The digital chime of the Hero Association application echoed loudly through the quiet student barracks.
Ren sat up on his thin futon, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
Outside, the sky was still pitch black.
He reached for his smartphone resting on the wooden floorboards and looked at the glowing notification screen.
Weekly Quota Evaluation: 24 Hours Remaining.
Ren let out a quiet sigh, shutting off the screen.
Two weeks had passed since the Silverback Alpha incident, and his mandatory grace period was officially over.
If he didn’t log a confirmed heroic action by tomorrow morning, the algorithm would flag his file, and the local branch executives would start asking questions.
He quietly dressed in his black combat trousers and undershirt, packing his gray Association jacket into a small duffel bag.
When Ren stepped out into the courtyard, he was surprised to see Bang already awake.
The old master was sitting on the edge of the veranda, sipping a steaming cup of tea in the freezing pre-dawn air.
“Going somewhere, Ren?” Bang asked smoothly, not turning his head.
“I have to fulfill my C-Class quota in the city today, Master,” Ren replied, bowing respectfully.
“I will return by nightfall to finish my chores.”
“A hero’s work is never done,” Bang mused softly.
The old man finally turned his piercing blue gaze toward him.
“Remember our training, Ren.
The city is full of jagged edges.
Do not let them catch you.
Flow around them.”
“I will try, Master,” Ren promised.
The hike down the mountain took less than twenty minutes.
By the time Ren reached the border of City Z’s safe zone, the sun had fully risen, casting a harsh, glaring light over the morning commuters.
Ren didn’t immediately head into the Ghost Town.
He needed to play the game.
He spent the entire morning and early afternoon patrolling the commercial district, handing out directions to lost tourists and helping local shop owners carry heavy crates.
He eventually managed to stop a bicycle thief, holding the terrified teenager by the collar until the police arrived.
He swiped his ID card on the officer’s tablet.
The green checkmark appeared.
Quota met.
The moment the police cruiser drove away, Ren turned his gaze toward the towering, ruined skyscrapers of the Abandoned Zone in the distance.
The mundane chore was over.
It was time for the practical exam.
He didn’t go to the Deep Zone.
The subterranean levels were too dangerous for testing unrefined technique.
Instead, he navigated to the medium-hazard industrial sector, a maze of abandoned warehouses and rusted shipping yards.
He walked openly down the center of a cracked access road, his tail uncoiled and swishing lazily behind him.
He didn’t mask his presence.
He wanted to be found.
A sharp, metallic scraping sound echoed from the roof of a nearby warehouse.
Ren stopped.
His enhanced hearing picked up the sound of heavy, rapid footsteps moving across the corrugated metal above him.
The roof violently buckled, and a massive figure plummeted toward the street, landing with a deafening crash that shattered the asphalt entirely.
A cloud of thick gray dust washed over the road.
Ren narrowed his eyes, tracking the silhouette through the debris.
It was a humanoid monstrosity, easily ten feet tall, but its anatomy was completely asymmetrical.
Its right arm was grossly overgrown, entirely composed of hardened, jagged bone plating shaped like a massive medieval mace.
Its left arm was spindly and useless.
Its face was nothing but a gaping maw filled with needle-like teeth.
[Bone-Mace Brute]
[Power Level: 71]
A Tiger.
A monster that possessed a Power Level nine points higher than Ren’s current baseline.
If he fought this creature using his old methods, trading blows and relying on his Saiyan durability, he would likely win, but he would walk away with shattered ribs and a ruptured spleen.
It was the perfect test subject.
The Brute let out a gurgling, wet roar and charged.
It dragged its massive, bone-plated right arm across the ground as it ran, tearing a deep trench through the asphalt and kicking up a shower of sparks.
Ren took a deep breath.
He didn’t drop into a brawler’s stance.
He raised his hands, his fingers slightly curved, his palms open and relaxed.
He called upon the spark in his stomach, letting the Ki flow in a continuous, stabilizing circuit through his body.
“Uncoil the spring,” Ren whispered to himself, forcing his shoulders to drop.
The Brute closed the distance, letting out a deafening screech, and swung its massive bone mace in a devastating horizontal arc aimed directly at Ren’s torso.
The attack was blindingly fast, driven by the creature’s 71-point musculature.
Ren panicked.
The sheer kinetic threat of the incoming mass triggered an involuntary survival response.
Despite his mental commands, Ren’s abdominal muscles clamped down like steel, and his legs rigidly braced against the asphalt to absorb the hit.
He tensed up.
He had failed the flow.
Ren tried to raise his palm to parry, but his arm was too stiff.
The bone mace smashed into his guard.
The impact was horrific.
The sheer force of the strike shattered Ren’s defense instantly.
He was launched sideways like a cannonball, crashing straight through the rusted corrugated wall of the warehouse.
He tumbled across the concrete interior, taking out two wooden support pillars before finally slamming into a heavy steel shipping container.
Ren gasped, dropping to his knees.
The left side of his body was completely numb.
His left arm hung at a sickening angle, the radius bone fractured.
Blood poured down the side of his face from a deep gash on his forehead.
“Damn it,” Ren coughed, spitting blood onto the dusty concrete.
His biology had betrayed him.
He had tried to be water, but at the absolute last microsecond, his instincts had forced him to be a rock.
And against a heavier rock, he had lost.
The warehouse wall violently tore open as the Bone-Mace Brute stomped inside, its jagged weapon covered in Ren’s blood.
It let out a mocking, clicking laugh, recognizing that its prey was already broken.
Ren slowly pushed himself to his feet, heavily favoring his right side.
The pain was blinding, but beneath the pain, the familiar, feral rage of the Saiyan bloodline began to boil.
His mind screamed at him to ignite his Ki, to focus it all into a single, explosive point, and punch a hole straight through the monster’s chest.
He clenched his uninjured right fist, the white aura threatening to ignite around his knuckles.
But then, Bang’s words echoed in his mind.
Power without discipline is a curse.
It turns men into monsters.
Ren looked at the drooling, mindless beast lumbering toward him.
If he relied purely on his rage and his Zenkai boosts, he was no different from the creature in front of him.
He would just be a slightly smarter monster.
Ren took a slow, agonizingly deep breath.
He released his clenched fist.
He forced the feral rage down, burying it entirely.
He let the white aura of explosive Ki dissipate back into his stomach, returning it to a smooth, flowing circuit.
He stood up completely straight, letting his broken left arm hang uselessly at his side.
He raised his right hand, assuming the starting stance of the first kata with only one arm.
“Come on,” Ren said, his voice terrifyingly calm.
The Brute roared, enraged by the lack of fear in its prey.
It closed the distance in three massive strides, raising its overgrown bone mace high into the air, bringing it down in an apocalyptic overhead smash that would turn Ren into a bloody smear on the floor.
Ren didn’t brace.
He didn’t tense a single muscle in his legs.
As the massive shadow descended over him, Ren moved.
He stepped diagonally forward, slipping entirely inside the creature’s guard.
The bone mace plummeted past him, missing his shoulder by a fraction of an inch.
As the massive weapon fell, carrying thousands of pounds of kinetic force, Ren brought his right palm up.
He gently caught the backside of the creature’s overgrown wrist.
He didn’t grip it.
He didn’t try to stop it.
Push, circle, pull.
Ren moved with the strike.
He used the flowing Ki in his body to perfectly match the velocity of the monster’s arm.
He guided the falling mace, adding a slight, circular pivot of his own hips, artificially extending the creature’s downward momentum far beyond its natural anatomical limit.
The Brute could not stop its own swing.
The massive bone mace slammed directly into the concrete floor, entirely missing Ren.
But because Ren had hijacked and accelerated the momentum, the creature’s heavy torso was violently dragged forward and downward.
The monster’s balance completely collapsed.
It pitched face-first toward the ground.
As the beast’s head fell perfectly into his strike zone, Ren completed the circular motion of his parry.
The kinetic energy he had borrowed from the monster’s own attack rippled up his arm.
Ren delivered a single, fluid palm strike directly to the underside of the monster’s jaw.
It wasn’t an explosive Saiyan punch.
It was a flawless redirection of a 71-point force, amplified by Ren’s own 62-point baseline.
The impact sounded like a bomb detonating inside a bank vault.
The immense, combined kinetic force shattered the Brute’s jaw instantly, traveling straight up through the roof of its mouth and completely liquefying its primitive brain.
The shockwave visibly rippled through the back of the monster’s skull, blowing out a shower of bone fragments and dark blood.
The creature’s massive body went entirely limp, crashing heavily onto the warehouse floor, shaking the dust from the rafters.
Ren stood perfectly still, his right hand still extended.
He looked down at the corpse.
He hadn’t used his explosive power.
He hadn’t relied on his feral instincts.
He had completely surrendered to the flow of the water, and he had killed a high Tiger-level threat with a single, effortless motion.
The adrenaline slowly faded, leaving only the sharp, throbbing pain of his fractured left arm.
A massive, genuine smile broke across Ren’s bloody face.
He began to laugh, a raspy, exhausted sound that echoed through the empty warehouse.
He had done it.
He had taken his first true step on the path of the martial artist.
“Master Bang,” Ren whispered, looking at his calloused palm.
“You are a genius.”
Ren didn’t stick around.
He grabbed his duffel bag from the street outside and began the long journey back to the mountain.
His body was battered, and he knew an incredible Zenkai boost was waiting for him when he finally slept.
But for the first time since he arrived in this universe, he wasn’t excited about the numbers.
He was excited about the technique.
The climb to the hundreds was no longer a brutal slog.
It had become an art form.