The burly leader roared, his eyes wild with desperate fury. He lunged forward, swinging his massive, rock-coated fists in heavy, brutal arcs designed to crush skulls and shatter spines. The sheer weight of the stone gauntlets tore through the air with a deep, nacing hum.
Jayden didn’t even raise his arms to block. As the first stony right hook ca crashing down, he simply tilted his head. The massive fist sailed past his ear, missing by a milliter, the wind pressure violently rustling his jacket. Before the leader could retract his arm, Jayden pivoted smoothly on his heel, bobbing inside the man’s guard, and delivered a surgically precise, lightning-fast strike directly to his exposed flank.
Crack.
The sickening sound of a rib cracking echoed in the alley.
The man stumbled sideways, his breath hitching, but the pain only fueled his rage. He bellowed like a wounded animal and charged again, swinging a wild, backhanded haymaker.
Jayden ducked beneath the swinging boulder of a fist, stepped into the leader’s blind spot, and drove two rapid-fire jabs into the man’s lower back—striking the kidneys with piston-like precision.
The leader gasped, his knees buckling, but as he dropped, Jayden snapped a controlled palm strike up into his throat. He stumbled back clutching his neck, gasping for air.
After a few seconds, the leader recovered and charged again. But Jayden simply evaded and hit him again.
It wasn’t a fight. It was an execution disguised as a dance.
Jayden was toying with him, punishing the gang leader for wasting his ti. Every ti a heavy stone fist ca within an inch of Jayden’s face, he countered effortlessly, delivering hard jabs to the man’s exposed vital organs—the liver, the floating ribs, the solar plexus, the throat.
Gasping for air, coughing up thick wads of blood, the leader finally realized he couldn’t win in close quarters. His opponent wasn’t just faster; he was untouchable.
Frantically backpedaling to put distance between them, the leader dropped to his knees and slamd both of his stone-coated hands violently into the pavent. His eyes glowed with a desperate, muddy brown light.
CRACK.
The earth beneath the alley groaned and ruptured. A massive fissure tore down the center of the asphalt, and suddenly, a dozen jagged spikes of concrete, rebar, and hardened earth erupted from the street. They shot toward Jayden at terrifying velocities, moving like high-speed missiles.
Jayden simply watched them co. He didn’t dodge. He didn’t brace for impact. He simply let his Molecular Intangibility engage and took a slow, deliberate step forward.
The first lethal spike, thick as a tree trunk and sharpened to a razor point, struck Jayden dead center in the chest—and passed straight through his torso as if he were made of smoke. The second spike phased harmlessly through his shoulder. The rest of the barrage passed through him at various angles, each one erging from whatever part of his body it had been aid at.
The massive projectiles continued onward with the forlorn, heavy montum of sothing that had found no purchase, obliterating the brick walls of the alley behind Jayden in a cacophony of shattering stone and raining debris.
The leader’s jaw dropped in absolute horror. He was looking at a ghost. Driven by pure panic, he ripped even larger chunks of earth from the ground, hurling a relentless, long-range barrage of massive boulders, ripped-up sewer grates, and razor-sharp debris. He threw everything he had, turning the narrow alley into a chaotic storm of flying shrapnel.
Jayden let out a sigh. Enough playing around.
He dropped low into a runner’s stance, the asphalt cracking beneath his boots. And then, he sprinted directly into the apocalyptic barrage.
Because of his intangibility, he was an absolute phantom. Untouchable. A massive, car-sized boulder passed harmlessly through his torso, instantly followed by a dozen lethal earth spikes that shredded the air where he stood. Jayden didn’t even break his stride. He accelerated to Mach 1, running straight through the hailstorm of debris like a dark, unstoppable missile cutting through a storm.
The leader’s eyes bulged in terror as the phantom vigilante erged flawlessly from the blinding cloud of dust and flying rocks, closing the fifty-foot gap in a microsecond. At the very last fraction of a second, Jayden dropped his intangibility.
His body snapped from a ghostly apparition back into solid, dense matter, carrying the full, devastating kinetic montum of his supersonic sprint. He pulled back his right fist, muscles coiling like a steel spring, and drove it squarely into the center of the leader’s face.
BAM! CRACK!!
The impact was catastrophic. A localized sonic boom ruptured the air at the exact point of contact, blowing the shattered dust and flying debris away in a violent, circular gust of wind. The sickening sound of the man’s jaw shattering, combined with the cracking of his stone gauntlets disintegrating from the shockwave, echoed loudly down the empty street.
The leader was launched backward like a cannonball fired from a dreadnought. He flew horizontally out of the alley, his feet never touching the ground. He soared backward across the entire width of the intersecting street and slamd violently into the exterior wall of an abandoned brick warehouse.
The sheer kinetic transfer of Jayden’s punch carried the man completely through the reinforced brick. The wall caved inward with a deafening crash, swallowing the gang leader in a massive cloud of dark rubble and choking dust. The dust slowly settled over the gaping hole in the building. Inside the ruins, the man lay motionless, utterly unconscious before he had even hit the wall.
He didn’t get back up.
Jayden casually dusted off the sleeves of his jacket, leaving the broken gang behind, and bolted toward the source of the explosion earlier.
It took him less than five seconds to reach the secluded comrcial street where the two won had fought. When he skidded to a halt at the edge of the intersection, the sight before him left him completely baffled.
The entire block was a disaster zone. The asphalt was cratered, half-lted into glass, and covered in jagged, dissipating glaciers of ice. The air was thick with rolling steam. And sitting slumped against the scorched wall of a bank building was Frost.
She looked absolutely wrecked. Her white crop top was singed and torn. Severe, blistering burns covered her arms, warring with patches of dark, necrotic frostbite. Blood poured freely from a deep gash on the side of her head, matting her black braids. She was breathing in heavy, ragged, agonizing gasps.
Standing over her, bathed in the flickering glow of a burning streetlamp, was Penelope.
The elegant woman looked as though she had just returned from a brisk evening stroll. She wasn’t out of breath. Her makeup was flawless. There was absolutely no sign of a scuffle on her person, save for a single, clean tear on the side of her trench coat and shirt, revealing a patch of pristine, unblemished skin underneath. There wasn’t even a scratch on her.
Penelope looked down at the broken Pioneer, a soft, aristocratic chuckle escaping her lips.
"I have to admit, Alaya, I am thoroughly impressed," Penelope said, her tone devoid of malice, carrying only genuine, warrior-like respect. "You actually managed to push this far. Fights with don’t normally last this long. You should be very proud of yourself. You fought brilliantly.
Frost leaned her head back against the brick, letting out a dark, wet chuckle that quickly dissolved into a painful cough, splattering blood onto the pavent. She didn’t growl. She didn’t curse or throw a final, defiant sneer.
She looked up at the woman standing over her, a strange, serene acceptance in her dark eyes.
"It was an honor fighting you, Your Highness," Frost rasped quietly.
Jayden watched from the shadows, his mind spinning in sheer confusion. He knew Penelope would win. Frost was a Level 68 Pioneer, an undisputed powerhouse in the criminal underworld, but Penelope existed on an entirely different plane of reality. She didn’t even possess a quantifiable level in the ranking system.
Before she entered the political arena to beco the Pri Minister of Beta, Penelope Isley had been an active combatant. She was said to have been an SSS-Rank Pioneer—the highest, most mythic classification of lethal force ever recorded.
Jayden knew it was going to be a one-sided fight, but witnessing the sheer, insurmountable disparity in power up close was terrifying. Penelope had utterly dismantled a walking natural disaster without breaking a sweat.
Jayden stepped out of the shadows, the steam parting around his dark suit.
"I can’t believe I missed a fight this intense." He sighed inwardly. "Dammit."
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