The Astren Plague killed 312,000 people in eleven days.
Adam watched the coverage on the common room display with the rest of Sigma-4. The footage was shaky, mostly civilian phone cameras, because the media blackout in Astren's southern corridor didn't lift until day nine. By then, the hospitals in Vaelport and the surrounding cities were already overwhelmed.
"Dreth," Sera said. She was standing by the window with her arms crossed, watching the screen with the flat expression she wore when she was angry and controlling it. "Single hostile. Came through a breach in the Oakridge district of New Valen. Response team engaged within four minutes. They killed it in under ninety seconds."
"And it had already released the payload," Tomás said.
"Spore-based pathogen. Airborne. The hostile was dead before the first symptoms appeared in the civilian population." Sera turned from the window. "The response team did everything right. Four minutes to contact, clean engagement, no casualties on their side. It didn't matter. The damage was done before they arrived."
The numbers scrolled across the bottom of the display. 312,000 confirmed dead. 1.4 million infected at peak. Astren's medical infrastructure buckled on day five and broke on day seven. International aid arrived on day eight. A team of L5 Explorers with medical specializations and Mana-based decontamination techniques arrived on day ten. The spore died on day eleven, either burning through its lifecycle or suffocated by the containment protocols.
Eleven days. A third of a million people. From one hostile that was dead before anyone knew what it had done.
Adam watched without moving. The common room was dim around the display's blue wash, and the rest of Sigma-4 sat in the spill of it like people at a wake. Tomás had his hands on his knees and had not changed the angle of them in twenty minutes. Hana was breathing too slowly in the way she did when she was counting the breaths.
Three hundred and twelve thousand. That's a city. That's a city I could have walked through in an afternoon and not met anyone twice.
The briefing came three days later.
Commander Eris Vane, Kerenth Strategic Operations, stood at the front of the operations center with a display wall behind her showing four species profiles. Every response team in the Kerenth sector was present, either physically or on screen. Sigma-4 sat in the second row. Adam counted forty-seven Explorers in the room and another sixty on the feeds.
"You all know the four species," Vane said. She was tall, silver-haired, with the kind of calm that came from having seen enough emergencies that they'd stopped being emergencies. "You've been briefed on them in orientation, you've trained against simulated profiles, and most of you have engaged at least one species in the field. I'm running through them again because Astren changes our response doctrine, and I need every team in this sector operating from the same updated playbook."
She brought up the four species profiles. Adam had memorized them during Sigma-4's orientation briefing eighteen months ago, when Sera had walked the team through every catalogued hostile civilization along with historical engagement data. Four species, responsible for ninety-three percent of all recorded incursions. The remaining seven percent were unclassified, anomalous, or one-off entities.
She tapped the first panel. An image filled the wall: a segmented body covered in dark brown chitin, six limbs, compound eyes with a faint bioluminescent glow. The proportions were wrong for any Earth insect. Too large, too organized, too structured.
"Vethrak. Insectoid. These are the most common hostiles you will encounter. They operate in coordinated swarms with a command structure built into their biology. Individual Vethrak range from L1 to L3 depending on caste. Workers and scouts are L1 at best. Warriors are L2. Commanders, which you'll recognize by the cranial ridge and the larger thorax, are solid L3."
She advanced the image. Cross-sections of exoskeleton, acid gland placement, mandible geometry.
"Their chitin is resistant to blunt force and most standard firearms below military grade. It is NOT resistant to energy-based attacks. Nen, Cursed Energy, Mana projection, Chakra techniques — all penetrate chitin effectively. Their acid is corrosive to organic material and most metals. Don't let them spit on you. Don't let them bleed on you. Severed limbs still leak acidic hemolymph for up to thirty seconds after separation."
Hana was taking notes. Adam was memorizing.
"Vethrak account for fifty-one percent of all incursions. They're the ones civilians recognize. They're the ones the news covers. They come in groups of five to thirty, and their coordination is biological, not tactical. Cut the Commander and the swarm loses cohesion within seconds. They scatter, they panic, they become individual threats instead of a coordinated unit. Prioritize Commanders."
Second panel. Bipedal figures in armor that shimmered between organic and crystalline, with energy conduits running through their limbs that pulsed with directed light. Adam recognized them instantly. The Jianhui hostiles. Thassari.
"Thassari. Bipedal humanoid. Armored in a material that's part organic, part crystalline. If you were at the Jianhui incursion briefing two years ago, you've seen them." She glanced at the second row. A few nods. "The Thassari are the ones that fight like us. Organized military civilization with an energy system built around force amplification and directed energy projection. They deploy in small tactical units of three to eight, with defined roles: striker, defender, support. A Thassari striker at full output hits like an L4 Explorer."
She paused to let that land.
"Individual Thassari range from L3 to L5. They are intelligent, adaptive, and they learn from engagement. If you use a tactic against them once, expect them to counter it the second time. They communicate through a subsonic frequency that our equipment can detect but not jam. Thassari account for twenty-two percent of incursions and cause the highest Explorer casualty rate of any species. The Jianhui event was eleven Thassari. It took the Shenluo Republic's entire response doctrine to put them down."
Third panel. The image that appeared was dense and angular. A figure built like compressed stone, shoulders that looked geological rather than biological, with a faint thermal glow visible through cracks in its mineral-like skin.
"Korrath. Mineral-based biology. These are your brute-force encounters. Individual Korrath range from L3 to L4, and everything about them is designed around durability and environmental damage. Their skin has a Mohs hardness between 7 and 8. They generate internal heat that they can discharge through contact or ground conduction. When a Korrath walks through a city block, the asphalt cracks and the buildings shake."
She pulled up thermal imaging of a past incursion. The heat signatures were staggering.
"Standard approach: sustained energy-based assault to crack the mineral layer, then precision strike to the thermal core located center-mass. Do NOT engage in prolonged melee unless your durability exceeds L4 baseline. Their thermal discharge on contact will burn through Nen protection in under four seconds at close range. Korrath account for fourteen percent of incursions. They're rare but they cause the most infrastructure damage. The Haldren government's repair budget has a Korrath line item."
A few dry chuckles from the room. Sera didn't laugh. Adam watched the small tight place at the corner of her jaw, where her anger went when there was nothing for it to land on.
Fourth panel. Adam leaned forward. He already knew. The word had surfaced in his head three slides earlier and he had been waiting for the image to catch up.
The image was less defined than the others. Organic, amorphous tissue. A shape that might have been humanoid but kept shifting in the different frames, as if the thing couldn't decide what it wanted to look like. Grayish-white flesh, membranes that pulsed with visible fluid movement, structures that might have been limbs or might have been delivery systems for something Adam didn't want to think about.
"Dreth." Vane's voice dropped half a register. "Biological warfare specialists. The rarest of the four species and by a significant margin the most dangerous per-unit. Individual Dreth range from L3 to L5. They do not engage in direct combat if they can avoid it. Their primary capability is pathogen deployment."
The room was quiet.
"Every Dreth carries a unique biological payload. Spores, viral agents, parasitic organisms, airborne toxins, contact-based infection vectors. No two payloads are identical, which makes pre-deployment countermeasures nearly impossible. A Dreth's goal is not to fight you. Its goal is to release its payload into the civilian population and die, because its death is part of the delivery mechanism. The body continues releasing biological material for up to seventy-two hours after termination."
Vane let the silence sit for three seconds.
"Dreth account for six percent of incursions. They have the lowest engagement rate and the highest civilian casualty rate. The Astren Plague was a single L3 Dreth that released an airborne spore pathogen during its four-minute engagement window. Three hundred and twelve thousand dead. The response team performed flawlessly. It didn't matter."
She looked at the room.
"The lesson from Astren is not that our response teams failed. The lesson is that speed of engagement is the only countermeasure for a Dreth incursion, and four minutes was not fast enough. Effective immediately, all Kerenth sector response teams are reducing target response time from four minutes to ninety seconds. Containment protocols are being overhauled. Medical countermeasure units are being doubled. And every Explorer in this room needs to understand that the next Dreth incursion is not a combat problem. It is a race."
The briefing ran another forty minutes. Technical specifications on each species, engagement protocols, known weaknesses, historical incursion patterns. Adam absorbed it, cross-referencing with what he'd already learned from field manuals and the operations center's archives. By the end, the four species were mapped in his head like a taxonomy.
Vethrak: swarm, chitin, acid, kill the Commander. Thassari: tactical, crystalline armor, energy-based, adaptive, treat like fighting Explorers. Korrath: brute, mineral, thermal, sustained energy assault then core strike. Dreth: biological, pathogen, speed is everything, body stays dangerous after death.
Training after the briefing changed.
Sigma-4 ran three full-team exercises in the first week, all focused on response time. Sera timed everything. Bay to deployment position in under sixty seconds. Threat identification and engagement in under thirty. The team's average dropped from three minutes forty to two minutes fifteen by the end of the second week.
Adam trained harder than the pace demanded.
His Nen had matured past the fundamentals. Gyo, the focused concentration of aura into a specific body part, had become reliable enough to use mid-combat. He could shift aura to his eyes to detect concealed Nen constructs, or concentrate it in his fist for a single devastating impact that sat between standard Enhancement and full Ko. Ken, the even distribution of Ren across his entire body, had become his default combat stance. Static Ken, just standing and maintaining it, he could hold for close to two hours before the aura drain became uncomfortable. Under combat conditions, with Ryu shifts and active engagement burning through reserves faster, he could sustain it for roughly thirty minutes. The HEC field manuals referenced standard benchmarks: most Nen users reached thirty-minute static Ken after a few weeks of dedicated training. Adam's combat Ken, which was harder and more draining, was already past that number. Hamon's passive aura supplementation was part of the reason. The rest was volume. Two years of daily Nen practice with six types running at full efficiency produced an aura pool that most single-type users would never match.
The numbers interested him. Adam had meta-knowledge that nobody else in the HEC had access to, a framework for quantifying aura that came from a world where Nen had been studied to a level of precision that the HEC's own research hadn't reached yet. In his past life, he'd watched an arc where a Nen user named Knuckle had broken aura into measurable components. MOP, the total aura a body could contain. POP, the usable portion after accounting for Ten's passive maintenance. AOP, the actual output concentrated into a single technique.
He remembered the broad strokes. The specifics were fuzzy, the way any anime he'd watched years ago would be, but the framework was solid enough to apply.
Knuckle estimated Gon's MOP at around 30,000 aura units. POP was roughly seventy percent of that. Maybe 21,000. And the focused attack, the big hit, was somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 aura concentrated into a single point.
Gon. Main character of HxH, the anime Adam had watched a lifetime ago. A generational talent by the show's own framing, and still only months into his Nen training when Knuckle measured him. Adam had been training Nen for over two years. He had Hamon supplementing his aura regeneration around the clock. He had all six Nen types running at full efficiency, which meant his aura pool wasn't fragmented the way a natural Enhancement or Transmutation user's would be.
He ran the math in his head during a cooldown between sparring sets. His static Ken drained aura at a rate he could feel, roughly 600 units per minute based on how his reserves depleted over a two-hour hold. Two hours was 120 minutes. 120 times 600 was 72,000, but he still had reserves left at the two-hour mark, so his POP was higher than that. Call it 68,000 usable aura. MOP, the total pool including Ten's passive draw, was roughly fifteen to twenty percent higher. Around 80,000.
Gon had 30,000. I have 80,000.
The gap was real, but it wasn't absurd when he accounted for the variables. Two years versus months. Hamon versus nothing. Six types at full efficiency versus one natural type with diminishing returns on the others. Every advantage stacked.
AOP was harder to estimate without Knuckle's technique to measure the exact output, but a Ko strike concentrated most of his usable aura into a single point. If his POP was 68,000 and Ko channeled roughly ten percent into the strike with the rest maintaining minimal Ken coverage, that put his AOP somewhere around 6,000 to 8,000 per hit. More than double what the reference point had been.
The framework had another use that Adam filed away for later. If he could estimate his own numbers from Ken duration and drain rate, he could estimate other people's numbers the same way. All it took was watching someone hold Ken and counting the minutes, or sparring with them long enough to feel their aura output and depletion rate. A few simple questions during training, how long can you hold Ken, how many Ko strikes before you're empty, and he could map a Nen user's entire aura profile without them realizing he was doing it.
He didn't share the framework. The HEC's Nen literature didn't have this level of quantification yet, and revealing it would raise questions about where the knowledge came from. But it gave him something valuable: a precise understanding of exactly where he stood, and a way to measure everyone else against the same scale.
Shu, extending his aura into objects, was the most immediately practical. He could channel Enhancement through a steel pipe and turn it into something that hit with Nen-amplified force. Ten's natural shroud already covered his clothing and the Nanosuit passively, the way it covered skin, but Shu let him push aura actively into the suit's material. Enhancement-infused Nanosuit plating became harder. Transmutation could alter the suit's surface properties. It was like the difference between wearing armor and wearing armor that fought back.
Not mastered. None of them were mastered. But they were stable, combat-ready, and improving every week.
Ryu was the technique that changed how he fought. Real-time redistribution of aura percentages while maintaining Ken. Seventy percent to the left arm to block, then instantly shift to eighty percent right fist for the counter. It required constant awareness of where attacks were coming from and where his own aura was distributed, and that was exactly what Observation Haki provided. Haki read the intent, Accelerated Cognition processed the redistribution, and his body executed the shift. Three systems working as one.
And beneath all of it, something was forming.
His Specialist Hatsu. He could feel it in the way his aura moved during intense training sessions, a pattern that didn't match any of the six standard types. Not Enhancement's straightforward amplification. Not Transmutation's property shifting. Something else. Something that pulled from multiple types simultaneously and wove them into a structure that his conscious mind couldn't quite grasp yet. The literature was clear that forcing a Specialist Hatsu produced unstable results. He didn't force it. He let it develop.
But it was closer now than it had ever been.
His medical examination at the six-month mark stopped the doctor mid-sentence.
Dr. Aleksa Novak had been the Kerenth Operations Center's primary physician for eight years. She'd seen every enhancement package on the market work its way through an Explorer's physiology. She'd cataloged growth curves for Nen users, Chakra users, Mana users. She had baselines.
Adam's numbers didn't match any of them.
"Your resting heart rate is forty-two," she said, looking between the readout and Adam like one of them had to be wrong. "That's elite explorer territory, except your cardiovascular profile doesn't match endurance training. It matches systemic optimization. Your VO2 max has increased thirty-one percent since your last assessment. Your neural conductivity is eighteen percent above the projected ceiling for Nen Enhancement at your training duration." She scrolled through more data. "Your bone density has increased by nine percent. Your soft tissue recovery rate is..." She trailed off and looked at the chart again. "This is not what Nen Enhancement alone produces."
Adam sat on the examination table and said nothing. The exam room smelled like antiseptic and the pale lavender hand soap Dr. Novak kept on the counter. The paper under him crinkled every time he breathed. He kept his hands folded in his lap, because if he let them sit open on his knees she would find something to read in them, and she was already reading enough.
"The scars from your L1 survival expedition are gone," she said. "Not faded. Gone. The pneumothorax scar tissue has remodeled completely. Your chest tube entry point is smooth skin." She set the tablet down. "What are you doing?"
"Training," Adam said.
"This isn't training. Training doesn't eliminate scar tissue. Training doesn't produce bone density increases in a Nen Enhancement user when Enhancement primarily affects soft tissue and aura output." She was frustrated because the data didn't fit the model, and Adam understood the feeling. He'd spent most of his past life debugging systems where the output didn't match the input.
"I train well," he said.
Dr. Novak stared at him. "That is not an answer."
"It's the one I have."
It is true. It is also not the truth. I have gotten good at the difference.
She wrote something in his chart. He caught the phrase "anomalous progression, non-standard enhancement profile, recommend monitoring" before she turned the tablet away.
Sparring told the rest of the story.
He was the strongest person on Sigma-4. Not by a slim margin. By a gap that had opened quietly over the past six months and was now wide enough that everyone could see it.
Tomás, who hit harder than anyone Adam had ever trained with, needed Chakra burst to match Adam's base Enhancement output. Hana, whose precision with Cursed Energy was surgical, couldn't land clean strikes anymore because Adam's Ryu redistribution moved his defense to the impact point before her fist arrived. Sera, who outclassed all of them in raw power and experience, still won their sparring sessions sometimes, but the rounds lasted longer now. What had been thirty-second exercises were becoming two-minute exchanges where Adam pushed her into using techniques she didn't normally bother with against L3 Explorers.
Ren was the one who noticed first.
They sparred three times a week, and the trajectory had been clear since month ten of the training year. Adam won more rounds than he lost. His TK gave him options that pure physical fighters couldn't match, his Haki read her intent before she committed, and his Nen versatility meant he could shift between offensive and defensive styles mid-exchange in ways that her Cursed Energy reinforcement couldn't mirror. Ren adapted by becoming more unpredictable, mixing her kinetic dampening field with feints and broken rhythms. It made her a better fighter. It also made their sessions the most technically demanding training either of them did.
"You're not the same person who graduated," she said after a session where Adam had won three of five rounds. They were sitting on the training hall floor, drinking water. Ren's bottle rested on her knee. She turned it in her hand the way she did when she was running a conversation in her head before saying it.
"None of us are."
"The others grew. You compounded." She said it simply, like an observation, not a question. Ren had always been perceptive enough to see the shape of things without needing the details filled in.
Adam drank his water and didn't confirm or deny it. His throat was dry despite the water. The closeness between them had a shape and he had decided a long time ago which sides of it he kept solid.
The first incursion came at month four.
The breach opened at 0215 on a Thursday, in a commercial district in Kerenth's northeastern sector. Fifteen hostiles. Mixed composition: twelve Vethrak, three Thassari.
Mixed-species incursions were unusual. The briefing data showed they occurred in roughly eight percent of events, and the working theory was that the breach points sometimes overlapped across civilizations. Nobody had confirmed whether the species cooperated intentionally or just arrived at the same time.
Sigma-4 deployed in two minutes and eleven seconds.
Adam hit the ground running. Literally. TK-assisted propulsion launched him across the rooftops toward the northeast breach point while the rest of the team fanned out to cover the perimeter. Sera's Mana barriers sealed the three main streets leading out of the commercial district. Containment first, engagement second.
His Haki painted the picture as he closed the distance. Fifteen presences confirmed. The twelve Vethrak were clustered in a loose swarm pattern around two Commanders. Their intent signatures were sharp and aggressive but simple. Hunt, feed, expand. The three Thassari were separate, positioned on rooftops with clear sight lines, their crystalline armor catching the streetlight in faint pulses. Tactical. Watching. Their intent was more structured. Threat-assess, target, engage.
Adam reached the district's northern edge and dropped from a rooftop into a side street. Two Vethrak Warriors were tearing apart a storefront. Six limbs, dark chitin, acid dripping from mandibles that were shearing through a metal security shutter.
He hit the first one with an Enhancement-charged strike to the thorax joint, where the chitin was thinnest. The exoskeleton cracked and the Warrior folded sideways. Nen penetrated chitin like the briefing said. The second Warrior spun toward him and spat. Adam read the intent through Haki, sidestepped the acid stream, and drove a Nen-enhanced forearm into the side of its head. The chitin fractured and it dropped.
Two down. He moved.
The next three came in a cluster, drawn by the noise. Warriors, all of them, with the jerky coordinated movement that said a Commander was nearby. Adam didn't slow down. TK grabbed a piece of rebar from the gutted storefront and launched it through the lead Warrior's compound eyes. The thing shrieked and the swarm coordination stuttered for half a second. Adam used the gap. Power Mode. Three strikes in two seconds, each one placed where his Haki showed the chitin was weakest. Thorax joints, neck seams, the gap between the headplate and the mandible root.
Three more down.
He found the first Commander two streets deeper. Larger, with a cranial ridge that pulsed with bioluminescent patterns and a thorax twice the size of a standard Warrior. Its intent signature was denser, more complex. Not just hunt. Command. Coordinate. Protect.
Adam hit it with a Ko strike to the cranial ridge.
The Commander's chitin was harder than the Warriors'. The Ko punch cracked it but didn't shatter. The Commander staggered, recovered, and its remaining Warriors converged on Adam's position from three directions.
Ryu. Sixty percent defense across his back and sides, forty percent offense in his right arm. The Warriors hit his Ken field and their mandibles scraped across Nen-reinforced armor without penetrating. Adam took the hits, pivoted, and drove a second Ko through the Commander's cracked ridge. This time the chitin broke. The bioluminescence died. The Commander collapsed, and the last remaining Warrior scattered, stumbling over its own legs.
Adam ran it down in seconds.
Seven kills total. Solo. The entire engagement had taken four minutes from first contact to last.
On the other side of the district, the rest of Sigma-4 engaged the remaining eight.
Tomás took two Vethrak Warriors with Chakra-enhanced speed that left them dead before they could register his presence. Hana used her Domain Echo to map the remaining Vethrak positions and guide Ren to three contacts that had tried to scatter past Sera's barriers. Ren's kinetic dampening field slowed them enough for clean kills.
The three Thassari were harder.
One engaged Sera directly. Energy blasts that cracked the air, each one trailing a crystalline afterglow. Sera's Mana barriers held, but the Thassari's force amplification was pushing them to flex in ways that showed it was at least L4 in output. Tomás flanked it while Sera held its attention, and a Chakra-burst strike to the base of its skull dropped it.
The second Thassari tried to disengage and was caught by Hana's sensory echo. Ren intercepted it. The dampening field stripped its mobility, and Ren finished it with a CE-reinforced strike that cracked its crystalline plating.
The third had positioned itself on the highest rooftop and was preparing what Adam's Haki read as a large-scale energy discharge. A building-level attack aimed at the populated streets south of the containment zone.
Adam was closest. He launched from street level with TK propulsion, hit the rooftop at speed, and reached the Thassari before it completed the charge. Enhancement Ren, Power Mode, a two-strike combination to the torso that disrupted the energy buildup and sent the hostile off the roof. It hit the street below and didn't get up.
Fifteen hostiles. Zero civilian casualties. Zero team injuries. Time from breach to all-clear: eleven minutes.
The district quieted the way only a freshly-finished fight quieted. Sirens somewhere a street away, somebody shouting into a radio two blocks east, the hiss of Vethrak acid steaming off asphalt in pale yellow curls. Adam stood in the middle of the road and let his pulse come down through three layers: Hamon first, then the Nen shroud, then his heart.
Eight. All of them mine.
It did not feel like anything. That was the part he would think about later, when he had time to be unsettled by it.
The debrief was quick.
"Eight solo kills," Sera said, looking at the after-action data on her tablet. "Eleven minutes total. No injuries."
Adam sat across from her in the operations center and didn't say anything.
"The Commander engagement was clean. Ko on a Vethrak Commander is overkill for the second hit, but the first strike gives you the data to know that, so I understand the decision to escalate."
"The chitin was harder than expected."
"Vethrak Commanders have been documented with Mohs 5 exoskeletons. You encountered a Mohs 6 variant." She set the tablet down. "Your performance exceeded the team average by a factor of two. You engaged more contacts than any other team member, finished your Vethrak side before the rest of the team cleared theirs, and still had the awareness and range to take the third Thassari before it completed its discharge."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"You're the strongest person on this team," Sera said. It wasn't praise. It was an assessment, delivered with the same clinical tone she used for everything. "By a margin that's becoming difficult to ignore."
Adam met her eyes and didn't respond. He knew. Sera knew he knew. The conversation wasn't about establishing the fact. It was about what came next.
Sera's thumb rested on the edge of her tablet without moving. She was waiting for him to say something. Adam felt the shape of the unsaid thing between them and did not fill it. He kept his shoulders square and his hands flat on his thighs. The weight that settled in his chest was not pride. It was closer to a door closing somewhere he could not see.
"We'll discuss it after the year review," she said. "Go get checked."
Months five through eight.
Training intensified. The Astren Plague had changed the global posture. Response time targets tightened again. New containment protocols rolled out monthly. Kerenth's Explorer council approved funding for three additional response teams, bringing the sector total from twelve to fifteen. Medical countermeasure units were stationed at strategic points across the city, and a rapid-deployment decontamination squad was assembled from L5 medical specialists.
The world was waking up to something the Explorer community had understood for years: incursions weren't random violence. They were patterns. Four species, four strategies, four sets of weaknesses. And the frequency was increasing.
International policy discussions accelerated in month seven. A joint communique from the Haldren, Shenluo, and Kessho governments announced exploratory funding for a new category of Explorer specialization: pure support builds designed around disease countermeasures, mass decontamination, and triage healing. Builds that couldn't fight. Builds that would never hold a line. A Haldren minister's quoted line got reshared across every Explorer feed by the end of the week.
The world needs saints, not just warriors.
Adam read the brief twice. The logic was right. Most Explorer builds optimized for combat because combat produced visible victories and NP flowed to visible victories. Nobody bought a healing package first. Nobody chose pure-support Nen types when Enhancement existed and paid. Saints were expensive to train, hard to retain, and impossible to validate until a plague arrived to prove the math. Astren had rewritten the calculus. Three hundred and twelve thousand dead was a number that bought saints.
The power core he'd sold to the Kerenth government after his L2 deployment was already producing results. A colleague of Dr. Novak's mentioned it in passing during a corridor conversation that Adam overheard: the Research Division's energy team had been running tests on the core for months, and the early findings suggested it responded to energy input in ways that existing physics couldn't fully explain. Adaptive output scaling. Self-regulating thermal cycles. The researchers were calling it "responsive energy behavior," and the defense applications paper was already in draft. Adam didn't ask follow-up questions. The core was theirs now, and whatever they built from it would strengthen Kerenth's position against the incursions. That had been the point of selling it.
Adam tracked the global incursion data in his downtime. Forty-seven events in the first eight months of the year, up from thirty-nine in the same period the previous year. The Vethrak accounted for the majority. Thassari were steady. Korrath spiked in months six and seven, with three events in Kessho alone. Dreth remained rare, with only two events globally, but each one killed thousands.
The pattern mattered because patterns could be predicted. And predictions could be prepared for.
He trained. The advanced Nen techniques deepened. Gyo became fast enough to activate in combat without a conscious decision, his aura snapping to his eyes or his fists based on the situation. His combat Ken pushed past forty minutes under sparring conditions. Shu extended naturally into whatever he was holding, and he'd started experimenting with channeling different Nen types through objects: Transmutation through a metal pipe to make it vibrate at a frequency that cracked chitin, Enhancement through a concrete slab to make it hit like a wrecking ball.
His Hatsu continued its slow emergence. Not forced. Not directed. But present in the way his aura sometimes moved on its own during high-intensity sparring, threading through multiple types in a pattern that his conscious mind recognized without being able to replicate on command. Specialist Hatsus couldn't be rushed. He'd accepted that. But the shape was becoming clearer.
He was almost nineteen years old and he'd never been in better shape in either life.
AN: Chunky chapter, didn't want to take up 2. I know you guys want to see the next deployment. We will have one more chapter like this and then move on to the next expedition, a very famous world. For a bonus chapter lets get to 200 power stones, and again at 400 I will release one more.