The ascent from the deep mining shafts back to the lower perimeter of Sector 4 was an exercise in pure stealth. With the Midnight Tunic suppressing his ether leakage, Zayn was essentially a ghost moving through the shadows, while Rora followed closely behind, carrying a modified plasma torch like a weapon.
They emerged into the ruins of an old automated sorting station, located right on the border of the Sector 4 Black Market District. The area was a smoking graveyard; the Inquisitor's purification squads had done a thorough job, burning down the open-air stalls and turning the rusted oil drums into molten puddles.
But at the edge of the square, a small detachment of Orthodoxy soldiers was still active.
Three paladins and a high-tier Inquisitor Escort—a tall, slender figure in reinforced white robes and a full-face chrome mask—were standing over a group of captured local scavengers. The Escort held a glowing, golden needle in his hand, hovering it inches above a scavenger's forehead.
"Where is the glitch?" the Escort's voice hissed through his mask, cold and synthetic. "The high-rank signature vanished near the forge, but the systemic logic dictates an entity of that caliber does not perish in simple slag. Speak, or your neural code will be wiped."
"We don't know anything!" the scavenger screamed, his hands bound by cybernetic zip-ties. "The forge blew up! The whole sector's plumbing went red! That's all we know!"
Twenty yards away, hidden behind a collapsed iron gantry, Zayn watched the scene. His battle IQ immediately crunched the distances, the angles, and the tactical weights.
[Target Assessment: 3x Paladins (Lv. 22), 1x Escort (Lv. 25)]
[Current Physical Output: 60%]
[Available Skill: Void Pulse (Suppressed but Functional at 40% Capacity)]
[Win Probability: 94.2% (If strike is executed within 3.5 seconds)]
"Zayn," Rora whispered, her knuckles white around her torch. "What are we doing? There's an Escort out there. Those guys have active tactical shields."
"A tactical shield is just an electromagnetic frequency," Zayn deadpanned, his legs tensing as his boots gripped the concrete. "If you hit it with an equal and opposite wave, it cancels out. Rora, stay here. If any of them manages to fire a flare, incinerate the signaling device."
Before she could answer, Zayn moved.
He didn't use Primal Step—the noise would be too loud. Instead, he used the enhanced gravity-dampening of his Midnight Tunic, sliding across the soot-covered floor like a shadow cast by a dying flame. He covered fifteen yards in 0.8 seconds, entirely silent.
The first paladin didn't even register a drop in air pressure.
Zayn appeared directly in his blindspot. With his physical output at 60%, his hands were steady. He didn't use a weapon; he simply grabbed the paladin's heavy helmet with both hands, twisted his wrists ninety degrees to the right, and used the soldier's own kinetic momentum to snap the neck seals.
CRACK.
[Target Deleted: Orthodoxy Paladin]
Before the body could hit the ground, Zayn grabbed the falling plasma rifle from the dead man's hands. He didn't aim for the chest plates; he used the heavy iron stock of the gun as a blunt instrument, driving it upward into the second paladin's jaw with the force of a hydraulic piston.
The impact shattered the helmet's chin guard, driving the bone fragments straight into the brain stem. The second soldier collapsed instantly, his rifle firing a single, wild round into the ceiling.
"Anomaly!" the third paladin shouted, spinning his heavy rotary cannon around, but he was already too late.
Zayn was already inside his guard. He placed his open palm directly against the center chest plate of the soldier's armor, his golden eyes flaring with absolute, unadulterated coldness.
"Void Pulse," Zayn whispered.
[Skill Activated: Void Pulse (Low-Output Variant)]
A localized, black shockwave of condensed gravity erupted from his palm. It didn't blow the paladin backward; it compressed the air inside his chest cavity. The heavy titanium armor buckled inward by three inches, completely flattening the soldier's lungs and heart before the kinetic force erupted out of his back in a spray of white insulation foam and dark blood.
[Target Deleted: Orthodoxy Paladin]
Three seconds had passed. Three elite soldiers were dead.
The Inquisitor Escort dropped the scavenger, his chrome mask reflecting the pitch-black figure standing over the bodies. The golden needle in his hand instantly transformed, extending into a six-foot energy pike that crackled with white-hot plasma.
"The glitch," the Escort hissed, his tactical shield flaring to life in a bubble of blue light around his white robes. "You dare face the light of the Board with raw muscle?"
"Your shield frequency is 4.2 gigahertz," Zayn said, his voice flat, his face completely expressionless as he dropped the broken plasma rifle in his hand. "The modulation cycle is 0.03 seconds. You are repeating your security encryption sequence every four steps, Escort."
The Escort froze, his chrome mask tilting. "What?"
"I said, your math is lazy," Zayn deadpanned.
Zayn stepped forward, his right hand moving in a strange, curved trajectory that perfectly traced the blind spot of the shield's modulation wave. The blue barrier didn't shatter; Zayn's fingers simply slid through the energy field during the exact millisecond the frequency cycled to its low point.
He gripped the Escort's throat through his white collar, his fingers sinking into the cybernetic vocal processors.
"Let's see how your algorithm handles an internal structural collapse," Zayn murmured.
With a brutal, single-handed lift, Zayn slammed the Level 25 Escort into the concrete floor, fracturing the tiles and shattering the chrome mask into a hundred shiny pieces. He didn't stop there. He drove his heel straight into the exposed circuitry of the Escort's chest regulator, sending a massive feedback loop into his neural network.
The Escort's body stiffened, his eyes rolling back as his internal interface completely fried.
[Target Deleted: Inquisitor Escort (Level 25)]
[XP Gained: 18,500]
[Level Up Criteria Met]
[Rank 18 -> Rank 19]
[Primal Core Status: 85% Restored]
[New System Title: The Ghost of Sector 4]
Zayn stood in the center of the ruined square, the gold in his eyes now burning with a brilliant, blinding light that completely illuminated the shadows around him. His Midnight Tunic vibrated slightly, absorbing the remaining static from the Escort's broken shield.
The scavengers watched him from the floor, shaking with terror, unable to comprehend what kind of demon they were looking at.
Zayn didn't look at them. He turned his eyes upward, looking past the smoke, past the ruined forge, straight toward the glowing neon spires of the High Cathedral at the center of the sector.
"Rank 19," Zayn said, his voice echoing in the silent square like a death toll. "The cooldown is effectively broken. Rora, grab their supply packs. It's time to go pay the Bishop a visit."