The crowd was gone, leaving only the lingering smell of sweat, blood, and ozone in the air. Grunt's taunts still hung there, a challenge as heavy as the sledgehammer he carried. Stokely stood at a distance, arms crossed, his single eye watching Leo with clinical detachment. This wasn't about cleanliness; it was about methodology. It was about seeing how the "Specialist Grade Janitor" handled a problem.
Leo walked into the center of the training yard. The Skitterer's corpse was a gruesome tableau. Chitinous plates were bent and shattered. Black ichor mingled with greenish, acidic fluid, creating a small, steaming patch where the very earth was being dissolved. A lesser janitor would have started with the shovel, a brute-force solution for a brute-force kill.
Leo set the shovel and bucket aside. He didn't need them.
First, he addressed the primary hazard. He crouched down, his fingers hovering over the steaming, acidic puddle. He could feel the malignant energy of it, a low-level contaminant that would poison the soil long after the mess was gone.
He activated his core skill. "[Mop Up]."
The air shimmered. The sizzling puddle of mixed ichor and acid didn't get soaked up; it was erased. The liquid was pulled from the soil and siphoned into the metaphysical container in his mind, leaving behind a patch of dry, slightly discolored dirt. The immediate corrosive threat was gone.
Stokely, from fifty feet away, uncrossed his arm. His eye narrowed slightly. He hadn't seen Leo touch anything.
Next, the biological material. The chunks of flesh and pools of dark blood. Leo could have shoveled them into the bucket, but that was inefficient. It would leave residue. It was... messy.
He swept his hand in a slow, deliberate arc over the entire area of the kill. He invoked his new skill, the one that validated his entire existence as a Janitor in this new world. "[Sterilize]."
A soft pulse of clean, blue energy washed over the blood-soaked ground. There was no sound, no flash. But the effect was absolute. Every drop of alien blood, every microscopic organism, every errant cell was instantly rendered inert, breaking down into a fine, harmless, sterile dust. The faint, coppery smell of blood vanished, replaced by the crisp, clean scent of ozone that Leo was coming to associate with his own power. The ground was now safe. The contamination was purged.
Finally, the physical debris. The larger, shattered pieces of the Skitterer's carapace. This was a job for a shovel. But shoveling was clumsy. It was work for a laborer, not a specialist.
Leo looked at the scattered pieces. They were trash. They were clutter. They were a violation of a clean, orderly space.
He extended his hand. "[Waste Disposal]," he thought, targeting not one piece, but all of them.
One by one, the jagged shards of black chitin shimmered and vanished from the ground, teleported directly into the five slots of his pocket dimension. In less than ten seconds, the arena floor was completely clear.
He stood for a moment in the now-empty yard. No blood, no body, no acid. The only evidence that a battle had ever taken place was the patch of discolored earth and the faint, clean smell of ozone hanging in the air. The entire process had taken less than a minute. He hadn't used a single physical tool Stokely had given him.
He walked back over to the chief, picking up the pristine, unused shovel and bucket on his way. He held them out. "Job's done," he said.
Stokely stared at the clean yard, then at Leo's empty hands, then back at the yard. A slow, disbelieving whistle escaped his lips. He had sent a man to shovel up a monster and had instead witnessed a quiet, efficient miracle of supernatural sanitation. He had seen Grunt's method: loud, brutal, and leaving a huge mess. Now he had seen the Janitor's method: silent, surgical, and leaving the place cleaner than it was before.
"I'll be damned," Stokely finally grunted, a flicker of genuine respect in his eye. He didn't take the shovel. "Alright, 'Specialist'. Come with me. Rostova wants a report on the sub-level filtration systems. I think you're the man to give it."
As they walked away, neither of them noticed a figure watching from the shadowed entrance of a nearby warehouse. It was Grunt. He had seen the whole thing. He had seen the way the body and the blood had just… disappeared.
He didn't understand what he had seen. The lack of comprehension was a burning frustration in his gut. But he understood one thing perfectly. The quiet man with the bucket was not a janitor. He was a rival. He was a threat to Grunt's position as the top dog of The Foundry, and he had a power that was quiet, unnerving, and completely alien to Grunt's world of muscle and rage.
The competition had begun, and Grunt hadn't even known he was in it.