The entrance to the Deep Zone wasn’t marked by a warning sign or a locked gate.
It was a massive, rusted storm drain located at the very bottom of a dried-up concrete riverbed, right in the geographic center of the Ghost Town.
Ren stood at the precipice, looking down into the absolute, suffocating darkness.
The air wafting up from the abyss was thick, humid, and carried the sickeningly sweet stench of rotting biomass and ozone.
He unzipped his gray C-Class jacket and let it drop to the concrete.
He wore only a fitted black undershirt and his durable combat trousers.
He reached behind his back and untied the thick binding around his waist, letting his brown, furry tail uncoil fully.
It swished behind him, instinctively mapping the subtle shifts in the air pressure.
“Down we go,” Ren whispered to the empty riverbed.
He stepped into the storm drain, relying entirely on his enhanced Saiyan vision to navigate as the moonlight faded behind him.
The descent was a labyrinth of crumbling maintenance walkways, rusted iron ladders, and knee-deep, toxic water.
The ambient temperature steadily rose the deeper he climbed.
At a Power Level of 38, his immune system and durability were robust enough to withstand the toxic environment, but he could still feel the localized radiation making his skin itch.
Two miles beneath the surface, the concrete tunnels gave way to massive, cavernous subterranean chambers.
Ren stopped on a narrow, rusted catwalk overlooking a massive drainage reservoir.
He crouched low, his eyes scanning the gloom.
The food chain down here was completely different from the surface.
On the catwalk mere yards away from him lay the corpse of a massive, mutated crocodile.
Ren focused his vision on the dead beast.
[Sewer-Croc – Power Level: 32]
It was a creature that could have terrorized the upper levels of the Ghost Town, yet it had been brutally ripped in half.
The bite marks on its thick, scaly hide were massive, jagged, and oozing a glowing, highly corrosive green acid that was slowly eating through the iron grating of the catwalk.
Whatever killed it was big, lethal, and close.
Ren didn’t mask his presence.
He stood up straight and deliberately stomped his heavy combat boot against the rusted iron grating.
The sharp, metallic clang echoed endlessly through the massive subterranean chamber.
He waited.
The water in the reservoir fifty feet below began to bubble.
Ren felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
The air pressure in the cavern violently shifted.
From the pitch-black depths of the reservoir, a massive cluster of glowing, crimson eyes ignited like lanterns in the dark.
A monstrous silhouette pulled itself up the concrete pillars supporting the catwalk.
It was a spider, but its biology was deeply twisted.
Its body was the size of a city bus, covered in thick, jagged obsidian plating.
Its eight legs ended in razor-sharp scythes, and thick, viscous green acid dripped continuously from its horrifying mandibles, burning hissing holes into the stone.
Ren locked his vision onto the nightmare climbing toward him.
[Caustic-Weave Arachnid]
[Power Level: 74]
A mid-to-high Tiger-level threat.
Nearly double his current strength.
“Hello, beautiful,” Ren murmured, a manic, feral smile breaking across his face.
His heart exploded into a frantic rhythm.
This was it.
This was the meat grinder he had come for.
The Arachnid didn’t hiss.
It didn’t posture.
It moved with a terrifying, silent speed that defied its massive bulk.
A thick rope of glowing green webbing shot out from the creature’s abdomen, rocketing toward Ren like a harpoon.
Ren used his tail to instantly push his center of gravity backward, launching himself into a backflip.
The acidic web slammed into the iron catwalk exactly where he had been standing, instantly melting the thick metal into a pool of glowing slag.
Before Ren’s boots even touched the ground, the spider was upon him.
It cleared the fifty-foot gap in a single, explosive leap.
One of its scythe-like legs swept through the air, a blur of jagged obsidian aiming to cleanly decapitate him.
Ren ducked, the wind from the strike tearing the top of his black undershirt.
He planted his feet, twisted his hips, and drove a full-power, 38-point hook directly into the joint of the monster’s leg.
The impact sent a shockwave up Ren’s arm, but instead of shattering the chitin, Ren felt the bones in his own knuckles scream in protest.
The obsidian plating was impossibly dense.
The spider barely registered the strike.
It violently twisted its massive body, swinging its abdomen around like a wrecking ball.
Ren couldn’t dodge.
The massive bulk slammed squarely into his chest.
The force was apocalyptic.
Ren was launched off the catwalk entirely, soaring through the dark cavern like a bullet.
He crashed back-first into the solid concrete wall of the reservoir, the impact leaving a spiderweb crater in the stone.
Ren dropped into the shallow, toxic water below, coughing up a massive mouthful of blood.
He tried to push himself up, but his left arm completely gave out.
His collarbone was fractured, and at least four of his ribs were completely shattered, digging agonizingly into his lungs.
The sheer gap in their Power Levels was insurmountable in a battle of pure attrition.
Above him, the spider crawled down the concrete wall, its crimson eyes locked onto its broken prey, its mandibles clicking in anticipation.
Fear, cold and rational, flooded Ren’s mind.
If he didn’t do something right now, he was going to be digested in this dark, miserable hole.
No one would ever know.
Fubuki, Tanktop Tiger, Tatsumaki—they would go on living in the light while his bones dissolved in the dark.
“No,” Ren gasped, spitting blood into the contaminated water.
The humiliation of his encounter with Tanktop Tiger rushed to the forefront of his mind.
The absolute, suffocating disgust of bowing his head and apologizing to a man he despised.
The anger boiled over, mixing with the primal terror of imminent death.
The Saiyan biology reacted.
Deep within his gut, that familiar, pressurized knot of heat ignited.
But this time, it wasn’t a tiny, fleeting spark.
Fueled by his intense, directed rage, it flared into a roaring furnace.
Ren didn’t try to calm his mind.
He didn’t try to find inner peace.
He grabbed that burning rage and violently pulled it upward, forcing the scorching heat through his circulatory system, down into his uninjured right arm.
The water around his right fist began to violently boil and vaporize.
A faint, glowing white aura began to leak from his skin, distorting the air in the dark cavern.
The Arachnid hesitated.
Its primitive instincts suddenly screamed that the broken prey in the water had just become highly lethal.
The monster hissed, rearing back to spit a massive volley of acidic webbing.
“I am not dying down here!” Ren roared.
He didn’t leap.
His legs were too damaged.
Instead, he planted his boots firmly in the muck, pointed his glowing right fist upward at the monster clinging to the wall, and thrust his arm forward.
He didn’t punch the monster.
He punched the air itself.
The burning Ki energy built up in his arm violently discharged.
A compressed shockwave of raw, untamed kinetic force erupted from his knuckles.
It tore through the cavern, parting the shallow water in a massive trench.
The blast struck the Arachnid squarely in its armored abdomen.
The localized concussive force completely bypassed the obsidian plating.
The spider let out a horrific, ear-piercing screech as its internal organs were instantly pulverized by the sheer, concussive pressure of the Ki blast.
The massive monster lost its grip on the concrete wall and plummeted, crashing into the reservoir with a tidal wave of foul water.
Its eight legs twitched violently for a few seconds, splashing the muck, before it finally went completely, utterly still.
Ren stood in the water, his right arm extended.
The white aura completely faded.
The heat in his stomach instantly vanished, leaving behind an absolute, chilling void.
His right arm was completely numb.
He looked down at it.
The sleeves of his undershirt had been entirely burned away, and the skin on his forearm was blistered and raw from channeling an energy his human body had not yet adapted to contain.
He had done it.
He had manifested Ki intentionally, using it to launch a rudimentary shockwave.
Ren let out a raspy, blood-choked laugh, completely uncaring of the agony wracking his broken body.
The gamble had paid off.
He had secured a kill on a high Tiger-level threat, and the damage he had sustained was catastrophic.
The Zenkai boost waiting for him on the other side of this recovery was going to be monumental.
“Now,” Ren wheezed, his vision swimming violently as the adrenaline finally crashed.
“I just have to crawl out of here before I bleed to death.”
He clamped his uninjured hand over his shattered ribs and began the long, agonizing drag toward the surface, leaving the corpse of the subterranean apex predator rotting in the dark.
I know lot of you are worried that Ren is acting too cowardly, I’d say don’t worry about it.
That is a plot point that won’t take too long to be explored.
He won’t stay weak for too long either.
Also,