Soren saw what looked like threads originating from the dead sniper and then scattering towards various direction within a mile radius.
While Soren was busy interpreting the meaning of the new vision, his "Master Builder Gene" was busy siphoning the Quick-Silver essence, mapping it and adjusting to the new information it was obtaining from it.
A few breaths later, the gene seemed to have selected the traces of the "Quick-Silver" elixir within the blood of the Ghost-Striders as the "Lubricant" needed for Soren's next skeletal refinement.
Soren looked down at the dead Seeker. He took the Seeker's shadow-cat cloak and wrapped it around himself.
He wasn't the prey anymore.
He was the "Filter" that the Wastelands had built to clean up the world of the Ignis Tribe.
He looked toward the high ridges where Vaelin and the rest of the Seekers were moving.
The threads originating from the dead sniper had scattered towards that area, but now that he was dead, they seemed to be vanishing.
"One," Soren whispered.
The Chimera Cub appeared at the edge of the ridge; its mouth stained with the silver-blood of the Seeker's scout-hawk it had intercepted in the air.
The "Sinking of the Jade" was complete. The "Shadow-Path of the Silt" had begun.
Then Soren stepped off the ridge, disappearing into the red mist before the Seeker's body had even turned completely cold.
Beneath his red skin, his Jade-Alloy bones shined with a dark, predatory light.
The Black Sun was spinning faster now. It wanted more. It wanted the Envoy. It wanted the Matron.
It wanted the world to realize that some debts... are can only be paid in the Silt.
---
The ridge was a jagged spine of scorched hematite, overlooking a valley of shifting red dust that the map called the "Cauldron of Sighs."
Here, the air didn't just move; it vibrated with the residual heat of a thousand buried iron veins.
Soren sat in a shallow depression beneath a shelf of quartz, his matte-red skin almost indistinguishable from the surrounding silt.
His entire body was currently a vessel of violent transformation.
Within his veins, the "Quick-Silver" essence he had siphoned from the Seeker Sniper was being dismantled.
Most Stone Skin experts looking to break into the Iron Skin stage would never dare use the "Quick Silver" Elixir.
Only the dare devils amongst the Ignis Tribe's Warriors use them, and as such, upon their successful breakthrough, they are all set aside for the Chieftain's Household's uses.
To a normal person, injecting the refined mercury-blood of the Ghost-Striders would be a death sentence—a heavy metal poisoning that would turn the brain to mush and the liver to stone.
But to the Master Builder Gene, it was a long-awaited delivery of industrial-grade grease.
Soren's breathing was shallow, his internal temperature skyrocketing as the Gene worked.
The "Sinking of the Jade" had left his joints feeling like heavy iron hinges; durable, but prone to "grinding" during explosive movements.
He felt the Gene seizing the silver molecules, wrapping them in a protective layer of the Tranquil Poison's necrotic energy to prevent toxicity, and then driving them straight into the "friction points" of his Jade-Alloy skeletal frame.
The silver mist seeped into the sockets of his shoulders, the vertebrae of his spine, and the complex hinges of his knees.
The sensation was not the "welding" heat of the Golden Elixir, but a cool, slippery numbness.
It felt as if his bones were no longer touching one another, but were suspended in a medium of zero-resistance.
The Black Sun—influenced by his heavily beating heart—gave a heavy, gravitational thump.
It flared into life in response to the nudges of the Master Builder Gene, activating from its observatory state, and becoming the most vital part of Soren that governed the entire process.
Its magnetic influence morphed the Quick-Silver particles into a "Super-Fluid" state.
Soren opened his eyes, but they were no longer just violet-and-gold; a thin, metallic silver ring had formed around the pupils, spinning in a counter-rotation to the Void.
He stood up like a well-oiled engine gear.
There was no sound of clicking bone or shifting muscle. He simply transitioned from sitting to standing.
The movement was so smooth it almost lacked a beginning or an end.
"Mercury Flow," Soren whispered.
He took a step forward. But he didn't just walk; he glided.
The Master Builder Gene had gone to work with the Hematite-Silt skin on the soles of his feet, adjusting its porosity to create a microscopic cushion of air and vibration.
To any tracker, Soren would no longer leave physical trails of his presence.
Beside him, the Chimera Cub let out a low, vibrating purr. It, too, was changing.
The silver-blood it had consumed from the scout-hawk had accelerated its maturation.
Small, jagged plates of rusted hematite were beginning to emerge from its shoulders, looking like a set of serrated, obsidian-colored pauldrons.
"They're coming," Soren said.
Four heartbeats.
They weren't heavy like the Iron Skins. They were "light" heartbeats—rhythmic, controlled, and suppressed.
They were moving in a pincer formation, utilizing the "Shadow-Cat Hide" cloaks to bend the light around them.
To the naked eye, they were nothing more than heat-shimmer in the canyon.
But to Soren's seismic array, they were screaming alarms.
He felt the displacement of air as Vaelin—the leader of the Seekers—leaped from one hematite pillar to another.
He felt the "click-clack" of the Bone-Steel crossbows being cocked.
Vaelin was two hundred yards away, perched on a spire that gave him a perfect line of sight to the quartz shelf.
"Target spotted," Vaelin's voice traveled through the vibrating rock, a faint whisper that Soren's skin amplified. "He's standing in the open. Arrogant brat."
"Wait," a second voice hissed—the voice of a Seeker named Kael. "Something feels wrong."
"It doesn't matter," Vaelin snapped. "The Envoy wants the Vault. Crossbows ready. Aim for the legs. We need him alive, but we don't need him mobile."
Soren didn't look toward the spire. He didn't need to. He felt the tension in Vaelin's trigger-finger through the atmospheric pressure.
Three... two... one...
Three Bone-Steel bolts hissed through the air, traveling at speeds that would have outpaced the Razor-Winged Manticore.
In the past, Soren would have had to dodge or brace his Bony-Jade skin to take the hit.
Now, that was still erratically thumping from his new bodily transformation, he decided to test the Magnetic Deflection of the Black Sun.
As the bolts entered a five-meter radius around him, Soren didn't move his body. He simply "pulsed" the Black Sun.
The Black Sun in his chest rotated with a violent, gravitational snap. Its magnetic field erupted outward in a spinning spherical shockwave.
The Bone-Steel bolts—high-density metal alloys—got caught in the invisible torque of the Void. But they weren't blasted away, and neither did they strike Soren. Instead, they "veered" slightly as if being caught in a rotating wind.
They spiraled around Soren in a chaotic orbit for a fraction of a second before being flung violently away, slamming into the quartz shelf behind him with enough force to shatter the stone.
Vaelin froze on his spire. "What... what was that? Did he just bend the air?"
"He didn't move!" Kael shouted, his voice cracking with panic. "The bolts just missed!"
"He's a monster," Vaelin whispered, his "Quick-Silver" blood turning cold. "Fall back! Establish a—"
He didn't get to finish the command before Soren used his newly-acquired Mercury Flow movement technique.
He pushed off the ground with a force that should have shattered his ankles, but the Jade-Alloy skeleton absorbed the recoil, and the Quick-Silver lubricant allowed his joints to snap into position with zero friction.
~Swoosh~
Soren vanished.
To the Seekers, it looked like Soren had simply been deleted from one spot and pasted twenty yards closer.
He was moving in a "Zig-Zag" pattern, his body low to the ground, his matte-red skin absorbing the light and his silhouette becoming a blur of crimson and silver.
The Mercury Flow technique, in partnership with his Silt Skin helped Soren bypass the "Wind-Resistance" that usually slowed down his physical body.
It was almost as if Soren was moving within the "Silt-Medium", a tunnel of non-existent friction and wind resistance.
Kael, the Seeker closest to the ground, panicked. He drew a pair of curved daggers made of blackened steel and lashed out.
Soren didn't parry. He "flowed" into evasion.
As Kael's blade swung toward his neck, Soren's waist pivoted with a liquid grace that would be impossible for a human spine.
He bent backward until his head nearly touched his heels, the blade passing inches above his chest.
While in this inverted position, Soren's right arm—the Dead Hand—snapped out like a cobra, and latched onto Kael's ankle.
Then the violet veins on the Dead Hand flared.
"Filter," Soren whispered.
The necrosis didn't just rot the skin; it "Locked" the Quick-Silver in Kael's blood.
By utilizing the magnetic influence of the Black Sun in such close proximity to his target, Soren was able to "freeze" the metal molecules in the man's leg.
Kael's leg didn't break; it ossified. It became as rigid and brittle as a frozen pipe.
Soren stood up from his bridge-position, his hand still clamped on the ankle, and simply twisted.
~Snap~
The sound was like a lead pipe snapping.
Kael shrieked, falling to the dust, his leg now a useless, gray-black pillar of necrotic metal.
Soren didn't finish him. He didn't need to. The Chimera Cub emerged from the red haze, its rusted-hematite scales bristling. It leaped onto Kael's chest and plunged an "Oxidizing Bite" into the man's throat.
Kael's Iron Skin didn't save him. The Cub's bite accelerated the decay of his "Quick-Silver" tempering, turning his neck into a flaking mess of rust and black bile in seconds.
Two Seekers remained, including Vaelin.
They were now on the high ridges, their "Shadow-Cat" cloaks fluttering in the wind.
They have now realized that they weren't hunting a boy; no, they were trapped in a cage with a biological catastrophe...
"The Resonance Stone!" Vaelin roared, pulling a bone-white artifact from his belt. "It's supposed to paralyze him! Why isn't it working?!"
Vaelin activated the stone.
A wave of white-hot, spiritual pressure erupted from the Resonance Stone on Kael's person, designed to "Soul-Freeze" anything with a limited radius in mere seconds.
Soren felt the wave hit him.
In the past, he had used the Black Sun to "absorb" frequencies. This time however, his instincts spurred him to "Reflect" it.
As the energy frequency surged into Soren, the Black Sun didn't just absorb them; it channeled it all into his vision.
Soren's eyes flared with a blinding, golden light that pierced through the red dust.
He stared directly at Vaelin.
"My world," Soren said, his voice carrying the heavy, gravitational weight bass to it. "My rules."
The spiritual pressure from the Resonance Stone shot out of Soren's eyes, magnified by the extra humph given to it by the Black Sun's magnetic shockwave.
Instantly, Vaelin let out a choked gasp, as his heart stopped for three full beats: the "Soul-Freeze" surging straight into his own nervous system.
He fell from the spire, his body hitting the jagged hematite ridges with a series of sickening thuds.
The final Seeker, seeing his leader fall and his comrade rusted to death, did the only thing a sane man could do.
He ran.
He utilized the full extent of his Quick-Silver blood, leaping over the ridges with desperate, frantic speed.
Soren watched him go. But he didn't chase. Instead, he reached into his pouch and pulled out the Cobra-Fang wrist-spikes.
He didn't aim with his eyes, they were currently suffering the aftereffects of coming in contact with a foreign energy; so, he aimed with his other senses instead.
He felt the Seeker's vibration—the way his feet struck the rock, the way the wind caught his cloak.
Then Soren threw the spike, "Pulsing" the Black Sun at the same time, causing the magnetic torque of the Void soul to behave like a Railgun Accelerator.
~Shiinng~
The Bone-Steel spike didn't just fly; it screamed through the air, breaking the sound barrier.
The spike caught the fleeing Seeker in the center of his back, punching through his "Shadow-Cat" cloak, his Iron-Skin, and his spine, exiting through his chest and pinning him to a hematite pillar fifty yards away.
A low draft of wind crossed the landscaping whistling a low sigh, before utter silence returned to the Cauldron of Sighs...