The abandoned automotive factory on the edge of the Ghost Town was a cathedral of rusted iron and shattered glass.
Ren stood shirtless in the center of the factory floor, illuminated by the pale moonlight spilling through the collapsed roof.
The night air was freezing, but his body radiated a steady, intense heat.
His brown tail swayed rhythmically behind him, sweeping through the layer of dust coating the concrete.
He closed his eyes, taking a slow, measured breath.
For the past week, he had strictly avoided the Deep Zone.
He had spent his days doing exactly what Eyelashes had commanded: playing the weak, unremarkable rookie.
He rescued a stranded cat from a drainage pipe, filed the paperwork, and kept his rank safely anchored in the mid-two-hundreds.
But his nights were dedicated entirely to the spark.
Ren exhaled slowly, pushing all his concentration into his stomach.
The pressurized heat was there, waiting.
But this time, he didn’t grab it with the violent desperation of a dying man.
“Control,” Ren whispered to the empty factory.
“Don’t force it.
Guide it.”
He gently coaxed the heat upward.
It felt like trying to carry a drop of boiling water on the tip of a needle.
The energy moved through his chest, expanding and contracting with his breathing.
When he had fought the Arachnid, he had blindly shoved the energy into his arm, causing it to pool in his forearm and violently burn his own flesh from the inside out.
Now, he understood the concept of circulation.
The Ki could not remain static; it had to flow.
Ren pushed the energy into his right shoulder, letting it travel down his bicep, into his forearm, and finally into his fist.
But instead of letting it violently detonate, he immediately cycled it back up his arm, creating a continuous, flowing loop.
A faint, brilliant white aura shimmered into existence around his right fist.
Ren opened his eyes, watching the glowing energy distort the air around his knuckles.
There was no pain.
The flesh of his forearm did not blister.
The Ki was stable.
Ren turned his attention to a massive, solid steel support beam holding up a section of the factory’s catwalk.
He didn’t run.
He simply planted his left foot, twisted his hips, and threw a straight right cross.
He didn’t touch the beam.
He stopped his fist exactly one inch from the rusted steel.
But the flowing Ki didn’t stop.
A condensed shockwave of raw kinetic force erupted from his knuckles, violently bridging the one-inch gap.
A deafening, concussive boom echoed through the factory.
The massive steel beam groaned in agony, instantly buckling inward in a perfect, fist-sized indentation.
The sheer force of the shockwave caused the heavy iron catwalk above to shudder and rain dust down onto the floor.
Ren pulled his arm back, exhaling sharply.
The white aura immediately dissipated, the heat retreating back to the center of his stomach.
He looked at his knuckles.
They were completely unharmed.
“Perfect,” Ren said, a triumphant smile touching his lips.
It was a fundamental breakthrough.
He couldn’t fire massive energy beams like a Dragon Ball Z protagonist, but he had successfully created an armor-piercing strike.
By extending his kinetic force just beyond his physical reach, he could bypass the thick carapaces and dense armor of the monsters that lurked in City Z, dealing devastating internal damage without shattering his own bones.
But punching a stationary steel beam was entirely different from hitting a moving target.
Ren grabbed his gray Association jacket from a nearby crate and zipped it up, concealing his torso and his tail.
He walked out of the factory and into the smog-choked streets of the Ghost Town.
He needed a test subject.
With his Power Level sitting firmly at 54, his sensory perception had drastically improved.
He didn’t just see the world; he felt it.
He could sense the subtle vibrations in the ground, the shifts in the wind, and the lingering, putrid scents of toxic biology.
He stalked through the ruined commercial district for two hours before he found it.
Tearing through the remains of an overturned armored bank truck was a creature that looked like a biological tank.
It was a massive, six-legged beetle, roughly the size of a dump truck.
Its carapace was a shimmering, metallic purple, incredibly thick and heavily segmented.
Its mandibles were currently crushing the reinforced steel doors of the truck as easily as a man chewing on potato chips.
Ren focused his vision from the shadows of an alleyway.
[Titan-Scarab]
[Power Level: 88]
A high Tiger-level threat.
Stronger than the Arachnid that had nearly killed him, and heavily armored to boot.
“Let’s see how thick that shell really is,” Ren whispered.
He stepped out of the alleyway, making no effort to hide his approach.
His boots crunched loudly against the broken glass.
The Titan-Scarab stopped chewing on the steel door.
It slowly turned its massive, armored head.
Its multifaceted black eyes locked onto Ren, and it let out a low, vibrating hiss that rattled the loose debris on the street.
The monster didn’t bother with a predatory leap.
It just charged like a massive bulldozer, its six legs tearing deep gouges into the asphalt.
Ren stood his ground.
At a Power Level of 54, his processing speed allowed him to see the creature’s massive bulk barrelling toward him with perfect clarity.
When the Scarab was only ten feet away, lowering its heavy, horned head to impale him, Ren finally moved.
He sidestepped with explosive speed, the air cracking violently behind him.
The massive beast blew past him, unable to halt its tremendous momentum.
But the Scarab was not entirely stupid.
As it passed, it violently swung its rear legs outward, a desperate, sweeping attack designed to crush anything in its blind spot.
The thick, spiked leg clipped Ren’s thigh.
The impact was brutal.
The sharp spikes tore through his combat trousers, carving deep, bloody trenches into his leg muscle.
Ren winced, his balance faltering, but he didn’t let himself get launched.
His Saiyan tail instantly whipped out, anchoring his center of gravity and keeping him rooted to the ground.
As the Scarab screeched to a halt, tearing up a massive chunk of the street to turn around, Ren went on the offensive.
He didn’t give the monster time to build momentum again.
He closed the distance in a blur, his uninjured leg driving him forward.
The Scarab reared up on its hind legs, exposing its massive, segmented chest, and brought its front scythes down in a lethal, crushing strike.
Ren ducked entirely under the swinging limbs.
He planted his boots, squared his shoulders, and called upon the spark.
The heat flared in his stomach.
He circulated it flawlessly, a brilliant white aura instantly coating his right fist.
He threw an upward strike, aiming directly for the thickest, most heavily armored plate on the beast’s chest.
He stopped his fist a fraction of an inch from the purple carapace.
The Ki violently discharged.
The concussive shockwave was deafening.
The sheer, pressurized kinetic energy hit the metallic shell and instantly punched straight through it.
A massive, perfect circle of the purple carapace shattered inward, exposing the soft, pulsating organs beneath.
The Titan-Scarab shrieked in absolute agony, a sound like grinding metal, as its internal structure was violently ruptured.
But Ren wasn’t done.
The Ki blast had created the opening, but his human biology needed the kill.
The white aura vanished from his fist.
Before the monster could even begin to fall, Ren coiled his body, channeled every ounce of his 54-point raw strength, and drove his left fist directly into the gaping, exposed hole in the monster’s chest.
His arm sank deep into the creature’s thorax.
Ren grabbed whatever felt vital and violently ripped his arm back out.
The Scarab froze.
A massive torrent of thick, dark fluid poured from the wound.
The monster’s six legs instantly buckled, and the massive biological tank collapsed onto the asphalt, dead before the dust even settled.
Ren stumbled backward, his left arm coated to the elbow in monster viscera.
He fell onto his back, panting heavily, clutching his bleeding thigh.
He lay there on the cold street, staring up at the moon.
He had taken down an 88-point monster.
He had sustained a painful injury, but his ribs weren’t shattered.
His arms weren’t broken.
He hadn’t been forced to the absolute brink of death to secure the victory.
He had fought with control.
He had fought with strategy.
Ren dragged himself off the pavement and limped back to his apartment, the adrenaline slowly fading into a dull, manageable ache.
When he reached his kitchen, he cleaned his wound with rubbing alcohol.
The bleeding had already stopped, his dense biology aggressively closing the gashes.
He didn’t need to gorge himself on thousands of calories tonight; a normal, massive meal of white rice and chicken was enough to satisfy the repair process.
He slept for eight hours.
When he woke up, the lacerations on his leg were entirely healed, leaving behind three thick, raised scars.
Ren stood in his living room, focusing his vision on the empty air.
[Ren]
[Power Level: 61]
Ren let out a quiet sigh.
Sixty-one.
A seven-point gain.
It was significantly less than the massive sixteen-point jump he had received from the Deep Zone, but it confirmed his theory.
The closer he fought to the absolute edge of death, the larger the Zenkai boost.
By fighting smarter and taking less catastrophic damage, his evolutionary growth was slowing down.
But it was sustainable.
It was reliable.
He wasn’t gambling his life on a coin toss anymore.
“Sixty-one,” Ren muttered, stretching his healed leg.
He was slowly, agonizingly creeping toward the hundreds.
He was building the foundation.
The gap between him and the Fubuki Group was shrinking, one precise, violent strike at a time.
The Ghost Town had become his personal training ground.
The monsters here were no longer terrifying nightmares; they were just stepping stones.