Chapter 57: A True Leader!

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." — Martin Luther King Jr.

– – –

The squad moved toward the bodies.

Nobody knew what they were looking for. Micah had told them to check the beasts and see if they could find anything useful, and that was all the instruction they had.

Four recruits who had spent their entire training inside protected walls were now standing in a street littered with mutant corpses, trying to figure out what ’useful’ meant when applied to a dead wolf.

Thomas was the first to cut one open. He drove his iron blade into the chest cavity of a wolf he’d killed during the ambush and pried the ribs apart.

The sound was wet and disgusting, and the smell was worse. Thomas gagged twice before he found it.

A small, glowing crystal sat nestled between the wolf’s heart and its spine. It was about the size of a marble, pulsing with a faint amber light that was warm to the touch.

Thomas pulled it free and held it up, staring at it with the confused expression of a man who had just found a diamond inside a garbage can.

"What is this?" he asked.

Micah walked over and looked at the crystal. His Beast Analysis came to life automatically.

[Low-Tier Beast Core]

Quality: Common.

Flux Density: Low.

Market Value: 500 credits.

Usage: Basic Flux supplement. Can be absorbed for minor energy recovery or sold at military trading posts.

"Beast core," Micah said. "Every mutant has one.

It’s a condensed crystal of Flux Energy that forms naturally inside their bodies as they grow. The stronger the beast, the bigger and more valuable the core."

He looked at the rest of the squad. "Check every body. Start with the smaller wolves and work your way up. The Alpha will have the most valuable one."

That was all the explanation they needed.

The squad spread out across the street and began cutting into the fallen beasts.

The work was gruesome and exhausting, but nobody complained. Thomas hacked through ribcages with his iron blade.

Dexter used his broadsword to split open the larger wolves. Myra worked in silence with her daggers, her movements precise and efficient. Tasha moved through the bodies with her twin blades, cutting and extracting with the same fluid grace she applied to combat.

As they worked, something happened to Micah that none of them expected.

The Regenerative Tissue talent activated on its own.

Green energy flooded through his system without any conscious input. It targeted the bite wound on his left shoulder, the one the Alpha’s fangs had torn open when they severed the muscle.

The torn muscle fibers began to knit themselves back together at a rate that was biologically impossible.

The shredded tissue reconnected, the severed muscle fibers reattached to the collarbone, and the deep puncture wounds sealed themselves shut.

The process was visible. Dexter was standing three meters away, cutting into a wolf, when he noticed the green glow coming from Micah’s shoulder.

He stopped mid-swing and stared.

The broadsword slipped from his numb fingers and struck the ruined concrete.

He watched as the wound closed in real time. The torn muscle reformed, the skin smoothed over, and within minutes, the gruesome injury that should have taken weeks to heal was completely gone.

The only evidence that it had ever existed was the blood-stained uniform and the shredded Phantom Carapace around the shoulder joint.

Dexter’s mouth was open. His eyes were wide, and his face carried the expression of a man who had just watched someone perform a miracle in front of him.

"That’s not possible," he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. "That kind of healing doesn’t exist. Not even in the top-tier military hospitals."

Dexter stood there for a long moment.

He had spent his entire life believing that noble blood, elite training, and family money made him superior.

He had always looked down on Micah, treating him like garbage. Now, covered in wolf blood, he could only stare as the recruit healed a fatal wound in minutes and killed an Alpha that had taken down veteran soldiers.

His pride didn’t just crack. It was gone.

Dexter picked up his broadsword without a word. He drew his hunting knife from his belt, walked to the nearest wolf corpse, and began cutting into the chest cavity to extract the core.

Tasha had stopped working.

She was standing in the middle of the street, her twin daggers lowered at her sides, staring at Micah’s broad back.

The green glow from his healing shoulder had faded, but the afterimage was still burned into her mind.

She watched him move from body to body, pulling cores from wolves with his right hand while his left arm was still recovering from the trauma.

Her grey eyes were different this time. The hostile glare that had followed Micah since the draft was gone.

The cold contempt she had carried since the academy tournament had dissolved somewhere between watching him kill the Alpha and watching his shoulder heal itself.

In its place was something she didn’t fully understand and wasn’t ready to name.

She had watched him lead the team with a calmness she never expected from a recruit. She had watched him coordinate their attacks, cover their weaknesses, and step in without hesitation when Dexter’s life was on the line.

She had watched him take command when everything fell apart, putting himself between his teammates and danger without thinking twice. And somehow, even with a destroyed shoulder and a body that was barely holding together, he had still led them to victory against a sixty-five percent Alpha.

He had earned it. Every bit of it.

She respected him, and the respect was real and hard-earned and impossible to ignore.

Tasha sheathed her daggers, pulled a skinning knife from her belt, and went back to work.

The harvest took two hours.

By the time they finished, the squad had extracted over fifty low-tier cores from the fallen wolves.

Each one was small, pulsing with faint amber light, and worth about five hundred credits at a military trading post. Fifty cores meant twenty-five thousand credits in loot, which was more money than most recruits saw in a year of service.

The Alpha’s core was different.

Micah found it himself, buried deep in the creature’s chest cavity behind a wall of bone and muscle that took him twenty minutes to cut through.

The core was the size of a fist, dense and heavy, and it pulsed with a deep amber glow that was visibly brighter than the smaller cores.

The energy radiating from it was dense and hot, and even holding it in his hand made his skin tingle.

[Mid-Tier Beast Core - Alpha Quality]

Flux Density: High.

Market Value: 100,000 credits.

Usage: Advanced Flux supplement. Can be absorbed for significant energy recovery

or sold at military trading posts for high value.

Myra walked over as Micah was pulling the core free. She looked at the glowing crystal in his hand, then at Micah.

She maintained her normal calm expression.

She reached out and carefully took the Alpha core from Micah’s hand. She held it for a moment, feeling the weight and the warmth, then handed it back to him with a small, genuine nod.

"Thank you," she said.

Two words, delivered without emotion or drama. But they were the first words of gratitude she had ever spoken to him, and the weight behind them was heavier than the core itself.

Micah took the crystal and slid it into his spatial compression capsule. He looked at his squad, scattered across the street among the bodies, and acknowledged what had changed.

They weren’t the same people who had arrived at Outpost 7.

The arrogance was gone. The hostility was fading. The complaints and the hostility and the wounded pride had been burned away by the reality of combat and the sight of their commanding officer nearly dying to keep them alive.

They weren’t a family. They weren’t friends. But they were a unit now, forged in blood and held together by something stronger than military code.

"Pack everything," Micah said. "We’re going back."

The return journey through the cratered wasteland was completely different from the trip out.

The heavily fortified Astralis border wall appeared on the horizon as they crested the last ridge.

The outpost was visible beyond it, its steel walls and automated turrets standing sharp against the darkening sky.

They entered through the main gate, and the guards stationed there immediately turned toward them.

Their uniforms were torn and stained with dried blood. Dirt covered their faces and clothes, while several bags of loot hung from their shoulders.

They were back. Alive. Intact. And carrying more loot than any patrol squad in the outpost’s recent history.

The officers on the walls looked them over in silence before raising their hands in salute.

The recruits had left as soldiers in training but they had returned looking like warriors.