Lina stood rooted to the stone floor of the airlock, clutching the radiant Stage 4 Wyrm core to her chest as if it had suddenly turned into a block of solid lead.
Her lips parted, closed, and parted again, not a single sound escaping her throat. A furious wave of crimson crept up from her collarbone to the tips of her ears, while her amber eyes darted wildly between my face and the weathered silver pendant resting against her sternum.
Inside her sea of consciousness, the silence didn't last long.
It shattered into an absolute, mortified uproar.
"H-He knew?!" the Sovereign Dragon Empress shrieked, her ancient, celestial composure flying completely out the window. "Since when?! My soul is sealed within an Immortal-grade Celestial Dragon Core! Not even a Martial Emperor of this mortal dust-bowl should be able to pry into my spiritual frequency without triggering a heavenly backlash! How did a sixteen-year-old brat in the Martial Adept realm sniff me out like a common house mouse?!"
Lina squeezed her eyes shut for half a second, clutching her forehead with her free hand as the Empress's frantic voice echoed inside her skull. 'Senior, calm down! He said he touched the pendant back in the library...'
"A physical touch shouldn't let a mortal read an Immortal's residual soul!" the Empress hissed, her voice trembling with a mixture of wounded royal pride and deep, chilling dread. "Wait... back in the library vault, when my defensive ward vanished at his fingertips... it wasn't neutralized! A piece of that invisible abyss inside him actually ate a sliver of my soul-aura and analyzed it! What kind of primordial taboo is this boy walking around with?!"
I watched the rapid, shifting expressions crossing Lina's face—the wide-eyed shock, the wince as the immortal undoubtedly yelled in her ear, and the helpless, flustered embarrassment that followed.
With my newly unlocked Viral Hive-Brain operating at five times normal human processing speed, reading her micro-expressions was effortless.
"Is she done screaming inside your head yet?" I asked casually, leaning a shoulder against the titanium doorframe while Kael's heavy extraction team marched past us into the cavern with plasma-saws and crane rigs.
Lina jumped slightly, her face burning even brighter. "Y-You can't hear what she's sayingright now, can you?!"
"No," I admitted smoothly, a faint, teasing smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. "My reach stops at your skin, darling. Though judging by the way you just winced, I imagine your ancient teacher has quite a loud voice for someone living rent-free in a piece of jewelry."
Inside the pendant, the Empress nearly combusted from sheer indignation. "Rent-free?! Tell this arrogant little demon that this Empress ruled the Nine Heavens while his ancestors were still crawling out of primordial mud! I am bestowing a supreme fortune upon his bloodline's future, and he dares call me a freeloader?!"
Lina didn't dare repeat that out loud. Instead, she let out a small, defeated sigh, looking up at me with a mix of lingering awe and quiet vulnerability.
"I wasn't trying to hide it from you out of distrust, Amar," she whispered softly, stepping closer so the passing workers wouldn't hear. "She only woke up yesterday morning on the steps of the tribunal. I didn't know how to explain it without sounding crazy... and she kept warning me that you were dangerous."
"I am dangerous," I replied, reaching out to gently brush my thumb across her cheek. "And you don't ever have to apologize to me for keeping a trump card, Lina. As long as that ghost inside your necklace remembers that you belong to me, she can teach you whatever she wants. The moment she tries to possess your body or lead you into a trap, however..."
My dark eyes dropped to the silver pendant on her chest. For a fraction of a second, the one billion, one hundred and fifty million bacteriophages in my veins pulsed in cold, terrifying unison.
"...I will find a way to infect a soul and eat her alive."
Beneath Lina's collar, the silver pendant instantly went stone-cold and dead quiet, the ancient Empress retreating into the deepest corner of the core without uttering another peep.
"Come on," I said, my tone returning to its warm, easy cadence as I took her hand. "Let's head back to the lounge while Kael's team extracts the Wyrm's spinal marrow."
Just as we turned to board the mag-lev transport, however, a sharp, urgent shout echoed from the cavern behind us.
"Master Ryuk! Wait! You need to see this!"
I paused, turning back toward the shattered fault line.
Commander Kael was standing atop the massive, eighty-foot carcass of the dead Stage 4 Rift Wyrm. His men had just used industrial laser-cutters to slice open the thick, armored bone plates along the base of the creature's neck—right where the mysterious "spatial burns" had crippled the beast before it fell into the cavern.
Only, as the heavy bone plate was pried back by the hydraulic crane, no jagged spatial tear was revealed.
Instead, embedded eight inches deep into the Wyrm's primary nerve cluster was a sleek, three-foot-long metallic cylinder forged from matte-black alloy, pulsing with a faint, rhythmic crimson beacon.
My eyes narrowed instantly.
"Hold the crane," I commanded, walking briskly back through the airlock onto the cavern floor, with Lina right at my heels.
I leaped lightly onto the massive, gray carcass of the dead Wyrm, my Stage 5 Adept agility making the twenty-foot jump effortless. Looking down into the severed neck cavity, the metallic scent of blood was mixed with something completely artificial: refined nitro-spirit propellant and synthetic neural-paralysis resin.
"That isn't a wound from a spatial rift," Lina gasped, landing beside me and staring at the black metal spike buried in the monster's spine. "That's a military-grade Behemoth Harpoon! And look at the glowing runes on the casing... that's a neural-lure transmitter!"
Kael wiped the gray blood off the side of the cylinder with his armored gauntlet, revealing a stamped serial code and a familiar emblem: a blazing golden sun impaled by a crossed halberd.
"The Imperial Frontier Vanguard," Kael said, his scarred face turning grim. "Master, this harpoon belongs to Grandmaster Vance's border regiment. And the neural-lure is tuned to a manual frequency."
For three seconds, the only sound in the cavern was the hum of the floodlights.
My Viral Hive-Brain connected the pieces in less than a millisecond, and a slow, icy chill—followed by a wave of dark, exhilarating amusement—spread through my chest.
A Stage 4 Rift Wyrm didn't "accidentally" stumble through a spatial tear right under Drop Zone Alpha days before the tournament.
It had been hunted at the southern border, crippled with neuro-harpoons, dragged through an underground fault line, and planted here with a remote-controlled neural-lure.
"Amar..." Lina whispered, her face draining of color as she realized the horrifying truth. "Arthur's ambush in the Ashen Gorge... it wasn't just meant to corner us. The Vance family planted a Stage 4 beast right underneath the trial zone! And Vice Principal Rosette—"
"—changed the tournament location to the Black Crag at the very last minute," I finished smoothly, a cold, razor-sharp smile carving its way across my face.
It wasn't just a petty family vendetta over twelve crates of herbs.
Wait—no. The harpoon's corrosion marks were at least two weeks old. That meant the Vance family and Vice Principal Rosette had planted this Stage 4 beast before I had even cut off their medicinal grass!
"Master!"
Before I could pry the harpoon out, a breathless security tech came sprinting out of the mag-lev tunnel, holding a flashing tactical tablet.
"Master Ryuk! The surface drones just picked up an encrypted transmission from the Ashen Gorge!" the tech shouted, projecting the intercepted audio-visual log into the air before us.
On the holographic screen, Grandmaster Vance was no longer swinging his saber in blind rage.
The old man was standing at the northern rim of the gorge, speaking into a military comm-stone. On the other end of the encrypted projection stood Vice Principal Rosette, her heterochromatic eyes gleaming with cold, ruthless calculation from inside her private quarters on the academy airship.
"The Roy brat and the girl vanished into the lower fissures, Rosette," Grandmaster Vance growled through the static. "Arthur is in critical condition, and my detectors are being jammed by unknown subterranean magnetic ore."
"Calm yourself, Vance," Rosette's voice crackled back, smooth and venomous. "It doesn't matter which hole Amar Roy crawled into. Did you forget why we chose the Black Crag? The Roy estate holds thirty percent of the eastern continent's banking liquidity and four spirit mines. Once Amar Roy dies in a tragic 'Stage 4 beast tide' alongside the traitor's daughter, the Imperial War Ministry will freeze his orphaned estate under emergency martial law—and divide the assets between our factions."
Grandmaster Vance's eyes flashed with cruel understanding. "The captive Stage 4 Wyrm in the lower fault line... you want to trigger the frenzy beacon now?"
"Trigger it," Rosette commanded coldly. "Pump the Wyrm full of the berserk stimulant through the harpoon and collapse the upper exits. Even if that boy has hidden cards, a frenzied Stage 4 Wyrm will turn the entire underground sector—and half the noble heirs in this trial—into a bloodbath. And the Board will have no choice but to hand control of the academy and the Roy banks to us!"
On the screen, Grandmaster Vance pulled a heavy crimson detonator rune from his belt and crushed it in his fist.
BEEP—BEEP—BEEP!
Down in our cavern, the black harpoon buried in the dead Wyrm's neck flashed bright red. A pressurized canister inside the spike hissed, injecting a liter of glowing crimson berserk stimulant straight into the corpse's cold, dead spinal cord.
Nothing happened.
The eighty-foot beast lay completely motionless—its blood already drained, its microbes already turned into four hundred million of my bacteriophage clones, and its brain already shattered by my boot five minutes ago.
The cavern was dead silent.
Kael stared at the uselessly beeping harpoon, then looked up at me. "Master... they planned this weeks ago. They weren't just after Miss Lina or a school grudge. Vice Principal Rosette and the War Ministry faction were planning to stage a beast tide to assassinate you and annex the entire Roy conglomerate!"
Lina's hands trembled with pure, unadulterated fury as she stared at the holographic projection of Rosette. "That venomous woman... she acted like she wanted to protect me at the tribunal, while all along she was planning to slaughter hundreds of students just to steal your family's wealth!"
I stood atop the dead Wyrm's skull, looking down at the flashing red harpoon.
My face was completely blank.
So that was why my parents had died in a "rift war" eight years ago, leaving a rich, unguarded estate behind. And now, the vultures in the academy and the military thought the sixteen-year-old orphan was finally plump enough to be slaughtered for his gold.
A low, quiet laugh bubbled up from deep within my chest.
It started soft, then echoed off the damp volcanic walls of the cavern—cold, unhinged, and dripping with a bottomless, psychotic delight that made Kael and his veteran soldiers instinctively take a step back.
"They want a Stage 4 beast tide?" I whispered, my pitch-black eyes locking onto the holographic image of Vice Principal Rosette and Grandmaster Vance.
I crouched down and pulled the intact, military-grade harpoon straight out of the Wyrm's neck.
Inside the harpoon's glass reservoir, half a liter of the ultra-concentrated Imperial Berserk Stimulant—a forbidden chemical compound designed to send Stage 4 beasts into a suicidal, blood-boiling frenzy—was still sloshing around.
Plaintext
=====================================================
NEW CHEMICAL SUBSTRATE DETECTED
=====================================================
[Substance]: Class-S Military Berserk Mutagen (Blood-Boil)
[Effect]: Forces target's cellular metabolism and qi
output to 400% capacity, causing fatal organ rupture
within 10 minutes.
[Swarm Compatibility]: 100% Assimilable!
[Warning]: If spliced into active parasitic clones inside
a living host (Target: Arthur Vance), the Swarm can
remotely trigger an unstoppable, contagious Qi-Frenzy!
=====================================================
My smile stretched wide, cold and terrifying.
Grandmaster Vance had just loaded Arthur's stasis pod onto his personal military shuttle on the surface, preparing to fly his precious grandson right back to the Academy's main command airship—where Vice Principal Rosette and the Vance clan elders were waiting to celebrate my death.
And inside Arthur's lungs sat two hundred and ten thousand of my bacteriophages.
"Kael," I said softly, holding up the glowing red canister of berserk mutagen as ten million phages poured from my palm to drink the chemical formula dry.
"Y-Yes, Master Ryuk?" Kael swallowed hard.
"Pack up the mining equipment and seal the tunnels," I murmured, my eyes gleaming like two dark moons in the gloom. "Grandmaster Vance and Vice Principal Rosette are about to have a family reunion on the command airship... and Arthur is going to bring them a very special present."