The City Z branch office of the Hero Association processed bounties with surprising efficiency.
Ren walked out of the heavy glass doors, holding a thick brown envelope.
Inside was his ten thousand yen flat rate, plus a five percent cut of the Silverback Alpha’s subjugation bounty.
Tiger-level threats carried a hefty price tag on their heads.
All told, he was walking away with just over seventy thousand yen.
To an S-Class hero, it was pocket change.
To Ren, it was a lifeline.
He didn’t bother going to the grocery store.
Cooking twenty pounds of raw meat in his cramped apartment on a single hot plate took hours he didn’t have.
Instead, he walked two blocks down the street and stepped into an all-you-can-eat Yakiniku restaurant.
The hostess smiled warmly at his gray Hero Association jacket, leading him to a corner booth with a built-in charcoal grill.
“How many in your party, sir?” she asked politely.
“Just me,” Ren replied, sliding into the booth.
“And I’ll take the premium meat package.
Keep the beef coming until I say stop.”
What followed was a horrific display of gluttony that left the restaurant staff in absolute silence.
Ren didn’t eat; he consumed.
He threw strips of marbled beef onto the grill, barely letting them sear before pulling them off and devouring them whole.
He ordered bowl after bowl of white rice, washing it all down with pitchers of water.
His Saiyan biology was a raging furnace, desperately demanding materials to solidify the massive nine-point Zenkai boost he had endured the night before.
After his thirtieth plate of premium beef, the manager cautiously approached the table, sweating profusely.
“Excuse me, Hero-san,” the manager stammered, bowing deeply.
“We are deeply honored by your patronage, but…
you have entirely depleted our reserve stock of sirloin.”
Ren paused, a piece of meat halfway to his mouth.
He looked at the towering stack of empty plates obscuring the table.
He felt the heavy, comfortable warmth radiating from his stomach, signaling that his cellular repair was finally complete.
“Right.
My apologies,” Ren said smoothly, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
He placed a few thousand-yen bills on the table for a tip.
“The food was excellent.”
He left the restaurant feeling like a new man.
The crippling exhaustion was gone, replaced by a dense, vibrating energy that made his muscles feel like coiled steel.
As he walked toward the train station to head back to the Ghost Town, he pulled his smartphone from his pocket and opened the Hero Association employee portal.
He wanted to check when his next weekly quota was due.
The screen loaded, and Ren stopped dead in his tracks.
[Hero Name: Ren]
[Rank: C-Class, Rank 214]
[Weekly Quota: Waived for 14 Days due to High-Threat Subjugation]
Ren stared at the glowing numbers, his stomach sinking.
Rank 214.
He had jumped over a hundred and seventy spots in a single afternoon.
“Crap,” Ren muttered, aggressively rubbing the bridge of his nose.
He had miscalculated how the Association’s merit algorithm functioned.
Surviving a Tiger-level threat engagement without any civilian casualties or squad fatalities resulted in a massive influx of points.
Even though Shooter took the kill credit and the lion’s share of the bounty, the sheer statistical anomaly of a rank 388 C-Class surviving a Silverback Alpha had triggered an automatic promotion wave in his file.
This was incredibly dangerous.
The lower ranks of the C-Class were practically invisible.
But once a hero cracked the top 150, they started showing up on the internal watchlists of the Association executives.
More importantly, they showed up on the radar of the B-Class factions.
If he accidentally ranked up to C-Class Rank 1, Mumen Rider’s spot, the Fubuki Group would immediately send Eyelashes and Mountain Ape to evaluate him for B-Class promotion.
With Fubuki’s psychic tracking and their vast intelligence network, his nighttime monster hunting would be exposed in days.
“No more group missions,” Ren whispered to himself, locking his phone and shoving it into his pocket.
“I have to stall my official rank.
Only purse snatchers and traffic duty from now on.”
He boarded the train, watching the sun dip below the horizon as he headed back into the desolate ruins of the Abandoned Zone.
By the time he reached his apartment, night had completely fallen.
Ren didn’t even bother going inside.
He stripped off his gray Association jacket, tossed it into a rusted mailbox in his lobby, and unwound his tail.
He needed to test the limits of his new baseline.
A Power Level of 38 was untested territory.
He moved deeper into the Ghost Town than he had ever dared before.
He crossed past the overgrown suburbs and entered the dense, shadowed concrete canyons of the old commercial district.
This was the medium-hazard zone, where the ambient toxic sludge and lingering radiation produced significantly stronger mutations.
Ren leaped onto the hood of an abandoned bus, then propelled himself up to the fire escape of a brick tenement building.
He didn’t feel the burning strain in his calves anymore.
He moved with a ghostly, effortless grace, his tail steering his momentum perfectly as he bounded across the rooftops.
An hour into his patrol, his ears picked up the heavy, rhythmic thud of destruction.
Ren dropped down from the rooftops, landing silently in an alleyway overlooking a ruined plaza.
Tearing through the remnants of a dry-cleaning shop was a creature built for absolute devastation.
It resembled a massive, bipedal rhinoceros.
Its skin was thick, plated gray armor, and a jagged, blood-stained horn protruded from its snout.
It was currently using that horn to flip a rusted delivery truck into the air just for the sheer fun of it.
Ren focused his vision from the shadows.
[Horned Brute]
[Power Level: 35]
A high-tier Wolf, bordering on Tiger.
A month ago, a Power Level of 35 would have required Ren to sacrifice his own limbs just to secure a mutual kill.
Now, he was three points higher than it.
Ren stepped out of the alleyway, his boots crunching loudly against the broken glass littering the plaza.
The Horned Brute snapped its head toward the noise.
Its small, beady eyes locked onto Ren, and a low, rumbling snort blew a cloud of dust from its nostrils.
“Hey,” Ren called out, his voice perfectly calm, echoing across the empty plaza.
“You’re making too much noise.”
The monster roared, dropping its massive head and scraping its heavy, three-toed foot against the asphalt.
It didn’t monologue.
It charged.
The creature moved like a runaway freight train, the concrete cracking beneath its immense weight.
The jagged horn was aimed directly at Ren’s chest, carrying enough kinetic force to punch through a bank vault.
Ren didn’t brace himself.
He didn’t drop into a defensive stance.
He simply watched the beast approach.
His ocular system tracked every micro-movement of the charging monster.
At a Power Level of 38, the Brute’s speed wasn’t overwhelming; it was entirely manageable.
Ren could see the exact moment the beast committed its weight to the final lunge.
When the horn was merely two feet from his sternum, Ren casually sidestepped.
The Horned Brute, unable to alter its massive momentum, completely missed.
As the creature blew past him, Ren pivoted fluidly.
He didn’t need the burning, mysterious Ki energy he had accidentally tapped into against the Lycan.
He just needed the raw, dense muscle he had earned through blood and agony.
Ren clenched his right fist, twisted his hips for maximum torque, and drove a devastating hook directly into the side of the monster’s thick, armored neck.
The impact sounded like a cannon firing.
The dense, plated armor of the Horned Brute completely shattered under the force of the 38-point strike.
The sheer kinetic transfer snapped the monster’s massive cervical spine in an instant.
The beast didn’t even have time to register the pain.
Its momentum carried its lifeless body forward, sending it crashing into the brick wall of a nearby building, bringing half the structure down in a cloud of dust and debris.
Ren stood perfectly still, his right fist still extended.
He slowly lowered his arm, looking down at his knuckles.
There wasn’t a single scratch on them.
His bones hadn’t fractured.
His muscles hadn’t torn.
The durability of a 38-point biology completely outclassed the defensive armor of a 35-point monster.
He had killed it with one punch.
Ren let out a slow, steady breath.
The thrill of the kill was there, but it was muted.
There was no Zenkai boost waiting for him tonight.
There was no desperate struggle for survival to trigger his Saiyan cells into evolving.
“It’s not enough,” Ren whispered, staring at the crushed corpse in the rubble.
He was outgrowing the outer edges of the Ghost Town.
If he wanted to reach a Power Level of 50 and surpass Mumen Rider, if he wanted to reach the hundreds and survive the B-Class, he had to seek out true danger.
Ren turned his gaze deeper into the heart of the Abandoned Zone, toward the pitch-black epicenter where the true horrors of City Z slept.
Down there in the darkness, the Demon-level threats were waiting.
“I need to learn how to use that energy,” Ren muttered, thinking back to the heat in his stomach.
“Raw strength won’t be enough for what’s down there.”