Brandt set the four-page senior-queue list on the breakfast counter and slid it toward Adam.
"We have a problem," he said bluntly. "We need an L5 team. But it's nothing we can't handle."
Adam remained standing as he scanned the pages. In his field of vision, the corresponding intake summaries began to overlay cleanly. Twelve nas on the list were marked with a small dot. Three of those carried a second dot, and a single na was heavily circled.
After a quiet minute, Adam tapped the paper. "Tovis."
"Tovis is one of the dots," Brandt replied, his prosthetic arm flexing once at the elbow joint with a faint chanical click. "He's not the circle."
"Then who?"
"Lyra Quist. Vaelport. Ex-Stormhold."
Adam looked up. "When did she leave them, and why?"
"Eighteen months ago," Brandt said. "A council dispute over build philosophy."
"An L4?"
"Likely an L5 in raw strength, based on the assessnt."
"Did she apply?"
"The night she landed in Astren. We held onto it because you weren't available at the ti."
Adam looked back down at the circled na. "Schedule her for a eting tomorrow."
"Already did. Three p.m."
Adam raised an eyebrow. "You just scheduled that without checking with first?"
"I'm sixty years older than you, kid," Brandt grunted with a faint smirk. "I know your schedule better than you do."
Adam allowed himself a rare, brief smile. Brandt only managed to coax those out of him every once in a while.
" Notice. Eleven months of operational data compiled. Active mbers: two hundred and ninety-eight. Retired: three. Killed in action since Renke: zero. The senior frawork is currently on draft seven. Pushing for L5 is the optimal strategic move, and candidate Lyra Quist is highly recomnded. "
Good, Adam thought.
" Report. You should consider a personal deploynt. You have not deployed Earth-side in thirteen months. Brandt has been managing the guild single-handedly during your recent operational lull. Ren has been at her L4 deploynt for eight days. There are no operational obstacles preventing your departure. "
I know, he admitted internally.
"Brandt," Adam said.
"Yeah?"
"I'm going out."
Brandt paused, looking at him over the rim of his coffee cup. It was the exact sa look he'd given Adam after the Marvel Raid graduation and after the brutal night he had dragged himself back from L4-1882. It was an expression that said: I knew you were going to say that, and I'm not going to waste my breath arguing.
"The second L4?" Brandt asked.
"Yep. I queue tomorrow morning and deploy from the Floor One pad in the afternoon. You hold down the fort. Ren is a week into her L4 run, so she's stable. You take on the Lyra eting."
"What about the new mbers applications?"
"The algorithm Sage left can handle it. You know the override sequence if anything requires a manual touch."
"And Eclipse Research?"
"Have Tovis report directly to you. The Floor 21 publication stays on schedule."
Brandt set his cup down with a soft sigh. "Haa... dumping this much work on an old man. Kids these days are ruthless."
Maybe this really is too much to ask of him, Adam worried montarily.
A heavy silence stretched between them before Brandt broke it. "I'll keep things running. Go."
Sorry, Brandt. This is the last ti, Adam promised silently. "Thank you."
He broke the news to Sophie over lunch.
She let herself into his apartnt carrying a small paper bag from the Hub bakery. Inside were two apricot-and-cardamom pastries, the specific kind Lena always used to buy. He told her at the kitchen counter while she ate hers.
"How long will you be gone?" she asked.
"Not sure," Adam replied. "I'm going to try to clear it fast. I don't plan on dragging things out with extra training sessions this ti around."
Sophie kept chewing quietly. Once she finished her pastry and carefully wiped her fingers, she looked up at him. "Henrik will want to know."
"Tell him after I'm back."
"He's going to be furious."
"He'll be angrier if I tell him now and give him thirty days to stew over it. Better to have one big fight when I get back."
She offered a slight shrug. "Fair."
She reached for the second pastry but didn't eat it; she just held it gently in her hand. "Adam?"
"Yeah."
"The... last one. You said it was a bad world."
"It was."
"Is this one going to be just as bad?"
He paused to consider it. Great Sage didn't push any information to his visual feed, recognizing that he didn't need it.
"It's an unknown world," Adam explained. "I won't really know what I'm dealing with until my feet hit the ground. It's an L4, so anything is possible."
"You usually know at least sothing about these places before you land."
"I know whatever the Bazaar tells . Sotis that's enough, sotis it isn't. We have the IEC database too. You really should spend more ti reviewing it, or at least look over my personal notes on the various worlds."
Sophie gave a quiet nod. She placed the pastry back into the paper bag, folded the top down twice with precise movents, and slid it across the counter to him.
"For when you get back."
"Sophie—"
"For when you get back," she repeated firmly. "It stays right here in your kitchen until then."
Sure, I guess, Adam thought wryly. Just let it sit there and rot...
She stood up on her toes, pressing a gentle kiss to his cheek exactly the way Lena used to do, then turned and walked out without another word. The front door clicked shut behind her with a quiet, final sound.
The brown paper bag remained on the counter.
Might as well just eat it now, Adam muttered to himself. No sense in letting good food go to waste.
By three in the afternoon, Floor One was enveloped in a profound quiet it hadn't seen in nine months. The expansive lobby stood entirely empty, and the partition to the mission hall was drawn tightly shut. Brandt sat alone at the duty desk. Behind the low wooden railing, the eight bay-pads of the deploynt chamber rested in their familiar semi-circle.
One of those pads belonged to Adam, the far-left platform closest to the window, designated since its acquisition as the Guild leader, customized.
Adam stepped onto it.
He wore his Suit-Hatsu configured in its standard clothing state. Great Sage had pulled a generic cover from her vast library, selecting an outfit designed to blend into most civilized worlds without drawing unnecessary attention: a tailored charcoal travel coat worn over a sharp, high-collared shirt, practical walking boots, and a stitched leather satchel. The satchel was purely aesthetic, containing nothing his Spatial Pocket couldn't store far more efficiently. No matter what the reality on the other side looked like, this wardrobe would paint him as an educated traveler, allowing him to adjust his style within the first few minutes of scouting.
From the duty desk, Brandt offered a solitary, firm nod.
The Bazaar's transit confirmation flashed directly across Adam's vision:
▓ EXPEDITION DEPLOYNT
Tier: L4
Pool: Random
Dilation: 5:1
Acknowledge to deploy.
Deploy, Adam thought.
" On standby. "
Adam locked eyes with Brandt across the wooden rail one last ti. Brandt simply stared back.
Then, the blinding light of the bay transit took him.
▓ DEPLOYNT CONFIRD
Destination: L4-1349
Deploying in 3, 2, 1...
He materialized on a narrow street.
The cobblestones beneath his boots were slick from a recent evening drizzle that left a thin, reflective film rather than deep puddles. Above, the sky had deepened into the rich, velvety blue of twilight, stained with the heavy tang of coal smoke and washed in the warm, flickering orange glow of gas lamps. Brick and stone townhouses rose four to six stories high, their sash windows radiating a cozy, inviting light. In the distance, the rhythmic clatter of horse hooves echoed from an adjacent lane, accompanied by the distinct aroma of burning coal, freshly baked bread, and the unmistakable scent of fried fish drifting from a vendor's cart a few blocks over.
The system prompt flared to life:
▓ EXPEDITION ACTIVE
World Code: L4-1349
Tier: L4
Days Deployed: 0 / 180 (Earth-side equivalent: 0 / 36)
Local Ti: 18:47 Backlund Local Ti
▓ OBJECTIVES
D-rank: Survive thirty in-world days.
C-rank: Establish a working presence within the Beyonder underworld.
B-rank: Recover or neutralize at least one Sealed Artifact.
A-rank: Disrupt an active, Antigonus-aligned operation.
S-rank: Prevent the death of the highest-ranking active Nighthawk officer in Tingen.
▓ ADVISORY
First-ti visit. Local universal laws are explicitly hostile to supernatural powers outside of this world's native pathway system. Low-profile operations are strictly recomnded.
["Analysis. Current location: Backlund, East Borough. Cross-referencing data with internal records... Match found: Universe 'Lord of the Mysteries,' Loen Kingdom, Fifth Epoch. Estimated local date: early September, 1349. Current tiline aligns with the eve of the Tingen final battle window. The 'Doomsday of Tingen,' the critical event we must target, occurs on September 9th. We have roughly seven to ten days. "]
Backlund. So Klein isn't even here yet, Adam realized.
[" Correct. Klein Moretti is currently operating as a junior Nighthawk in Tingen. He will migrate to Backlund only after the disaster. Distance to target location: several hundred kiloters. Recomnded transport: rail or steam coach. "]
Adam stared at the S-rank objective line, rereading it to ensure he grasped the stakes.
[" Explanation. The S-rank objective target is Dunn Smith, Captain of the Tingen Nighthawks. Canonical cause of death on September 9th, 1349: self-sacrifice via extracting his own heart to weaponize Saint Selena's Ashes against the True Creator's Spawn. The Spawn is summoned by the Aurora Order through a woman nad gose. Klein Moretti subsequently destroys the Spawn using his final Flaring Sun Charm. A secondary conspirator, Ince Zangwill, the rogue Archbishop of the Evernight Church, intervenes imdiately after to assassinate Klein and claim the Ashes. To preserve Dunn Smith, intervention must occur upstream: dismantle the Aurora Order cell, secure gose prior to the descent, or provide an alternative energy source capable of powering the Ashes without a heart sacrifice. We have one week to reach Tingen and establish an infiltration plan. "]
What's the plan? Adam thought.
[" Operational Strategy. Constraints: My local knowledge is limited strictly to your mories of the source material, which provide broad strokes rather than granular data. I lack specific train schedules, station nas, or ticket pricing. We will need to gather bearings via local signage and eavesdropping once we begin moving. Financials: We have zero local Loen currency. Three options for asset acquisition are available, listed from lowest to highest risk:
Pickpocketing: Using Suit-Hatsu Stealth Mode, improved dexterity, and Future Sight. The East Borough is well-suited for low-profile acquisition.Burglary: Lifting funds from low-security comrcial properties (higher exposure, but higher yield).Information Brokerage: Selling high-level pathway formulas to local Beyonders (extrely high risk of info-leaks; strictly advised against). Recomndation: Procure funds via low-profile pickpocketing en route to the primary rail line. "]
Acquire funds on the move. Maintain a civilian cover, Adam finalized. We'll find a station, buy a ticket for whatever overnight train heads to Tingen, and get so rest during the trip.
[" Affirmative. "]
Adam set off down the cobblestone street.
He traversed three blocks, passing through a hidden Beyonder underworld he didn't yet know how to recognize. This was a tropolis he only knew from a novel his Earth-1 self hadn't even finished reading. Great Sage's stream of comntary remained sparse, as there were no imdiate tactical threats to highlight. Instead, she fed him passive atmospheric updates, noting architectural flourishes, carriage routes, the positioning of gas lamps, and the closing hours of local bakeries. It was background data to help him acclimate to the strange new world.
He took a sharp right turn, heading east toward a boarding house Great Sage had earmarked for scouting. He weighed whether to leave Backlund tonight or stay a day to gather intelligence, while Great Sage quietly simulated the outcos of both choices.
Then, his thoughts ground to a sudden halt.
A man clad in pale, loose-fitting traveler's robes was standing on the wet cobblestones just three ters ahead of him.
The man hadn't been there a millisecond ago.
Adam stopped dead in his tracks.
The automated pre-combat defense layers of his equipnt triggered instantly. His Combat Instinct flagged the stranger as a threat so severe the gauge maxed out within the first hundred milliseconds, screaming danger at an unquantifiable scale. Adam pushed his Observation Haki forward to read the man's intent and aura, but the sensory wave bounced off a conceptual wall of sothing entirely alien. He tried to push his Future Sight two seconds ahead to chart the imdiate future, but the vision returned an absolute, terrifying void.
It wasn't a wall or a barrier. It was a complete absence of reality. A void.
["Alert. Threat level off the charts. Deploy full combat configuration imdiately. "]
Adam didn't hesitate. His Suit-Hatsu Battle Mode surged up his arms, across his chest, and encased his head in the span of a single heartbeat. He brought his Ken defense to maximum reserves, layered it with full Armant Haki, and coiled an intense concentration of Ko into his right index finger, ready to discharge on sheer intent. He shifted half a step back, keeping his center of gravity fluid.
The stranger was of average height, possessing curly black hair, a broad forehead, and a thin, angular face. A crystal monocle rested precariously over his right eye, and he loosely held a black, pointed hat in his left hand. He wore a smile that felt utterly disconnected from his features. It was too wide for his high cheekbones, stretched taut like a poorly fitting porcelain mask. His robes bore a unique cut that managed to look like a scholar from the late Loen Empire while simultaneously feeling entirely out of place for this era.
He stood precisely three ters away, blocking the path to the intersection. In the few seconds it had taken Adam to square his stance, the bustling street behind him had gone utterly dead. The horse-drawn carriages had inexplicably veered away, and the pedestrians had suddenly rembered urgent errands down other avenues. The gas lamps continued to burn silently. The dark alley belonged entirely to the two of them.
The man offered a casual wave with his right hand, his unsettling smile widening.
"You're new," he remarked smoothly.
[" Warning. We must retreat. We lack the necessary arsenal to engage this entity. "]
An icy dread blood in Adam's chest, devoid of sound or color. It was the raw, primal realization that the being standing before him existed in a conceptual tier he had never even had to conceive. This wasn't a rival, nor was it a high-tier boss within his known ecosystem. This was an entirely different category of existence. Great Sage's voice remained perfectly level, but beneath her artificial calm, Adam could feel the exact sa systemic error. The entity before them didn't even have a defined classification in Great Sage's extensive cosmic catalog.
Adam chose flight.
He exploded into a full-out sprint, his body transforming into a localized blur. The Suit-Hatsu's Battle Mode multiplied his kinetic output by another eighty percent. His very first stride matched the violent acceleration of a supercar; his second and third strides broke past it entirely. He pivoted hard, angling back toward the mouth of an alleyway two doors down, an escape route where his Future Sight should have been able to map out survival possibilities, even within this localized void.
He covered ten ters in a fraction of a second.
Then, the remaining thirteen ters between himself and the monocled man, along with the very cobblestones he had just sprinted away from, simply ceased to exist.
The space wasn't folded, compressed, or warped. The physical interval was systematically erased from reality, a feat completely absent from any combat literature published by the IEC. Adam's forward montum slamd his stride directly into the man's chest. His forehead stopped a re three centiters from the stranger's nose.
The man's grin hadn't shifted a fraction.
"You're fast," he mused.
[" Command. Execute maximum output strike imdiately. "]
Adam twisted his hips and shoulders, driving his right index finger forward with everything he had left. He forcibly funneled every single spark of aura his body could generate into a microscopic point. It was a catastrophic convergence weave, all six Nen types activated simultaneously at maximum thermal capacity, loaded with absolute Ko. It was, without question, the most devastating single attack he had ever conceptualized. Future Sight couldn't map the outco, and Great Sage had no data left to offer. He was entirely empty after this.
The ga Dodon Beam erupted at point-blank range.
It existed in reality for less than the blink of an eye. And then, it simply vanished.
The stranger's left hand materialized between Adam's finger and his chest, though it hadn't moved through any logical trajectory to get there. His fingers were slightly cupped, his palm gently cradling... nothing. The aura was gone. It hadn't been deflected, absorbed, or countered. It had been cleanly deleted from the universe. The pinnacle of Adam's destructive capability had vanished in the exact microsecond of its discharge.
The man tilted his head curiously, staring at the empty air where the beam had briefly burned.
"Interesting," he murmured, his voice laced with genuine amusent. "Such a unique signature. Wherever did you learn that?"
Adam couldn't formulate a response. He had no words, because he no longer possessed a single drop of aura to sustain himself. His spiritual reservoir was bone dry. The Suit-Hatsu Battle Mode began to flicker violently as the Ken layer collapsed from total energy exhaustion, leaving only the chanical Armant holding together. His right hand remained frozen in the air, two fingers extended uselessly toward the stranger's chest. Great Sage had gone entirely silent, lacking any viable tactical suggestions to push to his consciousness.
The man raised his right hand.
It wasn't a particularly large or imposing hand. He slowly extended a single index finger toward Adam's forehead. The finger never made physical contact. He rely pointed at the core of Adam's being, and tugged.
[" Warning. Host, core concept is being extracted. Re-routing internal processing... I am... "]
Great Sage's voice fractured and cut out like a radio signal swallowed by heavy static, dragged down into a conceptual frequency that Adam's mind couldn't interpret.
The lights in Adam's conscious mind went completely dark.
He didn't slump over the way a concussed man does; he collapsed the way an empty vessel falls when the soul has been cleanly extracted. His knees buckled first, his shoulders slumped, and his head tipped listlessly back. His body hit the wet cobblestones, though his chest continued to rise and fall. The fundantal autonomic nervous system, a layer the stranger hadn't poured energy into stealing, was still doing its biological duty.
The Suit-Hatsu power armor went entirely inert, reverting to plain fabric. Adam lay perfectly intact, unmoving save for his slow, chanical breathing.
The man knelt beside the unconscious body, examining it with the detached curiosity of a scholar looking at a broken wind-up toy. He let out a low, lodic hum of consideration. Reaching deep into the inner pocket of his historical robes, he produced a slender glass vial filled with a swirling green liquid: a Marauder potion, the lowest-stakes tool of the Marauder pathway he kept on hand for random test subjects.
He popped the cork and carelessly poured the liquid down Adam's throat. The body's involuntary swallowing reflex took care of the rest.
For ninety agonizing seconds, nothing visible occurred on the surface. Yet beneath his skin, every esoteric layer Adam had ticulously cultivated since the age of sixteen was thrown into a violent, chaotic blender. His Nen reservoir, his Hamon breathing channels, his telekinetic field, and his Haki perception clashed savagely against the invasive Marauder potion. The struggle was ungraceful and absolute. The potion had been refined over millennia to violently subjugate anything that opposed its integration.
Adam's Nen completely vented into nothingness, dissipating into the atmosphere. His Hamon collapsed, dissolving entirely into his cellular structure as a permanent, inert residue; the active technique was completely erased, leaving behind only a passive, cellular regeneration amplifier. His telekinesis collapsed inward like a dying star and vanished. The intent-reading layer of his Haki was aggressively hijacked by the Marauder pathway's conceptual instinct for theft, consud entirely to fuel the mutation. The internal Armant Haki dissolved out of his skeletal structure like salt in water.
Adam wasn't awake to feel a single second of the destruction.
Fortunately, the passive Compound V regenerative traits kept his vital organs stable throughout the spiritual restructuring. The Suit-Hatsu, now firmly anchored as an organic Sealed Artifact due to the potion's reality-warping influence, managed to survive the purge intact. Great Sage's background process continued to tick silently on the Bazaar anchor she had been hard-coded into, though she remained locked out of Adam's main cognitive channels because there was no active consciousness to receive her.
Before rising, the man planted a final seed. He lightly brushed his hand across Adam's chest, leaving behind an invisible, microscopic trace, a thread of his own divine pathway, subconscious and flawlessly camouflaged. It was a tracking tag designed to monitor intriguing specins across massive scales of ti. He perford the gesture casually, like a man flipping a coin into a fountain on a whim.
He stood up, glancing down at the body one last ti, before looking out over the misty, twilight-shrouded skyline of Backlund. He spoke aloud to the empty street.
"You don't belong to any of our pathways," he murmured softly. "To be quite frank, I would love nothing more than to spend a few decades dissecting and experinting on you. But unfortunately, I have an appointnt elsewhere."
He gave a lazy wave to the air.
The localized suppression of spirituality he had maintained over the thirty-ter radius evaporated instantly. Within minutes, horse-drawn carriages would resu their paths down this lane. Pedestrians on the neighboring streets would experience a montary wave of disorientation, shaking their heads as they puzzled over why they had stopped walking, before continuing on their way. The gas lamps would burn steadily without a flicker.
"Let's see what you manage to make of yourself," he whispered.
The man's avatar dissolved into the evening air like mist. The street remained desolate for another thirty seconds until a horse-drawn cab rounded the corner. The driver didn't spot the unmoving form lying in the gutter shadows until he had already trotted three ters past. Reining in his horse, he peered back through the gloom and spotted a well-dressed gentleman curled against the curb in the classic posture of an affluent man who had drunk himself into oblivion.
The driver cursed under his breath, climbed down from his seat, and dragged Adam by his shoulders into the narrow alleyway between a bakery and a lamp-pole. It was a small courtesy extended to the wealthy on a wet Backlund night, the standard neighborhood treatnt for a respectable drunkard. He quickly patted down Adam's coat searching for a wallet, but felt only the empty leather satchel tucked beneath the fine wool. He opened the satchel, found it entirely bare, and spat on the cobblestones, irritated at the wasted minute. Deciding that rolling a foreign drunk wasn't worth the risk of a magistrate's trial in the morning, he climbed back onto his carriage and rattled away into the night.
The body lay alone in the damp alley, breathing softly. Deep within, the reality of the Marauder mutation continued to settle into his bones.
Adam jolted awake exactly one hour later.
He returned to consciousness instantly, without a hint of grogginess or the typical fog that bridges sleep and awareness. His eyes snapped open, his vision focusing imdiately on the damp brick wall centiters from his face. His ears mapped the late-evening ambiance of Backlund: a coachman shouting two streets over, the faint clinking of silverware through the bakery's rear window, and the wet, rhythmic hiss of the gas lamp guarding the mouth of the alley.
He sat up abruptly. His head didn't spin, which was the first anomaly he registered: no vertigo, no nausea.
The second realization hit him with the force of a physical blow. A profound, terrifying emptiness resonated within him. Sothing fundantal was missing.
He couldn't feel his aura. The spiritual ocean where his Nen had thrived for years was entirely bone dry. The cellular pulse of his Hamon was gone. The passive, forward-facing cone of Observation Haki that had monitored his surroundings every waking second for years was dead, leaving him completely blind to the unseen world. His telekinetic field was missing. The deep skeletal reinforcent of his Armant Haki had vanished.
Everything was gone. Not drained. Not suppressed. Gone.
[" Report. Host has regained consciousness. Significant structural changes detected. I have manually stabilized your mind to prevent psychological collapse. Please sit up slowly. "]
Adam forced himself to sit back against the cold, wet brick, taking comfort in the fact that he could still register physical temperature. His body still felt like his own on a surface level. The Suit-Hatsu remained wrapped around him in its clothing state, and his ntal command to access the Spatial Pocket still yielded a response.
He tried to summon his Nen first. He reached for that internal foundation the sa way he had tens of thousands of tis since his awakening, the instinctual ntal flex that brought aura roaring to the surface. His mind grasped at nothing but empty space.
[" Confirmation. The aura is entirely non-existent, Host. I can no longer locate the spiritual reservoir. The Convergence Hatsu has been neutralized, along with all six fundantal Nen types. "]
He attempted a Hamon breathing pattern: inhaling for five seconds, holding for three, exhaling for seven. His lungs drew in the crisp, smoke-tainted air, but no rhythmic ripples followed the breath. It was just oxygen.
He tried his telekinesis, focusing his gaze intensely on a loose pebble on the alley floor. The stone remained stubbornly still.
He reached for his Haki, the dependable second sight he had relied upon since his days in Marineford. Nothing. The environnt ahead of him registered as a flat, two-dinsional sensory image, completely stripped of the rich, layered intent-awareness he had wielded for years. The structural reinforcent Rayleigh had taught him to forge within his bones was absent. His hard-fought physical durability traits remained, but the supernatural thodology to activate them was entirely erased.
He sat in the filth of the alley, entirely lost and disoriented.
[" Explanation. All four core spiritual systems, Nen, Hamon, Telekinesis, and Haki, have been entirely deleted from the host's soul. They have been systematically replaced by an entirely foreign frawork. I am currently mapping its paraters. "]
Replaced with what? Adam demanded internally.
[" Two distinct native traits have been verified. I will refrain from further speculation until data collection is complete. "]
Show , he commanded.
The first manifestation surfaced as a subtle, directional tug in his peripheral awareness, categorized by Great Sage as a passive evaluation-pull from an unfamiliar source. When Adam turned his gaze toward the bakery's back window, he could suddenly feel, with absolute certainty, that there was sothing of distinct material value resting on a shelf inside, though he couldn't specify what the object was or its exact position. The sensory pull extended roughly ten ters. Turning his head toward the street where the carriage had paused, he felt a faint, tallic resonance coming from the gravel, a couple of stray coins dropped in the dirt. He couldn't physically see them, but his instincts thrumd with the absolute knowledge that they were worth picking up.
The second trait was more physical, yet harder to quantify. He flexed his fingers; his grip snapped shut marginally faster than his previous baseline. He stood up, and his knees transitioned his weight into a standing posture with noticeably less effort than he had required over the last thirteen months. He tested a sudden sprint-start against the brick wall; the movent was far sharper and more explosive than his training sessions on Floor 40's sparring grounds.
["Analysis. Minor physiological augntation noted from an unknown source. I estimate a ten-percent optimization across your body. While not monuntal, it is far from negligible. Layered over your already enhanced anatomy, it elevates your base physical capabilities by a significant margin. "]
Standing in the dim light of the alley, Adam thodically ran through his remaining assets.
Compound V physical enhancents?
["Confird. Fully intact. "]
Suit-Hatsu?
["Operational. Currently locked in clothing-state; we will need to run a full diagnostic on its alternative forms later. "]
Spatial Pocket?
["Fully accessible. Inventory remains identical to your pre-deploynt state. "]
Bazaar abilities?
["Reinforced Physiology, Accelerated Cognition, Combat Instinct, and Spatial Pocket are all online and verified. "]
And the four major power systems?
["Eradicated, Host. All four, along with every single derivative technique, are completely gone. There is absolutely nothing remaining of them, replaced entirely by the two native traits observed. "]
He absorbed the reality of his situation in grim silence.
["Report. There is one final variable to account for. The entity administered a Sequence 9 Marauder potion. The potion appears to have integrated in an incomplete or fractured state, almost certainly due to the violent taphysical clash with your existing power systems during the purge. Furthermore, he has anchored an unknown anomaly within your soul that is entirely separate from the potion. I cannot decipher its function; its energy signature matches nothing in my database. It rests entirely beneath my current scanning resolution, rendering unable to extract it. Please operate under maximum threat paraters and exercise extre caution. Logically, we should abandon the run and return to the Bazaar for a full celestial audit. However... we have not t the mandatory deploynt paraters. "]
The mission, Adam rembered grimly.
["Notice. Despite the loss of previous power systems, the overall mission paraters remain active. Dunn Smith, Tingen, September 9th. According to your mory, we have exactly seven days. If we can locate the central railway station tonight and procure enough funds for a lower-class ticket, an overnight train will place us in Tingen by tomorrow morning. That leaves us a comfortable margin to draft an intervention strategy. Look on the bright side, Host: your capacity for theft has been significantly upgraded. "]
Adam let out a bitter, silent scoff. Oh, fantastic. Absolutely worth it. I traded years of hard-earned supernatural mastery just to beco a slightly more efficient pickpocket.
["Please maintain emotional equilibrium, Host. Your cognitive faculties are currently compromised by stress. "]
Adam straightened his charcoal travel coat. Beneath the fine fabric, the Suit-Hatsu shifted slightly, adjusting itself to his fra, no longer a roaring suit of high-tech battle armor but a compliant Sealed Artifact responding to its master's touch. He could no longer fire a destructive Dodon Beam, nor could he peer into the shifting threads of the future.
For a warrior walking open-eyed into a supernatural war, he felt entirely naked.
But his life was still his own. He had forged paths out of far worse situations with significantly less. Where there's a will, there's a way, he reminded himself. I'm still breathing, and right now, that's the only tric that matters.
He stepped out of the shadows of the alley. He turned down the cobblestone street, following the direction the carriages had been traveling before the world had ground to a halt. He walked toward the main thoroughfare, searching for any sign of a railway line cutting through the smog of the city.
["Locate the station. Secure the necessary fare along the way via lower-class carriage. Sleep on the train. "]
Ugh. I can't shake this disgusting feeling of being violated, Adam admitted to himself, his jaw clenching. I just have to hope to hell it's temporary... Whatever. Let's move.
Unnoticed by both the traveler and the Great Sage bound to his soul, the microscopic, invisible thread that Amon had woven into his chest began to pulse softly, settling into a deep, subconscious rhythm that Great Sage wouldn't be capable of detecting for a very, very long ti.
AN: Okay, people, this is D-Day for our MC. I know a lot of you will be pissed off, but give it a few chapters it will pay out big ti. For the rest of the week, I will be releasing daily chapters to speed up his recovery Arc. Bonus chapter at 500 power stones and another one at 700.
PS: Just noticed great sage paragraphs were not highlighted with special characters. Looks like WN doesn't show them in the reader view, only in the editor. So from now on I will use [] to show it.
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