AN: Tell me what you think. We will get relatively fast to seq 7-6 so he will be as stong or even stronger than he was with old powerset.
The extraction had a texture Adam had felt a hundred times.
A pull at the base of the chest, a quiet click somewhere behind the eyes, the world becoming half a thought thinner. He had learned to ride it. Close the eyes, let the world go, wake on the pad.
This time the pull stopped halfway.
The half-second of nothing that usually preceded the bay-light snapping back on stretched. Five seconds. Ten. Adam's body had no sensation in it. His thoughts were still his own.
[ H.. ]
Nothing. The channel was open and empty.
The white that was always there during transit thinned the way fabric thinned at a worn seam. Then all of a sudden it snapped.
Adam was sitting.
He had not chosen to sit. He had been standing in white nowhere a moment earlier, and now he was on a chair with no transition between the two.
The chair was high-backed leather, the colour of old library oxblood, deep enough that his shoulders touched the wings. The room around him was a deep panelled office of the kind that did not exist any more on Earth-Prime, the kind that belonged to a building older than electricity. Dark green walls. A coffered ceiling. A single lamp burning a steady soft yellow over a mahogany work-table the size of a cot. The light came from no source Adam could see.
Across the table sat the being.
It was the shape of a man and not a man at all. The outline of a person sitting upright with hands folded on the table, and that outline flickered the way candle-shadow flickered when someone moved past the flame. A coat collar suggested itself, then resettled. The face came into focus and went out of focus at a rhythm that had nothing to do with breathing. The eyes were where eyes belonged. They focused on Adam in a way that made him tense.
The Bazaar's voice, when it came, was old and patient and not unkind. It came from no mouth.
"Mr Varen. You are already sitting. Good."
The hand moved as if it wanted to form some sort of a gesture.
"I will not waste your time."
Sage.
Nothing answered him.
Where the hell am I.
His own thought, alone in his head, was a sound he had not heard in a long time.
The being lifted a ledger.
It was the kind of ledger a Victorian clerk might have used. Cloth-bound, foxed at the spine, the gilt half-rubbed off the corners. The pages were larger than a normal book's and they whispered when the being turned them. The flickering hand moved through them at a speed that was not reading. The being was looking for one entry.
It stopped.
It set the ledger flat. It looked up.
"Adam Varen. Explorer designation, 5-2698-56 Earth-Prime. Three years active. Twelve world deployments. Tier progression: L1 through L4."
The voice was reading and not reading. The ledger was a courtesy. Whatever the Bazaar was, it did not need the page.
"You are the first explorer of your kind to return alive from world L4-1349. There have been others sent to that world, and to its parallel versions across the levels. None came back. The world had been classified Hell-tier at the lowest tolerance for that designation, and the classification has been upheld every cycle the registry has recoded since."
Adam did not speak.
"You will be granted the Pioneer title. It is conferred on every Explorer who completes a Hell-tier world and returns first. The title does not carry a direct power. It widens your Bazaar access. Some shelves that were closed to you on the way out will be open. You will find the difference yourself."
The being moved a finger across the ledger. The page turned itself.
"You are also the first to clear world L1-0347 at the S-rank threshold on a first deployment, at sixteen, with no prior Explorer training. The standing record at the time of your attempt was that the world could not be cleared at S-rank by a candidate in their first year. You cleared it inside seventy-two hours." (AN: Its talking about Death note)
The being closed the ledger.
"Mr Varen. The Bazaar keeps accounts. Yours is unusually profitable. The energy released by your completion of L4-1349, in particular, has unlocked pathways on the public storefront that have not been listed yet. The Bazaar profits when its Explorers profit. You have profited the Bazaar. By the Bazaar's will, I am permitted to bestow upon you an opportunity."
A short pause.
"This courtesy is extended to exceptional people. You are not the first to receive it. You will not be the last. Do you understand what I am offering?"
"Not yet."
"Good. Listen."
"First. The parasite."
Adam's chest tightened in fright. He knew what this meant.
"Yes," he said before he had finished thinking the word.
The being inclined its head a fraction.
"You will not ask the price first. That is a bad habit. It is one I will let you keep."
"What is the price?"
"Ten thousand Nexus Points. The Bazaar's standard removal fee for a foreign anchor of the class planted in you would have been one hundred and forty thousand. You have been granted a margin reflecting the circumstances under which it was planted. You did not invite it. The donor is known to the Bazaar."
Amon, the name popped into Adams mind.
"He is known to us. The anchor he laid in you is below the threshold at which your individuated companion can find it. Removal is straightforward for us. Confirm and the parasite is gone before you leave this room."
"Confirmed."
The being did not move. Somewhere behind Adam's sternum, a sensation he had not registered as a sensation lifted off him. A weight he had not known was there stopped being there. His breath caught once, evened out.
"Done."
"Thank you."
"Ten thousand has been debited. The transaction will reflect when you go back."
"Second. The Marauder potion."
The being's hand turned a fresh page in the ledger.
"You ingested a Sequence Nine potion of the local pathway under non-consensual conditions. The potion's clash with your four spiritual systems voided those systems. The potion itself was not given the conditions it required to integrate cleanly. You came out of the encounter with a partial Marauder, no Nen, no Hamon, no Telekinesis, no Haki. The arithmetic of that is poor."
"It is."
"The Bazaar is permitted to settle this, because of your unique value and circumstances. The terms are not negotiable. You may accept them or refuse them. If you refuse, you keep what you have and we return you to your pad. If you accept, the following applies."
A breath. The being's outline steadied for the duration of the next stretch.
"One. Your Marauder potion will be completed. The full effects of Sequence Nine of the parent pathway will be present, as if you had taken the potion under proper acting-method conditions and digested it."
"Two. From this point forward, your primary growth is locked to this pathway. You may still purchase items from the Bazaar at standard rates. You may still develop ordinary skills. But you will not be permitted to acquire another full spiritual system from the Bazaar's listings. Your power will be the pathway, and what you can build with it."
"Three. To compensate for the loss of your prior systems and the lock-in, the Bazaar will provide the following:
"A. Your spiritual reserve is being adjusted upward, by a margin equal to four-fifths of the combined Nen and Haki pools you lost. The reserve at Sequence Nine will function at a depth equivalent to a peak Sequence Six Beyonder of an ordinary pathway. Think of it as carrying the lake of a Mid-Sequence in a Low-Sequence cup. The cup will grow as you advance.
"B. Because the Marauder potion was forced into you, and because the Bazaar's records show you did not select it, you are being granted uniqueness. The pathway you would have walked will instead mutate, in you, into a variant pathway unique to your line. You will hold abilities the standard Sequence Nine does not, and you will hold them on top of the base Marauder kit. The variant will name itself."
"C. Potions of this pathway are obtainable only from the Bazaar. You will not find a local equivalent on any deployment, and the formula will not appear in any registry outside this office."
"D. Digestion follows the rules of the world you visited. Acting method. You will live in the role of each sequence until the potion settles. The Bazaar will not shortcut this for you."
"E. After a potion is digested, you may purchase the next."
"F. From Sequence Five upward, the digestion-acting method will not be sufficient on its own. The Bazaar will issue a mission appropriate to the sequence in place of the ritual the parent pathway would have required. Completion of the mission completes the advancement."
"G. After you reach Sequence Four, you will be permitted to share the pathway. You may grant specific individuals the right to purchase its potions at your discretion. The Bazaar will administer the listings on your behalf."
"H. You will receive information on the current sequence only. No detailed information about future sequences will be released until you purchase them."
The being's hand settled on the page.
"That is the offer for the pathway. The terms are not modifiable."
Adam took a long breath through his nose.
"And the cost."
"None. The cost was the price you paid in that ally. The Bazaar does not charge twice for the same transaction."
"Then I accept."
"Acknowledged."
"Third. Your armour."
The being turned the page again.
"The garment you call the Suit-Hatsu was constructed off a merged biological-mechanical foundation through a Nen-anchored framework. The Nen framework is gone. Without it the construct would have decohered inside a year. The Bazaar will not permit the dissolution of an instrument that it had rewarded."
The flickering hand passed over the desk. A page appeared on the wood between them, fresh and unfoxed. Adam's vision did not need to focus to read it.
▓ SEALED ARTEFACT — UNIQUE
Designation: The Quiet Coat
Class: Bound. Adam Varen, exclusive.
Grade: 2 (Bazaar registry equivalent).
Origin: Suit-Hatsu, post-Marauder integration. Reforged.
▓ STATES
Two states only.
Integrated. No surface presence. Melded into host's body at the cellular level. Acts as a permanent passive protection layer; cannot be removed by force, perception, or hostile dissolution short of host death.
Clothing. Renders as ordinary garments selected by host, or as the prior fighting-form silhouette (sleek dark composite, faint indigo at the seams, helmet and visor optional). The two are interchangeable on intent.
The three former overlay modes (Stealth, Armour, Power) have been retired. Their functions are replaced by the new defensive baseline and the stamp system, below.
▓ DEFENSIVE BASELINE
The Quiet Coat carries a fixed defensive value tied to the host's current Sequence. The Coat absorbs and disperses incoming kinetic, thermal, and spiritual force across the bound region up to a ceiling appropriate to the host's tier. At Sequence Nine the ceiling holds against equivalent-tier strikes cleanly and against single Sequence-Eight strikes at meaningful cost. The ceiling rises as the host advances and recalibrates automatically; no investment of host spirituality required.
▓ ANTI-DIVINATION
The Coat is opaque to ordinary divination, scrying, fortune-telling, soul-reading, and remote-perception methods of equal-Sequence or lower origin. Higher-Sequence diviners can pierce it given effort; a peer-tier or sub-tier diviner cannot locate, identify, or read the host while the Coat is worn in either state. The host's name, history, future, and present state are not legible through it.
▓ THE STAMP SYSTEM
The Coat is the host's stamp ledger. Each successfully-returned-from L4-tier or higher deployment imprints a stamp on the Coat. A stamp is a small permanent residual ability, insight, or sensory channel drawn from the world it was earned in, and act as a passive ability for the host and an activatable one-shot effect on conscious draw.
Stamps are cumulative. Stamps do not decay. The host may carry as many as he earns.
Higher Sequence unlocks: at Sequence Four the host may spend stored stamps as fuel for advanced pathway constructs (definition deferred). At Sequence One the host may eject a stamp as a single-use standalone Sealed Artefact for transfer to another party.
▓ STAMPS AWARDED RETROACTIVELY
Two prior L4 returns are being recognised at this office. Effective immediately:
L4-1882 (The Boys): Homelander Resonance. Passive — Feather Falling, the ability to fall slowly, based on Homelander's flight. Active — a one-shot Homelander-tier laser attack.
L4-1349 (current): Beyonder Awareness. Passive — proximity detection of Beyonders within roughly thirty metres; flags presence of any Beyonder. Active — city-wide detection for Amon.
▓ BINDING
The Quiet Coat is bound to Adam Varen at the biological and soul level and cannot be separated, transferred, or used by another. On the host's death, the artefact dissolves.
▓ ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Acknowledge to integrate.
"Confirmed."
The page on the desk dissolved into the wood. Something at the cellular level of Adam's body settled, in the same way the parasite removal had settled, with no sensation he could point to.
"A note on the stamps. They are spending tools. Each active draw burns the charge until you return from a future L4 or higher deployment. The Feather Falling passive will keep you safe from falls; the active is the laser. The Beyonder Awareness passive will tell you when others like you are near. Spend them when you must. They do not refill on their own."
"Understood."
The being closed the ledger.
It folded the hands again. Adam had the impression, without anything in the room confirming it, that this exchange had taken a great deal less time than it appeared to have taken, and that the room would not exist a minute after he left it.
"Mr Varen. In addition."
"Yes."
"Your individuated companion will resume function on the pad. It has not heard this conversation. It will register the new pathway, the title, and the artefact change in the same instant It comes back online. It will adapt."
"Thank you."
"One final note. The pathway you are entering is not, properly speaking, the Marauder pathway any longer. The mutation completes itself the moment you wake. The variant will be created based on your own influence. Do not be surprised by what it becomes."
"Understood."
"The Bazaar acknowledges your service. May the odds be in your favor, Pioneer, and may you bring us more profit."
The being lifted a finger.
The reality around him crumbled like it was made from lego.
Earth Prime caught him on its pad like nothing had happened.
The bay lights had the same low warm temperature he had walked out under almost two Earth-side days earlier. Bay 3 of the Kerenth Operations Centre. The deployment array was winding down with its usual hum. The clock on the wall said 16:42. Mikhail Petrov was at the duty desk with the same chipped white mug he carried everywhere.
Mikhail looked up. He saw Adam. His chair scraped once against the floor as he stood.
"Adam. You came back early."
Adam tipped his head. He needed a moment to digest all of this.
Mikhail crossed to him at half a jog. "You all right? You look —"
"Give me a second."
Sage came back on inside his ear at the same instant. The channel opened with the small clean click it always had. There was a half-second pause as she finished orienting on the new state.
[ Host. I am back. I am seeing some changes. There is a great deal of new structure I did not authorise. Stand by. ]
Take your time.
[ We had a parasite it seems and the parasite is gone. Confirmed. I cannot find the signature anywhere in your body. The Suit-Hatsu has reconfigured to a Bazaar-bound sealed artefact, designation "The Quiet Coat." Two states only now, integrated and clothing. The three former modes are retired. A fixed defensive baseline is applied at the Coat's surface, scaled to Sequence Nine. Anti-divination layer is active. Two stamps are imprinted in the Coat's storage: The Boys, and the deployment we just left. The four spiritual have been retired. That has not changed. But, Host. I am reading a spiritual reserve in you that is much larger than my predictions showed. The depth is extraordinary, given your sequence. NP balance after the parasite debit: 12,290. ]
In the same moment Adam felt something snap inside of him.
Pioneer title. Marauder mutation. The mutation has finished and its called Stalker.
Sage paused.
[ ... Stalker. The variant has named itself. I have it now. Sequence Nine, Stalker pathway, Adam Varen exclusive. ]
Don't worry. I'll explain after I get out of the bay.
[ Host. The Bazaar has spoken to you in person? ]
It has. I'm fine. We are going to sit down with Brandt and the rest and I am going to explain it all once. Get the readouts ready.
[ Understood. ]
Adam took the first full breath he had taken since the alley in Backlund. His body felt different now in a way he had not expected. The armour was not on him, and it was. The integration was more spiritual now, different, the way a tuned instrument felt different in the hand once the right string had been replaced.
He brushed the Beyonder radar with his attention and felt the corridor open up around him as a map of presences. No Beyonders detected. Makes sense.
He let the attention slide off. The feeling dimmed back to ordinary sight.
He stepped off the pad.
Mikhail was watching him without saying anything. Adam met his eyes.
"It's been a long two days. I'd like to walk for a minute before I go find Brandt. Did Ren return?"
"Take yur time ser. Miss is still out on her deployment"
"Thank you, Mikhail."
He walked toward the corridor.
The Quiet Coat felt even lighter than before. A new pathway, sitting low in him under a new larger pool of something that had not been there before. The bronze knuckles in his coat pocket, cool against his hip, still there.
He was halfway down the corridor when the next notification surfaced in his vision. The Bazaar sent him his current-Sequence sheet.
[ Host. The Sequence Nine entry has landed. ]
Lets see.
He slowed to the wall and put his shoulder against the panelling. The notification bloomed across his vision in the bay-blue script.
▓ STALKER PATHWAY — SEQUENCE NINE
Designation: Stalker (variant of Marauder; Adam Varen exclusive)
Spirituality reserve: scaled to Sequence Six depth at Sequence Nine progression
Acting Method (current) hint: go unnoticed in a populated environment for sustained intervals
▓ BASE TRAITS (from canon Marauder, adjusted for cross-world operation)
Physical Enhancement. Body baseline rises ~10% above the host's pre-Sequence ceiling. Stacks on existing physiology.
Combat Proficiency. Native handling of short-blade weapons. Knife, short sword, hand-axe, and similar enter the host's muscle memory at trained-veteran level.
Agile Hands. Wrist and finger stability and speed elevated past human ceiling. Sleight-of-hand becomes unconscious-reflex.
Superior Observation. Passive pull towards valuable items. Works on items from any world: Bazaar inventory, Devil Fruits, Nen-imbued objects, Sealed Artefacts of any origin, Hatsus stored as residue. Does not reveal item identity, only presence and rough placement.Theft. The host may lift items from a target's pockets, hands, body, or close vicinity without being detected by ordinary means.
▓ THEFT — STALKER MODIFICATION (unique to this variant)
Standard Bazaar extraction strips world-native items from a returning Explorer. Only mission-rewarded objects, Bazaar-purchased items, and items the Bazaar has otherwise pre-tagged survive the cross-world transit. World-native objects acquired by an Explorer through any other means are filtered out at the pad and do not come home.
The Stalker Theft trait overrides this rule.
Any item the host successfully lifts under the Theft trait, in any world, is tagged at the moment of the lift as belonging to the host.The Bazaar's extraction filter honours the Theft tag. The item is treated as mission cargo for transit purposes and crosses worlds with the host.The right is the host's, by Stalker entitlement. No further fee is charged on the item's transit.Limit: applies only to items stolen using Theft. Items the host buys, is given, finds, picks up, or otherwise acquires by means other than the Theft ability remain subject to the standard extraction filter.
▓ STALKER ADDONS (unique to this variant)
Stalker's Veil. A passive ambient field. Two effects, simultaneous. (a) People in the host's vicinity feel a low-grade unease they cannot name — they do not want to look in this corner, do not want to remember this person, do not want to file the encounter in later recall. (b) Higher existences seeking to perceive the host meet a structural reluctance: their attention slides off unless they actively decide I am looking for this person and push through. Cost at Sequence Nine: trivial Spirituality, sustainable indefinitely. Visual concealment is partial — the host is still physically there. The veil cannot be see and is not present in reality.
Stalker's Shadow. A passive intuition. The host feels when he is being observed, searched for, named in another's thought, or tracked by ritualistic means. If the observer is within ~50 metres, the host registers a sense of direction toward them. The signal sharpens at proximity and dulls with distance.
▓ NEXT-SEQUENCE PURCHASE
Information on Sequence Eight (the next purchase) is withheld until the host commits to the buy. Current-sequence detail above is complete.
Adam read it three times.
[ Host. The Theft modification is the line worth re-reading. The Bazaar is rewriting the extraction filter for you. Anything you take under Theft comes home. ]
The Twin-Blow Knuckles came home with me, they were mission item. Bazaar honoured that. If they had not been a mission item, the standard filter would have stripped them off me on the extraction and left them in Tingen.
[ Correct. That was the standard rule. From now on, that rule does not apply to anything you steal by using Theft. If you had pickpocketed the Knuckles off a Nighthawk armoury clerk instead of them being mission item, the Theft tag would have traveled with it and the Knuckles would have crossed worlds with you. ]
So if next time I end up in LOTM, if I steal a Sealed Artefact off a high-Sequence Beyonder, I keep it.
[ Correct. The Theft works. You still have to steal the item without being killed for it. Stalker's Veil and Agile Hands are how you do that. The Theft modification is what makes the lift worth it. ]
What about objects with their own world-binding. Artefacts that anchor to a specific cosmos.
[ The Bazaar's filter is what enforces world-binding at extraction. The filter defers to the Theft tag. Whether the item functions on the other side is a separate question and depends on its mechanism. An Item that draws on some local energy source may not work well on Earth-Prime. A purely physical artefact, like the Knuckles, will work fine. Treat the Theft modification as a transit guarantee, not a power guarantee. ]
Understood. Useful.
[ Host. This is a great opportunity to equip Eclipse and sell the surplus items for profit. ]
Erectly my idea. All those famous weapons across the worlds shall be mine.
[ Host. We still need the ability to take them. ]
Let me dream a bit, like I would really like to snatch Ryujin Jakka. Would that work?
[ Possibly. ]
He pushed off the wall.
The Stalker's Shadow surfaced a faint passive feeling as he started walking again. Mikhail at the duty desk had turned his head to watch Adam's back through the bay glass. Just a friend wondering whether the man he had served on three contracts with was the same person who had walked into the chamber two days earlier.
Adam walked toward the corridor that led to the Hub portal block. He should talk with brandt.
AN: Bonus chapter at 500 power stones and another one at 700.