host. It could be said that his brain cells, muscle cells, skin cells and fat cells were all made of the same parasite cell.

He no longer had a human body. He had a far superior body. He wondered if this was the difference between him and the other parasites whose true form were nematodes.

*Bang* *Bang*

Hikaru ran down the tree bark at high speed which kept him from tipping over while Genji made holes in a straight line along the tree. After jumping off the tree he had gone around the house out of gun sight.

Genji blocked the back door with a tipped-over table, not to prevent entry, but to slow Hikaru's movement down if he tries to enter.

Genji centres himself in the room away from doors, windows and the stairs which are possible entry routes. He had no clue where he would come in from since he could run fast and jump high. Furthermore, Hikaru could be a distraction from the fact that others were waiting on ambush.

*Crash*

Hikaru kicked down the front door. The type 5 rifle fired its remaining rounds. Hikaru used the kicked door as cover while it was in the air and ran to the left wall of the room in an arc.

Bullets blew holes in walls and furniture, tossing up debris in the air like glitter.

After the rifle went empty, Genji moved into the stairs and turned around with his smg in hand. Meanwhile, Hikaru had finished dodging the bullets in his arc run and beelined toward Genji.

This was exactly what Genji wanted.

In the battle of Thermopylae, Emperor Xerxes gathered the largest invasion force Greece had ever seen. Xerxes had planned to march through a small coastal passage known as Thermopylae but his campaign was stopped by a small greek army that waited for them.

King Leonidas of Sparta led a small army of 300 Spartans and others and defended the small road over a couple of days despite being greatly outnumbered. They had used the narrow passage to limit the number of attacking combatants with the phalanx formation.

The Greek army lost in the end because of a person who betrayed them by leaking a secret passageway that flanked the road, but the story has been used repeatedly throughout history that with good equipment, tactics and terrain, one can face the odds against them.

Now Genji had lured Hikaru into the narrow staircase where it was difficult to dodge and easy to shoot in. Genji had outmatched Hikaru in experience