"Ay mate!", said Lorenzo, still using the corpse as cover.
Advancing further, he felt shooting pain on his leg as he realized he had taken a few hits earlier.
Damn... I got cocky. Enough playing around.
Dropping the body, he exposed himself to the thugs, who mercilessly opened fire on him. But Lorenzo didn't even flinch, no, instead he smiled a feral smile alike a rabid beast.
Gunfire launched itself at him from all sides, there was no way he could cover or avoid something like that. To drop his one protection against the gunfire would have been nothing more than suicide, any sane man could tell that much.
Luckily, Lorenzo was no sane man.
As the Helloweeners pulled their trigger around the pirate, pyre covered everything that stood before Lorenzo. The bullets never reached the pirate, flesh and metal melted off as all those surrounding him burned to ashes in a fiery explosion.
In the middle of all the destruction, Lorenzo smirked. "Tsk, you shouldn't ha-"
Before the pirate could finish his sentence, a loud bang interrupted him. His head was blown back as blood dripped, it seemed the sniper took advantage of the opening, and shot his head...
And yet Lorenzo's grin grew wider than ever, a bloodcurdling smile that would horrify even the blind. The bullet simply stopped, all it could've managed was to graze the pirate's forehead before it was caught by the flame bird that stood atop him earlier.
Pointing to where the shot had come from, he looked right at the sniper, smiling unlike ever before. "There, there you are."
The flames circled around the pirate, fully covering his body as they spread further and further. He now looked more akin to a demon than a man. In a hair's breath, he simply leapt from the ground, the flames around him firing from his feet like a rocket, he traveled at speeds comparable to a motorcycle, advancing towards the sniper's location.