I stood back, breathing deeply, surveying the training room around me out of the corner of my eye, though I was mostly focused on the status screen in front of me. I'd been locked away in the room training endlessly for hours, likely most of the day by this point. The gains from my training were significant, to say the least. Even after hours of experimentation, I was certain I was only scratching the surface of what I could do with my new Skills. Admittedly, I may have gone a little overboard in my excitement, experimenting with my new abilities. In my defence, I was left unsupervised, and it was far better done here deep underground at the banner facility than out in the wild, so to speak. Hopefully, David wouldn't freak out about the training room.

  That would be annoying.

  I snapped around when the door to the room hissed open. No one should have been able to open that door while I was in here. No one except maybe David or Uncle Wolf. And the young woman rushing towards me certainly wasn't either of the older men. Something was wrong, though; the woman looked like she was on the verge of panic, and her aura matched. She barreled across the training floor, nearly tripping over the shattered slabs of what used to be the floor.

  "Urgent, urgent, urgent!" she was shouting before she'd even stopped moving, her voice reedy with fear and anxiety. "Banner priority Zeta, all assets—it's Blackwood. Victor Blackwood. His team is in the red and requesting immediate reinforcement."

  The words tumbled out in a staccato, babbling rush. She was holding an earpiece in her palm so tightly her knuckles looked like snow. Her other hand flicked through a holopad that projected three rapidly updating screens. On one: a map, a dot blinking red; another, an inventory of Banner assets within a two-hundred-kilometre range. The third was a live feed of the team's life signs, all of them smeared in a haze of warning yellow.

  "You're the only high enough leveled combatant within thirty kilometres; no one else will make it in time," she said, her voice cracking. "They're requesting you by name."

  I didn’t need a second prompt. I snatched the earpiece, barely pausing to note the sweat-slick tremble in the admin’s hand. My own pulse thrummed with anticipation, suffused with a current of dread.

  "Where?" My voice was barely above a growl, but she flinched anyway.

  "Duffins Creek, north entrance. The dungeon is… It's already at stage three, and they're—" Her eyes darted to the screens, lips pressed in a thin line. "Sofia's down. Matt's missing. The boss is holding them in the chamber; they can't go after Matt."

  I grunted an acknowledgement to the woman before tearing off towards the exit at a full sprint.

  —-

  The woman stood there for a long moment, clutching her holopad with both hands now that her urgent delivery had completed its circuit. The impulse to run after the man tugged at her feet, but something—whether the horror show of debris in the room or the simple fact that her job was already done—kept her frozen.

  She looked around for the first time. Really looked. Her eyes skated uneasily over the deep gouges in the floor, the way the walls were caved inward as if taken to with a wrecking ball. The air was dense with the smell of ozone and burnt dust. She stepped gingerly over what looked like a chunk of ceramic embedded in the tile, then stared up at the ceiling where long, finger-width cracks radiated from the epicentre.

  "Jesus Christ, what the hell was he doing in here?" she muttered, words barely a sound.

  For all that, the room was silent except for her own ragged breathing and the faint hum of the still-active holopad. She ran a thumb along its smooth edge, eyes darting between the screens. None of them made any sense now; the red dot that indicated the location of the earpiece she'd just handed over to Kaesor was a comet streaking towards the dungeon, leaving the other assets in its dust. That shouldn't be possible. No one could move that fast.

  She shivered, a chill creeping down her spine as she took in the devastation surrounding her. The scars on the walls and floor were a testament to the raw power that man brought to bear. Power that had transformed this reinforced training room into a blasted wreck. If he could unleash such destruction in a space designed specifically for Rankers to hone their abilities, perhaps he truly stood a chance against whatever horrors awaited. Perhaps he could save the Blackwood team. The thought both terrified and exhilarated her. She pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders, feeling the weight of urgency pressing against her chest. Looking one last time at the battered remnants of the room, she wondered if Aiden's strength could indeed tip the scales in their favour. With a final glance at the chaos, she turned and left, her footsteps soft as she retreated down the hall, the door sealing behind her with a hiss that felt like an ending.

  She was needed back in the situation room; there was still work to do. And she wanted to see how this played out.

  —-

  The elevator was too slow.

  Flexing my Strength, I tore the grate from the ceiling and climbed out on top of it. A flex of my superhuman stats launched me up the shaft, wind whistling against my ears. Without even slowing for the first landing, I vaulted from wall to wall, boots and hands scarring the reinforced concrete with every impact. There was no time for measured movement, no space for caution—the elevator shaft was a vertical blur, wind hammered at my face. Flipping around, my feet slammed into the roof of the shaft a second later. A glance revealed the steel doors that led out of the shaft. Legs coiling, I launched myself at them, tucking my head to my shoulder. I barreled through the steel doors as if they didn't exist, steel screeching as it bent.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I tumbled out into the sterile hallway, white light strobing off the walls as alarms blared along the emergency line. The hallway was already filled with staffers and security, but they scattered like pigeons as I tore down the center, the comms earpiece squawking in my ear.

  "Kaesor, you're online?" a voice panted, female, the analyst who'd come to get me, maybe? I didn't know, and I didn't have time to care.

  "En route."

  A beat as the analyst toggled screens on their end. "Blackwood's team is pinned in the boss chamber. Looks like some sort of aberration abducted Matt, but the rest are still fighting." There were too many people in the hall, and they couldn't get out of the way fast enough. I growled before launching myself onto the hand, digging into the bricks easily. I launched myself along the hall over their heads, similar to the way I'd climbed the elevator shaft. I saw the window at the end of the hall and grinned; there was my exit. "The boss is something new; records don't match what we have." The analyst continued in my ear. You're… making good time."

  There was a question buried in that sentence, but I ignored it. My legs blurred as I dropped back down to the floor and launched myself through the window. It was only a two story drop. Nothing I needed to be concerned about.

  Not anymore.

  My feet hit the ground with a slap, and then I was gone again. "Get me pointed in the right direction," I growled.

  "Right, right," The analyst muttered, "a little to your left, twenty clicks out." I adjusted my heading, leaping clear over the perimeter fence of the banner facility. "That's it, dead straight, twenty klicks."

  "Going dark, I'll get back on when I hit the dungeon," I said, ignoring the squawking protest from the analyst. Speed mattered here, and I could go much faster as a spider than as a man, though that meant I'd have to forgo the earpiece until I arrived at the dungeon. That was a sacrifice I could live with. My form shifted, and I launched forward into the trees, my speed doubling.

  The world became a blur. A smear of green.

  I didn't bother with the service roads or anything like it—when your top speed hit north of a hundred kilometres an hour, trails were for people who cared about their shoes. I shredded through the woods, vaulting over fallen logs and cratering small bushes beneath my mass. The world yawned in slow motion; every branch and trunk, every stone, every struggling bird and squirrel registered as luminous afterimages across my new vision. The [All-Seeing Eye] drank in the mana-bleed from the dungeon, growing stronger as I closed the gap, warping the air around it into striated banners of blue and silver. I tore towards it, never slowing. Never blinking.

  By the time I hit the final approach, night was falling. The trees here were wrong, roots anchored in soil gone glassy with mana overexposure, leaves twitching in the windless dark. Even the crows knew better than to linger: they circled overhead, raucous and furious, but never landing. I slowed just enough to reorient. The forest was already thrumming—squirrels and raccoons had gone silent, all sound erased by the heavy background noise of panic that radiated from the entrance.

  I shifted back to being human. The earpiece returned much like my clothes and crackled to life. The voice of the analyst was waiting, a tremor of genuine relief audible now that the line was live. "Approaching breach perimeter now, less than a klick out—" There was a fumble on the other end, as if she was juggling a dozen security protocols. "Update. The boss chamber is stable, but only barely. No visual on the aberration, but... Matt's life signs just winked back in from deeper inside the dungeon. The remaining team is consolidated, holding the line. You're the only friendly within a kilometre and a half."

  I didn't reply. My eyes flickered, parsing the mana spill from the breach. It crawled along the bark of the trees and eddied around every rock, the blue and silver streaks thickening to a dense fog the closer I got. The world under the breach's influence was a painter's nightmare, smeared and streaked, everything brighter and more dangerous than real life. It wasn't right. The mana here was nothing like what I'd seen in the training room. Sure, there was more of it here, but that wasn't it. There was a qualitative difference between this and that. There was something wrong here. Deeply wrong.

  I bounded through the final thinning of forest, gravel popping underfoot as I careened onto the access road. The breach was maybe a hundred meters away, a halo of dissonant colour that scrambled the air and churned my stomach.

  I didn't break stride. I hit the edge of the breach at full speed.

  There was no resistance at all, just a bone-deep shimmer—one step you were in the forest, smelling cooling evening air, and the next the blank stone chamber of the dungeon entrance. A good thing to note would be that speed doesn't change from one side to the other. My shoulder slammed into the far wall of the dungeon chamber, and I bounced off with a grunt. I didn't have time to muse over the physics of whatever kind of inter-travel it was getting into a dungeon. I tore off down the hall following the scent of blood. I needed to get to the boss chamber. As much as I didn't want to leave Matt to whatever his fate was right now, the rest of the team was the priority. More lives saved and fewer lost. Simple math, and for the first time in my life, I didn't like it much.

  The corridors were thick with the reek of ozone and wet decay. Monster ichor left stains that steamed as I ran, the air curdled by what should have been a hundred years of rot crammed into a single hour. The walls sweated, the blue witch-light of the embedded stones flickering with every pulse of mana from the heart of the dungeon. [All-Seeing Eye] allowed me to see the currents of mana within the dungeon, leading me directly to the boss chamber where the mana was emanating from even more surely than the trail of monster blood and gore.

  The trail Victor and his team had left was clear: monster bodies strewn in clumps, limbs and chunks already dissolving into the stone, the air boiling around the larger corpses as the System chewed them away. Some still twitched. I didn’t stop, not even to check if their kills were truly dead. There was no time for redundancy.

  Through every twist and branch in the corridors, I followed the sound of battle, a constant, low-grade thunder that stuttered the stone underfoot and the trail of mana. I arrived at the entrance to the boss chamber, signified by the black veil hanging in the air. I dove forward without a thought, emerging into the boss chamber and the ongoing battle.

  The chaos of the fight hit me in the face. The chamber was a stone amphitheater, walls dripping with a tarry melt that looked like dungeon stone in necrosis. In the center coiled the boss—a titan of a snake, its scales rent and leaking, monstrous body thrashing as it fought Victor's team. But what I saw with [All-Seeing Eye] locked the air in my chest: the snake's aura was being eaten alive, blue suffused by a writhing black that pulsed in time with the corrupted mana webbed through the chamber.

  Victor was barely upright, shield arm trembling with exhaustion; Sofia lay sprawled against the wall, hands twitching as she tried to muster another spell. Alex's armour was rent in multiple places, his sword blunted and battered, blood trickling from his brow and soaking his shirt. The only one standing truly tall was Dave, the lean archer, teeth clenched white as he fired arrow after glowing arrow into the beast's boiling wounds.

  I didn’t have time for a plan. The snake saw me—or rather, felt me—before anyone else in the room. It jerked mid-coil, head swinging towards me, mandibles split wide as a new pulse of green built in its throat.

  I growled two words, the new Spell shivering through every nerve as more than a quarter, nearly half of my entire mana reserve was dumped into the Spell as I overcharged it by sheer instinct.

  "[Edge Glare]."

  The world slowed to a crawl. Light split and refracted, the snake's scales shining like prisms in an ink bath. For a split second, the entire chamber froze as if reality held its breath.

  Then it warped and twisted.