Soren didn't draw his Bone Khukuri. He didn't raise his crossbow. He simply unclasped his hands and let them hang by his sides.
The Black Sun in his chest began to rotate, creating a localized gravitational pull that caused the dust at his feet to spin in a miniature vortex.
"I am no thief, Father,"
Soren's voice carrying the multi-layered, metallic resonance of his new vocal cords.
"I am the consequence of your silence. I am the debt that has come home to roost."
"I am the Vault," Soren said.
The Chief however didn't respond. He didn't have the capacity for language anymore.
The needles in his brain registered only one thing: the high-density signature of the Courier's Vault on Soren's back.
The Chief's knees bent. The ground beneath his feet cracked as he loaded his massive muscle fibers like a siege engine.
~BOOM~
Envoy?
The Chief vanished in a blur of gray. He covered the twenty yards between them in a single, earth-shattering leap.
A normal Iron-Skin expert relied on momentum. Chief Ignis was a freight train.
When he swung the mace, the air pressure alone cracked the stone beneath his feet.
The weapon descended in a vertical arc that threatened to split the canyon floor, aimed at Soren's head, intent on turning his skull into a red smear on the canyon floor.
Soren's eyes flared tricolor; Gold, Violet, and Silver.
He didn't move. He didn't dodge. He didn't retreat. Not until the mace was inches from his skull.
Then he engaged his Mercury-Flow technique.
Soren shifted his weight by a mere fraction of an inch.
His joints, lubricated by the friction-less Quick-Silver essence, allowed his torso to pivot with a liquid grace that defied human anatomy.
His knees bent at an impossible angle, and he slipped under the swing.
The wind of its passage ruffling his hair so violently it threatened to pull them out of his very scalp.
~BOOM~
The mace slammed into the ground where Soren had been standing, shattering the bedrock and sending a shockwave of dust and stone shrapnel into the air.
But Soren was already inside the Chief's guard.
Soren drove his left fist—reinforced with Jade-Alloy and backed by the Hydraulic Pressure of his heart—directly into the Chief's abdomen.
It was a pure physical clash.
The Chief weighed three hundred pounds of muscle and iron. Soren weighed eighty pounds of boy.
But while his Golden Body was nearly three inches of hardened tissue, a literal armor of organic metal, Soren's density was four times that.
It was the sound of a falling mountain hitting a brine lake.
~Bam~
Chief Ignis didn't just grunt; he was lifted off his feet. The breath was driven from his lungs in an explosive gasp.
He stumbled back, his iron-hard heels gouging trenches in the rock as he fought for balance.
He looked down, confused by the green haze of his mind control. A child had just hit him with the force of a battering ram.
Soren stood his ground, his feet rooted. His internal organs, suspended in their Hydraulic Shock-Fluid, hadn't even registered the impact.
"You're hollow, Father," Soren said, his eyes glowing with the tricolor light of the Black Sun. "You built your armor on the outside. I built mine in the marrow."
As if responding to the taunt, the Qi-needles flared, forcing Chief Ignis' body past its limits, prompting him to deliver a heavy backhand counter.
His hand was a slab of meat the size of a shield, yet it swung over like the pillars of a roman mausoleum.
Soren raised his Dead Hand in defence.
~WHAM~
Soren was sent skidding back ten yards, his heels gouging twin trenches in the obsidian floor.
He glided himself to a halt, his Quartz-nerves humming with the electrical discharge of the impact.
"Impressive," Soren muttered, spitting a glob of dark, metallic blood. "Your skin is harder than the vault itself."
The Master Builder Gene did an extremely swift check of Soren's internal condition and began to adapt just as quickly.
[Target Armor: Golden-Body Tier 1 (Static Density).]
[Analysis: Physical strikes below 4,000 PSI are absorbed by the subcutaneous fat layer.]
[Strategy: Internalize the impact. Use the Quartz-Frequency.]
The inferences came as a combination of the Master Builder Gene's instincts, and the sheer amount of information Soren had managed to steal from the tribe's ancestral scrolls.
Instantly, Soren began to adjust his battle tactics, shifting into a different fighting style.
Chief Ignis however, wasn't going to allow him the breathing space to refine his combat style as he let out a roar and began unleashing a series of unrelenting strikes.
He swung the mace with one hand and lashed out with his fists with the other.
He almost became a whirlwind of brute force assault, each blow capable of leveling a house.
Soren however effortlessly flowed into a crimson blur, using the Mercury-Flow to "weave" his way through the attacks, his body bending and twisting like a ribbon in a storm.
He wasn't just dodging; he was storing.
Every time the Chief's mace grazed his skin, or a fist slammed into his forearms, the Quartz-Nerves kept converting the mechanical stress into an electrical charge.
Then Soren's skin began to glow with a faint, silver-blue aura; the "Piezoelectric Charge" of a god-tier machine.
Seeing this, Chief Ignis' instincts reacted aggressively.
He swung the mace in a horizontal sweep; it was the [Mountain Cleaver] technique that was the pride of the Ignis lineage.
This time, Soren didn't dodge.
He raised his Dead Hand. Its violet veins flared.
The Black Sun spun violently, generating a localized magnetic field around his palm.
Soren caught the haft of the mace.
~CRACK~
The ground beneath Soren's feet spider-webbed, but his arm did not buckle.
His Jade-Alloy bones held true.
His Quartz-Nerves converted the kinetic stress of the impact into a surge of electrical energy that crackled with a blue-white glow along his skin.
And the swing came to a dead stop.
Chief Ignis froze.
He tried to pull back his mace, his biceps bulging, but the weapon wouldn't move.
It was currently being held by a grip that felt like the gravity of the earth itself.
Then Soren looked up at the towering man.
"My turn."
Soren released the mace and spun.
His Goat-Horn Khukuri flashed into his hand.
He didn't aim for the chest or the head. The Golden body was too thick there. He aimed for the mechanics.
~Slash~
The serrated blade, driven by the hydraulic pressure of his heart, bit into the back of the Chief's knee.
It didn't cut the skin; it sawed through the tendon.
Chief Ignis growled, his leg buckling. He dropped to one knee, the stone cracking under his weight.
Soren became a fluid blur of Matte-Red and Silver.
He moved around the Chief like a liquid nightmare, dissecting the giant piece by piece.
Strike One: The Khukuri handle hammered into the Chief's radial nerve, and the mace fell from his numb fingers.
Strike Two: A Cobra-Fang spike, driven by a magnetic pulse, punched through the soft tissue of the Chief's elbow, locking his joint.
Upon strike three, Soren called for help.
"Cub! Now!" Soren commanded.
The Chimera Cub lunged from the shadows of a hematite flute.
It didn't aim for the throat; it was smarter than that. It aimed for the Friction Points.
The Cub's jaws clamped onto the Chief's Achilles tendon.
Its Rust Toxin flooded into the wound instantly, and from there, seeped the Chief's system.
Where the Cub bit, the famous "Golden Body" didn't bleed red or gold; it bled black rust.
The Chief let out a strangled cry of pain as his heel began to flake away into black, necrotic dust.
His leg buckled, his "Golden Body" unable to repair a wound that was attacking its very molecular structure.
He dropped to one knee, the mace clattering to the stone.
The golden sheen of his skin began to flake away like old paint, revealing the raw, vulnerable meat beneath.
Soren didn't hesitate. He closed the distance in a heartbeat, his feet making no sound on the silt.
He didn't punch. He didn't kick.
He delivered a gut-wrenching palm strike into the Chief's massive chest, right over the sternum.
But it didn't end there.
"Frequency Discharge" Soren whispered, before pumping the entire stored electrical charge from his Quartz-Nerves directly into his Hydraulic Pressure Reservoir.
~VROOOOOM~
A high-frequency vibration, so intense it was nearly silent, erupted from Soren's hands.
This was the "Internalized Fortress's" true weapon.
It didn't seek to break the Golden Body from the outside; it aimed to harmonize with the skeleton on the inside.
The vibration traveled through the Chief's chest, ignoring the armor, and resonated with his ribs.
Then his lungs.
Then his heart.
Chief Ignis' eyes went wide.
The green fire flickered violently as his internal organs, unprotected by the "Golden Body," began to hemorrhage under the sonic pressure.
The Chief coughed, and this time, the blood was bright, human red.
The brainwashing of the Qi-Needles stuttered.
For a fraction of a second, the green light faded, replaced by the pained, confused eyes of a father.
"S...Soren?" the Chief wheezed, his massive hand reaching out, not to strike, but to touch.
Soren froze.
The Black Sun's magnetic activity in his chest gave way to a heavy, mourning throb of his heart.
But then, the needles at the base of the Chief's skull flared with a blinding, toxic green light.
The Envoy's command re-asserted itself with brutal efficiency.
Then Chief Ignis' hand which had previously carried the intent of a longing father, abruptly swung heavily, delivering a backhand strike that caught Soren in the ribs.
~CRUNCH~
Soren was thrown ten feet through the air, before slamming into the canyon wall.
A normal boy would have turned into jelly. But Soren slid down the wall and landed on his feet.
He took a deep breath.
His Jade-Alloy ribs had flexed but not broken. His Hydraulic Organs had absorbed the G-force.
He spat a glob of metallic-tasting saliva.
"Good," Soren whispered. "You still have some untamed savagery left in you."
He looked at the Chief, who was struggling to stand, his leg ruined, his arm rusting, his mind still enslaved by the green light.
Soren felt a pang of something in his chest.
It wasn't love. It was pity.
This was the man who had thrown him into the pit.
This was the "Strongest" warrior of the tribe.
And now, he was just a puppet dancing on the strings of a man who breathed perfume and hid behind women.
"I won't save you," Soren said, walking forward.
The Black Sun resumed its activity with an indignant roar.
To think that it; the governing authority over Soren's internal world would be swiftly reduced to a subdued puppy by a fleeting insignificant emotion.
It was truly a first for it; a blight in its sovereign record, and it demanded recompense.
It demanded to obliterate the root cause of its plight.
It demanded the energy from the Qi-Needles.
"I shall free you." Soren whispered, influenced by the agitated state of the Black Sun.
Chief Ignis lunged forward in a desperate underhanded sneak attack.
His hand closed into a fist, and he drove it upward, looking to catch Soren in the chin.
~CRACK~
Soren was launched into the air like a kite with a loose string, spinning severally like a top.
He slammed into the ceiling of the Hollow, shattering a massive stalactite, before crashing back down into the Cinnabar trench he had occupied hours before.
His vision blurred.
His Jade-Alloy jaw slightly came undone, and misaligned.
His Hydraulic Organs screamed beneath the pressure of the G-force.
Then just as expected, the Master Builder Gene got to work. However, this time, even it was struggling to maintain Soren's healing integrity.
Soren felt the term "Critical Warning" blare all across his senses.
His body kept struggling against both the weight and suddenness of the damage.
He felt immense structural stress all over his body, and even an unpalatable dose of neural overload.
Then as if coming to a unanimous consensus with every fibre of his being, a thought slipped into Soren's mind;
'End It.'