The Brimstone Mercenary Conclave had never witnessed a logistical anomaly quite like The Eternity Adventurer Group. To the local hunters, rising through the guild's hierarchy was a grueling, decades-long crawl through severed limbs and broken contracts. To Markus, it was simply a routing optimization problem.
In less than a single week, the group systematically dismantled the guild's ledger, clearing active hunts with such mechanical velocity that the registrar's iron slates could barely keep pace.
The guild ranking system, designed to bottleneck reckless adventurers, completely collapsed under the weight of Markus's clinical execution.
***
On the first two days, the vanguard operated under the stifling weight of the Bronze register. Markus deliberately selected nothing but relentless, overlapping Tier 1 and Tier 2 invasive cull contracts, treating the local threat matrix like a simple endurance drill.
While other novice teams limped back from the valley perimeter bruised and shaken by the world's crushing gravity, the girls used the endless swarms of minor beasts to calibrate their physical stances.
Every parry and strike became a raw data point for Nyx to analyze. By the forty-eighth hour, the vanguard had logged a flawless one-hundred-percent contract completion rate, draining the local guild branch's lower-tier bounty reserves entirely dry.
***
By the dawn of the third day, the guild registrar had no choice but to force-promote the group to Silver rank, if only to open up a fresh backlog of work and stop them from monopolizing the novice boards. Markus immediately rerouted the vanguard toward the high-density Tier 3 monster dens anchoring the valley's mid-tier zones. It was here that their tactical synchronization truly locked into place.
Under Markus's cold, predictive directions, the girls ceased operating as individuals and began moving like a single, multi-limbed apex predator. They returned from the depths with zero casualties, but what truly rattled the settlement was the sheer volume of pristine, systematically harvested lower-grade hides they unloaded at the trade stalls, effectively choking out the local supply lines overnight.
***
The final push across the Gold threshold on days five and six became a masterclass in absolute baseline dominance. Bypassing the standard months-long probationary periods, the vanguard qualified for promotion by executing high-risk Tier 4 frontier anomalies—missions usually reserved for entire veteran mercenary companies.
They dismantled these territorial threats with such terrifying, quiet precision that the guild's senior leadership could no longer justify keeping them under the standard structural throttles. By the end of the sixth day, the vanguard stood recorded as Gold-rank anomalies, granting Markus direct, unmonitored access to the guild's restricted sovereign-level bounty boards.
By the dawn of the seventh day, the five young adventurers walked into the iron fortress not as fresh-faced tourists, but as the most terrifyingly efficient harvesting unit in the sector. The surrounding mercenaries no longer laughed—they actively cleared the thoroughfare the moment Markus's dark coat crossed the threshold.
With their Gold-rank clearance secured, Markus immediately pushed the perimeter out into the deep, unmapped volcanic trenches of the step valley, targeting Tier 4 beast colonies.
Deep within the sulfur-choked jagged crags, the vanguard faced a pack of Tier 4 Tectonic Dread-Wolves—beasts whose skin was a dense lattice of living obsidian and whose veins pumped liquefied copper. Unlike the clumsy Tier 1 razorbacks, these predators moved with frightening spatial speed, utilizing localized gravitational bursts to crush their prey.
"Do not rely on sight," Markus commanded from the upper ridge, his silver-blue eyes mapping the wolves' trajectory vectors. "Feel the displacement in the ambient mana. Plant your anchors before the shockwave hits."
While the girls cleared the pack, Markus moved through the perimeter, his shears extracting rare, uncompressed botanical assets like Tier 4 Ashen Lotus and Blood-Veined Ginseng—herbs that had soaked in the raw essence of the universe for centuries.
With surgical precision, he then dismantled the fallen wolves, collecting their copper-infused tendons and obsidian skull plates. Every item was a premium building block for the empire's forward defenses.
As the hunt concluded, the girls sat in a tight circle amidst the debris, cupping the massive, pulsing Tier 4 beast cores. The energy bleeding from these crystals was immense, radiating a deep, low-frequency hum that vibrated through the stone floor.
As they initiated the deep-sync absorption, the uncompressed primordial mana did not just flood their pathways—it violently refined them.
[INTERNAL SYSTEM REGISTRY: CELLULAR AUDIT]
[Vanguard Metric: Physique Compression Index]
[Modern Human Framework: Deconstructing... 74%]
[Primordial Lineage Template Alignment: Active]
To calculate the structural mutation rate of their muscle fibers and bone density, Markus watched the internal tracking coefficient settle into a permanent, high-density curve.
The agonizing, burning sensation of the early days had transformed into a profound, cellular reconstruction. Their bones grew as dense as reinforced ironwood; their muscle fibers compacted until they could naturally withstand the crushing atmospheric pressure of the external universe without the aid of elixirs.
With every Tier 4 core they drained, their bodies were shedding the artificial throttles of the modern world's global ledger. They were actively closing the biological gap, refining their human frames toward the flawless, uncompressed Primordial Human physique—the very same absolute, god-tier blueprint that Markus had naturally been born with.