The sulfur-tinted twilight of the primordial settlement was settling heavily over the cobblestone thoroughfares as Markus tracked the vanguard's signatures to the central plaza. The market square was crowded with local merchants packing away their mineral crates, but the natural flow of foot traffic had ground to a sudden, tense halt near a stone archway.
Centering the disruption was a dozen heavily armed guards wearing matching bronze-plated scale armor. At the front stood a young man draped in ostentatious, unrefined primordial silks that did little to hide his soft, uncalibrated physique. This was Young Master Tan.
"I don't think you understand the local hierarchy, girl," Tan sneered, his eyes tracing Rosanne's form with an aggressive, possessive familiarity. "Out here on the frontier, talent without a patron is just raw material waiting to be spent. A drink at my table isn't an offer. It's an investment in your survival."
Rosanne didn't back down. Thanks to the Primordial Human cellular compression she had just undergone, her stance was completely unshakeable under the local gravity. Her gold-flecked pupils flashed with dangerous, lethal irritation. Her fingers hovered mere millimeters from her dagger hilts, her newly compacted muscles coiling like steel springs. Beside her, Mika's palm was already humming with a low, hyper-dense thermal crackle. They weren't afraid; they were waiting for an excuse to paint the cobblestones with him.
Before Rosanne could draw her blades, a tall, imposing shadow fell over the confrontation. The heavy air of the plaza seemed to drop by several degrees as Markus stepped cleanly between the vanguard and the armed contingent, completely shielding the girls from Tan's line of sight.
His dark traveling coat didn't rustle. His silver-blue eyes looked right through the young noble, treating the entire group with the same clinical indifference he would show an inconveniently placed pillar of stone.
"Who the hell are you?" Tan barked, taking an involuntary step back as the sheer, unyielding weight of Markus's presence hit his sensory pathways. He quickly puffed out his chest, gesturing aggressively to the bronze-clad guards behind him. "Do you have any idea whose territory you're standing in? I am the sole heir of the Tan Mansion. My father is the appointed Mayor of this entire settlement. One word from me, and the Brimstone Conclave blacklists your entire party from the sector!"
Markus didn't answer. He didn't waste a single watt of vocal energy or engage in the primitive posturing of the local elite. To Markus, a mayor's son wasn't a political entity—he was a minor spatial obstacle delaying an optimized operational schedule.
With a fluid, imperceptible twitch of his left index finger, Markus tapped into his 100% Space Mastery. He didn't unleash a destructive kinetic blast. Instead, he isolated the exact cubic coordinates enclosing Young Master Tan and his entire twelve-man retinue, severing their localized timeline from the surrounding universe's spatial momentum.
To establish an absolute, unyielding dimensional lock that would completely paralyze their atomic structure without causing a noisy localized implosion, Markus anchored the coordinates with a precise, fixed stasis interval.
The effect was instantaneous and utterly terrifying.
Young Master Tan's mouth remained frozen mid-sentence, his arrogant smirk locked into a rigid, porcelain caricature. Behind him, his guards became instantaneous statues, their boots pinned to the earth, their flaring Tier 3 mana signatures abruptly flattened and frozen within their pathways like ice trapped in iron pipes. Even the dust motes floating around their hair hung perfectly motionless in the dead air.
They were completely conscious, their eyes wide with silent, frantic panic, but their physical frames were entirely decoupled from the universe's kinetic laws for exactly two hours.
"Don't waste your focus on local grunts," Markus addressed the girls calmly, turning his back on the frozen squad as if they were nothing more than decorative landscape features. "The inn has a Campeón feast waiting on the table. Eat quickly. We deploy for the Tier 5 anomalies in thirty minutes."
"Understood, Big Bro," Rosanne murmured, a highly satisfied, razor-sharp smirk tugging at her lips as she slipped her hands away from her daggers.
As the five adventurers walked away from the stunned, whispering crowd of onlookers, the shadow beneath Markus's leather boots expanded with fluid, manic amusement. Nagini slithered rapidly up his shoulder, her spectral, ink-black form shivering with liquid delight as her dual crimson eyes looked back at the frozen noble family.
The moment Markus deactivated the localized preservation ward, the heavy obsidian table practically radiated a thermal bloom. The rich, intoxicating aroma of Campeón's signature oak-smoked crackling chicken, garlic-rubbed prime loin, and honey-glazed boar ribs expanded through the cold stone suite like an olfactory shockwave.
To the four girls, who had spent the last seven days breathing sulfurous air and choking down the tough, mineral-heavy game of the primordial settlement, the scent was an absolute assault on their senses. It wasn't just food; it was a sensory anchor to the home world, prepared by the finest culinary forge in the Valerian capital.
Any remaining pretense of elite, disciplined etiquette completely evaporated.
Driven by the primal, ravenous hunger of a body that had just violently compressed its cellular matrix, Rosanne was the first to move. Bypassing the silver cutlery Markus had laid out, her fingers—now backed by the terrifying physical density of a Primordial Human—snapped a colossal rack of honey-glazed ribs clean in half. She tore into the thick, tender meat with a raw, predatory speed, her newly reinforced jaw effortlessly snapping through the cartilage as she savored the familiar, sweet-and-savory glaze of her favorite home-world restaurant.
"Oh my god," Mika muffled out, her eyes nearly watering with pure bliss as she crammed a massive, crispy slab of salt-crusted crackling chicken into her mouth. The crunch echoed through the stone room like a minor kinetic impact. "I forgot food could actually taste like this. The meat in this universe tastes like iron and ash. This is... this is heaven."
Jessica and Donna weren't any slower. The two shields operated like a coordinated harvesting unit, systematically dismantling the mountains of wood-fired loin and pouring the rich, herb-infused bone reduction over the remaining portions. Their bodies were working on pure survival logic; their newly adapted primordial pathways were practically screaming for refined lipids and clean proteins to fill the structural voids left by their rapid evolution.
Markus sat perfectly still at the head of the table, an untouched glass of water in his hand as he watched the clinical demolition of the feast. He didn't offer a single word of reprimand for their lack of decorum. To his analytical mind, this wasn't a social dinner—it was a highly critical structural patching sequence.
His silver-blue eyes scanned their vitals through his interface, tracing the rapid, hyper-efficient breakdown of the high-density proteins as they flooded the girls' circulatory systems.
Within fifteen minutes, the massive mountain of imperial culinary wealth was reduced to a pile of perfectly clean, polished bones.
Rosanne leaned back against the volcanic jade slab, let out a soft, thoroughly unladylike sigh of absolute contentment, and wiped a trace of glaze from her cheek. Her gold-flecked eyes were bright, clear, and vibrating with an intense, revitalized current of power. "I feel like I could sprint through a mountain," she murmured, her voice carrying a deep, resonant weight.