The air inside the Artisan District's central smithy was becoming a pressurized soup of soot and ionizing heat.
To Soren's 3D Energy Vision however, the environment looked more like a shimmering grid of thermal gradients, with the massive pile of Star-Iron bars acting as a gravitational sink.
He stood in the center of the forge, his matte-red skin now heavily marbled with the silver veins of integrated ore.
The Master Builder Gene was working at peak efficiency, weaving the high-density mineral into his Jade-Alloy skeletal structure.
He felt his own mass increasing, his feet creating micro-fissures in the reinforced stone floor with every infinitesimal shift of his weight.
Then all of a sudden, the smithy's iron-reinforced oak doors began groaned under a sudden, external pressure.
It wasn't the rhythmic battering of soldiers; it was a heavy, wet thud, followed by the sound of wood fibers splintering under immense, thundering force.
Soren didn't turn.
He watched the door through the seismic vibrations traveling through his heels.
The "Green Static" outside was thick, a condensed storm of parasitic Qi that signaled the arrival of something beyond a mere thrall.
The doors finally gave way, not bursting inward, but warping off their hinges as a massive shadow stepped into the flickering orange light of the forge.
"Soren... the little ink-stained ghost," a voice wheezed, the sound of the voice being synonymous to wet leather being dragged over gravel.
It was Gary.
But the steward Soren remembered—the man who had stolen his scrolls and backhanded Liora for his quilt—was gone. In his place stood a biological obscenity.
Gary's once-gaunt frame was now bloated.
His skin had stretched so taut it was almost translucent; revealing pulsating green veins that throbbed synchronously with a secondary, parasitic heart.
He still wore the tattered silk of a steward, the fabric cutting into his unnaturally swollen shoulders.
His eyes were no longer human; they were twin pits of emerald fire, housed on a face that had two glowing, green permanent crying scars.
Gary stepped forward, his breathing a wet, mechanical rattle.
"The Envoy... he told me you'd come for the metal.
He said the 'Anomaly' would seek density to hide its hollowness."
He raised a hand—a fleshy, distorted limb ending in fingers that had fused into blunt, green-veined clubs.
"I'm took your scrolls, boy. That I took your 'genius.'
Otherwise, the Matron... she wouldn't have given me something this better.
She gave me purpose." He rage-baited.
In Soren's vision however, Gary was no longer a man anymore; he was a failing containment vessel.
The Envoy had pumped him so full of parasitic Qi that his cellular walls were undergoing a permanent, agonizing meltdown.
He was the "Hardware" the Envoy had discarded to test Soren's limits.
Soren finally turned, his tricolor eyes cold and analytical.
He shifted his weight, and the stone floor beneath him shattered, a spiderweb of cracks spreading outward from his silver-veined feet.
"You merely took papers, Gary," Soren replied, his voice coming in a resonant, metallic bass that caused the hanging tools in the smithy to chime in sympathetic vibration.
"You didn't take the knowledge. And unlike me, you don't look too well,"
"You are an inefficient system, overloaded by a power your biology wasn't built to house." He raised his hand, his Star-Iron knuckles gleaming with a dark, lunar light.
The Mercury-Flow in his veins began to hum, a high-frequency vibration that prepared his frame for the impending impact.
The memory of the Weeping Cottage flickered in Soren's mind—the cold, the hunger, and the day Gary had laughed as he confiscated the only things that gave warmth and meaning to his life.
The "Debt" was not just about scrolls; it was about the systematic dehumanization of a child who only wanted to find hope in the past.
"I remember the honeycake, Gary," Soren murmured, his internal monologue a cold script of retribution.
"And I remember the price of the ink."
He saw Liora in the shadows, her eyes wide with terror as she stared at the monster Gary had become.
This was the ghost of their past, manifested in rotting, green-lit flesh.
Liora pressed herself against the soot-stained wall, her hands trembling as she clutched the vault
She saw the way Gary looked at her—a flicker of the old, lecherous malice still ever-present in those burning green sockets.
Even as a monster, Gary's was still rotten to the core.
"Soren, be careful!" she whispered, her voice barely audible over the roar of the furnace.
She saw the floorboards buckling under Gary's weight.
He was a wrecking ball of parasitic energy, a biological bomb waiting for a trigger.
She realized then that Soren wasn't just fighting for his life; he was purging the last remnants of their shared nightmare.
Gary roared—a sound that was half-scream, half-engine-grind—and lunged.
He swung a massive, green-glowing fist that carried enough kinetic energy to level a stone wall.
But Soren didn't dodge.
He planted his feet, engaging the Seismic Grounding technique of his Master Builder Gene.
~BAM~
He caught Gary's fist with his own palm.
The impact sent a shockwave through the smithy, blowing out the remaining windows and extinguishing half the forge-fires.
However, Soren's silver-veined arm didn't buckle even a tiny bit.
He stood like an iron pillar, his Star-Iron-reinforced bones absorbing the impact of the blow, siphoning the excess energy into his Black Sun.
Structural failure imminent in target's radius," the Master Builder Gene assessed, as Soren analyzed the biological cost of Gary's strike.
The green Qi had surged through Gary's arm, but his own muscles were tearing under the strain of his unnatural strength.
Blood, black and steaming, were beginning to leak from Gary's pores.
The Envoy obviously didn't care about his survival; he was simply using the steward as a sensory probe to measure the density of Soren's new frame.
It was a dilemma Soren felt in his marrow: he was being forced to participate in an experiment where the only outcome for his opponent was total biological dissolution.
Soren's tricolor eyes flared with a sudden, Abyssal light.
"Then the debt is even higher than I calculated," he said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, subsonic growl.
He didn't push Gary back; he pulled him in. Then by manipulating the high-density Star-Iron in his own frame, Soren created a gravity well in his immediate surroundings.
Gary's bloated body was jerked forward, his feet dragging through the stone floor.
Soren's free hand moved with surgical precision, his fingers stiffening into needles of Star-Iron Qi.
He didn't want to punch Gary. He wanted to thoroughly dismantle the parasite.
"No... stop... it burns!" Gary screamed, his emerald eyes flickering as the Envoy's control signal began to stutter under the gravitational rip.
Soren ignored the plea. He wasn't listening to Gary; he was listening to the frequencies of the "Green Static", searching for something that had proven elusive up until now.
Then all of a sudden, his senses picked up on it.
He found the anchor point—a pulsating node of concentrated parasitic Qi located just beneath Gary's sternum.
It was the "Stitch" that held the biomass together.
Soren leaned in close, his cold, matte-red forehead nearly touching Gary's sweating, green brow.
"You all made me a ghost, Gary. But the Wastes remade me a reaper; and now I have come for your souls."
Then Soren drove his fingers into Gary's chest.
There was no resistance.
The Star-Iron-tipped fingers sliced through the overtaxed flesh as if it were wet parchment.
However, Soren didn't grab at the heart; no, he grabbed the "Green" node, and instantly, Gary's body stiffened.
A violent convulsion racked across his frame as Soren began to vibrate his Quartz-Nerves at the exact counter-frequency of the Envoy's signal.
He was undoing Gary himself.
The effect was immediate and horrifying.
The green light began to bleed out of Gary's eyes and mouth, turning into a fine, emerald mist that Soren's Black Sun immediately began to consume.
The "Dissection" was a clinical execution of biological justice.
Soren watched through his 3D vision as the parasitic network inside Gary began to unravel.
His bloated muscles began to deflate, the translucent skin sagging and tearing.
Without the "Green" Qi to hold the cells together, Gary was literally falling apart.
The Envoy's presence radiating out of Gary—a distant, cold observation—sharpened into a jagged spike of irritation.
Soren felt the feedback loop; the Envoy had just lost a primary sensory node, and he was incensed.
The "Hardware" had failed the stress test, and the "Anomaly" was proving to be a purifier to his contamination.
As the last of the parasitic energy was sucked into Soren's chest, the consequence rippled outward.
In the Obsidian Spire, the Envoy's throne cracked.
By deleting Gary, Soren hadn't just killed a steward; he had severed a "Command Thread."
The hive-mind of the Ignis Tribe flickered, for a brief millisecond, every thrall in the inner rim stood still.
It was a momentary lapse in the symphony of their oblivion, a silence that signaled the arrival of a predator that could eat the conductor's music.
Soren felt the weight of the moment—the realization that he was no longer just surviving; he was now dismantling the infrastructure of someone who is revered as a god.
Soren pulled his hand back, allowing Gary to slumped to the floor, his body now a withered, gray husk of its former self.
There was no "Green" left in him, only the faint, dying spark of a man who had sold everything for a power he could never understand.
Soren stood over him, his matte-red skin glowing with the stolen energy, the silver veins in his arms pulsing with a dark radiance.
He looked at Liora.
"It is finished," he said, but his voice lacked the warmth of the reunion.
He was embracing the "Monster" role now, his frame too heavy for pity, his heart too dark for forgiveness.
However, the peace of the smithy was terribly short-lived.
The seismic sensors in Soren's heels registered a massive, coordinated movement approaching.
The smithy door was suddenly blasted inward by a volley of Golden-Body Qi strikes.
Five Golden Elites, their armor shimmering with the Envoy's emerald light, surged into the room.
These weren't bloated stewards; they were trained killers, their meridians reinforced by years of cultivation and now "Overclocked" by the parasitic override.
They moved in perfect synchronization, their spears forming a cage of golden and green light around Soren.
Among the Elites, a taller figure emerged, draped in the blood-red robes of the Shamanic Inner Circle.
It was the High Shaman's Successor, his face hidden behind a mask of hammered bronze.
The Golden Elites closed in, their spears humming with a lethal frequency.
Soren looked at the pile of Star-Iron bars, then at Liora, then at the High Shaman's successor.
He felt the Black Sun in his chest settle into a low, terrifying growl.
He wasn't trying to run; no, he was going to use the smithy as his anvil, and the Elites as his raw material.
"Liora, get behind the anvil," he commanded, his skin beginning to glow with a dull, incandescent heat.
The smithy doors were sealed by the Shaman's Qi, turning the forge into a cage of fire and iron.
Soren lowered his center of gravity, the stone floor groaning as his Star-Iron density reached its peak.
The first Elite lunged, his golden spear-tip whistling toward Soren's throat with the momentum of a vengeful viper.
Soren however didn't even block with a weapon; he simply stepped into the strike, his silver-veined chest meeting the spear-point with a deafening clang.
The spear shattered into a thousand splinters, as the First Elite felt his entire arm jerk backward with a level of force that threatened to snap his arm in half.
For a brief moment, everyone paused in shock, before they all charged with an even greater level of aggression.
To them, if they couldn't capture him, then they would take him down with them down a path of mutual destruction.
Soren however, simply smirked a bit, he was just about to go test the effect of his new Star-Iron body, but who would have thought these training dummies would come find him instead.
And to make things even more interesting, they sealed themselves in with him.
They thought he was a sheep amongst wolves, not knowing that they had just locked themselves in a cage with an enraged tiger.