The retreat through the sewers was a humiliating, pain-filled crawl. Every slosh through the ankle-deep, foul-smelling water sent a fresh, jarring wave of agony through his dislocated shoulder and bruised ribs. The darkness of the tunnels was absolute, a suffocating, black velvet that was a perfect mirror for the state of his own mind. He was a creature of the shadows, and for the first time, the shadows felt less like a sanctuary and more like a tomb.
He finally emerged from a grate a mile away from the Crimson Altar, in a part of the undercity so decrepit and forgotten that even the rats seemed to have given up. He leaned against a crumbling brick wall, the cold, misty rain a welcome, cleansing shock against his feverish skin. He was a mess. His clothes were soaked in sewer filth, his body was a symphony of pain, and his pride, the cold, analytical certainty that had become the bedrock of the Zero persona, was shattered.
The journey back to his dorm room was a blur of calculated, pain-filled movement. He slipped through the ghost paths, his mind a dull, throbbing ache that was somehow worse than the sharp, physical pain in his shoulder. He made it back to his room without incident, the familiar, threadbare space offering no comfort, only a stark, four-walled reminder of his own profound failure.
He barred the door and slid to the floor, his back against the rough wood. He sat there in the darkness, listening to the sound of his own ragged breathing. The failure in the Altar had shaken him to his very core. For the first time since acquiring [Callous], he felt a flicker of something that was dangerously close to an emotion. It was not the hot, panicked terror of Ashe. It was a cold, empty dread. The feeling of a master strategist who has encountered an opponent whose moves are not just unpredictable, but are played on a board he doesn't even recognize.
His internal monologue, usually a clean, efficient stream of data and probabilities, was a frustrated, chaotic loop.
How do you fight something you cannot touch? How do you predict an enemy that teleports at random? Variable: Intangibility. Variable: Instantaneous movement. These are not variables. They are violations. They are cheats.
He had built his entire existence, his entire strategy for survival, on the principle that the world was a system. A complex, often brutal system, but a system nonetheless, with rules that could be learned, exploited, and broken. The Glimmer-Hulk was not a player in that system. It was a virus that was causing the system itself to crash.
He gritted his teeth, a fresh wave of pain from his shoulder making him see stars. He had to pop it back into place. He stood up, his movements stiff, and braced himself against the wall. He took a deep, shuddering breath and, with a single, brutal, and agonizingly precise movement, he slammed his own shoulder against the unforgiving stone.
The pop was a sickening, wet crunch that echoed in the small room. A scream, raw and animalistic, tore itself from his throat, a sound he immediately stifled by biting down hard on his own hand, the taste of his own blood filling his mouth. Black spots danced in his vision, and he slid back down to the floor, his body slick with a cold sweat, his newly reset shoulder a single, massive, throbbing sun of pure agony.
It was in this moment of profound weakness, of pain and frustration, that the monstrous, predatory nature of his own power began to whisper to him.
It was not a voice. It was a feeling, a deep, instinctual pull from the corrupted skills that were now a part of his very soul. The gnawing, parasitic hunger of [Flesh Devourer's Strength], which had been a dull ache, suddenly sharpened. It was no longer a simple hunger for life force; it was a specific, targeted craving. It whispered of a solution, a simple, direct, and brutally efficient one. That creature is chaos. Like you. If you could just get close enough… if you could just get a piece of it… tear it… consume its chaotic essence… you could make its power your own. You could become stronger. The pain would be a memory.
Simultaneously, the buzzing, addictive echo of the [Nerve-Wrack Sting] flared in his nerves. It tempted him with a different kind of release. Analysis is slow. Traps are for the weak. You felt the power. The absolute, neurological dominance. Unleash it. Don't hold back. Overwhelm the beast with your own chaos. Who cares what happens? Who cares if you lose control? The feeling… you want to feel it again.
The twin temptations were a siren song, a promise of an easy way out of the complex, unsolvable problem. To just stop thinking and become the monster. To give in to the monstrous, consuming appetites his own System had cursed him with.
For a moment, he was tempted. A part of him, the part that was tired of the pain, tired of the fear, tired of the constant, grueling effort of thinking his way through every problem, wanted to say yes. To just… let go. To unleash the full, horrifying potential of his cursed skills and let the pieces fall where they may. It would be so easy.
But he knew what that meant. His skills were not his allies. They were the System's own monstrous nature asserting its dominance. To give in would be to become a mindless slave to his own corrupted powers, a creature of pure, instinctual appetite. He would cease to be a hunter and become just another beast, no different from the Glimmer-Hulk itself.
No.
He pushed the temptations down, walling them off with a sheer, desperate act of will. The cold, analytical Zero persona reasserted its control, its logic a shield against the monstrous whispers.
Brute force is a tool for those without imagination, he reasoned, his thoughts becoming clear and sharp once more. To surrender to it is to admit defeat. The problem is not that the enemy is chaotic. The problem is that my data is incomplete.
He had been arrogant. He had believed that his own unique, glitched knowledge of the System, his "hacker's" insight, was the only tool he needed. He had dismissed the centuries of accumulated knowledge, the hard-won wisdom of the thousands of hunters and adventurers who had come before him, as antiquated and irrelevant. He had been a fool.
The Glimmer-Hulk was an external anomaly. And to fight it, he needed external knowledge. He needed to understand how the world fought monsters, not just how he did.
He stood up, his newly reset shoulder a dull, throbbing protest, and walked to his desk. He pulled out a small, coded message slip and a piece of charcoal. He needed a book. Not a rare, powerful tome from the academy's restricted section, but something far more valuable. Something practical. Something illegal.
He sent a coded message to Kael, a simple, untraceable drop in a designated sewer pipe. The request was specific. He needed a grimoire. A real one. A stolen, annotated, and well-used bestiary and tactical manual from one of the professional monster-hunting guilds, like the Silver Swords or the Iron Gryphons. He knew such things were forbidden to outsiders, their secrets guarded as jealously as a dragon's hoard. But he also knew that for the right price, Kael the Rat could acquire anything.
Two days later, a heavy, oilskin-wrapped package was waiting for him at the dead-drop location. The price Kael had demanded had been steep—a detailed, verifiable prediction of a coming trade dispute between two major merchant houses that would allow the Rat-kin to play the market and make a fortune. Zero had paid it without a second thought. Knowledge for knowledge. It was the only currency that mattered.
He sat in his dim, silent room, the stolen, leather-bound grimoire open before him on the desk. It was not an elegant, scholarly work. The pages were worn, stained with what looked suspiciously like old blood, and filled with the cramped, handwritten notes of a dozen different owners. But the words on the page were not just ink; they were a weapon.
Glimmer-Beasts, one entry read, the script a messy, practical scrawl. Phase-state is unstable, a localized reality flux. Vulnerable to high-frequency sonics and pure-grade iron filings. Disrupts their quantum cohesion. Don't try to hit them. Make the very air they exist in toxic to them.
A slow, cold smile, the first genuine expression he'd felt since the aqueduct, spread across his face. He had been trying to solve a physics problem. He had been a fool. This wasn't about physics. It was about chemistry.
The Glimmer-Hulk, the impossible, unsolvable monster, was about to discover what happened when pure chaos met a meticulously researched and brutally applied scientific method.