The exact millisecond the two-hour stasis interval expired, the spatial coordinates anchoring the plaza's air snapped back into alignment.
Young Master Tan gasped violently, his lungs expanding as if he had been drowning in solid glass. He stumbled forward, his knees buckling against the uncompressed basalt cobblestones. Behind him, his twelve bronze-clad guards collapsed in a chaotic heap of armor, their joints popping as their long-throttled mana circuits violently re-pressurized.
Humiliated, trembling with a mixture of raw terror and suffocating rage, Tan looked around the market square. The onlookers were hurriedly averting their eyes, but the damage to his reputation was already absolute.
"Find them..." Tan choked out, his voice turning into a shrill, hysterical screech as he slammed his fist into the stone. "Gather the enforcement captains from the outer ring. Get my circle from the gaming dens! Every Tier 3 combatant who owes the Tan Mansion a debt—bring them to the guildhall now!"
Within thirty minutes, Tan had assembled a dozen high-tier ruffians and family enforcers—a crude but heavily armed contingent averaging Tier 3 combat power. They marched directly into the Brimstone Mercenary Conclave, completely bypassing the entry queues.
Tan slammed his father's official mayoral crest onto the iron counter, denting the metal. "Open the active deployment ledger," he demanded of the trembling clerk. "Show me the exact coordinate routing for The Eternity Vanguard. Now, or I'll have the city guards burn this registry post to the ground for harboring undocumented anomalies."
The clerk, caught between the terrifying memory of Markus's gaze and the immediate political threat of the Mayor's son, buckled. He flipped open the iron-stamped log, revealing the three overlapping Platinum-rank crisis contracts Markus had claimed.
"The northern trench sector," Tan hissed, his eyes tracing the map coordinates. "They're hitting the closest vector first—the Leyline Leakage. Move out! We intercept them in the wild, strip their gear, and break their legs before the suns complete their orbit."
The posse moved out at maximum speed, kicking up plumes of gray silica dust as they raced toward the first zone. However, when they arrived at the coordinate link of the spatial tear, they found absolutely nothing. The rift had already been cleanly resealed, the surrounding landscape left entirely barren of anomalies. Markus's harvesting speed had completely outpaced their navigation logic.
"Damn it! They've already cleared it!" Tan roared, spinning on his heel toward the second coordinate marker on the ledger. "To the crags! They're tracking the territorial beasts. Catch them while they're engaged!"
As the dozen Tier 3 men scrambled up the jagged obsidian cliffs of the second sector, the heavy air began to vibrate with thunderous, low-frequency battle echoes. Heavy kinetic impacts and the sharp, cutting hiss of hyper-compressed plasma lasers echoed through the narrow ravines.
Reaching the crest of the ridge, Tan's group halted, staring down into a wide volcanic crater.
The four vanguard girls were deep in combat, methodically suppressing a territorial pack of Tier 4 Tectonic Dread-Wolves. Moving with the flawless, dense weight of their newly integrated Primordial Human biology, the girls weren't struggling; they were treating the apex predators like standard training dummies.
A short distance away from the violent fray stood Markus. His hands were clasped casually behind the back of his dark traveling coat, his silver-blue eyes clinically observing the girls' kinetic arcs, entirely detached from the bloodshed.
Before Tan's group even cleared the brush, Markus's sensory pathways registered their approach. His mind, operating via Nyx's passive radar arrays, instantly mapped the biological signatures of the twelve incoming men.
[SYSTEM CORE: SYSTEMIC THREAT AUDIT]
>> Detected Signatures: 12 (Biological / Humanoid)
>> Average Combat Capacity: Tier 3 (Unrefined Baseline)
>> Threat Level Assessment: NEGLIGIBLE / INTERNAL STATIC
>> Recommendation: Ignore; proceed with training sequence.
Markus didn't even turn his head. To his analytical calculus, a dozen Tier 3 ruffians carried less structural significance than a minor atmospheric pressure drop. He completely ignored them.
"Hold your weapons!" Young Master Tan shouted, swaggering down the rocky slope with his enforcers fanning out into a crude pincer formation. His face was twisted in an arrogant, triumphant sneer as he pointed his silver cane at Markus.
"You thought you could embarrass the Tan Mansion and just walk away into the frontier? Look around you, boy! You are completely outnumbered by the settlement's elite enforcers. Call off your little pets, surrender your spatial storage rings, and crawl on your knees back to the plaza, or we'll ensure your bodies are buried deep enough that the vultures won't even find the bones!"
Markus let out a soft, thoroughly bored sigh. The absolute lack of logistical efficiency in these local disputes was becoming an annoying variable. He had a tight schedule to maintain before his grandparents' arrival.
Without turning to look at Tan, Markus lightly tapped his left heel against the bedrock. His 100% Space Mastery surged outward in a localized, razor-thin wave, instantaneously constructing a reinforced spatial domain around the twelve advancing men.
Clack.
Tan's haughty laughter choked in his throat as the absolute spatial domain slammed shut. The dozen enforcers instantly became rigid statues, their weapons raised mid-air, their bodies frozen in their tracks like insects trapped in amber. They were completely paralyzed, unable to move a single muscle from the neck down.
Through their synchronized neural network, Markus delivered a flat, conversational command to the girls: "Rosanne, Mika. Cease direct termination protocol. Re-route the active Tier 4 beasts to these exact coordinates."
"Understood, Boss," Rosanne smiled sharply.
With flawless agility, the girls executed a sudden, coordinated disengagement. Instead of striking the wolves' vital spots, Mika unleashed a low-output fire bolt that merely enraged the three remaining alpha dread-wolves, while Rosanne and Jessica kited the roaring beasts directly toward the frozen, helpless group of men.
The Tier 4 Tectonic Dread-Wolves, suddenly losing sight of their agile tormentors, immediately locked their glowing crimson eyes onto the twelve stationary, high-density protein targets pinned to the rock floor.
"Wait... No! What are you doing?!" Tan shrieked, his eyes bulging with sheer, unadulterated terror as his frozen body refused to move. "Let me go! My father will murder you! Help! Help me—!"
The wolves didn't care about mayoral lineage.
The apex predators exploded forward, their heavy obsidian-plated paws shattering the earth as they tore into the paralyzed line of enforcers. Without the ability to parry, dodge, or activate their defensive skills, the Tier 3 ruffians were completely defenseless. The wolves made short, brutal work of the group, their massive jaws snapping through the unrefined scale armor like paper. Within less than two minutes, the frantic screams fell entirely silent, leaving nothing but a quiet, gory clearing filled with broken armor and torn silks.
"Clean up the remaining beasts," Markus commanded flatly.
With the distraction cleared, the girls closed the distance. Operating with absolute, clinical precision, they systematically executed the three remaining dread-wolves. Rosanne drove her dagger cleanly through the lead wolf's optical circuit, while Mika vaporized the final beast's core with a single, hyper-dense laser burst.
The crater settled into a quiet, heavy silence. The vanguard took their time, systematically extracting the high-grade Tier 4 beast cores, harvesting the copper-infused tendons, and packing the pristine obsidian hides into Markus's organized storage rings. Not a single second was rushed.
Once the harvest was completed, Markus walked over to the remnants of the Tan expedition. With a casual wave of his hand, he used his spatial mastery to lift the mangled bodies of Young Master Tan and his men, neatly gathering them into a uniform pile.
"We are returning to the settlement," Markus noted smoothly, checking the celestial alignment above. "The official narrative is simple. Young Master Tan, showing a severe lack of tactical foresight, led an unauthorized, reckless hunting party into a known Tier 4 crisis zone. They were ambushed by the territorial apex predators. The Eternity Vanguard, arriving to fulfill their legal contract, attempted a rescue operation but unfortunately did not make it in time to salvage the casualties."
"A tragic loss for the town," Rosanne added, her gold-flecked pupils flashing with a calm, dangerous amusement as she adjusted her gear.