"Opportunities don’t happen. You create them." — Chris Grosser.
Two days passed like two hours in the ruined city.
Micah had barely had any sleep. He ate cold rations on the move, drank from a canteen he refilled in a broken water pipe, and fought.
Every few hours, he found another isolated beast. A mutant rat the size of a small dog. A razor-winged bat-creature nesting in a collapsed subway tunnel. A snake-like thing with six legs always looking to choke him from behind.
Each time, he let them draw first blood. Each wound triggered the system.
Each pull added something to his inventory. Another Basic Flux Enhancer. A small vial of healing salve. A pair of reinforced gloves that slightly increased his grip strength.
He consumed every enhancer the moment he got it. The burning got worse each time, but the results were undeniable.
His Flux Unlock had climbed from 15% to 22% in forty-eight hours.
His moves and reflexes were much more better than before. He was stronger and faster, but.... not fast enough.
"Twenty-two percent," he thought, crouched on a rooftop overlooking a wide boulevard choked with abandoned vehicles. ’Dexter is at forty-two. I’m still halfway behind.’
He needed bigger game, high-tier beasts. The kind that could possibly inflict serious damage and trigger high-rarity pulls. But those creatures were deeper in the ruins.
Micah was tracking one such creature when he found the footprints.
He had been following an armored mutant beetle through a dense sector of shattered skyscrapers. The beetle was enormous. Its shell gleamed with a dark sheen under the dim light filtering through the collapsed roofs.
Through Beast Analysis, the system tagged it at 28% Flux Unlock. It was definitely going to be a serious fight. But a serious fight meant a serious reward.
He was calculating his approach, scanning the creature’s movement patterns from behind a collapsed concrete pillar, when his eyes caught something on the ground.
Boot prints. Fresh ones.
Micah froze for a minute. His gaze dropped to the dusty floor. Two sets of heavy tactical boots, pressed deep into the layer of debris and ash. The stride length was long. Military-trained? The prints were side by side, perfectly synchronized.
His Beast Analysis Talent activated automatically, scanning the residual kinetic weight embedded in the tracks. The system read the pressure distribution, the depth, the stride frequency.
His stomach clenched.
[Track Analysis: Two subjects. Heavy tactical gear. Synchronized patrol pattern. Estimated Flux Unlock: 40%+ and 38%+.]
[Match probability: 94% — Dexter Ashford. 91% — Myra Martell.]
"Dexter and Myra," Micah thought. "What the hell are they doing out here?"
The mission brief had clearly stated that Malakor was somewhere in Sector 7. But these tracks were heading northwest, away from Sector 7 entirely.
They were moving toward the old financial district, a cluster of collapsed skyscrapers that his predecessor’s memories flagged as a high-contamination zone.
"They’re not hunting Malakor."
Curiosity burned through him. He just had to know what was going on.
Micah abandoned the beetle. He scaled the nearest intact fire escape, pulling himself up rusted rungs with his good arm while favoring his injured shoulder.
The metal creaked under his weight, but held.
He reached the fourth floor of a collapsed office building and found a perfect vantage point. A wide ledge overlooking the boulevard below, partially concealed by a chunk of fallen ceiling that rested against the window frame.
He peeped through the gap and there they were!
Micah kept his Flux signature suppressed, a trick he’d picked up from his predecessor’s fragmented memories. By keeping his energy output as low as possible, he was essentially invisible to anyone scanning for Flux signatures above him.
He followed them from the rooftops, leaping across narrow gaps between buildings, keeping low, staying silent.
Twenty minutes in, they stopped.
Dexter crouched behind an overturned bus and pulled out a small, folded map. Myra leaned over his shoulder, her eyes scanning the hand-drawn lines and marked coordinates.
They were talking in low voices, almost whispers.
Micah crept closer. He found a section of collapsed wall about fifteen meters above them and pressed himself flat against the concrete, his ear angled toward their position.
The wind carried fragments of their conversation up to him. He caught pieces at first. Then full sentences as the wind shifted.
"—confirmed the coordinates with my source," Dexter was saying. His voice was low but filled with barely contained excitement.
"The vault is directly beneath the old Meridian Bank tower. Subterranean level three."
"And you trust this source?" Myra’s voice was suspicious.
"I paid sixty thousand credits for the intel. Black-market cartographer. Ex-military. He mapped these ruins before the academy sealed them off."
Dexter folded the map and then got up.
"The vault predates the apocalypse. Pre-war military installation. They are completely untouched."
"Untouched means trapped," Myra shot back immediately.
"Trapped means valuable." Dexter smirked. "And according to my source, the vault contains an artifact called the Astral Prism."
Micah’s fingers tightened against the concrete.
"What does it do?" Myra asked.
"It’s a concentrated Flux conduit. Pure, unrefined energy compressed into a crystalline structure."
Dexter’s voice dropped even lower.
"My source said that absorbing the Prism’s energy could push a recruit directly into the Awakened Soldier tier... Immediately! No months of meditation, no gradual breakthrough. Just raw, instant evolution."
Then silence. Absolute silence.
Myra stared at him. "You’re saying one artifact could skip us past an entire tier of training?"
"That’s exactly what I’m saying."
"And Malakor?"
Dexter waved his hand dismissively. "Malakor is a low-tier demon. The academy sent ten recruits after one creature. That’s overkill. We handle the Prism first, then track Malakor before the week is up. Two birds, one stone."
Myra was quiet for a long moment. Her green eyes narrowed.
"If the academy finds out we bypassed the mission objective—"
"The academy won’t find out," Dexter cut her off.
"Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody’s tracking us. And even if they did, what are they going to do? Expel the top two recruits right before the tournament?"
He laughed softly. "Jason would never risk it."
Myra said nothing else. She adjusted her blades and nodded once.
"Lead the way." They moved out of their spot.
Micah stayed frozen against the concrete for a full minute after they disappeared around the corner.
His mind was racing.
"The Astral Prism? An artifact capable of pushing a recruit directly into the Awakened Soldier tier ? With no gradual meditation, no months of painful grinding. Just instant, overwhelming power?!
"If Dexter gets that Prism, I’m fucked," Micah thought. "He’ll hit Awakened Soldier before the tournament. I’ll never catch him. Never!"
"But...if i got it first—"
The thought of it put a smile on his face. His eyes narrowed.
Assassinating Malakor is suddenly the least valuable thing in these ruins.
He replayed their conversation in his head. The old Meridian Bank tower. Subterranean level three. Pre-war military installation. Dexter had a map with exact coordinates.
But Micah had something Dexter didn’t.
He had Beast Analysis.
The talent didn’t just track beasts. It read environmental energy signatures. It mapped structural layouts. It identified the safest routes through hostile territory. It was a tactical mapping system built directly into his brain.
He didn’t need Dexter’s black-market map. He needed the destination.
And now he had it.
Micah pulled up a mental image of the ruins based on everything his Beast Analysis had scanned over the past two days. The financial district was roughly three kilometers northwest. Dense cluster of collapsed skyscrapers. High contamination. Heavy beast activity.
The main thoroughfares were death traps. Open ground and limited cover. Any creature within two hundred meters would spot movement instantly.
But there was a secondary route. A series of connected underground parking structures that ran beneath the boulevards.
They were dark and always almost too tight. Dangerous in its own way, but completely concealed from anything watching from above.
Through Beast Analysis, he could map every energy signature along that route in real-time, threading the needle between nests and patrol zones without ever being detected.
Dexter and Myra would most likely take the surface route, swinging their swords at anything that moved.
"If I move fast enough, I can reach the vault before them."
Dexter and Myra had resources, connections, and years of elite training. Meanehile, Micah only had a system that rewarded pain and a talent that read the battlefield like a book.
He memorized the route in seconds, then he moved.
Micah dropped from the ledge, hit the ground in a shoulder roll that absorbed the impact perfectly, and sprinted toward the nearest parking structure entrance.
His new strength made his strides longer and his footing surer. The reinforced gloves from his last Gacha pull gripped the rough concrete as he swung himself down into the dark stairwell.
The underground was dark as expected. It had a foul smell also.
His Beast Analysis lit up immediately. Golden markers traced the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Faint energy signatures dotted the environment like fireflies.
Most were small, like Insects and rats. They were things that were too minor to trigger the system.
But three hundred meters ahead, a cluster of red markers pulsed behind a collapsed wall. It seemed like a nest. Something big and territorial.
He rerouted instantly, cutting through a side tunnel that ran parallel to the main corridor. His boots splashed through stagnant water. His breathing was controlled.
The tunnel went on ahead, dark and endless.
’Financial district. Subterranean level three. Meridian Bank tower.’
He had maybe a twenty-minute head start if Dexter and Myra were taking the surface route at their current pace. Maybe less if they pushed hard.
But twenty minutes just had to be enough for him.