“Now, put down that silly gun and get on all fours and I will consider sparing your snitching ass!”

The silence that followed perfectly contrasted the loud threat the bandit issued.

“Step back, get down on your knees, and interlock your fingers behind your head.”

Contrary to Werber’s threat, Tina ordered the man in a perfectly calm, collected voice.

Her grip on the gun tightened. She adjusted her right shoulder to correct her aim while using her left arm purely to steady and support her posture.

‘Bad blood or something?’ Leo thought, seeing how the two clearly knew each other.

“Try me, bitch,” Werber laughed outright as he made a step forth.

Wasting no time, Tina pulled the trigger, her eyes hardly even twitching at the notion of blasting another human being.

The handgun jumped in Tina’s hands from the recoil, only for the girl to quickly correct her aim and pull the trigger again.

A double-tap.

Just from the slight instant, Tina needed to compensate for the recoil, she couldn’t really master the higher end of the technique, opting to send her first bullet at Werber’s heart before allowing the recoil of the gun to drive it a bit higher, turning her aim towards the center of the bandit’s forehead.

With no warning shot, Tina unloaded a quick burst at the man at the front before twisting her upper body at her hips and turning her gun towards the next target.

Tina’s twist could be attributed to muscle memory. At this distance, she simply couldn’t miss, so, rather than waiting for her brain to process the obvious result, she eliminated this delay by assuming the probability of success was high enough, allowing her to move on.

And so, Tina’s body twisted, her gun turned towards the target to the right pretty much the moment she squeezed the trigger for the second time.

BaBang!

Sparks exploded at two points, roughly two inches away from Werber’s face.

The bullets which had no right to miss, bounced off an invisible obstacle and ricocheted off to the side, digging a long line in the pain of the wall before embedding itself deep enough into the concrete to vanish.

The corners of Werber’s smirk pulled even higher up. The confidence on his face lacking any hint of surprise proved it was the outcome he anticipated if not outright waited for.

“I will tear you fu…”

“That’s enough.”

Halfway through his second step, Werber suddenly stopped in his tracks, his right knee freezing just high enough for his foot to stop a hair’s width away from the ground.

Werber’s knee froze… but the rest of his body didn’t.

Pushed by the momentum, the man suddenly somersaulted through the air, as if he was hanging on some sort of a gymnastic bar with his bent knee.

This bar only existed at the level of his slightly raised knee, though. When pushed by the momentum of his slow approach, the man simply fell down, as if dead-set on planting his face deep into the concrete below the wooden panels of the corridor’s floor.

Before he could actually smear his facial sweat on the cheap wood, with his knee refusing to leave the spot it was in, the man suddenly swung down and back, only adding to the already considerable momentum of his fall.

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“Hey, Tina,” Leo spoke out again only when everyone properly stopped and simply stared at the ridiculous mishap of the bandit, a show of extreme clumsiness unbefitting of someone who somehow denied two separate bullets their natural right of cutting through the empty air. “I was gone for six years, so I’m not exactly up to date with the regulations.”

Glancing over to her returnee stepbrother, Tina’s facial muscles trembled, pulled into all sorts of different expressions all at the same time.

“What regulations?”

Leo held back a small smirk.

Pulling the trigger in a tense situation like this was one thing, but was she used to the sight of blood or the idea of death?

‘Her being a policewoman doesn’t mean she saw death yet. And…’ Leo glanced over at his stepmother, stuck in the limbo of panic, fear, and extreme concern.

“Those guys clearly came here to harm us,” Leo looked back at his stepsister before shrugging his shoulders.

It had to be this display of a complete lack of concern that somehow made the two Werber's lackeys stay still and not utter a single word.

A distinctive mental pressure of denying the usual traits of the situation they expected to construct with their actions.

Rather than acting like a small prey that would stay still almost as if petrified in moments of great stress, Leo’s expression was like that of an elephant disregarding the mosquito with the ambition of sucking him completely dry.

“How far can we go with them?” Leo’s question was simple and lacked any sort of killing intent or tension. Still, it was enough to shake both slightly injured Werber and both of his lackeys from the shocked state Werber’s tripping sent them into.

“You little…” Werber attempted to stand up, only to fall right back down when he attempted to use his leg and expected to quickly put some weight on it. “What…?!”

“I mean…” Tina looked over at the messy trio in the corridor with an extremely conflicted expression. The gun in her hands turned slightly towards the ground as if she hesitated if she still was justified to keep them directly in the potential line of fire.

“Can’t you just kill them?” Mark suddenly asked, quickly coming to his senses and showing exactly the same lack of concern that one could attribute to Leo’s face. “They came here to kill Tina, so we are fully justified to kill them in self-defense,” he stated before giving his oldest brother a look and scoffing, “plus, it’s not like they can do anything with you here.”

‘He might be unruly, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid,’ Leo thought, his opinion of his youngest brother improving by a slight, very slight margin.

Even though he openly revealed a small portion of his powers, the part he revealed back in the portal was still much greater than anything their systems or their hands could do.

Knowing what Mark just stated was one thing, but properly absorbing this knowledge into one’s active mindset was an entirely different topic altogether.

“While that might be true, I don’t really want to deal with them myself,” Leo shrugged his shoulders as he spoke before changing his position in his chair to get himself slightly more comfortable on the cushions. “It would get too messy and things would be really hard to explain to the authorities afterward.”

Leo momentarily glanced over at Tina before turning his attention to Rob, Mark, and then Rob again.

“This can actually be the one lesson I couldn’t teach you back in the portal,” Leo stated as his lips twisted in a slight smile, a smile that quickly turned sour when he looked over at Carol.

“Mom, I’m sorry, but this is a lesson they really need to learn right now, even if it’s something you might be against.”

Carol’s face twisted in confusion.

“I think you two should be the ones to kill them,” Leo stated in a matter-of-fact manner. He then looked over at Millie. “Don’t take it wrong, but since you appear to be aiming for a supporting role, it’s not necessary for you to take this step yet…”

“You little…”

Rather than shouting as he did before, Werber spat his words out, as if oozing poison out of his mouth.

“Kill us?” Werber uttered, struggling to hold back the seething flame of fury burning in his eyes.

“Hmm?” Leo looked over at the man with a kind if not outright sympathetic smile.

“I’ve decided now…” Werber whispered as if struggling to gather any air to voice his words out.

Then, without even a hint of hesitation, he raised and then nigh instantly swung down his bloodied mace… Aiming at nothing else but his own, locked knee.

The strike was undeniably powerful, powerful enough to smash both the man’s knee and the simple thicket of mana Leo used to hold it in place. Yet, despite devastating his own knee, by the time his knee dropped down to the floor, he was halfway up.

“I’m gonna slaughter…”

Poof!

Werber’s chest exploded, his blood, guts, and shattered bones exploding out of the man’s back, leaving behind a dinner-plate-sized hole while spraying the man’s insides at everything that stood in its path.

“…”

For a moment, the room turned silent, especially with how this explosion… lacked any sort of loud noise to announce it.

“See?” Leo asked while leaning back in his chair. “It gets ugly in a hurry when I act.”