Chapter 394: Commander Jenny

The air outside the facility was thick with tension, illuminated by the harsh, overlapping beams of high-intensity floodlights. Twenty-four elite EVA agents held their positions with military precision, their weapons raised and locked onto Jayden.

Jenny stepped fully into the clearing, her eyes cold and sharp as flint. She looked at Jayden with the chilling detachment an officer would give a dangerous criminal.

"Stand down, Hunter," Jenny commanded, her voice cutting through the hum of idling transport engines. "The perimeter is locked. Your invisibility is useless against our thermal visors, and the intangibility disruption grid is already at one hundred percent capacity. If you attempt to phase, the backlash will liquefy your internal organs. Surrender now. Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head."

Behind his mask, Jayden's mind worked at hyper-speed. He could feel the heavy, oppressive frequency of the disruption device vibrating in the air, pinning his spectral abilities firmly behind a locked door. If the entire troop opened fire simultaneously, the raw volume of kinetic and elemental attacks would tear him to shreds.

But he had no intention of surrendering. And he had no intention of running away. Silas's actions had lit a fuse inside him. The EVA had sent a significant portion of their most powerful assets to this yard. If he eliminated them right here, it would be a devastating blow to the EVA's command structure. It would be a statement carved in blood.

The silence stretched, suffocating and absolute. Neither side moved. Every agent's finger was white on their trigger, waiting for a single breath of escalation.

Then, Jayden deliberately twitched his right fingers.

It was an infinitesimal movement, but to a hyper-vigilant agent on the frontline, it looked like a draw mechanic.

"Target is making his move! Attack!" the operative roared.

"No! Hold your fire!" Jenny yelled, her eyes widening as she tried to override the command, but the discipline broke for a single microsecond.

A high-caliber kinetic slug tore from the lead agent's rifle, whistling through the air directly toward Jayden's head. Jayden tilted his neck a fraction of an inch, the bullet grazing the edge of his hood and embedding itself in the dirt behind him.

Before the rest of the unit could follow up, Jayden retaliated. He unleashed his flames.

But he didn't aim to incinerate them. He knew their heavy combat suits were layered with advanced thermal-dampening ceramics.

Instead, he slammed his palms together and spun, sending a massive, 360-degree shockwave of roaring crimson fire exploding outward in a perfect circle. The inferno didn't scorch their armor, but the sudden, intense heat expanded the air, forcing the frontline back and filling the entire courtyard with a blinding wall of thick, choking black smoke and shimmering heat distortion. Their visors whined, overwhelmed by the sudden thermal overload.

When the fire wall dissipated a heartbeat later, the center of the clearing was empty.

"Where'd he go?" An agent asked, his rifle swinging wildly.

"Perhaps he ran away," another agent suggested.

Jenny's eyes darted across the courtyard, her instinct screaming. She knew he didn't run. He was still there. She could sense it.

"Stay focused. He's still inside the perimeter," she said.

And just a second later, Jayden suddenly materialized in front of the frontline agent who had fired the first shot. But he wasn't in his human form anymore. The moment the fire had obscured their view, Jayden had triggered his Partial Lupine Form.

Beneath his tactical gear, his entire skeletal structure had expanded, his muscle mass dense-shifting and tripling his baseline physical statistics. The advanced fabric of his suit groaned, stretching to accommodate his broader, heavily muscled shoulders and thickened chest. And beneath his mask, his jawline had elongated, sharp fangs pressing against the interior lining, and his throat structures tightened into a feral configuration. His fingers were tipped with elongated claws that hummed with a dripping, emerald-green coat of lethal toxin.

Without a shred of hesitation, Jayden drove his claws forward. The biological talons sheared through the agent's reinforced ceramic backplate like a hot knife through butter, puncturing deep into his chest cavity. As Jayden ripped his hand free, he delivered a concentrated dose of poison directly into the agent's bloodstream.

The agent didn't even have time to scream. The moment the toxin hit his heart, his nervous system short-circuited. He collapsed into the dirt, dead before his body hit the ground.

The other agents watched in shock as one of their comrades had died within seconds. They didn't hesitate anymore.

"Fire!" a trooper screamed.

The line fractured into pure, unadulterated chaos. The left flank of the troop opened fire, a barrage of energy rounds and elemental lightning bolts tearing through the air. Jayden blurred into motion, his tripled speed rendering him a visual anomaly. He evaded the first three lines of fire, stepped into the guard of a heavy-weapons operative, and grabbed the man by the throat.

Using his immense, augmented strength, Jayden hoisted the 250-pound armored trooper into the air and spun him around, using him as a meat shield. A dozen friendly kinetic slugs chewed into the trooper's chest, spraying blood and shattered armor plating across the concrete.

Before the dead weight could drop, Jayden drove a devastating punch into the corpse's sternum. The shockwave traveled completely through the body, sending the dead agent flying backward like a human cannonball directly into three oncoming operatives. The impact shattered their ribs and skulls with a sickening, wet crunch, throwing them to the ground in a tangled heap of broken limbs.

Jayden didn't pause. He swiveled on his heel, dodging a sweeping energy blade from a Level 53 agent. He caught the operative's wrist mid-swing, twisted it until the radius and ulna snapped cleanly through the skin, and used his elongated claws to slash open the man's throat. Blood erupted in a red geyser, instantly turning black as the heavy poison turned the man's tissues into liquid rot within seconds.

He moved through the elite troop like a blender. An agent tried to tackle him from behind; Jayden delivered a blind, backward kick that hit the man's helmet, imploding the composite visor and driving the fragments directly into his brain. He blurred to the right, sliced through the thigh armor of two more troopers, and watched them seize and die as the poison claimed them instantly.

Then he advanced. Evading and striking.

Every punch shattered bone; every claw strike spelled immediate, agonizing mortality. His own body took a couple of stray grazing shots—a localized plasma burn on his shoulder and a blade slash across his thigh—but his accelerated Lycan healing factor sealed the wounds in real-time, smoking flesh knitting back together in milliseconds.

In less than three minutes, the courtyard had become a gory, violent slaughterhouse. Twenty-four elite agents had been reduced to a horrific landscape of mangled armor, severed limbs, and pooling, poisoned blood.

Jayden stood in the dead center of the carnage, his chest heaving, his claws dripping crimson and green onto the ruined asphalt.

Fwump.

A sudden projectile warning echoed from an idling armored vehicle. One of the surviving reserve agents inside had panicked, firing a shoulder-mounted RPG directly at Jayden's back.

Jayden didn't even turn around. He extended his left hand backward, his mind tapping into his telekinesis. The rocket froze instantly in mid-air, floating three feet away from his hand, its thruster sputtering and screaming against the invisible psychic vise holding it captive. With a cold, violent flick of his wrist, Jayden redirected the projectile, hurling it back at twice its original speed.

The rocket slammed directly into the windshield of the vehicle. The resulting explosion tore the vehicle apart in a massive fireball, flipping the multi-ton transport onto its side and silencing the crew inside permanently.

A system notification appeared in Jayden's face as he surveyed the carnage.

[+2500 Exp Received]

[Exp: 14,410/28,000]

Just then, the doors of the secondary vehicles burst open, and the last standby agents stepped out into the firelight, about seven of them, their faces pale with rage and horror as they looked at the total annihilation of their frontline comrades.

"You monster!" one trooper roared, his hands crackling with lightening. "I'll rip your damn head off!"

The agents raised their weapons, preparing to launch a desperate, vengeful assault, but Jenny instantly stepped in front of them, her arm extended. "Stand down! All of you, hold your positions! Do not advance!"

"Commander, he slaughtered the entire unit!" the trooper screamed, his voice cracking with fury. "We can't just let him stand there!"

"That is exactly why you will stay back!" Jenny snapped, her voice carrying an icy, unquestionable authority that forced them to freeze. "I am not losing another single man to this executioner tonight. Back off. Now."

Jenny turned slowly, stepping over the crumpled body of a fallen operative to face Jayden. Her fists were clenched tightly at her sides. Her eyes suddenly ignited with a vibrant, pink energy, and jagged sparks of matching pink light crackled violently across her shoulders and forearms.

Jayden shifted his weight, resetting his stance. His claws flared with poison, fully prepared to tear the EVA Commander apart if she took another step.

But then, the pink energy dimmed. Jenny took a deep, controlled breath, letting the sparks dissipate entirely. She let her hands drop, standing completely defenseless in front of him.

Behind his mask, Jayden's eyes narrowed. He remained perfectly silent, his modified throat preventing him from speaking without exposing his shifted anatomy. Why wasn't she attacking?

"If we fought right now, it wouldn't exactly be a fair match, would it?" Jenny said, tilting her head slightly as she stared at his bulked-up frame. "After all... your physical attributes are currently tripled."

Jayden's pupils dilated beneath his mask. A cold jolt of shock ran down his spine. How did she know that?There were no scanners in the air, and his system logs were completely private.

Jenny took another step forward, her sharp eyes scanning every inch of his altered body. "So... why don't we try to settle this like two rational, intelligent human beings? Or..." She paused, a cold, calculating smirk playing on her lips as she noticed his absolute silence. "...perhaps you aren't even a human being to begin with."