Walking was just a matter of efficiency. Left foot. Right foot. Do not waste motion.
Jin kept his head down beneath his heavy brown hood. The afternoon sun baked the hard dirt of the trade route, but his new Foundation Level 4 body handled the heat with surprising ease. On Earth, a twelve-hour hike would have put him in the hospital. Here, a steady, coiled energy pulsed in his stomach, absorbing the shock of every step.
It was an upgrade to his hardware, but his software was still playing catch-up.
The rocky plains of the Zenith planet were a wasteland of yellow scrub brush and jagged stone spires. And it was a busy wasteland. In the last few hours, Jin had witnessed the violent reality of the local ecosystem twice.
The first was a pack of mutated hounds covered in crystalline spikes. They had charged out from behind a boulder, tracking the smell of the salted meat in Jin's bag.
Nyx hadn't even broken her stride. She just turned her featureless black visor toward them and released a fraction of her Divinity Realm pressure. It wasn't an attack; it was a biological cease-and-desist order. The invisible weight slammed into the hounds. The lead dog's front legs snapped like dry twigs under the sudden gravity. The rest of the pack panicked, scrambling over their dying alpha to flee back into the rocks.
The second incident was a massive subterranean centipede that erupted from the dirt directly in their path. Nyx had simply sidestepped, flicked a single wire from her fingertips, and bisected the creature in mid-air. Two halves of a giant bug fell into the dust, twitching.
Jin had watched both encounters with cold, corporate detachment.
Nyx was the ultimate asset. She was a flawless security system. But Jin was a logistics manager, and he knew the golden rule of business: never rely entirely on a single point of failure. If Nyx was delayed, or if her Aether ran out again like it did during the crash, Jin was just walking meat. He needed his own Gene Legacy. He needed to turn his perfect, empty genetic vessel into something lethal. Power was the only currency that mattered here, and his bank account was currently empty.
"The ambient temperature is dropping, My Prince," Nyx's telepathic voice sliced through his thoughts. It was as cold and smooth as polished glass. "Nocturnal predators will begin to encroach on the road soon."
Jin looked up. The sky was bleeding from bright blue into harsh streaks of violet and orange. The jagged rocks cast long, distorted shadows across the dirt.
"Do we stop?" Jin asked, his physical voice slightly raspy from the dry air.
"No," Nyx replied. She slowed her pace by a fraction of an inch. "We maintain our route. But adjust your posture. The environment has shifted."
Jin frowned. He focused his newly enhanced senses. At first, he just felt the dry wind. But then, he noticed the silence. The constant chirping of armored insects and the distant calls of scavengers had completely stopped. The wasteland had gone dead quiet.
Then the smell hit him. It wasn't the smell of wild beasts or rotting leaves. It was the sharp, metallic tang of cheap gun oil, stale sweat, and unwashed leather.
"Ambush," Jin breathed. His muscles coiled with instinctual tension.
"Stay behind me," Nyx commanded.
The trap sprang a second later.
From the high ridge of the jagged rocks flanking the road, a blinding flash of blue light erupted. A heavy plasma bolt, thick as a man's arm, tore through the twilight, aimed directly at Jin's chest.
Before Jin's brain could even process the light, the world warped. Nyx didn't block the bolt; she simply bypassed the space between them. She blurred into a streak of absolute darkness, materializing directly in the path of the plasma.
She raised her left hand, her palm open. A vortex of pitch-black Aether swirled to life around her fingers, catching the searing blue plasma like a baseball in a glove. She crushed her fingers shut, extinguishing the lethal energy with a sharp hiss of escaping steam.
"Kill the big one! Take the supplies!" a rough, guttural voice roared from the rocks above.
A dozen figures detached themselves from the shadows of the boulders. Bandits. They were scavengers who couldn't make it in the mercenary guilds, forced to prey on the weak. They wore mismatched scrap armor and carried rusted weapons. There were twelve of them, and they had the high ground.
They thought they were ambushing two lost travelers. They had no idea they had just initiated a hostile takeover against a Divinity Realm monster.
Nyx vanished.
A localized sonic boom echoed across the plains as she broke the sound barrier from a dead standstill. The rocky ridge where the sniper had fired the plasma bolt exploded in a shower of shattered stone and blood. A severed arm, still clutching a smoking rifle, tumbled down the cliff face and landed with a wet thud in the dirt near Jin's boots.
Screams erupted from the right flank. Jin spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He couldn't track her movements. He only saw the terrifying results. A bandit in heavy iron armor raised a bone axe; a thread of black wire whipped around his throat, and his head slid off his shoulders before the axe could fall. Another bandit tried to turn and run, only for Nyx to appear directly in front of him, driving her palm into his chest plate. The kinetic shockwave liquefied his internal organs, sending his broken body flying backward into a boulder.
It was an exhibition of absolute, merciless efficiency. The bandits were in the Core Formation realm—sturdy and lethal by mortal standards. Against Nyx, they were just numbers being deleted from a spreadsheet.
Within thirty seconds, the screaming stopped.
The silence that followed was heavy, thick with the smell of copper blood. Jin stood in the center of the dirt road. He looked around. The jagged rocks were painted in dark crimson. Mangled bodies lay in unnatural angles, their cheap armor cleaved clean through.
A soft thud drew his attention forward.
Nyx stepped out of the lengthening shadows. Her dark cloak was unblemished. In her right hand, she dragged a massive, terrified man by the collar of his rusted chainmail tunic.
The man was missing his left leg below the knee. A tourniquet of dark Aether was wrapped tightly around the stump, preventing him from bleeding out, but keeping him in a state of blinding, white-hot agony. He was sobbing, his face pale and slick with terror as he clawed desperately at the dirt.
Nyx casually tossed the man onto the road. He collapsed into a pathetic, whimpering heap a few feet away from Jin.
"Eleven hostile assets eliminated," Nyx reported, her telepathic voice entirely devoid of emotion. "One asset secured for interrogation."
Jin stepped forward, looking down at the weeping bandit. The man looked up at him, his eyes wide and bloodshot, silently begging the hooded figure for mercy.
Jin felt nothing. No pity. No disgust. Just cold, calculating logic.
"Why keep him alive?" Jin asked.
Nyx stood over the broken man, looking down through her cracked visor.
"These men are cowards. They do not live on the open road; they strike and retreat," Nyx explained smoothly. "Which means they have a fortified encampment nearby. An encampment holds stolen supplies, clean water, and hoarded Aether cores taken from their victims."
Jin's eyes narrowed beneath his hood. The logic clicked into place instantly.
They were heading to Iron-Spire. Iron-Spire was a major hub. To use the teleportation circle, to buy a Gene Legacy, to secure safe passage—they needed capital. Right now, they had nothing but a few snake scales.
He looked down at the bandit. This wasn't an ambush anymore. This was a supply chain opportunity.
"We are going to liquidate your camp," Jin said to the man on the ground. His voice wasn't an edgy threat; it was just a statement of fact. "Point the way, and she will let you bleed out quickly. Lie to me, and she will take the other leg."