The Blacktooth perimeter was a graveyard of sharpened iron.

  Broken Halos hung from branches like trophies. Martyrs huddled in transport cages, eyes hollow, fingers clawing silently at the bars.

  Some gnawing their own knuckles raw. Stripped Ether-crates were stacked into crude barricades.

  Before the menacing gate, Val stopped.

  His hands were shaking. In his mind, he wasn't a negotiator; he was a lab rat about to walk into a cage of starved wolves.

  'You're a physicist, Val,' he thought, his chest tight. 'Analyze the variables.’

  It didn't help. The image of their rusted jaw hinge flashed in his mind.

  Val glanced to the corner of cages. Among them, Noah trembled against the bars, Lysa’s lips pressed tight in silent defiance, and Elena’s hands clenched at her knees.

  Val let out a single, aggressive breath. A sharp, exhale that forced the carbon dioxide from his lungs.

  SLAP.

  He brought his right hand, the human one—up and struck his own cheek with a stinging crack. The pain was grounded. It was a physical reset.

  “Too late to run now,” he whispered into the empty, violet air. “It's now or never, Val."

  He adjusted his collar, wiped a bead of cold sweat from his temple, and stepped out of the shadows.

  Val didn’t sneak.

  He walked straight down the center of the silt-path with a relaxed manner.

  Ten paces in, the violet fog curdled.

  A Blacktooth subordinate stepped out from behind an Iron-Oak. His name was Cane.

  Val knew it from the System overlay—and his lower jaw had been replaced with a rusted chrome hinge that clicked softly as he spoke.

  He leveled a jagged spear-tip at the soft pulse point beneath Val’s jaw.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Cane rasped.

  “Others run from us. Yet this one walks straight into the bubbling cauldron.”

  Val didn’t slow. Didn’t flinch. He didn’t even look at the spear.

  “Where’s your boss?” Val asked calmly.

  Cane’s grip tightened. “One more step, Martyr, and I’ll see if your blood’s as thin as your coat.”

  Val stopped. Not because of the threat, but because he’d reached the distance he wanted.

  He lifted his gaze. It wasn’t angry. It wasn’t defiant.

  It was clinical. Like an autopsy already in progress.

  “You’re vibrating,” Val said softly. “The stabilizer coil in your spear is cracked. If you thrust, the feedback will shear your arm off before the tip reaches my spine.”

  The spear trembled.

  Just for a microsecond.

  That was enough.

  Val reached into his belt and withdrew an Iron-oak Rungu. Slowly, almost politely.

  Then, Val began to disassemble it. The hilt unscrewed. The pressure seals came free with soft clicks.

  He placed each component into Cane’s open palm as if discarding trash.

  Finally, he held up the Orb in his right hand.

  Cane froze.

  Val didn’t wait for permission. He reached out and casually pushed the spear-tip aside with one finger, then walked past him.

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  “Hey hey hey!” Cane sputtered, scrambling after him. “I’m gonna kill you, Martyr. I swear. Imma kill you!”

  Val didn’t respond.

  He stepped into the heart of the camp.

  Chigurh sat at the center of the clearing atop a pile of stripped Ether-crates, methodically cleaning a serrated blade. His movements were slow. Unrushed. The kind of patience that came from a man who never worried about consequences.

  He didn’t look up.

  “You’re the one,” Chigurh said at last, voice dry and flat. His eye flicked briefly to Val’s left arm.

  “The Abyssal human.”

  Val stopped five feet away.

  He was completely disarmed.

  And somehow, he looked like the only man in the clearing who owned the ground beneath his feet.

  “You see,” Val said, his tone conversational, “my abyssal companion has a very specific processing requirement.”

  Chigurh paused. The blade stilled.

  “…Go on.”

  “Human ocular tissue,” Val continued. “Fresh.”

  A flicker of intrigue crossed Chigurh’s face. Not disgust. Recognition. Like finding someone who shared an unpleasant hobby.

  “You have surplus,” Val added. “Trade them as slaves. Strip their Halos. Harvest them however you like. I don’t interfere with your margins.”

  He met Chigurh’s gaze.

  “I respect efficient businesses.”

  Chigurh exhaled slowly. “And what do you offer me, Abyssal Martyr? Your neck?”

  Laughter broke out around Val. Cane and another thug, Suture—snorted openly.

  Val raised his right hand.

  The Fulminating Mercury Orb gleamed in the violet light.

  “On Earth,” Val said, “we call this a grenade.”

  The laughter died instantly.

  Cane’s jaw clicked uselessly. Suture leaned back a step without realizing it.

  Val’s voice remained steady.

  “Where I’m from, I’m what Ortho would call a magician.”

  A pause.

  “I supply tools like this… to people in your profession.”

  Chigurh finally looked up.

  And smiled.

  Val tilted his head slightly.

  "People back home don’t look kindly on an 'abomination' like me.”

  His obsidian veins pulsed once, faint and ugly.

  “And honestly? My world is halfway through a heavy reconstruction because of the corruption anyway. There’s nothing left for me there."

  Val stepped a fraction closer, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial rasp.

  “So, I’m choosing a new home.”

  A pause. Calculated.

  “Ortho…”

  He met Chigurh’s gaze, unblinking. “With you, as my benefactor.”

  “So... what say you, Mr. Boss Man? Do we have a contract, or am I wasting the best ocular tissue in the sector?"

  Chigurh’s eye weighed up the profit. Earth’s weapon may prove beneficial for his ‘enterprise’.

  “Very well then…”

  He turned his back—dismissal etched into every line of his shoulders.

  “Suture, take our new ‘Magician’ to the stores. Let’s see how he handles the inventory.”

  Dismissal achieved.

  Val moved.

  He didn’t just throw it. He used the momentum of Suture trying to shove him forward. As the man reached out, Val spun, his Abyssal arm blurring with unnatural speed, obsidian veins flaring in protest.

  Val tossed the Fulminating Mercury Orb across the silt like a stone on water. He didn't wait to watch it land. The instant the orb left his fingers, Val dropped — not backward, sideways. Throwing himself behind the nearest Ether-crate stack with the graceless urgency of a man who understood exactly what was about to happen.

  He hit the silt hard, arms over his head, mouth open the way his father's old civil defense manual had specified for blast wave absorption.

  It was better than nothing.

  The Fulminating Orb didn’t go for Chigurh’s head. It went for the cracked Ether-crates beneath him.

  The crates were already leaking raw resonance. To the Mercury Orb, they weren’t just wood. They were fuel.

  It triggered a violent chain reaction. The blast hurled bodies, splintered iron, and ripped the fog into spiraling sheets.

  For a fraction of a second, Val thought it had worked.

  But it didn’t kill Chigurh.

  Val felt the miscalculation the instant the shockwave hit.

  The blast had bled outward. The leaking crates diffusing the pressure into raw resonance instead of compressing it into lethal force.

  Too much fuel. Not enough confinement.

  A flawed detonation geometry.

  Cane, standing closest, vanished in a spray of silver silt and broken Halo fragments. Nothing left but a crater and a ringing absence.

  [THREAT ELIMINATED: CANE]

  [CALIBRATION GAIN: +120 CP]

  [SUBJECT: MARTYR 0996] [YOU HAVE SLAIN AN INDIVIDUAL WITH STRATUM HIGHER THAN YOU]

  [INSIGNIA RECEIVED: GIANTSLAYER]

  Suture was thrown clear, slamming into a barricade with a bone-cracking thud. Chigurh himself was hurled backward, crashing through stacked debris.

  Alive. Both of them. He recalculated in real time.

  Probability of survival: collapsing.

  Distance to treeline: 47 meters.

  Enemy recovery window: 2.3 seconds.

  Chigurh’s likely Verse activation: unknown.

  Val felt something he didn't have a clean word for. Not panic, because panic was irrational and this was entirely rational.

  ‘Shit! I miscalculated.’ The thought landed clean and cold. ‘Run.’

  The negotiation was over. The deception was spent. The orb was gone.

  The plan had shifted from assassination to escape.

  He had one asset left.

  The jungle. His boots were already finding ground.

  Behind him, shouts compressing into a single roar, Verse-activations flaring white in his peripheral vision, the rhythmic clatter of Skitter-Drake legs finding purchase on the silt.

  “AFTER HIM!” Chigurh’s voice cut through the chaos, cold and furious.

  “Martyr! I’ll skin you alive!”

  Val plunged into the Primeval Sector’s jungle frantically. The jungle swallowed him, but the roar of Chigurh's fury haunted him like an avenging angel of Death.