Nathaniel was on his last legs. His limbs shook under him and there were still holes punched clean through muscle. Magnum stood across from him without a hint of strain. Nathaniel felt the warning heat in his bones as the interface finally responded and dropped several precious jade light vials into his hands.
He crushed them without hesitation. Healing light spilled over his body in a soft wash that stitched the open wounds and forced damaged tissue back together. It was enough to move. Nothing more.
He rushed forward, exhaling sharply as the interface opened another page. A progress bar flashed. Fatigue at fifty. Reserves at seventy percent. The numbers felt too low for what he needed to do. His skin glowed with heat. What remained of his clothes clung as charred scraps, even though he had tried to shield them with his uratsu.
Magnum braced as an orb of blue flame built in Nathaniel's hand. The mercenary grinned, already predicting an ordinary charge that he could counter.
Nathaniel let him believe it.
His eyes flashed gold. The glow intensified until the irises were almost blinding. His reserves shrank by a tenth in an instant. A wild golden aura exploded out of him in controlled waves that cracked the stone beneath his feet.
Hairline fractures of gold ran across his skin like living lightning.
He reached Magnum before the man could process the shift.
A single grasp. Super heated. Precise. Violent.
Nathaniel caught Magnum's arm and wrenched. The sound was sharp and decisive as the joint dislocated under the sudden amplification of his strength. Magnum staggered, taken off guard for the first time. The temperature spike hit him moments later, washing over his armour in a wave of blistering heat.
Nathaniel stood there, breathing hard, operating at ten times his normal capacity.
The air shimmered around him.
The fight had changed.
They were on much better terms now, at least from Nathaniel's point of view. Magnum was far less composed. He stepped in with a punch that carried the full weight of his augment. Tremor enhancement multiplied the impact a hundred fold compared to his usual ten times boost. The blow crashed into Nathaniel's jaw with enough force to cave a wall.
Nathaniel's head snapped back. His vision blurred for a moment, then refocused with unnatural calm. His muscles coiled. Kinetic Muscle hit its threshold. His skin lit from within, first cyan and then gold, each fibre sparking like overloaded conduits.
He struck without hesitation.
Every muscle transmitted force in perfect chained succession. The impact launched Magnum downward as a shock wave burst through the air. The ground split beneath them. Magnum looked up in stunned confusion, finding himself in a crater seventeen feet deep with Nathaniel's arm buried in his chest cavity.
He reacted fast, pulling out his uratsu based firearm and emptying several rounds into Nathaniel's head and into the positions Polaris had attacked from earlier. The rounds burned Nathaniel's uratsu on contact, searing painfully as several punctures cauterized. He could not feel his legs anymore. His nerves were overloaded. Heat scorched the inside of his bones.
Magnum looked into Nathaniel's glowing gold eyes and saw something worse than the pain. Dark silver fluid seeped into his body through the wound. He felt his strength decline rapidly. His hands trembled. He tried to move and failed.
Nathaniel slowly withdrew his arm. Crystals spun into existence around his fingers and drilled into Magnum's joints and limbs, locking him in place. He reached into the man's gear and pulled free his firearm, looting him with a soldier's efficiency.
Nathaniel lifted the weapon. Smoke and ash filled the sky above the ruined block. He used meta vision and locked onto a faint energy outline overhead. He poured his uratsu into the firearm. The gauntlet expanded, taking on a gold sheen over its usual black. He fired a condensed resin bullet that glowed gold as it streaked upward. It hit Polaris in the shoulder and clipped through her barrier with brute force, burying itself in bone. His uratsu surged through her system, freezing her in place as crystal grew across her limbs.
Nathaniel shot upward, a streak of gold cutting through the smoke. Polaris tried to encase herself in a barrier of reinforced black steel that rose in layers, but his arm tore through the entire wall of metal. She screamed as he ripped the barricade apart.
"What did you do," she yelled as she tried clawing the crystal from her skin.
Far behind them, Alyssa regained consciousness. She knocked the sealed door open with a violent pulse of uratsu. She blinked rapidly as the world came back into focus. Nathaniel's signal was muted, and so were several others. Panic hit her. She had marked him specifically. She followed the faint trail straight into the desolate sector of the city.
She found a hooded sniper in tactical armour kneeling in concentration. Every sense was shut down, as if he had muted the world around him. Alyssa smiled. Her forearms opened like shifting metal, extending into high frequency blades that gleamed with violet light. She cut him down before he sensed her.
Nathaniel descended toward Polaris, ready to finish her. The radiant buff inside him burned at the last of his reserves. The interface chirped once and displayed a clean confirmation. Seventeen out of seventeen hostiles eliminated.
He landed with her and drove her reinforced body into the ground with a brutal lariat. She went limp immediately. Dust rose around them in a choking cloud.
Nathaniel stepped away from her and looked back toward Magnum. The dark silver fluid that had seeped out of him was flowing across the ground like a living thing. It glowed faintly with the same uratsu signature Magnum carried. Nathaniel crouched. The substance coiled around his wrist and seeped into his pores. The sensation was strange but not unwelcome.
The interface blinked to life beside his fatigue meter.
New augment factor unlocked: Kinetic Path: Impact Reverb [Tremor].
Nathaniel looked at the woman on the ground. Polaris lay bruised and broken, breathing shallowly. He needed information, and the interface had spared her since it had not listed her among the required kills. That alone made her valuable.
He turned slightly, his senses stretching outward. In the far corner of his awareness Alyssa waved at him, bright and casual despite the carnage. She had gotten the straggler, the one who had been muting the battlefield.
Nathaniel glanced down at himself and sighed. His flannel shirt was nothing but scorched strips. His trousers were half melted. His shoes were worse. Heat had climbed too high for anything to survive. He was still wearing one of Magnum's gauntlets. He stowed the looted weapon and picked up the matching gauntlet where it had landed in the dust.
Alyssa arrived on the broken street level and stopped short. The sector had already been damaged by the past biome break, but Nathaniel had turned it into a bowl of ash and ruptured earth. Bodies lay scattered across the crater and along the tilted blocks of collapsed infrastructure. There were no identifiable pieces left. He had burned nearly everything, either by heat or blunt trauma.
Even so, Alyssa still saw him loot what remained of the corpses. He moved with cold efficiency, collecting any firearm that still functioned, pocketing key cards, access chips, and storage tabs. One thing caught his attention. None of the bodies had fingerprints. They were scrubbed clean. Off grid. Untraceable.
Alyssa watched him closely. The gold radiance that had coated him earlier had faded. Now his skin carried a thin sheen of flexible but solid resin across his palms and forearms, almost like armored gloves. Nathaniel lifted several slides of blood from the ground, sealing each sample between sheets of crystal. He placed them into the air and they vanished with a crackle of white light, absorbed into whatever inventory his interface provided.
She finally noticed the state of his body. The worst wounds were already knitting together, but his limbs were still torn and burned. His breathing was slightly uneven. He picked up the stimulants Magnum had used earlier. Several vials were unbroken. He cracked one open and swallowed the contents. The remaining surface wounds shut almost instantly.
The stimulant was more effective than the jade light when it came to recovery. It even eased fatigue. His fatigue meter dropped to low, though his reserves stayed depleted. He looked down at the empty max regen he had used earlier and exhaled through his teeth, frustrated at the waste.
A moment later he walked behind a half-standing wall. Alyssa heard the faint ripple of the interface. When he stepped back out he was fully dressed, the damage to his clothing replaced entirely. He approached Polaris and noted that the crystals restraining her had faded. He dispelled what lingered over Magnum's corpse as well and left the ruined remains where they were.
He shut Polaris's wounds, cleaned her face, and even arranged her hair so she would not look disheveled. Then he draped a trench coat over her body and hoisted her onto his back. If anyone passed them on the street, they would have looked like a drunk couple walking home.
Nathaniel looked at Alyssa. She understood immediately. The warning was simple. Do not speak about any of this.
They left the alley together. At the edge of the street he handed off the sniper Alyssa had dragged earlier. She took the body and tossed it down into what remained of the crater.
Nathaniel disappeared down the next block with Polaris on his back.
Alyssa smirked to herself. Her arm shifted, metal folding into a blaster. She charged it and opened fire, cremating the bodies she had gathered at the bottom of the crater, turning the entire pile to drifting gray ash.
The feed hissed with static long after the last frame died. The broken camera had captured enough. Nathaniel striding through smoke with gold still flickering in his skin. Polaris limp on his back. The ruin of Magnum spread across the crater. The glow in Nathaniel's eyes shifting from cyan to gold as if something buried had awakened.
Those last images hung in the room like ghosts even after the monitors went dark.
Ivo sat still for several seconds. The cracked lens distortion from the feed lingered in his mind. His augment hummed faintly, its internal gyros adjusting with the tension rolling through his body. The artificial vertebrae clicked once, sharp and final.
He poured whiskey into a glass and took a quiet drink before speaking.
"Now leave," Ivo said. "Your presence is not needed here."
Theodore stiffened. He tried to hide the tremble in his hands, but the fading reflection of Nathaniel ripping open Magnum's armor still played in his pupils. The image of gold light surging from him when he dislocated Magnum's arm had shaken him more than he wanted to admit.
Theodore hesitated. "You said he was a manageable variable. You said he could be contained."
Ivo set the glass down. The sound was small but heavy in the silence.
"I said what was calculated at the time. Then we watched him melt Magnum's armor. We watched him tear through twelve trained grunts without slowing. We watched gold energy spread across his skin that was not in his registered augment list."
The client's jaw tightened. "Then this operation was misrepresented."
Ivo's spine clicked again. "Variables change. You paid for removal, containment, and discretion. What you paid was the cost for what you believed the target could do. If we charged based on what Nathaniel actually did, you would have refused the job entirely."
Theodore's eyes flickered with fear. "He should not be able to fight like that. No Knight at that tier should."
Ivo looked at the dead monitors as if he could still see the footage. Nathaniel lifting Polaris with one arm. Nathaniel dragging himself through flame with holes in his body. Nathaniel crushing jade-light vials in his hands. Nathaniel's reserves burning down as his body overheated. Nathaniel's eyes turning gold.
"That is exactly the problem," Ivo said. "He should not be able to. But he did."
Theodore took a step back toward the door. "So what now. What do we do."
"We are done here," Ivo said. "Your attempt failed and I lost manpower."
He took another sip of whiskey, the liquid steady despite the growing tension.
"And I stop assuming Nathaniel Alderman is only what the Association thinks he is."
The client lingered one last moment. His voice dropped. "Magnum said something on the feed before he died. Something about the one who ordered the hit. He sounded drunk."
Ivo looked at him flatly. "Yes. He said your name. Slurred, but clear enough if the Knight ever reviews the audio."
Theodore paled.
"I thought the sound was corrupted."
"Not corrupted enough," Ivo replied. "If Nathaniel finds that trail, he will follow it. He survives things your men do not. He survived an encounter none of them should have."
The client backed toward the exit with stiff, uneven steps, rattled by the implication.
The door shut behind him.
Ivo breathed out through his nose. His spine hummed, mechanical tension rolling up the artificial joints.
He stared at the empty monitors. The final image of Nathaniel walking into the smoke with gold cracks across his skin felt burned into them.
"Kaisen, begin log," Ivo said.
A soft chime answered him from within his augment.
"Subject Nathaniel Alderman has exceeded all prior parameters. Observe, track, evaluate. And if necessary, terminate."
He finished his glass in one slow swallow, the room quiet except for the hum of his spine.
"He is not just evolving," Ivo said softly to the dark. "Someone built him to."