Chapter 149: The Mark on the Metal

Inside the spacious ground-floor salon of Victoria’s villa, the cold wash of moonlight illuminated a scene of chaotic frustration.

Blaze stood casually near the shattered remnants of a marble pillar, his sharp, predatory eyes sweeping across the dusty floorboards and shadows. Around him, the scarred bald brute and his mercenary squad were kicking through adjoining corridors, overturning mahogany sideboards and hammering their rifle butts against closet doors in a fruitless hunt for the girl who had vanished into thin air.

None of them noticed the imperceptible distortion rippling through the shadows three feet behind Blaze’s left shoulder.

Without a sound, Ethan stepped out of the dimensional fold.

His dark eyes were as cold as winter ice. Raising his left hand, a condensed crescent of silvery-gray spatial energy coalesced along his fingertips. With a sharp, high-frequency whistle that cut through the ambient noise of the room, a Spatial Cut lanced directly toward the unprotected base of Blaze’s spine.

Shhhk!

Years of life-and-death survival in the wasteland had honed Blaze’s combat instincts to a razor’s edge. The instant the spatial displacement pricked the hairs on his neck, his torso twisted violently sideways before his brain even registered the threat.

The invisible blade of void energy grazed past the alloy collar fitted around his throat, shearing away a strip of his black tactical collar and carving a deep, smoking trench straight through the marble pillar beside him.

Blaze spun around on his heel, a three-edged, triangular steel spike snapping out from the wrist housing of his heavy mechanical left arm with a metallic clack. Brutal, bloodshot fury erupted across his scarred features as he locked eyes with his attacker.

"Ethan! Do you have any idea how hard I’ve been looking for your rat bastard face?!"

Ethan stood calmly in the moonlight, spinning the hilt of his combat sword in a fluid arc across his palm as a cold, mocking smirk touched his lips.

"Funny. I was just thinking the exact same thing."

"If it weren’t for your dirty tricks at the plaza, that Golden-Winged Corpse would never have torn my left arm off at the shoulder!"

Blaze’s mechanical fingers clenched into an iron fist, and he slammed the cybernetic appendage straight down into the floor with all his might.

BANG!

The reinforced concrete slab beneath the parquet flooring fractured like brittle glass. A spiderweb of deep cracks radiated outward for two meters, sending jagged chunks of cement and splintered oak flying across the salon.

"This heavy piece of scrap metal has bottlenecked my spiritual meridian circulation by a full thirty percent!" Blaze snarled, veins bulging like earthworms along his temple. "Do you have any idea how much that has crippled my combat progression?!"

Ethan cast an unhurried, critical glance over the humming hydraulic joints and dark alloy plates of the prosthetic limb.

"Honestly, I think it suits your personality," Ethan remarked lightly, resting the flat of his blade against his shoulder. "It looks much more durable than the flesh-and-blood one you lost. You really ought to be thanking me for the upgrade."

Blaze’s face contorted into a mask of homicidal rage.

"You’re courting death!"

A violent green gale erupted instantaneously from Blaze’s spiritual core. The ambient air inside the living room screamed as a localized tornado materialized around his frame, its rotational force ripping a massive leather sofa off the ground and shredding it into a storm of flying cotton, torn upholstery, and lethal wooden splinters.

Before Ethan could step forward to sever the wind vortex, heavy boots thundered back into the salon from the side hallways.

The scarred bald brute burst through the archway with eight armed subordinates right on his heels. Catching sight of the stranger standing opposite Blaze, the brute didn’t waste a single breath asking questions. He threw his thick arm forward.

"Open fire! Turn him into a sieve!"

Eight submachine guns and assault rifles snapped up in unison, their muzzles flashing brightly in the dark room.

RATATATATATAT!

A deafening storm of lead flooded the enclosed living room. Brass casings rained across the floorboards like golden hail as dozens of high-velocity rounds tore through the air, pulverizing plaster walls, shattering crystal lamps, and chewing the remaining furniture into sawdust.

Ethan’s dark eyes turned completely glacial.

"Time Stop."

An invisible, spherical domain erupted outward from his spiritual core, instantly encapsulating a full fifty-meter radius in absolute temporal arrest.

The deafening roar of gunfire died into dead silence.

Hundreds of copper-jacketed bullets hung suspended in midair just inches from Ethan’s chest, frozen like harmless brass insects trapped in clear amber. The raging cyclone screaming around Blaze locked into a static sculpture of swirling dust and fabric, and the sadistic grin stretched across the bald brute’s scarred face became an unmoving wax mask.

Within the frozen world, Ethan moved like a phantom.

Channeling his upgraded physical agility, his dark silhouette blurred across the marble floor. His combat sword wove six consecutive, whisper-thin silver arcs beneath the pale moonlight. Each slash was surgical, unhurried, and lethal, gliding smoothly across the exposed throats of the six nearest gunmen whose necks lacked heavy armor plating.

As he glided past Blaze’s frozen frame on the return arc, Ethan’s left hand shot out. His fingertips lightly brushed the cold, humming steel of Blaze’s mechanical forearm, silently injecting a microscopic thread of spatial energy deep into the alloy casing.

Space Marker.

One second expired.

Snap!

Time rushed back into motion with a violent roar of displaced air.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

The six gunmen didn’t even have time to register that their windpipes and carotid arteries had been severed. Their momentum carried them forward half a step before their knees buckled simultaneously, six corpses collapsing into expanding pools of dark crimson blood while their rifles clattered uselessly across the floor.

Blaze and the bald brute froze, their pupils shrinking to pinpricks as icy terror washed down their spines.

Neither of them had perceived so much as an afterimage of Ethan’s movement. Six armed veterans had been butchered in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Both men instinctively raised their hands to touch the thick, military-grade alloy guards bolted around their throats, acutely aware that only those metal collars had spared them from being decapitated alongside their men.

"Fall back! Now!" Blaze roared, his arrogance evaporating into pure survival instinct.

He didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second. Igniting his Wind Ability to its absolute limit, a burst of compressed air exploded beneath his boots, propelling him backward toward the shattered front entrance at breakneck speed.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed. "Leaving so soon?"

He thrust his left hand forward, tearing open a jagged Space Fissure that hurtled straight toward the center of Blaze’s retreating spine.

"Block it!" Blaze barked over his shoulder.

With a guttural roar, the scarred bald brute lunged sideways, planting his heavy boots directly into the trajectory of the spatial tear. His thick muscles swelled to nearly twice their normal volume, tearing through the sleeves of his black vest as a dense, yellowish-brown earthen luminescence coated his skin like a layer of petrified stone.

CLANG!

The pitch-black spatial fissure slammed directly into the brute’s broad back. Sparks and fragments of stone-like energy scattered across the room, yet instead of cleaving the man in half, the dimensional blade only carved a shallow, two-inch gash across his shoulder blades before dissipating.

Ethan’s brow furrowed slightly.

An Earth-type defensive mutation? His physical carapace is nearly as dense as an Elite mutant beast.

Before the blood could even drip from the shallow wound, the bald brute pivoted with a ferocious snarl, swinging a fist the size of a sledgehammer straight toward Ethan’s temple. The punch carried enough raw kinetic weight to cave in the front of an armored truck.

Ethan blurred out of existence, executing a short-range Teleportation micro-seconds before the iron fist connected.

BOOM!

The brute’s knuckles smashed into the floorboards where Ethan had stood, blowing out a crater half a meter wide and sending shockwaves rattling through the villa’s foundation.

Ethan materialized three feet to the man’s left flank, gripping his sword with both hands and driving a vicious horizontal slash straight into the back of the brute’s right knee joint.

Screeech!

The hardened steel edge scraped across the yellowish-brown skin like a knife dragging over granite, leaving only a thin white line and a trickle of blood without severing the tendon.

The brute bellowed in fury, whirling around with a backhanded haymaker that forced Ethan to blink backward across the room.

For the next fifty seconds, the ruined living room became a brutal game of cat and mouse. The bald brute charged like an armored rhinoceros, his stone-coated fists obliterating pillars, walls, and support beams with every miss. Ethan wove through the destruction using short spatial jumps, relentlessly peppering the man’s elbows, knees, and ankles with dozens of rapid-fire Spatial Cuts and sword strikes.

While the brute’s movement speed was sluggish compared to the Blackscale Drake, his earthen armor was maddeningly resilient, forcing Ethan to burn through charge after charge of his spatial pool just to chip away at the man’s defense while keeping him pinned inside the room.

Ethan watched his internal clock tick down: Three... two... one.

Sixty seconds had elapsed. His Time Stop cooldown had refreshed.

Right on cue, the bald brute overextended, throwing his entire body weight into a reckless, lunging overhand right.

"Time Stop."

The fifty-meter domain snapped shut once more.

The brute froze in mid-lunge, his massive stone fist hanging inches from Ethan’s nose, his lower abdomen and groin completely unguarded by his raised arms.

Ethan didn’t waste a fraction of the precious second. He stacked two concentrated Space Fissures directly into the brute’s hip joints and lower groin—where the earthen armor was thinnest—and followed through with a full-power, two-handed cleave of his sword straight through the fractured gap.

Time resumed.

A fountain of dark blood erupted from the brute’s shattered pelvis. His yellowish-brown earthen glow shattered like broken pottery, and the massive man collapsed face-first into the rubble with an agonizing scream, his lower body completely crippled before he bled out onto the stone.

The two surviving gunmen near the hallway saw their invincible tank butchered in an instant. Their nerves snapped completely; they dropped their submachine guns and bolted blindly toward the garden windows.

Ethan flicked his wrist twice.

Two silent crescents of Spatial Cut whistled through the moonlight, neatly severing both men’s spines before they could clear the sill.

Within seconds, the grand salon returned to dead, blood-soaked silence.

Ethan calmly wiped the dark crimson off his blade against a torn curtain, sheathed the weapon, and closed his eyes. Tuning his spiritual perception outward, he locked onto the Space Marker he had imprinted onto Blaze’s mechanical arm during the first temporal freeze.

Inside his mind’s eye, a bright, pulsing pinpoint of silver light appeared at the edge of his five-hundred-meter tracking radius, streaking rapidly eastward toward the central luxury sector of Century Skyline.

"Running back to the nest, are we?" Ethan murmured, a cold glint flashing in his dark eyes. "Let’s see who’s holding your leash."