Chapter 110: The Perimeter Gate

The trek northward across Silvermont was a stark reminder of just how rapidly the city’s ecosystem was mutating. For the first four miles, Ethan led Sofia and Tessa along elevated railway tracks and through the gutted interiors of department stores to avoid the main thoroughfares, where roving packs of bone-plated hounds and shambling hordes of evolved zombies fought over fresh carcasses. Twice, Ethan had to use short-range spatial blades to silently decapitate mutated crows perched on overhead power lines before their shrieks could alert the streets below.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, after navigating a maze of collapsed highway overpasses, the three of them finally reached the outer urban ring surrounding the North City Military District.

The difference in the environment was immediately striking. The wide avenues here were noticeably cleaner than the rotting, corpse-choked streets elsewhere in the city. Wrecked civilian sedans had been bulldozed neatly against the curbs to clear unobstructed firing lanes. Squads of soldiers in crisp digital camouflage patrolled the asphalt in disciplined six-man formations, assault rifles hanging ready across their chests and bayonets gleaming in the pale sun. Heavy concrete barricades wrapped in triple coils of razor wire blocked every major intersection, and olive-drab armored vehicles with roof-mounted heavy machine guns stood idling near the entrances to key administrative buildings.

Keeping their footsteps silent and their spiritual auras suppressed, Ethan guided Sofia and Tessa through a shattered side alley, up a rusted fire escape, and into an abandoned six-story residential building that directly overlooked the military district’s main gate.

Crouching behind the broken aluminum blinds of a fourth-floor living room window, Ethan peered down at the fortress. Two massive, reinforced iron gates~reinforced with welded steel plates~blocked the main roadway. High-voltage electric fencing ran along the top of the twelve-foot concrete perimeter wall, humming faintly in the dry afternoon air, while sharpshooters in a raised concrete guard post swept the surrounding streets through high-powered binoculars.

The base clearly possessed an independent, high-output power supply and a functioning chain of command.

"We’ll wait here until full dark before making a move," Ethan said, pulling back half a step from the window edge so the afternoon glare wouldn’t catch his eyes. "Too many open sightlines during the day. Use the remaining daylight to practice your Abilities and bring your spiritual energy to its absolute peak."

Sofia nodded without a word and stepped over to the far side of the dusty room, raising her right hand palm-up. Instantly, the ambient temperature in the abandoned apartment plunged several degrees. Visible frost crept across the peeling wallpaper beside her as moisture condensed out of the air, swirling together into a sharp, crystalline blue cone of ice hovering three inches above her fingers.

Unlike the fragile, thumb-sized ice spikes she had struggled to conjure on the rooftop the day before, this projectile glowed with a deep, glacial blue core and measured nearly half a meter long. Its smooth, faceted surface reflected the pale afternoon sunlight like forged steel.

Ethan stepped over, drew his heavy combat sword from his Survival Space, and brought the tempered steel edge down hard against the floating ice cone in a controlled test strike.

Clang!

The sharp, metallic impact rang loudly through the quiet apartment, sending a tiny shower of sparkling frost drifting toward the floorboards.

When Ethan lifted his blade, the half-meter Ice Spike remained completely intact, showing only a hairline white scratch across its middle where the sword had bitten against it.

Ethan examined the mark closely before nodding in approval. "That’s a massive improvement in density and hardness. How far can you project it while maintaining its lethal force?"

Sofia turned toward the side window and aimed through a narrow gap in the frame at a dilapidated brick office building directly across the wide boulevard. With a sharp flick of her wrist, the Ice Spike shot from her palm with a piercing whistle that tore through the still air. It crossed the street in a pale blue blur, punched cleanly through two separate layers of thick window glass in the opposite building, and detonated against an interior concrete pillar in a loud burst of glittering frost fragments.

"About two hundred meters with pinpoint accuracy," she replied, letting out a slow, frosty breath. "Farther than that, the spiritual link starts to disperse."

"Two hundred meters is more than enough for urban cover," Ethan said, sliding his sword back into his space before turning his attention toward Tessa. "Now let me see exactly what your Ability can do in practice."

Tessa hesitated for half a second, her cheeks coloring slightly under his direct gaze, before stepping forward and reaching gently for his outstretched hand. As soon as her cool, slender fingers closed around his palm, a soft, warm emerald light bloomed between their skin, casting a gentle glow over their wrists.

Ethan immediately felt a profound, unmistakable shift inside his body.

The spatial and spiritual energy circulating through his meridians~which had remained somewhat turbulent and jagged after his rapid breakthrough to Quasi-S-Rank and his consecutive life-or-death battles against the peacocks and Uncle Ray~gradually began to settle. It felt as though a cool, purifying mountain stream were washing through his veins, filtering out the microscopic, violent impurities left behind by absorbed monster Cores and leaving his raw power noticeably purer, heavier, and more concentrated.

At the same time, a faint, pleasant tingling sensation spread across the skin of his forearms and ribs. Several old, pale scars from the early days of the outbreak began to smooth over and fade away entirely, leaving fresh, unbroken skin beneath his shirt.

Beside him, Tessa suddenly let out a choked gasp. She pulled her left hand back and yanked up the dark sleeve of her shirt to her elbow. Along her pale forearm, an ugly row of circular, puckered scars left behind by Trevor’s lit cigarettes had grown so faint that they were practically invisible against her skin.

Hot tears welled up in her dark eyes at once. For a long moment, she simply stood frozen in the middle of the dusty room, staring down at her own arm as if she couldn’t comprehend that the physical proof of her nightmare was finally gone.

Ethan watched her quietly. He understood without asking that those circular marks weren’t merely surface burns; they were psychological chains that had kept her mind trapped in Trevor’s dark basement even after his head had been melted into sludge.

"Your Life Link is exceptionally rare," Ethan said, his voice calm and grounding. "Because it links your vitality directly with your target’s, it doesn’t just heal the other person~the feedback loop repairs your own cellular damage and stabilizes spiritual energy at the same time. Just remember one rule: don’t exhaust your own life force trying to play savior for strangers."

Tessa quickly wiped her wet eyelashes with the back of her sleeve and nodded firmly. "I understand. My power belongs to you, Ethan. I won’t waste a single drop of it on anyone else."

Slowly, the pale sun dipped below the jagged concrete skyline, and heavy, suffocating darkness swallowed the ruined city.

Inside the North City Military District below them, powerful halogen searchlights flicked on with a heavy mechanical hum, sweeping bright white cones of light back and forth across the perimeter walls and the cleared kill-zones outside. Armed sentries continued pacing the iron gates in overlapping shifts, their breath fogging in the cold night air, and every twenty minutes or so, an armored patrol truck rumbled through the entrance after undergoing a strict identity and undercarriage inspection.

Ethan stood in the deep shadows by the window for nearly an hour, patiently memorizing the exact timing of the searchlight sweeps and the three-second blind spots in the guard rotations. Once he had mapped the compound’s layout completely in his head, he opened the shimmering portal to his Survival Space and ushered Sofia and Tessa inside, where food and warm blankets waited.

"Stay inside and don’t make a sound until I pull you out," he instructed quietly.

Once the spatial ripple sealed shut, Ethan took a slow, centering breath, locked his eyes onto the thick canopy of an ancient oak tree growing fifty meters inside the military compound wall, and activated Space Teleportation.

The air around him folded seamlessly. A split second later, his boots touched down silently on a thick wooden branch hidden deep within the dark foliage of the tree.

Before he could even draw a breath to scan the courtyard below, a deafening, high-pitched electronic alarm shattered the stillness of the night.

WEE-OOO! WEE-OOO! WEE-OOO!

Red warning beacons began spinning wildly along the inner concrete walls, bathing the compound in pulsing crimson light. Ethan’s expression changed instantly. Without wasting a millisecond, he triggered his spatial energy to teleport back out to the fourth floor of the abandoned apartment building.

Nothing happened. The space around him felt as rigid and unyielding as cured concrete.

His heart skipped a beat. He immediately tried to lock onto the distant Space Anchor Point he had left back at the apartment complex, but the dimensional pathway was slammed shut by an invisible, impenetrable barrier running along the perimeter wall.

Another Space Seal?

For a fraction of a second, a cold chill ran down his spine as he wondered whether the terrifying Blackscale Drake from the museum had somehow tracked his scent across the city. But as he extended his spiritual senses outward, he realized the sensation was completely different. There was no suffocating, beastly pressure crushing his lungs~only a structured, artificial grid of spiritual energy preventing him from folding space across the compound’s outer boundary.

"Intruder in Sector Four! Up in the oak tree! Don’t move!"

A dozen blinding tactical flashlight beams converged on the canopy at once, turning the dark leaves as bright as midday. Heavy combat boots pounded across the asphalt below as more than twenty fully armed soldiers surrounded the trunk in a tight semicircle, the red laser sights of their assault rifles painting a lethal cluster of crimson dots directly across Ethan’s chest.