[Absorb Starbreaker?]
The blue sphere remained suspended in front of Adrian. Inside it, the martial artist’s silhouette repeated a series of strikes powerful enough to fracture the air.
The decision didn’t require much thought.
Adrian had just been thrown ten thousand years into the future, he had no idea how to return, and the first inhabitant he encountered had tried to crush his skull with its bare hands.
He needed something better than ordinary fists.
"Absorb."
The sphere compressed.
For an instant, it became a single point of light. Then it shot into his chest.
Adrian felt something pass through his skin, his ribs, and the center of his heart. There was no wound, but his muscles tensed as if an electric current had surged through them.
[Class Soul absorption initiated.]
[Compatibility with Infinite Sovereign: 100%.]
[Class acquired: Starbreaker.]
[Current registered classes: 1.]
[Combat memories available: 63 years.]
Adrian barely managed to read the final message.
The future disappeared.
A child punched a wooden post beneath the rain.
His knuckles had split open. Blood ran down his fingers, but he continued striking while an old man corrected the position of his feet.
"Again."
The child threw another punch.
The post didn’t move.
"Don’t try to destroy it. Find the place where it already wants to break."
The scene changed.
The child became a teenager striking a metal plate inside a training hall filled with students. One of his knuckles was deformed. He breathed, planted his right foot, and struck the same spot seven times.
The first strike left no mark.
The second produced a dent.
The third opened a thin line.
On the seventh, the plate split apart.
The scene changed again.
The teenager was now a man fighting atop a wall. Creatures covered in armored shells climbed up from the streets. The martial artist struck one of them in the chest six times. Each impact penetrated deeper than the last.
The seventh pierced its armor and destroyed its heart.
Another scene.
Another battle.
Another body.
The same man grew older while Adrian watched through his eyes.
He struck beasts the size of buildings. He shattered armor made from materials Adrian didn’t recognize. He fought humans capable of walking through the air and creatures that regenerated their bodies before hitting the ground.
Decades of training appeared simultaneously.
Thousands of stances.
Millions of strikes.
Pain, breathing, rhythm, distance, defeats, and victories compressed themselves inside Adrian’s mind without any order.
He tried to focus on one sequence.
A hundred others tore through it.
He tried to remember the old man’s face.
He saw a creature tear half the martial artist’s body away.
He tried to separate the first lesson from the last.
The child, the old man, the plate, the wall, and sixty years of enemies blended together into an unbearable noise.
Adrian fell to one knee.
The ruined avenue reappeared around him, but the memories continued hammering him from within. His hands attempted to assume twelve different positions. His breathing changed uncontrollably, imitating techniques his body had never practiced.
A red window appeared before his eyes.
[Warning: Combat memories remain unprocessed.]
[Direct assimilation exceeds current mental capacity.]
[Identity contamination risk detected.]
[Automatic assimilation interrupted.]
The images stopped.
Adrian pressed one hand against the pavement. His shirt was soaked in sweat, and he felt as though he had remained awake for several days.
"Sixty-three years sounded better before I tried shoving all of them into my head."
The sphere was no longer in front of him. In its place, a new ring had appeared inside his Class Archive.
It was dark blue and bore the symbol of a fist piercing a star.
[Registered Class: Starbreaker]
[Rarity: Unregistered]
[Status: Available]
[Combat Memory Archive created.]
[Stored experience: 63 years.]
[Organized experience: 0.03%.]
Adrian studied the percentage.
He had experienced hundreds of fragments, yet he had organized only a tiny fraction of them. He could remember that the warrior had devoted his life to Starbreaker, but he couldn’t reproduce any of his advanced techniques.
When he attempted to retrieve one, he received only incomplete images: the rotation of a hip, a mountain splitting apart, and the sound of human bones breaking.
It wasn’t knowledge.
It was noise.
"So I can’t steal sixty-three years of practice just by touching a corpse."
[Correct.]
Adrian arched an eyebrow.
"Now you decide to answer?"
No other message appeared.
He opened the memory archive and found thousands of locked fragments. Some required greater mastery of the class. Others couldn’t be organized until his body reached the necessary attributes.
Only one memory was fully available.
The first.
The child beneath the rain.
[Compatible foundational memory detected.]
[Process memory?]
Adrian accepted.
This time, the experience didn’t try to drown him.
He felt the cold rain against the child’s skin. The pain in his knuckles. The exact position of his feet in the mud and the reason the old man corrected every movement.
Starbreaker didn’t depend on striking with greater force.
Each impact left a vibration within the target. The next strike had to find the previous vibration and amplify it. Repeated enough times, the accumulated damage destroyed materials that the user’s physical strength shouldn’t have been capable of breaking.
One strike created the first flaw.
The next found it.
The last turned it into a fracture.
The memory ended.
Adrian opened his eyes.
His feet had settled into a narrow stance. His left foot pointed forward while his right remained slightly turned. It wasn’t the stance the corpse had used.
It was simpler.
The foundation upon which the others were built.
[Foundational memory processed.]
[Technique acquired: Starbreaker Fist.]
[Starbreaker Fist]
[Rank: Basic]
[Mastery: Beginner — 0.1%]
[Effect: Consecutive strikes against the same target accumulate Fracture.]
[Current maximum Fracture layers: 3.]
[Growth requirement: Use Starbreaker Fist against resistant targets.]
Adrian closed his fist.
The technique existed within his mind, but it didn’t feel like a skill he could activate with a command. He knew the stance and understood the theory. His body, however, wasn’t accustomed to the movement yet.
That was better.
Completely automatic skills produced fighters who depended on the system to decide when they should move. Starbreaker gave him a tool he could integrate with everything he already knew.
Adrian approached the vehicle the corpse had struck during their fight. He chose an intact section of the door and positioned his feet as he had seen in the memory.
He breathed.
He struck.
The metal vibrated.
[Fracture: 1/3.]
Adrian withdrew his fist. He had felt something at the instant of impact—a resistance that remained in the door even after he was no longer touching it.
He struck the same spot again.
The previous vibration responded.
A tiny crack appeared around his knuckles.
[Fracture: 2/3.]
The third strike punched through the door.
The metal split as though struck by an industrial tool. Adrian withdrew his hand and studied the hole.
He hadn’t used his full strength.
[Fracture: 3/3.]
[Target integrity compromised.]
[Starbreaker Fist mastery increased.]
[Beginner — 0.1% → 0.2%.]
The increase was small, but it confirmed something important.
The technique could grow.
It wasn’t limited to the memory he had processed or the level the corpse had possessed when he began practicing it. The more Adrian used it against targets capable of resisting it, the greater his mastery would become.
Adrian looked at the ruined buildings surrounding the avenue.
The future didn’t appear to have any shortage of resistant targets.
He crouched beside the corpse. Now that the blue light was gone, all that remained was a dead man inside a torn uniform. He appeared to be around fifty, but the memories confirmed that he had fought for at least sixty-three years.
Adrian touched the body’s shoulder.
No personal information appeared.
"Who were you?"
The system responded.
[Class Souls preserve accumulated combat experience.]
[Personal memories are inaccessible.]
Adrian examined the uniform. The remains of an emblem were visible on its chest: a tower surrounded by seven stars. An identification plate rested beneath it, but the name had been damaged beyond recognition.
Only one word had survived.
Instructor.
The man who had nearly killed him hadn’t been a legendary soldier or the founder of Starbreaker.
He had been an instructor.
Adrian rose and looked at the other corpses scattered across the avenue.
Some wore armor. Others held broken weapons. If each of them retained a class and a portion of their experience, this graveyard could contain more professions than every academy in the present combined.
His Class Archive displayed only one.
Empty spaces continued beneath it.
An infinite number of them.
Adrian extended his hand toward the nearest corpse, but the system didn’t react.
The body belonged to a tall creature covered in plates of bone. The center of its chest had been destroyed by multiple circular impacts.
Probably the instructor’s work.
Farther ahead, Adrian found two human bodies, but their class cores had shattered. Another corpse still held a sword, although nothing remained inside the armor except a layer of ash.
There was no other Class Soul available.
Not yet.
Adrian proceeded carefully down the avenue. The pain from his injuries remained real. His wrist was swollen, and his ribs protested with every breath, but he could walk.
The city grew increasingly familiar.
Beneath the black roots, he recognized the entrance to a station he used to reach the academy. The tower in front of it retained the same structure as a shopping center from the present, although dozens of floors had been added above the original building.
Ten thousand years hadn’t erased the city completely.
They had only turned it into a corpse.
Adrian crossed what remained of the entrance. The elevators had been destroyed, but a staircase descended into an underground area. Symbols similar to the one on the instructor’s uniform covered the walls.
The tower surrounded by seven stars.
At the end of the corridor, he found a training hall.
There were broken posts, metal plates, and machines that no longer received power. Several walls were covered in circular indentations, each one formed by consecutive strikes.
This had to be where the instructor had taught Starbreaker.
Adrian ran his fingers across one of the marks.
A memory attempted to open but stopped behind a warning.
[Insufficient Starbreaker mastery.]
[Required mastery: Beginner 10%.]
The possibility of unlocking memories through his own progress confirmed that the sixty-three years of experience weren’t useless. They were simply stored behind doors he would have to open one by one.
Adrian withdrew his hand and continued onward.
At the back of the hall stood a metal plaque. Dust concealed most of the inscription, but the material had endured better than the rest of the building.
He cleaned the surface with his sleeve.
The first lines had been written in a language derived from his own. He recognized some of the words, but others had changed too much.
The system reacted.
[Written language detected.]
[Temporal linguistic reconstruction available.]
[Translate?]
"Yes."
The letters rearranged themselves before his eyes.
[MARTIAL FEDERATION — MERIDIAN BRANCH]
[In memory of the 4,218 students and instructors lost during the Final Defense.]
A date appeared below.
Adrian compared it to the calendar used by the system in the present, but the numbers didn’t match. A second window converted the information.
[Record created: 9,137 years before current temporal location.]
He continued reading.
[Meridian was the last confirmed human city.]
[No evacuation vessel survived.]
[No human transmission has been recorded since the fall.]
[If anyone finds this facility, know that humanity fought until the final day.]
Adrian stopped breathing for an instant.
He had assumed the ruins belonged to a war, invasion, or catastrophe that had occurred shortly before his arrival. The corpses appeared ancient, but the future had developed materials capable of preserving buildings and bodies for periods impossible to estimate by sight.
The plaque eliminated any doubt.
The city hadn’t fallen recently.
It had been dead for more than nine thousand years.
Adrian looked at the date again.
[Elapsed time since last confirmed human transmission: 9,137 years.]
If humanity had disappeared nine thousand years before this moment, then the extinction wouldn’t happen ten thousand years in the future.
It would happen in less than nine hundred.
The blue light crossing the sky flickered.
The entire building trembled.
[Temporal Projection destabilizing.]
[Remaining connection time: 00:30.]
Adrian tried to touch the plaque, but his fingers began turning transparent.
"Wait."
[Temporal energy depleted.]
[Returning to origin era.]
The hall disappeared before he could search for anything else.
Adrian opened his eyes in his bedroom.
The ceiling was intact. The city lights still shone through the window, and his communicator displayed 6:14 a.m.
He sat up abruptly.
His wrist was no longer swollen.
He touched his ribs. There were no bruises or fractures, although his body still remembered the pain. The cut on his cheek had also disappeared.
The experience had been a projection.
Not a dream.
Adrian raised his hand and opened his status.
[Adrian Vale]
[Unique Class: Infinite Sovereign]
[Registered Classes: 1]
A dark blue ring had appeared beneath his primary class.
[Starbreaker]
[Rarity: Unregistered]
[Class Synchronization available.]
[Technique: Starbreaker Fist — Beginner 0.2%.]
Adrian selected the class.
The ring emerged from the window, revolved around his arm, and closed around his wrist as blue light.
[Starbreaker synchronized.]
The stance of the child beneath the rain returned to his mind.
Adrian looked at the table beside his bed. It was a thick piece of reinforced metal designed to withstand minor training accidents.
He struck it once.
[Fracture: 1/3.]
A thin line appeared across the surface.
Adrian kept his fist pressed against the metal as he stared at the first damage caused by a class that wouldn’t exist for more than another four centuries.
He had brought a class from the future into the present.