Then he got to the real business. He took hold of the bars of the cell, set his hands, and bent them apart, carving himself a way out. Poire was completely stunned by the impossible thing she had just witnessed.
In reality, Jin had been waiting for her all this time, for a private conversation. The blue-haired girl was confused about why, but Jin could already sense that she had been blackmailed into working for them, because someone she cared about was imprisoned here somewhere.
Poire was terrified that his guess was so accurate. He went on to heal her wounds, explaining that the only reason he had been fooled at all was that he knew the girl's wounds were real. Criminals did not go around beating their own allies to a near-death condition. That was how he had known immediately that Poire was being blackmailed and forced into the work.
His words caused her massive guilt, and ultimately gave her the chance to share her side. Her little brother had been captured by these scumbags. They constantly threatened that they would sell the boy outside the country if she resisted, and that they would never let her see him again. Poire broke down into tears, revealing that even her parents had been slaughtered by these people. Her brother was all that was left.
Just hearing her story got Jin going in a way nothing else had. He was in a literal fit of rage, and Hakama finally understood why he had let himself be captured in the first place. His goal had always been to save these people, but he also knew that villains were stubborn and annoying. Letting even a single one escape led to disaster later, because they could rebuild their power and cause trouble all over again.
Long story short, he intended to squash these cockroaches all together, and he started by kicking the daylights out of the beast-eared guard at the door.
With the path now open, Jin set out to tear these lowlifes to pieces. He knew the psyche of villains better than anyone, and the reason for that lay a hundred million years in the past, when human civilization had reached its technological prime.
The boy he had been then was beaten down and had nothing. His first thoughts were to admire justice in the world, but that admiration came with a second, more haunting realization. Any world that needed justice was also filled with an overwhelming number of bad people. People who wanted to hunt him down, for example. Living an ordinary life was something to be praised, but in the kind of environment he grew up in, the boy never experienced the peace he wanted.
So when it came to the people who tried to mess with him, Jin crushed them under the weight of his powers, breaking their bones and destroying them over the years. He took down bad people everywhere he went, continuously crushing the ones that disrupted the peace of the world. Until one day, a man came to him with a different opinion. He thought Jin had been born into the wrong world.
In the present, Jin strode forward to confront the fools standing in his way, having already laid waste to piles of bodies behind him. He wanted only to increase his count, and refused to answer any questions. He threw one of their own at the henchman in front of him.
The moment the man caught his falling comrade, Jin swooped in with a lightning-fast kick and slaughtered the other one. His friend was left horrified, because Jin had just sent the man into the wall hard enough to leave a crater, appearing no different from a monster that did not know how to stop. Terrified, the survivor tried to run, but it was pointless.
Only his agonizing screams reached the captives on the lower level. Poire could tell the scream was coming from the others. She was genuinely starting to wonder who on earth Jin was. Hakama casually revealed that this man was a walking god, and that they had nothing to worry about, since he would take care of everything by himself. Right now they needed to follow his instructions and head outside, though it was terrifying to Poire that they were about to be saved.
The leader of the bandits was not exactly easy to beat, even by ordinary standards. He possessed a talent for powerful divine magic, and in a battle of brute strength it was hard to imagine anyone taking him down. But while Poire was thinking such useless thoughts, Jin already had the man quivering on his knees.
The boss begged Jin to stop, offering him lumps of money, and then adding slaves into the picture. Poire's brother was being kept in that very room.
Jin was disgusted by the mere suggestion of being offered slaves. He killed another man in front of the boss, while the bandit leader demanded to know what on earth was going on. Not even his spirit arts seemed able to activate in the face of this man's powers.
Even more than that was the mystery of why Jin had all this power in the first place.
Jin called the man a half-baked villain, because the real ones at least had the spirit to run away when they knew they were outclassed. But the bandit leader and his henchmen were all condescending cowards who looked down on others, deluding themselves into thinking they could win. The moment they feared a loss was in sight, they began to plead.
Following Jin's advice, the bandit leader moved his feet and started running. He went straight for the elevator to pull the lever, unleashing the secret weapon they had been keeping caged: a monster. Jin was shocked to find a Corruptor under their control.
It was a powerful beast, acquired for a certain noble. The bandit leader was more than happy to give Jin a challenge, vowing to reduce everything to chaos as the creature roared its battle cry.
The Corruptor attacked first, swinging down hard as if to smash Jin into the ground. The attack was blocked, and the bandit leader was left speechless by the sheer power in the man's frame. Jin remarked that he had literally been born with a superhuman body, possessing muscle fibers several orders of magnitude denser than an average person's.
Now that it was his turn to strike, he kicked the creature back before vowing to unleash more of his strength. He fired a single wave of energy from both hands and wiped the monster to pieces in one blast.
All that talk, and the bandit leader was back where he had started, on his knees. Jin stared him down, wondering what this scumbag would do next. Now that he had run out of options, the man tried to weasel his way out and begged to be spared. But the white-haired man answered with a straight punch to his face, refusing him any chance of mercy.