Vladimir exhaled sharply a breath of white mist, his weapon still raised as he slowly approached his boss despite his bleeding forehead that obscured his right eye with red vision.
"Sir, are you ok?" he exclaimed as he looked sideways to confirm no more enemies were present. Yuuta, who had two dislocated arms, scratches all around his body, and an impaled eyed that slowly healed, marking his identity as a partially successful experimental subject.
Yuuta wiped a speck of blood from his cheek using the backside of his hand before nodding slowly, still gazing at Nikola's now-deceased corpse.
"We have a plane to catch." He answered stoically, as if he was taking a walk in a garden and happened to stumble upon such an unfortunate guest.
Although Vladimir was quite worried about his boss's injuries, he sighed in surrender as he walked towards the SUV to start it, only to realize that the SUV had turned into nothing more than a pile of ashes and scrap metal by now, with the flames that were once ablaze and as alive as he was, starting to diminish because of the snow and wind of the snowstorm.
He felt a bad premonition as a chill ran up his spine, slowly turning towards Yuuta who gestured him to approach him.
Vladimir panicked, but was forced to approach, as he slightly trembled from what awaited him. He arrived in front of Yuuta and gulped, observing Yuuta's doll-like face and murky, black pools inside his eyes.
They silently stared at each other for a while, before Yuuta took the initiative and approached him.
Vladimir closed his eyes in fear, expecting to get beaten up due to his incompetence of taking care of the SUV, until he felt a cold yet warm hand slowly caressing his scratched cheek.
."...Don't worry"
He opened his eyes in evident surprise, overcome with emotion, he softly smiled, not expecting his boss to have cared about his well being.
SLAM!
Vladimir fell to the ground holding his stomach as he wheezed in pain, as Yuuta's knee had knocked the air out of his lungs. Under his breath, he cursed his idiocity for actually believing that his boss cared about him as he rolled on the snow.
Now we might ask, what happened exactly.
To start off, Yuuta at first did not speak to Vladimir for a while to create a tension that would later come into play. When Vladimir expected the worse, he was met with something he did not expect; Yuuta had cared for him.
In that moment, the previous tension that Yuuta had created made Vladimir put down his guard, which would multiply the pain he felt if Yuuta decided to beat him in his most unexpected moments.
He applied temporal summation of pain and central sensitization to multiply Vladimir's pain.
The human nervous system isn't made to handle consecutive waves of extreme pain without consequence; when nociceptors, also known as pain receptors are overstimulated, the brain amplifies rather than regulates the signals.
This is known as temporal summation, causes repeated or continuous pain to feel exponentially worse, with each new signal stacks onto the last one before the previous one fades.
But Yuuta's timing made it even worse.
By letting Vladimir's brain falsely believe the worst was over, his nervous system tried to recover, only to be ripped back into agony at the exact moment his body was most vulnerable.
This, combined with central sensitization, a state where the brain itself amplifies pain signals rather than dampening them, meant that the knee strike didn't just feel like a blunt impact, it felt like a catastrophic explosion inside Vladimir's body, which sent his nervous system into total overload.
(A/N: Tell me in the future if you would like more psychological explanations or not :3)
In our case here, Yuuta grabbed Vladimirs hair before he kneed him in stomach, resulting in the latters state of devastation.
Vladimir spat saliva mixed with bits of blood and coughed violently.
"How tiresome." Yuuta spoke with a sigh, looking far ahead at the distance they would have to walk before they were able to get a cab to the airport.
Originally, the state of the weapons, equipment, vehicles, machinery, and tents were excellent, which made Yuuta excitedly speculate about the prices he would sell them for after getting exterminate the 'rats' that held such expensive material, as he quickly calculated the interest rates, taxes he evaded, tariffs, and other fees he would pay and get.
However, his plan went in flames as Vladimir wasn't even able to protect the SUV!
This simply pissed off Yuuta as he thought for a moment about trying to drive one of the vehicles to the airport, but it was futile.
Every few hours, contact would be initiated inside the vehicle via a radio to confirm the state of the platoon. Morse code would be sent, and by decrypting it and resending it with one tone being modified, verification would be correctly processed.
If after a few hours there was no response, a certain code would be said three times. If no response comes back, the tracker on the vehicle would be activated in case anyone considered stealing them, and the unfortunate drivers would be immediately targeted by the 'merciful' missiles of a f-25 or a military helicopter, which would technically give anyone a free pass to the underworld.
With this in mind, Yuuta had hoped to at least sell the weapons and equipment, but because of Vladimir's idiocity, his plan was crushed by the weight of a fools mind.
He stared at the snowy distance, before he grabbed the bloody Jagdkommando knife he had thrown earlier to the ground and took his two suitcases that Vladimir had successfully saved before the utter explosion.
"A way…. a way.." He pondered with his index and thumb rubbing his small chin.
He contemplated leaving Vladimir behind who had passed out from the pain who was twitching here and there, before a quite peculiar and interesting plan came up his mind.