Chapter 136: The Sealed Arena

Penny sat frozen on the cracked asphalt, staring in open-mouthed disbelief at the crushed skull of the Elite zombie.

She slowly lifted her eyes toward the tall, broad-shouldered silhouette standing over her. The morning sunlight illuminated the sharp contour of his jaw, completely steady and unbothered, as though stepping between a diving monster and her throat was the most trivial task in the world.

Ethan slowly lowered his right hand, glancing down at the puddle of blackened blood before turning his gaze toward her.

A faint, teasing smirk curled the corner of his lips.

"Penny, I heard what you muttered just now."

Penny’s heart lurched violently against her ribs, skipping a full beat.

He... he heard that?!

Ethan took a casual step closer, leaning down slightly so his dark eyes locked onto hers with unbearable closeness.

"You said you liked me, didn’t you?"

A searing wave of heat rushed up from Penny’s collarbones, flooding her cheeks, her nose, and the tips of her ears until her entire face burned a brilliant, vivid crimson. The mortification was so total and instantaneous that she wished the ground beneath her would split open and swallow her whole. She ducked her chin immediately, clamping her lips shut and finding the stained gravel between her knees infinitely more interesting than the towering man standing in front of her.

"I... I was just... I didn’t..."

Her voice cracked, the words refusing to form any coherent defense.

Ethan folded his arms across his chest, watching her agonizing embarrassment with genuine amusement dancing in his eyes.

"Penny, I just saved your life from an Elite flying beast," Ethan said smoothly, his tone light yet undeniably commanding. "Don’t you think your savior deserves a proper reward?"

Penny’s head sank lower still, her chin practically pressed against her collar.

For several long, agonizing seconds, she remained frozen like a statue, her breath hitching in her throat as she fought through the violent whirlpool of emotions raging in her chest~the raw shock of survival, the lingering sting of Susan and Linda’s cruel betrayal, and the profound, electric warmth of Ethan’s presence.

Then, gathering every shred of courage left in her trembling body, she pushed off the pavement.

She stepped into his space, rose onto her tiptoes, closed her eyes, and pressed her soft lips against his.

The kiss was clumsy, brief, and intensely hesitant. A tiny, muffled sob escaped her throat as she leaned against him, her tears salty and wet against the corners of their mouths. It was an awkward, unpolished gesture born of someone completely inexperienced in intimacy, laying bare her vulnerability without a single shred of defense left.

Ethan froze for a fraction of a second at her sheer earnestness.

Then, his arm slid smoothly around the curve of her slender waist, pulling her flush against his chest as he leaned down and deepened the kiss with calm, steady warmth.

For Penny, the surrounding ruins seemed to vanish into total silence.

The suffocating terror, the gut-wrenching pain of being abandoned to die, and the cold despair of the wasteland all dissolved beneath the solid, protective heat of his arms.

When they finally separated, Penny scrambled backward as though burned. She wrapped both arms tightly around her stomach, her chest heaving as she stared at the dirt, her face radiating enough heat to boil water.

Ten minutes dragged by, and she was still entirely incapable of meeting his gaze, fidgeting nervously with the frayed threads on her jeans.

Ethan watched her for another quiet moment before stepping forward and gently pinching her flushed, soft cheek.

"Looks like the food in the shelter has been treating you well."

Penny blinked in confusion, her hand coming up to touch the spot he had pinched. "What?"

"At least you’ve put on a little healthy weight since we met," Ethan replied with a faint grin.

Her cheeks flamed red all over again. She opened her mouth to shoot back a sharp protest, but the words withered on her tongue. In the end, she simply puffed out her cheeks, crossed her arms, and looked away with a petulant pout.

Ethan’s smile gradually faded, replaced by the cool, sharp gravity of a squad leader.

"Now, tell me the truth." His voice was low and serious. "Why did you ignore my explicit orders and sneak out of the air-raid shelter?"

Penny’s shoulders immediately hitched upward, her body stiffening under the sudden shift in tone.

She lowered her gaze back to her boots, her thumbs nervously rubbing against her knuckles as guilt washed over her expression.

"Susan and Linda... they said their old homes were in an apartment complex just two blocks east of the library," Penny whispered, her voice tiny and strained. "They begged me over breakfast to walk them over for just half an hour. They claimed they only wanted to check if their winter clothes and some family keepsakes were still in their closets."

She stole a quick, timid glance up at Ethan’s stern face before dropping her eyes again.

"I... I thought that since it was so close, and since I had awakened my wings and combat blades, I’d be able to get them there and back without any trouble. I never thought... I never imagined they would just turn around and run the second an Elite showed up."

Ethan stood quietly, his dark eyes studying her without uttering a single word of rebuke.

The oppressive silence made Penny’s anxiety spike through the roof.

"Ethan, I know I was wrong! I know I broke the rules!" Penny lunged forward, grabbing the sleeve of his tactical jacket with both hands and giving it a desperate, pleading shake, her big eyes brimming with fresh tears. "Please don’t be mad at me... If you’re still upset, you can kiss me again. You can hit me or touch me however you want... Just... please don’t cast me out. Don’t be angry with me."

Ethan looked down at the trembling young woman clinging to his arm.

He let out a slow, resigned sigh and reached down, ruffling her messy, sweat-damped hair with his broad hand.

He had no intention of coddling her, but the terror of nearly being mauled to death and the brutal lesson of human betrayal had already hammered reality into her mind far better than any lecture ever could. She understood now that strength without caution was merely a faster path to the grave.

"Enough," Ethan murmured. "Stay behind me."

He stepped past her and crouched beside the grotesque, pulverized corpse of the Elite flying zombie.

Drawing a small combat dagger from his boot, he carefully sliced through the remaining muscle tissue at the base of the shattered skull. A few seconds of probing revealed a hard, crystalline obstruction embedded deep within the bone marrow.

He pried it loose.

Wiping away the dark, coagulated gore against the creature’s leathery wing, a brilliant, pale-blue crystal revealed itself in his palm. It hummed with distinct aerial energy, remarkably similar to the Core he had originally used to awaken Penny’s abilities, except this one was nearly twice the size and far denser in spiritual purity.

Ethan studied the crystal before storing it safely into his spatial inventory.

Her gift cooldown hasn’t refreshed yet, Ethan noted internally. Once the timer resets, this Core will be an ideal return catalyst. Even if it doesn’t trigger a massive multiplier, boosting Penny’s combat rank will make her an invaluable aerial scout.

Standing back up, Ethan wiped his blade and turned toward the alleyway exit.

"Let’s move. I’m taking you back to the bunker."

"Okay," Penny murmured obediently, trailing half a step behind him like a chastised puppy.

As they walked out of the narrow alley and turned onto the main street, Ethan’s gaze flicked sideways toward the mouth of a shadowed lane twenty meters away.

Against the base of a crumbling wall, two female corpses lay crumpled in the dirt.

Susan and Linda.

Both bodies lay completely limp, their eyes frozen wide in horror. Across each of their throats was a clean, thread-thin, bloodless incision that had severed their arteries and windpipes in a single microsecond~the unmistakable, lethal signature of a spatial vacuum.

When the two women had pushed past the zombies and abandoned Penny to be ripped apart, Ethan had already stood atop the ruined wall. A cold, imperceptible flick of his index fingers had unleashed two silent, frictionless Spatial Cuts across the street, cutting their retreat short before they could even round the block.

In this world, Ethan tolerated weakness, but he had zero mercy for traitors who fed their companions to monsters to save their own skin.

His cold expression didn’t change in the slightest as he walked right past the opening.

Penny was completely oblivious to the corpses lying in the shadows. Her head was tilted down, her boots aggressively kicking loose pebbles across the cracked asphalt as she muttered venomously under her breath.

"Selfish cowards... I risked everything to protect them, and they ran without a second glance. If I ever see their faces back at the shelter, I’ll never say a single word to them again!"

Ethan glanced down at her angry, pouting profile and shook his head with a faint, wry smirk.

He saw no reason to burden her with the knowledge that the two women were already cold meat.

The two continued down the desolate boulevard, heading south toward the library’s perimeter.

However, when they reached a wide cross-intersection roughly five hundred meters from the library square, Ethan’s footsteps came to an abrupt, violent halt.

The faint smile on his face vanished instantly.

The air around them shifted.

A heavy, suffocating aura of primeval oppression suddenly descended from the sky, pressing down against the shattered street like an invisible, leaden weight. The morning breeze died instantly. The fluttering dust froze in midair, and even the distant, ambient groans of the ruined city were choked into an unnatural, absolute silence.

Penny noticed the atmospheric change a heartbeat later.

The tiny hairs along her arms stood on end. A primal terror seized her chest, making it feel as though the oxygen had been vacuumed from her lungs. She stumbled closer, instinctively ducking behind Ethan’s broad back and clutching the fabric of his jacket.

"Ethan... what is that? What’s happening?"

Ethan did not look back. His dark eyes were locked dead ahead on the skeletal frame of an eight-story commercial office building flanking the intersection.

At his fingertips, the space trembled faintly with dangerous gray sparks.

Space Fissure.

"An old acquaintance," Ethan replied, his voice dropping into a chilling, calm murmur. "Penny, get inside."

Without waiting for her to question him, Ethan grasped her wrist and channeled his spatial authority. With an instantaneous flash of light, Penny vanished from the street, safely deposited inside the vast, protected expanse of the Survival Space.

The street returned to total, eerie isolation.

Ethan stood alone in the center of the wide four-lane road, his senses expanding outward to test the perimeter.

A faint frown creased his brow.

He could feel it now~the dimensional fabric across this entire three-block radius had been locked down by a massive, gravitational field. The spatial resonance of his Teleportation was heavily suppressed by an overwhelming, brute physical force, preventing him from blinking out of the area easily.

Under ordinary circumstances, a sealed spatial arena would be a death sentence for a Space Ability user.

Yet Ethan’s aura did not waver. The morning reset had restored his full daily arsenal: fifty teleport charges, one hundred spatial cuts, and twenty devastating spatial fissures, backed by his peak physical strength and the defensive shielding of his expanded realm.

He had no intention of running.

A cold, fearless smile touched his lips.

"Let’s see just how much you’ve grown since we last met."

A massive shadow detached itself from the ruins behind the shattered office building.

At first, it was merely an immense, indistinct silhouette moving through the swirling dust and crumbling masonry.

Then, step by heavy, earth-shaking step, a colossal, armored nightmare stepped out into the open morning light.

Its colossal paws tore deep, smoking trenches through the solid concrete with every stride. Two massive, recurved horns rose from its armored skull like crowns of black iron, reflecting the pale sun with a dull, metallic gleam. A thick, coarse mane of dark scales framed its muscular neck, and its gargantuan, bronze-and-black scaled body radiated an aura of unbridled apex savagery that made the surrounding four-story ruins look like fragile toys.

The Blackscale Drake had arrived.

The beast came to a dead halt thirty meters away, its towering mass blotting out the sun.

Its brilliant, vertical golden pupils narrowed into razor-thin slits, locking onto Ethan with terrifying, hyper-focused intelligence.

The scaly mane around its neck flared outward like iron spikes. Its heavy jowls pulled back in a feral snarl, exposing double rows of jagged, bloodstained fangs that dripped with corrosive saliva.

For several agonizing seconds, human and beast remained locked in an absolute, motionless standoff.

Then, the Blackscale Drake arched its colossal spine, threw back its horned head, and unleashed an earth-shattering, apocalyptic roar.

ROAAAR!

The concussive shockwave rolled down the boulevard like a physical cannon shot.

The remaining glass panes across the entire commercial block shattered into thousands of glittering fragments, raining down like hail. Cracked concrete slabs were ripped from the street, tumbling through the air