Chen Xi didn’t stop at the threshold. He stepped into Workshop Unit 73, letting the heavy blast doors hiss shut behind him. His posture remained perfectly slouched, the picture of an exhausted logistics cadet returning from a grueling night shift.
He walked to the workbench, picked up a greasy wrench, and dropped it onto the metal surface with a loud clatter.
"Another burnt-out logic core," Chen Xi sighed aloud, his voice echoing in the empty room. He pulled out his chair and sat down heavily. "If the Titan Faction pushes their servos past eighty percent one more time, I'm going to charge them triple."
Internally, his mind was a fortress of ice.
Sylphe, Chen Xi communicated through his newly integrated Synapse-Cowl, the thought transferring with zero latency. Isolate the audio-visual feed of the bug beneath the desk. Feed it a continuous loop of me working on a Class-2 engine block. Make it flawless.
"Already done," Sylphe replied, her digital avatar appearing in his mind's eye, her golden eyes narrowed into slits of pure malice. "The physical bug is transmitting exactly what we want them to see. Now, let me trace the encrypted frequency. No one spies on my host and lives."
Chen Xi sat completely still at the desk, his silver-rimmed eyes staring blankly at the wall. Through his Machine Dominion, he didn't just wait for Sylphe to trace the signal; he actively felt it. The transmission was a tight-beam microwave burst, bouncing off the Academy's internal relay towers to mask its origin.
He followed the invisible thread of data as it wove through the ferrocrete walls, up three levels, and into the administrative offices of the Logistics Sector.
"Got it," Sylphe announced a second later. "The signal terminates in Office 402. That is the office of Senior Supervisor Kael. He oversees the assignment of lower-tier mechanics to the Elite combat bays."
"The man who assigned me to Bay 19 yesterday," Chen Xi realized, a cold realization dawning on him.
"He is not just a supervisor," Sylphe corrected, pulling up Kael’s decrypted personnel file in Chen Xi’s HUD. "His biometric markers match an alias used by the Ironfang Syndicate's internal intelligence division. He is a Hound-Master. He must have flagged your sudden, massive score anomaly during the Sector G combat assessment and decided to investigate Workshop 73 personally."
"If he's an intelligence officer, he hasn't reported his findings to the main Syndicate yet. He's waiting for hard evidence to secure a promotion," Chen Xi deduced, his mind working with terrifying, machine-like efficiency. "If he sees me doing anything anomalous, he hits the panic button and the Ironfangs descend on this Academy with a corporate army."
"Then we do not let him press the button."
Chen Xi stood up. He didn't grab his tools. He didn't equip the Viper-Mantis blades. With the Synapse-Cowl grafted to his spine, he didn't need to touch his weapons to command them.
He looked toward the dark corner of the workshop.
"Iron-Maw," Chen Xi commanded mentally. "Hunting protocol. Target: Office 402."
The shadows shifted. The massive, skeletal tungsten hound stepped into the dim light. Its crimson optical sensors flared, syncing perfectly with Chen Xi’s expanded sensory bandwidth. Through the Synapse-Cowl, Chen Xi could literally see through the beast's eyes, feeling the cold, hard logic of its combat subroutines meshing with his own human intuition.
Iron-Maw didn't use the door. The beast leaped vertically, its artificial tungsten tendons launching it fifteen feet into the air. It sheared through the heavy steel grate of the ceiling ventilation shaft with a single bite of its serrated jaws and vanished into the ductwork, completely silent.
Chen Xi walked out the front door, adjusting his grey jacket, and took the stairs.
Four levels up, the administrative wing was deserted. The Elite Qualifiers were dominating everyone's attention, leaving the bureaucratic corridors dead and silent.
Chen Xi walked down the pristine, white-tiled hallway until he stopped outside Office 402. The frosted glass door displayed the name Senior Supervisor Kael.
Chen Xi didn't knock. He didn't even reach for the handle.
He closed his eyes, his Machine Dominion spreading outward like an invisible net. He felt the electronic tumblers of the mag-lock securing the door. He didn't use a decryption key or a physical tool. He simply forced his Kinetic Qi into a hyper-specific frequency, overloading the micro-processor holding the lock shut.
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With a soft click, the heavy mag-lock disengaged.
Chen Xi pushed the door open and stepped inside.
Supervisor Kael was sitting behind a sleek mahogany desk, staring intently at a wall of monitors. He was a thin, rat-faced man with cybernetic implants lining his jaw. When the door opened, he spun around, his hand instinctively dropping to the heavy plasma-pistol holstered at his hip.
Kael froze when he saw the scrawny, grey-clad mechanic standing in the doorway.
"Cadet Chen Xi?" Kael blinked, his cybernetic jaw clicking. He glanced quickly at his monitors. The feed from Workshop 73 clearly showed Chen Xi sitting at his desk, welding an engine block. Kael looked back at the boy standing in front of him.
The color completely drained from the spy's face.
"Your bug is transmitting a pre-rendered, hard-light holographic loop," Chen Xi said calmly, stepping fully into the office and letting the door seal behind him. "It's a neat trick. Corporate tech usually takes at least ten minutes to bypass. It took my Origin AI three seconds."
"Origin AI...?" Kael breathed, his hand gripping the plasma-pistol. He ripped it from its holster, aiming it squarely at Chen Xi’s chest. "I knew it. You aren't a logistics rat. You're a corporate plant! Zhao Ming’s death, the mechs in Sector G—it was all you! Stay exactly where you are, or I will burn a hole through your heart!"
Kael reached with his left hand to slam the emergency lockdown button on his desk, intending to broadcast an SOS to the Ironfang Syndicate.
"I wouldn't," Chen Xi warned softly.
His silver-rimmed eyes flared. Machine Dominion.
Kael slammed his hand onto the emergency button. Nothing happened. The console was completely dead. Kael gasped, looking down at his plasma-pistol. The weapon’s magnetic containment coils, which should have been glowing a bright, lethal blue, were dark. The battery cell had been completely drained, the internal circuits fused into useless slag by an invisible, localized surge of kinetic electricity.
"What... what are you?" Kael whispered in absolute terror, dropping the useless gun. He was a Rank-B Esper, but his entire arsenal was technological. He was completely disarmed without Chen Xi even moving a muscle.
"I'm the guy who fixes things," Chen Xi said, taking a slow step forward. "And the Ironfang Syndicate is a broken gear in my machine."
Kael’s survival instincts finally kicked in. He lunged backward, his hands glowing with a faint, toxic-green acidic Qi. He threw a desperate, sweeping strike aimed at Chen Xi’s face.
Chen Xi didn't dodge.
A massive, matte-black shadow dropped from the ceiling panels directly above Kael’s desk.
Iron-Maw landed with the force of a falling anvil. The tungsten hound’s sheer mass crushed the mahogany desk into splinters. Before Kael could even scream, the beast lunged. Its serrated tungsten jaws clamped down on Kael’s extended right arm, the artificial tendons snapping shut with the bite force of a hydraulic press.
The sickening crunch of shattering bone and tearing flesh echoed in the small office.
Kael shrieked, falling to his knees, his acidic Qi completely dissipating as shock overwhelmed his system. Iron-Maw stood over him, pinning the spy to the floor, its crimson optical sensors glowing brightly in the dim room, a low, terrifying mechanical growl vibrating from its chest.
Chen Xi walked around the ruined desk and crouched down next to the whimpering spy.
"You didn't broadcast yet," Chen Xi stated, his voice devoid of any emotion. "But you were preparing a report. What does the Syndicate know?"
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"Go to hell!" Kael spat blood onto the floor, clutching his mangled stump.
Chen Xi sighed. He tapped Iron-Maw’s armored flank. The beast shifted its weight, pressing one of its bladed front paws directly onto Kael’s chest, applying exactly enough pressure to crack a rib. Kael screamed again.
"I have a Rank-B Healer making sure my body can survive catastrophic trauma," Chen Xi said coldly. "If I have her keep you alive while Iron-Maw takes you apart piece by piece, you will experience a depth of agony that your corporate masters haven't even theorized yet. What. Does. The. Syndicate. Know?"
Kael looked into Chen Xi's silver-rimmed eyes. He saw no hesitation, no bluff. He saw a primordial void.
"Nothing!" Kael sobbed, the fight completely breaking out of him. "They know nothing! They think Zhao Ming was killed by a rival Elite from the Lin family! I was only sent to investigate the lower bays because the Sector G anomaly didn't sit right with me! I haven't transmitted the feed yet!"
"He is telling the truth," Sylphe confirmed, having simultaneously hard-jacked into Kael's personal datapad. "His outgoing transmission logs are completely empty. The Syndicate is blind."
"But they aren't stupid," Kael coughed, a desperate, bloody laugh escaping his lips. "You think you've won? You think killing me changes anything? The Ironfang Patriarch is furious. He’s not sending more spies. He's coming here."
Chen Xi’s eyes narrowed. "The Patriarch? He can't enter the Academy grounds without triggering a corporate war."
"He doesn't need to," Kael sneered, his eyes rolling back slightly from the blood loss. "The Elite Qualifiers. The final matches are in two days. The Patriarch is attending as a VIP sponsor. He's bringing Elder Vane. A Transcendent-Realm master. When the tournament ends, they are going to lock down the entire sector until they find whoever humiliated their bloodline."
A Transcendent-Realm master.
The planetary tier. Someone who could survive in a vacuum and level a city block with a single wave of their hand. Chen Xi was strong, his Dual-Class synergy terrifying, but he was still only in the Awakened tiers. A direct confrontation with a Transcendent would be suicide.
"Thank you for the intel," Chen Xi said softly.
He didn't give the order aloud. Through the Synapse-Cowl, a single, cold command passed from his brain to the mechanical beast.
Iron-Maw’s jaws snapped shut over Kael’s throat. The execution was instantaneous and silent.
Chen Xi stood up, looking at the bloody mess of Office 402.
"Sylphe," Chen Xi said, his voice echoing in the quiet room. "Can you scrub this room's security footage and frame this as a corporate assassination by a rival syndicate?"
"Already generating the falsified data packets," Sylphe replied smoothly. "I will leave traces of Lin Family encryption codes on his terminal. It will look like he got caught spying on the Elites and was silenced."
"Good. Clean it up. We need to prepare."
Chen Xi turned and walked out of the office, leaving Iron-Maw to dispose of the heavy evidence through the ventilation shafts. The stakes had just exponentially increased. The shadows were no longer safe. If a Transcendent-Realm master was coming to the Academy, Chen Xi couldn't just hide—he had to be ready to break the sky.
He needed more firepower. He needed Aria’s resources, Yuxuan’s distraction, and Sera’s serums.
He needed his first Mecha.