Chapter 2
In Crimson City's lowest district — the Rust Belt — the corrosive acid rain never really stopped.
I pushed open the heavy blast door of the Black Dog tavern. Cheap synthetic alcohol, the sharp bite of machine oil, and the murk of cigar smoke hit me all at once.
Ten minutes ago, I had used Rule Manipulation to force my own cellular regeneration rate to 10,000%. The lethal through‑and‑through wound that would have killed an ordinary person in minutes had closed completely in five, without leaving so much as a scar. All that remained was a combat suit with a gaping hole in it, still stained dark red — the only proof that Alpha Squad's betrayal had been real.
Rule Manipulation burned through energy at a punishing rate. My stomach announced itself with a loud, insistent growl, and I took the hint.
I walked to the bar and dropped a bloodstained credit chip on the counter. "High‑concentration nutritional black rye. No ice."
While the bartender fumbled with my order, the open floor in the middle of the tavern was playing out a scene Crimson City staged every single day.
Crack — !
A small figure in a heavy exoskeleton was hurled to the floor like a sack of garbage. The impact cratered the wood.
That was Roxie — captain of the Hound Squad. C‑rank fighter on paper, famously short‑tempered, and a blacklisted underground anti‑hero who'd spent years being crushed for refusing to play by the syndicates' unwritten rules. Nearby, Hound Squad's sniper Stella and their blade specialist Maya were in similar shape: bloodied, pinned to the floor by high‑penetration tactical bolts.
"You backwater bottom‑feeders think you can just waltz in and claim a premium bounty that the Apex syndicate has its eye on?"
The man standing on Roxie's head was built like a wall with a bad attitude. He wore A‑rank powered exo‑armor that cost more than most people's lives, and spun a high‑frequency plasma cutter between his fingers with the casual confidence of someone who'd never once faced real consequences. Behind him, a dozen fully armed syndicate soldiers were enjoying themselves thoroughly.
Roxie's nose was broken, blood smeared across half her face — and she still stared up at the mercenary captain with the fixed, unblinking eyes of a cornered wolf. She spat a mouthful of bloody saliva at his feet.
"The bounty was issued by the Guild. Whoever brings in the core keeps it. That's the rule. All Apex knows how to do is poach and ambush — that's it."
"Mouthy little bitch —"
The captain's face went ugly with rage. He drew back his armored leg to bring it down on Roxie's skull.
In the fraction of a second while he was shifting his weight back, the heel of his heavy armor connected with the bottom of the glass I'd just picked up.
Clink.
The synthetic rye splashed across the floor. The glass broke with a sound too small to stand out in a loud room — but enough to make my brow twitch.
The mercenary captain turned. He looked at me the way someone looks at a cockroach crossing their floor, taking in the torn clothing, the absence of any high‑ranking guild insignia, and the general impression of a man with nothing to lose. He gave a contemptuous snort.
"Where'd you crawl in from? You blind?" He raised the plasma rifle, its muzzle leveled between my eyes, his tone dropping to something cold and flat. "I'm in a bad mood right now. You've got three seconds to get out of this tavern. After that, I blow your head off along with everything else."
The onlookers in the tavern dropped their gazes in unison, eager to be invisible. Even Roxie, pinned under an armored boot, managed to wrench her head toward me. "Hey — whoever you are, just go! These syndicate dogs will actually kill you!"
I looked at the plasma barrel three centimeters from my face, and felt nothing in particular.
Five years. Five years of playing small inside Alpha Squad — calculating around the egos of people who couldn't have survived a week without me, keeping my real ability buried, doing it all without letting a single seam show. It was like dancing in shackles at the bottom of a swamp.
But that was before.
I'd just been fired.
"You should apologize," I said. My voice was entirely level. "Then lick the floor clean."
The mercenary captain stared at me for a long moment, then burst out laughing — the full‑throated, genuine laugh of someone who has heard something so absurd it registers as comedy. "Did the acid rain eat your brain? You want me to apologize?! I'm going to send you straight to—"
He didn't get to finish.
Without even glancing at the weapon pointed at my face, I stepped forward half a pace, past the cold barrel, and extended one finger. I pressed it lightly against the bruised back of Roxie, lying on the floor below me.
My expression stayed flat. But in the depths of my left eye's retina, the blue data‑tide ignited like a volcano blowing its cap.
Target identified: Roxie (C‑rank Fighter).
Override sequence initiated —
Strength parameter cap: lifted.
Kinetic output coefficient: forced amplification ×100.
Supplementary force concepts appended: [Recoil Negation], [Absolute Shattering].
"Get up," I said, looking down at Roxie. "Clear the trash in front of you."
Roxie blinked.
Then, in the next second, a power flooded into her spent body — a power so immense, so alien to anything she had ever felt, that the only comparison her mind could reach for was a star going supernova. Her pupils contracted to pinpoints. Every vein across her body flared crimson.
"AAAAAHHH—!!"
It wasn't technique. It wasn't form. It was pure instinct. Roxie swung upward with one fist — no stance, no setup — and drove it into the mercenary captain's A‑rank ballistic chest plate.
BOOM — !!
The sound tore the air apart. This was not a noise a human body was supposed to produce. It landed like a cruise missile detonated indoors.
Every eye in the tavern was fixed on the same point, wide with a terror that had gone beyond the ability to process.
The mercenary captain's prized A‑rank exo‑armor ceased to exist on contact with Roxie's knuckles — crushed like wet paper in a fraction of a second. The kinetic force behind the blow traveled upward, annihilating bone and organ and skull in a clean, vertical line.
A single dull thud.
The captain's upper body, along with five of the soldiers standing behind him, dissolved into a cloud of red mist.
The force didn't stop there. It punched through the tavern's blast‑alloy wall — half a meter of reinforced metal — and kept going. A spray of viscera and shrapnel scattered into the street outside.
Silence.
Every syndicate soldier left standing. Every hardened lowlife in the tavern who had seen people die before. Every single person in that room stood with their mouth open, their body locked rigid, and forgot to breathe.
Was this a C‑rank fighter?
This was the main battery of an S‑rank heavy mech firing a full salvo.
Clang. Somewhere nearby, a mechanical blade slipped from someone's fingers and hit the floor.
The surviving soldiers came back to themselves. They looked at the scene — the rubble, the red fog still hanging in the air, the captain's legs standing upright without anything above them — and the sound that came out of them was not quite human. They ran. They didn't look back.
In the wreckage.
Roxie still held the follow‑through position, fist extended, white smoke rising from her knuckles, her entire consciousness somewhere between here and nowhere. Stella and Maya stared with the same blank, shattered expression — watching the woman who could usually just barely kill two D‑rank creatures by herself become, for one second, something that could end the world.
Roxie turned her neck, stiff as a rusted joint, and looked at the man standing behind her.
Blood‑rain drifted through the narrow space. I stood where I had been standing the whole time, perfectly still. When the dust finished falling, I lifted a hand and brushed the ash from my shoulder.
"Shame about the drink," I said.
It was only then that all three members of Hound Squad woke up.
They weren't fools. The survival logic of Crimson City's underground had taught them to recognize power at its source more clearly than anyone. Roxie knew her own ceiling. The god‑level force that had just moved through her body had only one possible origin: the unremarkable man standing behind her.
No words were needed.
Thud.
Roxie — the most volatile, least governable heavy fighter in the Rust Belt — dropped to one knee without hesitation, right there in the blood and the wreckage. Maya and Stella pulled the tactical knives from their thigh sheaths, drove them blade‑first into the floor, and performed the deepest gesture of fealty the underground world recognized.
"Hound Squad Captain Roxie, reporting for you." Roxie's voice was still shaking — not from fear, but from the electric frenzy of having witnessed a miracle firsthand. "Sir... who are you?"
I looked down at three women who had just passed through despair and come out the other side with something bright and hungry burning in their eyes.
If I was going to reclaim what I was owed — and prove what I had always been — these three were the right foundation.
I was done hiding. No more careful rationing of my ability, no more engineered mediocrity to protect someone else's ego. This time, I would hold nothing back.
"My name is Arthur." My voice was quiet, but the weight behind it didn't need volume. "As of today, Hound Squad has a new commander. Any objections?"
"None." Roxie's wolf‑yellow eyes blazed. "Sir, as long as you can keep us alive and put those syndicate bastards under our boots, our lives are yours. Give the order."
I nodded.
But just as I was about to take stock of this newly acquired unit, something pulled at the edge of my focus. My eyes settled on a ventilation grate in the far corner of the tavern, gray with dust.
A pinhole‑sized mechanical red light was blinking in it, almost imperceptibly.
Simultaneously.
In the luxury lounge at the top of the Apex conglomerate tower, Victoria sat rigid, staring at footage that showed the inside of a tavern looking like it had been through an artillery strike. The color had left her face entirely.
"That's... impossible. How does a B‑rank nobody like Arthur know someone with this kind of power?!" Her fingers sank into the leather sofa, and her face — beautiful even in its distortion — twisted with jealousy and something colder underneath it.
Victoria was a profoundly vain woman and a profoundly insecure one. The moment she'd kicked me out, she'd used the conglomerate's high‑clearance access to tap into the citywide surveillance network, intent on watching me die in the slums with her own eyes — to make sure the fabricated glory of her career record stayed safely buried.
Instead, she had watched Arthur press a single finger to a worthless C‑rank prostitute, and produce a level of destruction that she — an A‑rank mage — couldn't have touched.
"He can't be allowed to live." Victoria's voice was barely above a breath, but the killing intent in her eyes had the density of something physical. "If people find out he left my squad and got stronger — my whole image collapses. Everything I've built."
She slammed her hand down on the private comm unit and opened an encrypted channel.
"Shadow Unit, this is an order. Target location confirmed: Black Dog Tavern, Rust Belt. Activate S‑rank termination protocol. Now."
