The deeper Ren ventured into the Ghost Town, the darker the world became.
The streetlights in this sector had been dead for years.
The only illumination came from the pale moonlight filtering through the heavy smog, casting long, jagged shadows over the ruins of City Z.
The silence here was absolute, heavy, and suffocating.
Ren stood in the middle of a shattered intersection, slowly unwinding the thick binding around his waist.
His brown, furry tail dropped free, swaying heavily in the cool night air.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling the joints pop and crack, releasing the tension he had been forced to carry all day.
The suffocating restraint of his C-Class persona melted away, replaced by the cold, feral anticipation of a predator.
He had a Power Level of 29.
He was fast, strong, and highly durable.
But he was hungry.
His biology was violently demanding that he break the barrier of thirty.
He didn’t bring his crowbar tonight.
He had abandoned weapons entirely.
If he was going to trigger a massive Zenkai boost, he needed his own bones to bear the brunt of the impact.
He needed to push his physical frame to the absolute brink of failure.
A low, guttural growl echoed from the ruins of a collapsed parking garage to his left.
Ren turned slowly, a manic grin stretching across his face in the darkness.
“There you are.”
From the twisted metal and crushed concrete stepped a nightmare.
It was a massive, bipedal creature resembling a werewolf, but its anatomy had been gruesomely warped by the toxic environment of the Ghost Town.
Its fur was not hair; it was composed of razor-sharp, jagged metallic bristles that scraped against each other with the sound of grinding steel.
Thick, toxic saliva dripped from jaws that could effortlessly snap a steel beam in half.
Ren focused his vision, his heart pounding a frantic, euphoric rhythm against his ribs.
[Steel-Hide Lycan]
[Power Level: 64]
A Tiger-level threat.
The true embodiment of the term.
Ren’s breath hitched.
Sixty-four.
It was more than double his current strength.
If he made a single mistake, if his reflexes were off by a fraction of a millisecond, this beast would tear him into unrecognizable pieces.
“Perfect,” Ren whispered, his blood singing with the thrill of impending violence.
The Lycan didn’t roar.
It didn’t posture.
It simply vanished.
Ren’s eyes widened.
The creature’s speed was incomprehensible.
A blast of displaced air hit Ren’s face a split second before the monster appeared directly in front of him, bringing a massive, metallic claw down in a lethal arc.
Ren threw his arms up in a desperate cross-guard, his tail whipping backward to anchor his stance.
The impact was like being hit by a speeding train.
The Lycan’s claws tore through the sleeves of his black shirt, slicing deep into the dense muscle of his forearms.
Ren was launched backward, his boots skidding across the asphalt, tearing up chunks of the road for twenty feet before he finally dug his heels in and stopped.
“Agh!” Ren grunted, blood pouring down his arms and dripping onto the pavement.
The beast didn’t give him a second to breathe.
It lunged again, its metallic fur bristling like needles.
Ren dropped low, using his explosive 29-point torque to slide directly under the monster’s leap.
He pivoted on his hands, his tail acting as a rigid spring, and launched a devastating upward kick aimed right at the creature’s exposed stomach.
His boot connected with a sickening thud.
But instead of the monster buckling, Ren felt a sharp spike of pain shoot up his leg.
Striking the creature’s metallic fur was like kicking a wall of solid iron spikes.
The Lycan snarled, twisting mid-air with impossible agility, and backhanded Ren across the chest.
Three of Ren’s ribs fractured instantly with a sharp crack.
He was sent tumbling wildly through the air, crashing headfirst into a rusted streetlamp.
The thick iron pole bent perfectly in half from the force of his impact.
Ren collapsed onto the street, coughing up a spatter of warm blood.
His vision blurred, swimming with red spots.
His arms were shredded, his chest was caved in, and his right leg was throbbing with localized trauma.
The monster slowly stalked toward him, its metallic bristles grinding together in a sickening symphony of death.
It was toying with him.
It recognized that its prey was unusually durable, but ultimately powerless.
Panic, rational and human, screamed at Ren to run.
But the Saiyan biology silenced it.
As Ren lay broken on the pavement, a bizarre, profound sensation bloomed deep inside his gut.
It was a localized heat, an intense, burning pressure residing exactly in the center of his stomach.
It wasn’t adrenaline.
It wasn’t anger.
It felt like a compressed star trying to ignite within his own cellular structure.
He didn’t know what it was.
He had no concept of Ki control, no martial arts master to guide him.
He only knew that the heat demanded to be used.
Ren placed his bloodied hands on the asphalt and forced himself up.
His legs shook violently, but his tail wrapped tightly around his waist, acting as a brace for his shattered ribs.
The Lycan stopped, its slit-like eyes narrowing in confusion at the prey that refused to die.
Ren took a deep, ragged breath.
He closed his eyes, focusing entirely on that burning knot of pressure in his stomach.
He didn’t think about his broken bones.
He didn’t think about his failing muscles.
He imagined taking that burning heat and forcing it violently through his veins, pushing it up into his right shoulder, down his arm, and directly into his fist.
His right hand began to tremble, radiating a faint, nearly imperceptible wave of distortion in the air around his knuckles.
The Lycan sensed the sudden shift in the atmosphere.
The beast roared, dropping onto all fours, and charged with lethal intent, a blur of metallic fur and gnashing teeth.
Ren opened his eyes.
They were wide, feral, and completely devoid of fear.
“Die,” Ren roared.
He didn’t dodge.
He stepped directly into the creature’s path.
As the massive jaws opened to snap his torso in half, Ren threw his right fist.
He unleashed every single ounce of his physical strength, perfectly synchronized with the strange, burning heat he had forced into his hand.
The punch connected flush with the center of the Lycan’s snout.
The resulting sound was not a thud.
It was a deafening, concussive crack, like a stick of dynamite detonating in a closed vault.
The sheer, localized force of the blow completely bypassed the monster’s metallic hide.
The shockwave rippled through the creature’s skull, shattering its reinforced cranial plating and turning its primitive brain into liquid.
The Tiger-level monster’s momentum instantly died.
Its massive, heavy body went completely limp, crashing into Ren and driving them both into the blood-stained asphalt.
Silence rushed back into the Ghost Town.
Ren lay pinned beneath the heavy corpse, gasping for air.
His right arm was completely numb, the bones in his hand fractured in a dozen places from the sheer, impossible force of his own strike.
The burning sensation in his stomach had completely vanished, leaving him utterly hollow and exhausted.
He had done it.
He had killed a Tiger-level threat with his bare hands.
“Get…
off,” Ren wheezed, using his uninjured leg and his tail to violently shove the massive corpse off his chest.
He dragged himself out from under the beast.
He couldn’t walk.
The damage was too severe.
He was forced to crawl, pulling himself over the jagged ruins of the street, inch by agonizing inch, navigating by the moonlight.
It took him nearly three hours to drag his broken body back to his apartment block.
When he finally hauled himself through the heavy iron door, he collapsed onto the kitchen floor.
He didn’t bother cooking.
He couldn’t.
With his left arm shredded and his right hand shattered, he used his teeth to tear open packages of raw meat and practically inhaled them.
He consumed everything he had bought that afternoon—pounds of beef, raw eggs, and dry rice.
His body demanded fuel with a violent, agonizing desperation.
The moment his stomach was full, the blackness took him.
Ren awoke on the cold kitchen floor.
The afternoon sun was violently piercing through the blinds, warming his face.
He groaned, rolling onto his back.
He braced himself for the excruciating pain of shattered ribs and broken hands.
There was nothing.
Ren slowly lifted his hands to his face.
The deep, shredded lacerations on his forearms were entirely gone, replaced by thick, pale scars.
He flexed his right hand.
The knuckles cracked loudly, the bones feeling infinitely denser, like forged steel beneath his skin.
He touched his chest.
The ribs were perfectly intact.
He sat up, his breathing heavy.
The air in the room felt different.
It felt lighter, as if the gravity in the apartment had somehow decreased.
He felt an overflowing, terrifying ocean of stamina coursing through his newly forged muscle fibers.
His heart pounded.
He focused his vision, pulling up the digital overlay.
The numbers flickered, attempting to calculate the massive, violent leap in his biology, before locking in with a bright, solid chime.
[Ren]
[Power Level: 38]
Ren stared at the number, his mouth slightly open.
Thirty-eight.
He hadn’t just breached the threshold of thirty; he had absolutely smashed through it.
A gain of nine points in a single night.
It was the largest Zenkai boost he had ever experienced.
The raw trauma of nearly dying to a Tiger-level threat, combined with whatever that strange, burning energy had been, had forced his Saiyan DNA into overdrive.
He was rapidly approaching the strength of Mumen Rider.
He was climbing the ranks of the C-Class without anyone in the Association even realizing it.
Ren clenched his fists, a dark, victorious laugh echoing through his empty apartment.
“Thirty-eight,” Ren whispered, his eyes burning with absolute certainty.
“The food chain is changing.”