Chapter 26: Ghost Rider + TRON = ?

The motorcycle painted with flame patterns tore through the streets of the John District like a high-speed blaze, its burning wheels carving raging trails of fire across the asphalt.

Cage twisted the throttle and executed another perfect drift through a ninety-degree turn, speed unabated as he shot forward.

He glanced at the rearview mirror.

Within the sea of flames he had left behind, a black, beastlike motorcycle burst through the inferno, pursuing him relentlessly.

Riding that monster was a slender woman in a tight one-piece leather suit.

On her yellow helmet, painted with a blue lightning emblem, two cat-ear-like protrusions gleamed with reflected light.

So that was Selty?

Cage narrowed his eyes.

His intuition had been right—this racer called Selty was a true expert.

He lowered his body to reduce air resistance, and the motorcycle beneath him let out another shrill howl.

With his thumb, he flicked open the red safety cover beside the handlebar and turned the dial inside to its highest setting.

“Boom!”

The flames spraying from the wheels surged instantly, growing several times stronger in both heat and volume.

The fiery tracks left on the road swelled to a height taller than a man.

This was the weapon Cage had personally designed and developed together with his pit crew.

The tires on his motorcycle were not made of rubber in the traditional sense.

Rubber encasing air and wrapping around a wheel hub had been the standard since the birth of motorcycles, providing excellent shock absorption and grip.

But Cage’s tires were a pair of wheels forged entirely from heat-resistant refined steel, each weighing over a hundred kilograms on its own.

Such steel wheels, however, could never provide sufficient traction at high speed.

So to solve this problem, Cage devised a mad solution.

He covered the surface of the steel wheels with chainsaw-like serrated teeth, trading destruction of the road itself for enough grip to keep the motorcycle stable.

At the same time, wheels covered in such serrations, once spinning at high speed, gained terrifying destructive power—enough to shred almost anything.

This motorcycle was nothing less than a chainsaw racing across the streets.

That was why Cage could instantly grind Wire Man and his bike into pieces, and why he could smash through walls and race through buildings.

And Cage’s true killing move was hidden inside these steel wheels.

Several fuel lines were embedded within the wheels, constantly spraying fuel.

When Cage pressed the button, an igniter hidden beneath the fender lit the fuel, causing the chainsaw-like wheels themselves to burst into flame.

The extreme heat produced by those flames became the perfect softening agent, allowing the steel wheels to tear apart even hardened motorcycles with ease.

The intense heat softened metal in an instant, letting the serrated steel wheels rip through opponents more easily.

Meanwhile, the fuel sprayed from the wheels left blazing trails of fire on the road, blocking pursuers and preventing them from closing in.

Of course, such a crazed modification came with an unavoidable flaw—the suspension system.

These rigid, serrated heat-resistant steel wheels produced horrifying vibrations at high speed.

The vibration was so extreme that no rider could possibly control it, no matter how advanced the suspension was.

It turned the motorcycle into a beast that should have been completely unrideable.

But Cage was different.

He didn’t need suspension.

A former top-tier professional racer, he possessed driving skills far beyond ordinary comprehension.

Relying on that supreme technique, he could completely ignore the terrifying vibrations caused by the steel wheels.

As a result, this motorcycle became a mount that only Cage himself could ride.

The bike roared ahead, and the tracks it left behind had already turned into walls of fire.

Those high-temperature flames—hot enough to instantly melt rubber tires—were more than enough to block the woman called Selty.

Cage glanced at the rearview mirror again.

Just as he expected, the wall of fire had completely sealed off Selty’s path.

The mirror was filled with raging flames, and beyond the firewall there was no movement at all.

That woman had been forced to stop by the flames.

Beneath his helmet, Cage’s face remained calm—so calm it could be called a poker face.

Silently, he continued twisting the throttle, stepping on the gear shifter, and took another corner.

Scenes like this had played out countless times in his racing career.

He had seen countless dark horses, and countless opponents who chased him just as tightly as Selty had.

But those dark horses, those challengers, always flared briefly before being crushed by him.

He never felt any emotion about it.

Victory had always been something within easy reach.

“Vrooom!”

A beastlike engine roar suddenly sounded in the air behind and to his side.

He turned his head toward the rearview mirror, his expression beneath the helmet still an unchanging poker face.

A black shadow flashed through the gaps between buildings behind him.

That woman had chosen to ride her motorcycle onto the rooftops to avoid the firewalls?

What a lunatic.

Still, being able to bypass the firewalls in such a crazy way was something he had never seen before.

Cage himself didn’t realize that at the instant he saw that black motorcycle leaping between buildings, the corner of his perpetually expressionless mouth curved up ever so slightly.

But buildings wouldn’t remain the same height forever.

Sooner or later, she would encounter a vertical gap she couldn’t overcome.

And when that happened, how would she ride a four-hundred-kilogram monster across such a height difference?

“Boom!”

The Hell Mammoth’s massive rear tire slammed down onto a rooftop, blasting insulation sand in all directions.

Evelyn twisted the throttle again, the engine roaring as the motorcycle raced across the rooftop at an absurd speed.

As the bike neared the edge of the roof, Evelyn yanked up the front.

Under her control, the four-hundred-kilogram beast reared up and leapt across the gap between buildings like a stallion clearing a fence, crashing down onto the next rooftop.

After Cage increased fuel output and turned his burning tracks into full firewalls, Evelyn had made a snap decision.

She turned the bike around and charged toward a steep staircase by the roadside.

Even though the Hell Mammoth was a military motorcycle designed to handle extreme environments, its tires were still made of rubber.

Even if Evelyn could punch through a single wall of fire with speed alone, Cage left more than one.

Those firewalls, formed by burning tracks, stretched endlessly.

As long as she hadn’t overtaken Cage, they would continue roasting the Hell Mammoth’s tires—and her.

Evelyn herself could endure the flames.

But she couldn’t guarantee that the Hell Mammoth’s tires could withstand such prolonged heat.

So she maintained her insane speed, using the steep staircase as a ramp and launching the Hell Mammoth skyward like a stunt rider, leaping directly onto the rooftop of a nearby building.

“TRON-style tactics, huh?”

Evelyn narrowed her eyes, looking down at Cage’s motorcycle below—now practically a blazing war chariot—and the firewalls he left behind.

In her previous life, she had seen something like this in a sci-fi movie.

That movie’s version was even nastier.

The tracks those bikes left behind exploded on contact.

Even from a distance, she could feel the scorching heat washing over her face.

This guy was basically racing while straddling a high-speed bomb.

If he took even the slightest damage and fuel leaked, the flames would instantly turn his motorcycle into a massive explosive and blow him sky-high.

Or was he confident enough to claim victory without a scratch in this race against death itself?

And then—

Evelyn whipped out the Shut Up in a flash and aimed forward.

Ahead stood a skyscraper towering dozens of floors above the surrounding buildings.

This was exactly the height difference Cain had mentioned—the one Evelyn supposedly couldn’t deal with.

No matter how skilled she was, she couldn’t possibly ride the Hell Mammoth across a gap that wide.

Unless the Hell Mammoth suddenly grew wings and carried her through the air.

But when had Evelyn ever followed the normal route?

She had already ridden the Hell Mammoth onto rooftops.

She pulled the trigger.

Amid thunderous gunfire, two bullets rode exaggerated muzzle flash and blasted a massive hole into the skyscraper’s outer wall.

The Hell Mammoth immediately charged in like a high-speed bulldozer, roaring through the floors, smashing walls, wooden doors, desks, and furniture alike.

Amid the deafening crash of shattering brick and stone, the industrial behemoth burst through a glass window and shot out the other side of the building.

It landed precisely on the rooftop of the neighboring structure.

With the skyscraper no longer blocking her view, the motorcycle with wheels blazing like flaming chakrams came back into sight.

Beneath the cat-ear helmet, a playful curve formed at the corner of Evelyn’s mouth.

This guy wasn’t ordinary at all.

When he rode that motorcycle, the flames on the wheels were only a few dozen centimeters away from his body.

That kind of heat—enough to soften ordinary metal and melt rubber in seconds—was not something a normal person could endure.

Yet he could run the entire course while staying that close to the flames?

Such a thing wasn’t entirely impossible.

In Evelyn’s previous life—on Earth—racing suits often included insulating liners made of heat-resistant materials.

Those liners protected drivers to the greatest extent possible, even if the car flipped and caught fire.

But that was Earth.

A world where mechanical and materials science far surpassed this one.

In this world, materials that could nearly negate flame damage simply didn’t exist yet.

Which meant this guy clearly had something unusual about him.

The smile beneath Evelyn’s helmet slowly turned frightening.

‘Then let me see what you really are.’