As night comes, I rush into the basement of the branch house to avoid an array of annoying questions, complaints, and the endless chatter. It is one of the tricks I use to escape them by applying some of the sillier parts of the contract I missed.

Everyone does it.

The Doc is down there. His two tails are swaying like they’re arguing with each other as he bends over the table. His thick glasses sit crooked on his nose, and he mutters to himself while poking what I recognize as my pale left arm, the one I cut off for him a week ago in exchange for some of his research.

“I want to meet your healer,” he blurts, not even glancing up. His pen scratches over a notebook filled with cramped symbols. “Would she let me experiment on her? Hmm?”

“Probably for a price?”

“Great! Glorious! Decapitation?” His ears twitch as if the word tastes good.

“Ehhh, maybe?”

“Wonderful! Would she be willing to try growing two separate bodies, one with a head, one without, then switch the heads back and forth?” He slaps the table with both hands.

“I don’t want to know what her answer would be.”

With a spin, his lab coat flares out, one tail hitting a chair hard enough to knock it over. He doesn’t even notice. “In the worst case, she dies, and that is a sacrifice I am, after brief but intense consideration, entirely willing to make.”

“How nice of you. We are at war, you know?”

He waves one hand like brushing away a fly. “Yes, yes, yes, war. Always the same, always dull, always bodies for me to cut open.” His head tilts. “Ah, but Nyssa. She promised Morwag would bring me something fun from the 5th floor. She always delivers.”

“What is she like?” I sit on the steel table beside him.

The Doctor’s expression shifts. It softens, just a bit.

“She is beautiful. A mistake made perfect,” he says. “Something that should’ve never existed, yet I am grateful I was allowed to linger in her presence. As much as I’m just a tiny footstep in her journey.”

“How poetic.”

“I am always poetic! My entire work is poetry. What else could be more glorious than discovering the secrets of our bodies? Aren’t people always saying to look inside yourself for answers?” He taps his pen against my old arm, grinning. “I just do it literally.”

“I think you got that a bit wrong. And Morwag?”

His glasses slip, and he pushes them back with one finger. “Morwag is a perfect representative of the demon race. If you boiled every demon bone, ground every horn, shredded every tendon, simmered it all for two weeks, three hours, ten minutes, fifteen seconds, stirred counter-clockwise the entire time, then let the steam condense into a single drop to get an essence of demons… that drop would be Morwag. The most demon demon to ever demon.”

I nod. Talon’s going to love the guy.

“You were right about my constructs. They are getting harder and harder to remove. Even the old ones and the earliest changes I ever made are almost seeming to come back to life.”

“I told you!” He nearly shouts, tails thrashing. “But no one listens. Please, don’t stop, never stop. Make more constructs, ten more, twenty, no, a hundred. A hive inside you! In the best case, get many more of them before the body upgrade. I’ll watch them grow until you crack. Beautiful cracks.”

“You theorized the body upgrade could kill me.”

He raises one finger like a teacher correcting a child. “Not the upgrade. The disruption it’ll cause. A hammer smashed into the nest of wires and strings and bones you dared to call stable.” His grin stretches. “I want to see it. I want front row seats when you break. And if you don’t break? Even better.”

“Yup, that. I’ve been making preparations to counter it, so everything’s going to be fine.”

He exhales slowly, almost dreamily. “Mind and body are indeed mysterious things. Combine them with mana that defies the natural order, forcefully awakened within us, and you get an accident waiting to happen. Oh, to be young and wrong again. To be able to fail so gloriously. I envy you.”

“Good for you. I came to check on the orb.”

The Doc freezes, his ears snapping upright, then he practically vibrates in place. “The orb! The glorious little parasite, greedy bastard, hungry child!”

He doesn’t wait for me, already skipping toward the corner of the basement where the voidcopper door waits.

It takes a minute to open. Both of us have to work together. A precaution set in place so he doesn't mess with the orb without me here. A deal that was forced on me by the branch leader after the... incident. Barely an inconvenience in my opinion.

The locks click, and the door swings open.

We step into the voidcopper chamber, the walls plated with the same metal the door is made of. The room is just large enough for two people to breathe without touching shoulders.

In the middle, on a small pillar, the black orb the size of my fingernail floats over the palm of a pale left hand. My severed hand is connected to tubes running into containers filled with red, blue, and gray liquids. The hand itself is covered in carved inscriptions, a mess of my work and the Doc’s scribbles blended together.

And the hand is moving slightly. Fingers twitch, curl, uncurl, like they are resisting sleep.

The Doctor exhales, “So beautifully conductive. So obedient, yet so hungry. Adapted to your black mana. Your body, your beautiful broken body.”

He rushes closer, crouches low, then begins stroking the pale hand like it is a pet. The hand twitches again, harder this time, jerking toward him like it wants to grab his throat.

Good boy.

While he blabbers, I examine the orb for a few minutes.

Then, testing, I reach out with my hand like all the times before. The black orb reacts instantly. It stretches toward me, trying to drink from my mana.

I don’t simply let it happen. The same way it reaches for me, I reach back.

From inside it, I pull a thread of mana. My Mana Wavelength Iris works on full throttle, my unique arcane passive Mana Wave Predation supports me, and I just do it. The orb’s hunger for mana is met by my own.

A part of its mana fuses with mine. That mana, entirely unwoven from a part of what used to be the black orb, joins mine, stolen and ready to be used.

It feels wonderful, and wrong, and like a cheat all at once.

The Doc gasps sharply, glasses sliding down to the tip of his nose. His golden eyes seem to glimmer. He sees what I am doing, and his voice trembles.

“Yes, take it, devour it, claim it! Push it as far as your will and effort can carry you. Again and again, push past the edge until all mana will be yours!”

I cut off my connection to the black orb and take a step back with myriad thoughts flashing through my head.

The doc staggers a step closer. His voice becomes quieter, but still carries that insane excitement he constantly shows. “A god born in my basement. A god I will dissect.”

----------------------------------------

The moment I leave our branch to head toward the outpost, someone places a mark on me. More than anything, it feels like being slapped with a wet noodle, even though I notice the effort they’ve made to hide it.

My mana flares as I take the mark apart, leaving only the connection to its origin. Then I follow it and spot a single lumoran standing in the distance. Like all of them, this one has black skin and golden eyes. The usual web of crystalline features is embedded in his flesh, covering his arms and neck more than anywhere else.

When our eyes meet, he smiles at me and turns to walk away. A single step with Wraith Dance takes me just a few paces behind him, and I follow through the street.

There, at our goal, the lumoran who escorted me is holding a restaurant door open. His golden eyes track me the entire time, unblinking, until I pass inside.

At the table sit two more. A man and a woman. The three of them are nearly indistinguishable. The same obsidian skin, the same web of crystalline features, the same faint smile waiting to spread. If not for the minor differences in where the crystal spreads across their bodies, they could be copies. Even their posture mirrors one another, like reflections set at different angles.

I sit. My escort takes the chair across from me, sliding into it. The other two fold their hands on the table at the exact same moment.

“You’re paying for the food?” I ask.

Both men glance at their sister in the same instant. She tilts her head, still staring straight at me, and smiles. “Yes.”

I gesture with my hand. When the server comes closer, I say, “The most expensive food and drink you have.”

The server hurries off. The grinning brother starts drumming his fingers on the table in some erratic rhythm, but the sound cuts off the moment I look at him. His sister leans back, utterly relaxed. The quiet one remains still.

“So, to what do I owe the pleasure? Do we talk about the weather first? Or will we skip straight to threats? Perhaps you’re stalling me while someone else hits the outpost?” I ask.

The two men look at each other, but the woman keeps her eyes on me. “And if we did send someone to the outpost?”

I shrug. “S rank?”

“No,” she answers.

I observe her heartbeat, the twitches of her body, the movement of her blood. All of it confirms that she’s not lying. It makes me relax a little more, and the mana I had been accumulating seeps back to circulate through my body.

“In that case, I don’t think I need to be in a hurry,” I reply.

At that moment, the food arrives. Some sort of steak from a high-leveled monster. One bite would likely have been enough to last the pre-tutorial me an entire day. The drink is light purple with blue swirling inside. It is slightly fizzy, bitter, and sweet at the same time.

“You have a lot of trust in your Null King,” she notes.

“Weslin hates that name. If you ever do meet him, do not call him that,” I say in between bites, then pause. “Or you know what, do. I want to be there when it happens.”

I can almost hear the three of them exchanging mental communication, but I do not bother trying to spy on them. Instead, I pay attention to my food.

“Are there many of you here on the Third?” I ask.

The man on the left snorts. “You don’t seriously think we would answer that, right?”

His male triplet joins in. “He does not. He’s just looking for lies and reactions.”

Lastly, their sister, who has not taken her eyes off me for even a moment, smiles again. “Let us say there is someone much more powerful than the three of us coming.”

“Strong enough to fuck up Morwag? And please don’t act like you didn’t already know he was coming,” I say.

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

This time, I cannot even properly estimate what she means, but I judge that even she herself does not know for sure. She seems to think that the person is either equal to or stronger than Morwag. Interesting. I thought the Eternal Clowns didn’t have an S rank.

“Anyway, I’ll be leaving now.”

For the first time, the two men show a hint of aggression, their mana surrounding me. Some kind of field forms, trying to keep me here.

“I would really appreciate it if you stayed here with us a while longer,” the sister tells me warmly.

“Nah. Fuck you. And by the way, nice attempt, but good luck trying to remove the marks I placed on you.” Saying that, I stand up, let [Eclipse] surround me, as I teleport through their field.

I appear near the entrance to the guild branch where I placed a mark just before following the triplets. From there, I quickly reach the edge of the city, rise into the air, and head toward the outpost. The marks on my radar remain in that restaurant while, with a few powerful pushes of kinetic energy, my speed picks up and my surroundings blur.

On the horizon, a dark sky covers a massive area. It almost looks like night itself hanging over one place. The location of our outpost. From within it, I sense the unmistakable vibrations of Weslin’s attacks and pulses of his void energy. The defensive array we’ve set up there is also fully active and in use.

I fly higher, letting my sight encompass the entire area, drowned in darkness. Quickly, I locate a few sections hidden by shields and powered by massive, almost industrial sized, mana batteries.

Multiple javelins of pale blue mana manifest around me. Each one shoots ahead with a booming crack, shockwaves reverberating through the air. They pierce the barriers as if they were paper, damaging the inscriptions that have been placed there.

The moment that happens, the darkness starts wavering and dissipating, and I enter.

A shockwave shoots towards me, tearing through the three barriers I’ve stacked in front of myself. Another follows right after, stopping only when it collides with the last barrier I manifest, and still manages to push me farther back. Something below roars, the sound carrying a force that feels like it could disintegrate all of the material around us. That roar is followed by a violent pulse of void energy and tremors like an earthquake.

The darkness vanishes completely, revealing a monster below with Weslin standing against it. The creature is distantly humanoid, but much taller, with massive gorilla-like arms and dark brown fur covering its body. Its head is elongated like a hyena’s, full of dangerous teeth, and four white horns grow from the sides of its skull.

[Gorakth - lvl ???]

As the last of the darkness fades, the monster screeches even louder and bolts away, throwing itself against a nearby hill. It digs straight into it at incredible speed, clearly using some kind of skill. The hard stone simply moving aside as if it were foam.

“You good?” I ask, landing near Weslin, both of us facing the direction the monster fled.

“Yeah. We got lucky that a stronger one didn’t come out. But even this one was in the 400s, so don’t get any ideas about following it. Our objective is to defend this place.” His tone is steady, but I notice wounds across his body. Not life-threatening, but I know well how durable he usually is.

“As you wish, boss. I met the triplets and left marks on them.”

“Will they be able to remove it?”

“In a few days, maybe. I placed the annoying self-replicating one.”

“Good. Next attack, you're on defense.”

“Please say: next attack you're on defense, because I’m too old for this shit.”

“Fuck you, Nathaniel.”