The concrete floor of the apartment was covered in a bizarre assortment of items: a roll of silver duct tape, several thick fashion magazines he had scavenged, a pair of heavy leather work gloves, and his rusted steel crowbar.
Ren sat cross-legged in the center of the mess, methodically constructing his armor.
He wrapped a thick, glossy magazine around his left forearm, holding it tightly in place before wrapping it entirely in layers of duct tape.
He repeated the process for his right arm, and then his shins.
It was crude, incredibly heavy, and looked completely ridiculous, but compressed paper wrapped in heavy-duty adhesive was surprisingly resistant to slashing attacks.
If another monster tried to bite his limbs, it would have to chew through an inch of dense paper before it reached his flesh.
He slipped on the heavy leather work gloves and picked up the crowbar.
Over the past two days, he had spent hours grinding the hooked end of the steel against the concrete wall in his alleyway, wearing it down until it formed a nasty, jagged point.
It was no longer just a prying tool; it was a heavy spear.
Ren stood up, testing his mobility.
The makeshift armor restricted his joints slightly, but with a Power Level of 9, his legs carried the extra weight easily.
He tightened the belt around his waist, ensuring his furry tail was securely bound and hidden flat against his lower back beneath his jacket.
“Alright,” Ren breathed, staring at his reflection in the dark television screen.
“Time to go to work.”
He left his apartment, stepping out into the suffocating silence of the Ghost Town.
Hunting in City Z was an exercise in pure terror.
He didn’t have a radar, and he couldn’t sense ki yet.
He had to rely on his entirely human senses.
He spent the first three hours simply tracking, moving from one overgrown block to the next, looking for signs of recent destruction.
He found it near the entrance of an abandoned subway station.
The heavy steel security gates that normally blocked the underground stairs had been violently bent outward, ripped from their concrete hinges by something massive.
Thick, viscous slime coated the handrails, leaving a putrid smell of rotting meat hanging in the humid air.
Ren tightened his grip on his modified crowbar and slowly descended into the darkness.
The subway platform was a subterranean graveyard.
Skeletal remains of long-dead commuters were scattered among overturned ticket machines and shattered glass.
The only light came from the flickering, dying emergency bulbs overhead.
A heavy, wet scraping sound echoed from the dark tunnel ahead.
Ren immediately dropped low, hiding behind a rusted turnstile.
He controlled his breathing, silencing the frantic beating of his heart.
From the absolute pitch-black depths of the train tunnel, a massive silhouette emerged into the dim light of the platform.
Ren felt the air catch in his lungs.
It was a monstrous amalgamation of a sewer rat and a centipede.
It had the bloated, furry body of a massive rodent, roughly the size of a small car, but stretched out and supported by a dozen scuttling, segmented legs.
Its face was a nightmare of bucked teeth and compound eyes.
Ren focused his vision, his system immediately calculating the threat.
[Corpse-Crawler]
[Power Level: 16]
Ren swallowed dryly.
Sixteen.
It was nearly double his current strength.
He calculated the odds.
It was stronger, larger, and likely possessed a crushing bite force, but its bloated, elongated body looked incredibly cumbersome.
It lacked the coiled, spring-like speed of the Acid Hound he had fought previously.
“I can take it,” Ren whispered to himself.
He didn’t wait for the monster to notice his scent.
In a battle where he was outmatched in raw stats, giving up the element of surprise was suicide.
Ren sprinted out from behind the turnstile, his sneakers pounding silently against the tiled floor.
He closed the distance in a matter of seconds.
His Power Level of 9 allowed him to move with the explosive speed of an Olympic sprinter.
The Corpse-Crawler turned its horrific head, its compound eyes clicking as it registered the movement, but it was too slow.
Ren leaped into the air, driving the entire weight of his body behind the jagged, sharpened point of his crowbar, aiming directly for the creature’s massive right eye.
The steel tip punctured the hard outer lens with a sickening crunch, sinking deep into the monster’s optical cavity.
The Corpse-Crawler let out an ear-piercing, distorted shriek.
Its heavy, segmented body thrashed violently.
A massive, furry limb whipped out blindly and struck Ren directly in the chest.
The impact was devastating.
Ren was launched off his feet, flying backward through the air until he slammed into a concrete support pillar.
Pain exploded in his ribcage.
He dropped his crowbar and gasped for air, his lungs refusing to expand.
He tasted copper in the back of his mouth.
The monster, blinded in one eye and leaking thick, yellow fluid from the wound, whipped its head toward him.
It charged, its dozen legs tearing up the tiled floor as it closed in for the kill.
Ren forced himself to roll to the side just as the creature’s massive jaws slammed into the concrete pillar, taking a massive chunk out of the stone where Ren’s head had just been.
The Saiyan blood in Ren’s veins began to boil.
The excruciating pain in his chest did not trigger fear; it triggered a primal, burning rage.
“Come on!” Ren roared, scrambling to his feet.
The monster turned and lunged again, snapping its jaws.
Ren raised his left arm, bracing for impact.
The creature’s teeth clamped down violently on his forearm.
The pressure was immense, strong enough to snap a human bone in half, but the teeth couldn’t penetrate the dense layers of duct tape and thick fashion magazines.
The makeshift armor held.
The monster froze for a fraction of a second, confused by the strange, unyielding texture.
That fraction of a second was all Ren needed.
With his left arm still trapped in the beast’s mouth, Ren pivoted on his heel.
His hidden tail tensed, wrapping tightly around his waist to provide absolute core stability.
He clenched his right fist, pulling it back to his hip, and channeled every single ounce of his strength into a single, desperate strike.
He drove his fist directly into the metal end of the crowbar still protruding from the monster’s eye socket.
The blow hammered the steel rod completely into the creature’s skull, piercing straight into its primitive brain.
The Corpse-Crawler’s jaws went slack.
Its dozen legs buckled instantly, and the massive, bloated body collapsed onto the platform with a heavy, wet thud, dead before it even fully hit the ground.
Ren yanked his left arm free from the monster’s mouth.
The duct-tape armor was heavily dented and covered in saliva, but his arm beneath it was unbroken.
He stumbled backward, clutching his ribs, and fell heavily onto an overturned ticket machine.
He sat there in the flickering dim light, hacking violently and spitting a glob of blood onto the dirty tiles.
He was absolutely certain he had cracked at least two ribs.
He stared at his trembling hands.
The adrenaline was slowly fading, leaving behind the grueling reality of his physical limits.
A Power Level of 16 had nearly caved his chest in with a single, blind strike.
But as he sat there, clutching his injured ribs, a profound sense of clarity washed over him.
The terrifying panic that had gripped him during his first encounter with the Carnage Mantis was completely gone.
He was adapting to the violence.
His mind was becoming hardened to the brutal reality of this world.
Ren forced himself to stand.
He grabbed his crowbar, placing a foot on the monster’s dead face to wrench the steel free, and slowly began the long, agonizing walk back to the surface.
The journey back to his apartment was a blur of pain.
Every breath felt like a knife twisting in his chest.
When he finally locked his heavy iron door, he collapsed onto his futon, completely ignoring the makeshift armor still taped to his limbs.
He dragged himself to his stash of canned food, forcing down three cans of heavily processed meat and a can of beans.
His body screamed for the calories, immediately putting them to work repairing the fractured bone and torn tissue in his chest.
Ren fell asleep with an empty can still gripped in his hand.
When he awoke, the apartment was bathed in the dull, gray light of the following morning.
Ren sat up slowly, bracing himself for the agonizing pain in his chest.
He took a shallow breath, then a deeper one, and finally filled his lungs completely.
There was no pain.
He lifted his shirt, inspecting his ribcage.
There was a massive, ugly yellow bruise covering his side, but the bone underneath was completely solid.
The fractures had aggressively knit themselves back together overnight, the bone density increasing significantly in the process.
Ren felt a heavy, powerful heat radiating through his muscles.
The baseline strength of his entire body had shifted.
He pulled up the digital overlay, his eyes fixed on the empty air in front of him.
[Ren]
[Power Level: 12]
A sharp grin stretched across Ren’s face.
Twelve.
He was now officially stronger than the absolute pinnacle of an unenhanced human.
If he stepped onto a professional sports field right now, he would break world records without breaking a sweat.
The gap was closing.
“From nine to twelve,” Ren murmured, running a hand over the thick duct tape still strapped to his arm.
“Three points a kill.”
It was a slow, agonizing grind.
But it was a reliable one.
Ren stood up and grabbed his crowbar.
He needed a Power Level of thirty to comfortably secure a C-Class rank and enter the Hero Association.
He looked toward the window, out into the ruined skyline of the Ghost Town.
The city was crawling with Wolf-level threats.
“Eighteen more points,” Ren said softly, his Saiyan blood thrumming with dark anticipation.
“Time to go hunting again.”