Inside the command tent, the horrific, rhythmic heartbeat echoing through the comms channel finally died out.
The holographic map of Sector 2, once a crisp tactical blue, remained a corrupted, glitching neon-green.
General Vance stared at the corrupted map. He didn't yell. He didn't smash the console.
He calmly reached down and yanked the main power cable from the holographic projector.
The table went dark.
"General?" the communications officer swallowed hard, his hands trembling over the useless keyboard. "Sir, we've lost all radar. Satellite imagery is being fed false loops. The disruption spikes are offline. We are completely blind inside the Sector."
"We aren't blind," General Vance said, his deep voice carrying the absolute, grounding authority of a Level 50 Warlord.
Vance turned to the panicked Guild Masters and military aides in the tent.
"It didn't just break our technology," Vance stated flatly, his scarred face grim. "It learned our systems. That changes everything."
He slammed a heavy, analog paper map of Sector 2 onto the dark table.
"We go dark. We go analog."
He looked at his adjutant. "Deploy the 'Bloodhounds'. No exosuits. No mana-filters. No digital comms. Pure physical enhancement paths only. Tell them to rely on scent, sound, and raw instinct. I want eyes on the Core Tower, and I want them to bring me a piece of that fog."
...
As the heavy, analog boots of the Bloodhounds crossed the perimeter into Sector 2, the [Domain of the Dead] rippled.
Deep inside the toxic green fog, the boy—the First Shadow—felt it.
The Domain did not welcome him like a king. That privilege belonged only to Arthur. To the boy, the Domain was a harsh, unforgiving judge. The thick fog didn't melt his skin, but it whispered to the dark, unstable void-mana in his chest, constantly urging it to break free.
Thump.
The massive heartbeat of the [Graveborn Mana Heart] echoed through the concrete under his boots.
Every time it beat, the fog shifted.
"Target," a cold, telepathic echo whispered directly into his mind. Arthur's voice.
"Three miles east of the Core. A scout. He slipped past the Corrupted Soldiers. He isn't using magic. He is using instinct. Hunt him."
The boy gripped his void-laced dagger.
"Yes," he whispered back to the silence.
He moved swiftly across the ruined rooftops, finding his target in an abandoned plaza.
It wasn't a standard soldier. It was a man wearing ragged leather and bone armor, wielding twin serrated hunting knives. A Bloodhound.
The man was kneeling on the ground, sniffing a patch of acid-melted concrete.
Suddenly, the man's head snapped up. He didn't look at a wrist-scanner. He simply smelled the shift in the air.
"Found you," the Bloodhound growled, lunging forward with terrifying, explosive speed.
The boy raised his dagger to block.
CLANG!
The impact was immense. The boy was thrown backward, crashing into a rusted light pole.
The Bloodhound pursued relentlessly, his knives a blur of lethal motion.
Slash. Pierce. Rip.
The boy couldn't match his veteran reflexes. A knife dragged across his thigh. Another bit deep into his shoulder.
Pain flared. Hot, blinding human pain.
But then... something else happened.
[Subordinate Trait Activated: The Broken Vanguard]
The boy didn't scream.
As the serrated knife tore his flesh, the pitch-black void-mana inside his heart surged. It didn't heal the wound immediately. Instead, it violently drank the kinetic energy of the attack.
The pain didn't disappear. It converted.
It made him heavier.
The Bloodhound frowned. His veteran instincts flared with sudden, primal warning. The boy wasn't slowing down, and the air around him was growing impossibly dense.
The veteran stopped slashing. He analyzed the boy's stance, noticing the dark energy pulsing specifically where the blades had struck.
"You're not fighting..." the Bloodhound whispered, his eyes narrowing as he dropped his low stance. "You're storing it."
The veteran instantly changed tactics. No more kinetic impacts. No more slashing.
He lunged forward, dropping his knives and violently tackling the boy to the ground. He bypassed the boy's chaotic aura, wrapping his thick, augmented arms around the teenager's neck in a lethal sleeper hold.
He was going to crush his windpipe without triggering the kinetic absorption.
The boy gasped, his airway instantly cut off. His vision blurred, the ruined plaza narrowing into a tunnel of choking darkness.
He figured it out, the boy's fractured mind panicked, his hands clawing uselessly at the thick, leathery arms crushing his throat.
His lungs burned. The edges of his consciousness began to fray.
And for a split second... he thought he heard Arthur's cold voice echoing in the absolute silence of his fading mind.
Endure.
The boy couldn't breathe. He couldn't unleash a shockwave without kinetic fuel.
But the boy wasn't just a brawler anymore. He was a creature forged in a massacre.
If the enemy wouldn't give him the kinetic energy... he would take it himself.
The boy didn't try to pry the choking arms away.
Instead, he raised his own void-laced dagger and aggressively plunged it directly into his own leg.
The Bloodhound's eyes widened in sheer horror. "What are you—"
The boy ripped the dagger out, tearing his own muscle, generating a massive, agonizing spike of internal trauma.
The void-mana inside him, gorged on the self-inflicted damage and the previous knife wounds, violently reached its critical mass.
His body literally began to crack from the inside out, unable to safely contain the sheer density of the stored agony.
The boy's eyes turned pitch-black.
"You just loaded me," he whispered, blood bubbling past his lips.
[Skill Activated: Void Reflection]
It wasn't a clean, spherical explosion.
The shockwave tore out of him—jagged, violent, and erratic, as if the pain itself was screaming to escape.
BOOOM!
The blast of dark-purple energy erupted directly from the boy's chest, right into the Bloodhound at point-blank range.
The man didn't even have time to scream. The sheer, concentrated force shattered his ribs, ruptured his organs, and blasted him fifty feet across the plaza. He crashed through a brick wall, dead before the rubble settled.
The boy collapsed onto his hands and knees, coughing up a sickening amount of black blood.
The void-mana immediately rushed to his self-inflicted stab wound and his crushed throat, slowly and painfully knitting the flesh back together with black, unnatural scar tissue.
He was panting. He was mangled. He was in agony.
And he was laughing.
It wasn't a laugh of relief. It was broken. Hollow.
Like something inside him had actually enjoyed the pain.
High above, sitting in the darkness of the Core Tower, Arthur watched through the Domain's link.
He saw the Bloodhound adapt. He saw the boy stab himself to bypass the lock. He saw the violent recoil tearing the boy's own body apart.
Arthur didn't smile. He leaned forward, his pitch-black eyes cold and analytical.
"It converts damage into force... but the vessel is degrading," Arthur murmured. "A weapon that burns itself to strike harder."
It was a flawed masterpiece. Brutal, effective, but ultimately self-destructive.
Arthur turned his attention back to the massive, beating Heart behind him.
The military was sending Bloodhounds. Analog killers who could analyze and adapt mid-combat.
"They want to play in the mud," Arthur whispered, a cold, abyssal light igniting in his eyes.
He raised his hand, thick red lightning arcing across his fingers.
He looked at the four elite corpses he had stored in his [Domain of the Dead] during the Tartarus raid.
"I will build something that does not exist," Arthur commanded the void, his voice dropping into a terrifying, absolute echo.
"...Until it kills. Until even instinct fails to recognize it."