The air in the Expanse seed to freeze, thick with the tallic tang of raw mana and the sharp scent of adrenaline. The newcors—five hunters in mismatched gear, their faces cycling through confusion toward dawning anger—stared at Zeke’s announcent like he’d just declared the sky green.
One of them, a burly man with a scar running down his cheek, stepped forward, knuckles whitening around the hilt of a chipped broadsword. "You think this is funny, kid?"
"Not really," Zeke said, his voice easy. "I think it’s efficient."
Before Scar-Cheek could move, a calm, resonant voice cut through the tension. "Stand down, Joran."
From the back of the group erged a woman who moved like water over stone. Her armor wasn’t ornate, but it was clean, functional, and fitted with the precision of soone who knew violence intimately. A single silver pauldron glead under the dungeon’s ambient light. She carried no weapon, but her hands were wrapped in bands of inscribed leather that pulsed with a faint, restrained glow. The air around her humd.
Zeke’s tallic eyes sharpened.
An A-Ranker. Finally sothing interesting.
"Apologies for my companions’ brashness," she said, her cadence asured and educated. "We mistook you for part of the group pursuing us. We’ll be on our way."
Zeke’s grin didn’t shift. "See, that’s the thing about muggings. They’re non-negotiable. Your friends look tired—we’ll take the heavy stuff off your hands. You keep running."
The woman—Elara, by the insignia on her pauldron—exhaled slowly, a sound of genuine weariness. "A pity." Her gaze swept the trio, already in position. "Your theatrics are impressive. But they won’t—"
She didn’t get to finish.
Aaron had already moved.
His form blurred from the shadow of the boulder, reappearing behind Scar-Cheek in the silent void of Shadow Step. His fist, sheathed in living darkness, drove toward the man’s kidney.
Elara didn’t turn. She simply flicked her wrist.
The ground beneath Aaron’s feet hardened into a transparent crystalline glue, seizing his boots mid-stride. He grunted, montum arrested with brutal suddenness.
"Geomancer," Jude muttered from his perch, eyes narrowing.
"Boring," Zeke declared, and his boots left the ground.
He didn’t dash. He strolled toward Elara, hands in his pockets, as if the thickening air and gathering mana were nothing more than a mild breeze.
"You handle the appetizers," he called over his shoulder. "I’ll take the main course."
Elara’s eyes locked onto him. She thrust both palms forward. The earth didn’t just shake—it rearranged. A wave of solid crystal, sharp as razors and fast as a striking serpent, erupted from the ground, angled to encase Zeke from the knees up.
He didn’t dodge. He didn’t slow. He simply looked at the incoming wave, raised a single finger, and drew a lazy horizontal line through the air.
Sunder: Unseen Severance.
No sound. No fanfare. The crystal spikes in a perfect semicircle before him ceased to exist from their midpoints up—top halves sliding free with impossible, geotric cleanliness before clattering to the earth like felled timber.
Elara’s breath hitched.
She didn’t get the chance to process it. Zeke was already closing the distance. She reacted, clapping both hands together to compress the air around him into a crushing vice.
He felt the pressure spike. He walked through it.
She was strong—but he was stronger, and his trait, Pride, nullified damage from anyone weaker than him. Her aura display had been impressive. It just didn’t matter.
Panic flashed in her eyes. She dropped to one knee, slamming both palms flat against the earth. The ground roared. Dozens of crystalline spikes, each as thick as a tree trunk, shot up in a sudden forest of instant death.
Zeke didn’t break stride. Another casual flick of the finger. Another line drawn in reality.
Shhh—CRACK.
An entire swath of spikes simply ceased to exist, a clean corridor opening straight to her. He stepped through before the crystal dust had settled.
She looked up at him, defiance warring with shock. She swung—her fist wrapped in earth-hardening mana, aid at his jaw. A last gamble.
Let’s see how this feels.
BAAM.
The sound was like a boulder splitting. Dust kicked up from the shockwave. Zeke’s head didn’t move an inch. Her arm recoiled violently, a sharp gasp tearing from her lips as the feedback cracked through her bones.
He looked down at her, expression settling into mild curiosity. "You punch good," he said. "For a gardener."
Before she could process the insult, his hand moved—a single, precise chop to the side of her neck.
Her eyes fluttered. The world tilted. She slumped sideways, unconscious.
Behind them, the trio’s fight reached its crescendo and ended.
Freed from his bindings by a well-tid lance of holy light from Kai, Aaron had beco a storm. Combat Flow let him transition from a shadow-tendril that tripped one hunter directly into an A-rank boxing combination that put another flat on the ground. Efficiency made physical.
Kai was a whirlwind of redirection. The Flowing Stone Breaker Art made him functionally untouchable—he used an incoming sword thrust to spin its wielder into the path of a thrown axe, then delivered a palm strike that sent the man flying without so much as adjusting his posture.
Jude simply watched the final hunter charge him, then raised one hand. A whip of fire lashed out, wrapped around the man’s ankles, and yanked him face-first into the chiming grass. Done.
Silence returned, broken only by the soft moans of the defeated.
"Main course, served," Zeke announced, rolling his shoulder once.
The trio regrouped—slightly breathless, entirely unscathed. Aaron was already thodically rifling through the hunters’ packs.
"Mostly junk," he reported, setting aside dried rations and low-grade mana stones. "But they were carrying this." He held up a small reinforced chest, then opened the lid.
Inside sat a single herb. Unlike anything any of them had seen before. Its stem was the color of twilight, and it bore three leaves: one shimring like molten gold, one deep as a starless night, one that appeared to be woven from solidified light itself. The air around it grew thick, sweet, and so dense with mana it pressed against the skin.
"Whoa," Kai breathed.
"That," Jude said, voice sharpening, "looks like a high-ranked herb. The kind guilds go to war over."
Zeke leaned in slightly. "An S-Rank, if I had to—"
A new sound reached them. The unmistakable thunder of many boots against crystalline earth, growing rapidly closer.
From the sa direction Elara’s group had co, a wave of hunters crested a nearby ridge—at least twenty, their gear uniform and high-quality, marked with the emblem of a coiled serpent. At their head was a man in sleek erald-green armor, his face set in furious determination. He skidded to a halt, eyes sweeping the scene: his unconscious quarry, the open chest in Aaron’s hand, the glowing herb within, and four interlopers standing calmly among the fallen.
His gaze fixed on the herb. Then it snapped to Zeke, burning with venom.
"Congratulations on dealing with Elara’s team," the leader said, his tone the flat courtesy of soone accustod to being obeyed. "Now hand over the herb. We had eyes on it first."
Zeke looked at the twenty hunters. Then at the herb. Then at his three companions, who had already shifted into a loose defensive triangle without a word between them, faces set.
He let out a long, slow sigh—theatrical rather than weary.
"You know," he said, his voice carrying easily in the charged silence, "for a place called the Expanse, it’s getting really crowded in here."
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