The hunts never stopped.
No matter the continent, no matter how far Damien ran into the ruins of old cities or the peaks of dead mountains—Null Sanctum always found him.
Not with armies.Not with announcements.With precision.
Strike teams. Drones. Synthetic assassins.
Each encounter ended the same:Damien walking away—bloodied, tired, but unbroken.
But the net was closing.Null Sanctum was learning.They didn't try to overpower him anymore.
They tried to trap him.
Old Cairo, Earth – Underground Transit Hub
Damien ducked into a sealed pressure chamber after disabling four Sanctum agents. His shoulder was dislocated. His shirt torn, soaked in synthetic blood.
He was cornered.
That's when the platform lights flickered.
The door opened.
And there stood Auren Valebright.
"Need a lift?"
"Didn't think you still owed me one."
"I don't. But I figured you'd get killed before I beat you again."
They didn't smile—but there was understanding in the silence.
A ship was waiting. Unmarked. Silent. Ready for orbital jump.
Planet Vael'Tris – Outer Fringe, Unclaimed System
No borders. No flags.No laws.
A wasteland planet abandoned by the galactic core decades ago—now a breeding ground for:
Fusion maniacs rejected from society.
Failed serum experiments dumped from corporate labs.
Genetic anomalies evolved beyond sanity.
Bio-beasts—mutated horrors from fusion waste zones.
Auren handed Damien a small datapad.
"This is where we part ways. I've got a war brewing back home. But this place? It's outside Sanctum's net."
"You think they won't come?"
"They will. But not fast enough. And not without dying first."
He paused.
"One more thing… my AI says surviving Vael'Tris for a week has a success rate of 4.6%."
"And you still brought me here?"
"You're the 0.1% that breaks models. Don't die, Thorne."
Then Auren was gone.
Welcome to Hell
Vael'Tris was a planet that had forgotten what peace looked like.
Cities weren't built here—they were scavenged together. Towers of scrap metal and neon scaffolding climbed over the skeletons of older ruins, each layer a history lesson in failure.
The air smelled of ozone and rust, thick with the exhaust of hovercraft and the sharp bite of arc plasma discharges. Rain didn't fall so much as drip in oily sheets from the maze of cables strung between buildings like cobwebs.
Markets bled into fight pits. Alleyways became black-market labs. Augment surgeons worked from the back of dim-lit stalls, offering speed, strength, or reflex upgrades for the right price—or the right threat.
And beneath it all, the planet itself was restless. Vael'Tris' unstable core sent tremors through the streets without warning, shaking loose chunks of ferrocrete and sending people scattering. The locals barely noticed anymore.
Not earthquakes.
Something was moving below.
At night, the screams echoed through valleys. Some human. Some not.
There were no safe zones. Only camps. Fighters. Warlords.
And most of them weren't fully human anymore.
Within Two Days
Damien had fought:
A man with panther DNA, fused with berserker serum.
A twin-headed brute stitched together from bio-forged gladiators.
A gang of children—hollow-eyed, fast, and implanted with twitch-speed AI reflex stimulants.
He won. Barely.But not cleanly.
And then came the first bounty notice:
TARGET: DAMIEN THORNE
REWARD: Unlimited Fusion Serum Access.
Live Capture Preferred. Dead Accepted.
BONUS: For Recovery of Genetic Sample
Now the planet hunted him.
Every mutant, mercenary, warlord, and failed experiment wanted a piece of the legend.
But what they didn't understand…
Vael'Tris was the perfect place for Damien.
Here, everything was chaos. Everything tried to adapt by augmentation, shortcuts, savagery.
But Damien?
He thrived in chaos with discipline.
He wasn't looking for shelter.He was looking for something stronger.
Something to test him.
Or something to break.
And far, far beneath the crust of Vael'Tris…Null Sanctum's oldest secret slept.
And it was waking up.