Chapter 26: Ten Seconds of Truth
(First Person POV – May Blackheart)
The drop-ship's interior was a symphony of hydraulic groans and the heavy, rhythmic thumping of atmospheric stabilizers. Red battle-lights bathed the squad in a crimson hue that made everyone look like they were already bleeding.
"Three seconds to LZ!" the pilot's voice crackled. "Sector 4 is hot! Good luck, Delta."
The floor dropped out.
Gravity reclaimed us. We weren't just falling; we were being launched into the throat of Old London. The Void-fog here was a physical weight—a gray, swirling soup of particulate energy that tasted like bitter metal.
"Form up!" Sera Veylan's voice screamed through the comms. "Diamond formation! Lily, center! Blackheart, if you lag, you're bait!"
We hit the ground with the force of a meteor strike. My boots crunched into the black glass that used to be a London street.
"System," I whispered, my voice lost in the roar of the wind. "Initiate the Blackout."
"Calculated," Cellular Adaptation replied. "Electronic warfare suite active. Injecting 10-second static loop into the Night Watcher surveillance uplink now."
The why was simple. Ten seconds is an eternity for a god, but a mere 'glitch' for a man. If the Overseer saw the reality of my movement—my acceleration exceeding Mach 2, my Void absorption peaking at Star-3 levels—my life as a 'recruit' would end. I needed ten seconds of darkness to commit a slaughter that logic could not explain.
The fog rippled.
From the shadows of a collapsed clock tower, the Merged Stalker emerged. It was a nightmare of biological geometry—six spindly limbs ending in obsidian blades, three heads fused into a single, screeching mass of teeth, and a body that flickered in and out of physical reality.
It moved faster than the human eye could track. It ignored Sera's kinetic shield. It ignored Kael's speed. It lunged directly for the center—directly for Lily.
"May!" Lily's scream was the signal.
Ten.
The cameras went dark. I triggered Neural Overclocking (Rank 1).
The world turned into a frozen sculpture of gray and red. Sera was mid-shout, a ripple of kinetic energy frozen around her hands like jagged ice. Kael was halfway through a blink. The Stalker was airborne, its claws centimeters away from Lily's throat.
Nine.
I didn't run. I erased the distance.
My movement generated a vacuum that pulled the fog along with me. I reached the Stalker before its brain could register a change in the air pressure. I didn't use a weapon. My hand, reinforced by a 100% output of the Physical Star System, drove straight into the creature's central thorax.
Eight.
My fingers closed around its Void Core—a pulsating, violet heart of pure energy. The beast tried to phase-shift, to turn its body into a ghost to escape my grip.
"Wrong frequency," I thought.
I adjusted my internal resonance to match its phase. I became as intangible as the beast, and then I became harder. My hand solidified inside its chest.
Seven.
I ripped the core out.
The beast shrieked in a frequency that shattered every window within three blocks, but in my overclocked world, it was just a slow, mournful moan.
Six.
I didn't stop there. I needed the energy. I opened my palm and triggered Void Energy Absorption (Full Manifestation). The violet core didn't just drain; it imploded. A torrent of raw power flooded my meridians.
"Physical Star 1: 96%... 98%... 100%."
"Transition Complete. Physical Star 2 Unlocked."
Five.
My body underwent a microscopic reconstruction. Bone density tripled. Muscle fibers re-wove themselves into a carbon-lattice structure. My senses expanded. I could hear the heartbeat of a rat three kilometers away. I could see the heat signatures of the squad's fear.
Four.
I looked at the Stalker's dying body. It was still in the air, its momentum carrying it forward despite having no heart. If I let it land on Lily, the impact alone would kill her.
I spun, my leg moving in a perfect 360-degree arc. I caught the beast mid-air with a roundhouse kick that carried enough force to level a small building.
Three.
The Stalker was launched backward, its body disintegrating into ash as it broke the sound barrier. It slammed into a reinforced concrete wall five hundred meters away, the explosion masking the sound of my impact.
Two.
I moved back to my original position. I dropped to one knee. I bit my lip until it bled, letting the crimson liquid smear across my chin. I forced my heart to hammer against my ribs. I made myself look like a girl who had just been blown back by a shockwave.
One.
The static cleared.
The Overseer's monitors flickered back to life.
Sera Veylan blinked. The Stalker was gone. A massive cloud of dust and debris was settling five hundred meters down the street where the beast had "mysteriously" crashed.
"What... what just happened?" Kael gasped, his blades trembling in his hands.
"The beast... it lunged," Sera stammered, looking at the crater in the distance. "It must have miscalculated its phase-jump. It hit the wall. It self-destructed."
"Is everyone okay?" Lily cried out, her eyes searching the fog.
She found me. I was on the ground, breathing heavily, looking up at her with a facade of terrified relief. But deep in my shadow-tether, I sent her a single, pulsing thought: I have it.
Lily's eyes widened, but she stayed silent. She knew.
High above, in the Command Center, Overseer Mark leaned into his screen, his hands gripping the edge of the desk.
"System! What was that?" he roared. "Why did we lose the feed?"
"Electromagnetic interference from the Merged Stalker's death-shriek," the AI replied calmly. "Candidate 16 appears to have suffered minor concussive trauma from the shockwave. Sector 4 is clear of primary threats."
Mark stared at the image of me—the 'lucky' Rank 16 girl wiping blood from her face.
"Ten seconds," Mark whispered. "We lost ten seconds, and the strongest beast in the sector turned into dust."
He looked at my profile. He looked at the [GHOST] tag he had created.
"You didn't just survive, May," he murmured, his voice a mix of awe and terror. "You fed."
Down in the ruins, I stood up slowly. The power of a full Physical Star 2 was humming in my blood like a choir of sirens. I looked at the dark horizon, where more beasts were gathering, drawn by the scent of the slaughter.
The "Training" was over. The hunt had officially begun.
(First Person POV – Kaiden)
I hit the ground twenty meters away from Squad Delta's drop zone. My Perfect Weapon Mastery was already screaming. The air felt wrong. It wasn't just the fog; it was a pressure in my inner ear, the kind you get before a massive lightning strike.
"Epsilon, form up!" I shouted, drawing my serrated daggers. My hands were shaking. My talent, which usually told me exactly how to kill everything in sight, was currently whispering a single word over and over: RUN.
I looked toward Delta's sector. A massive plume of ash was rising into the violet sky.
"What was that?" one of my squadmates gasped. "Did the Stalker explode?"
"I don't know," I muttered, but my eyes were fixed on the silhouette standing in the center of that ash cloud.
It was May. She was standing perfectly still, her back to us. Even through the fog, she looked... different. Her posture wasn't that of a tired recruit anymore. She looked like the sword I had been sharpening for fourteen days—finally pulled from the forge and plunged into ice.
"Sera! Kael! Report!" Harrington's voice boomed over the wide-channel comms.
"We're... we're okay," Sera's voice came back, sounding dazed. "The Stalker... it engaged us, and then there was a massive energy discharge. It just... disintegrated. I think it was a core instability."
I gripped my daggers until my knuckles turned white. Core instability? Merged Stalkers didn't have core instabilities. They were the most stable predators in the Void. They didn't disintegrate. They were harvested.
I looked at May again. She finally turned around. Even from this distance, her eyes seemed to glow—one a bloody sun, the other an endless night. She looked at me, and for a split second, my Weapon Mastery gave me a reading on her.
Target: May Blackheart.
Status: Complete.
Lethality: Divine.
I looked away immediately, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I didn't want to know. I didn't want to be the one who saw the ghost.
(AUTHOR'S NOTE:- the reason why she said the core instability because how the hell one explained how a monster miscalculated his own ability distance to that extent.)