With the frontier settlement's local administrative anchors thoroughly cowed, Markus ordered the immediate evacuation of the perimeter. The team's objective was no longer localized resource harvesting; it was horizontal exploration toward the continental metropolis—the grand nexus of the Primordial Universe's central sovereign state.
As they traveled across the rugged, unmapped steppes, the expedition functioned as a mobile data-collection unit. Markus kept Nyx's sub-routines constantly active, charting local resource nodes, tectonic fault lines, and atmospheric density variations to build a flawless navigational map for future Valerian deployment.
[SYSTEM CORE: TOPOGRAPHICAL MAPPING ACTIVE]
>> Sector: Central Continental Steppes
>> Atmospheric Density: 242% (Stable)
>> Recording Environmental Leylines... 41% Complete
However, they were not traveling alone. From the moment they crossed the town's outer wards, Markus's passive spatial awareness flagged an anomalous ripple in the background friction. A synchronized unit of six Tier 4 elite guards, wrapped in wind-suppression cloaks, was trailing their exact trajectory from a distance of two kilometers.
Mayor Tan had chosen to ignore Markus's parenting advice, opting instead to discreetly dispatch his personal execution squad to liquidate the vanguard in the lawless wilderness. Markus left the trailing variable entirely unaddressed. To his calculus, a predictable enemy was simply an asset whose execution date had not yet matched the optimal logistical window.
On the third night of their overland march, the vanguard established a cold camp within a deep, basalt ravine. The sky above was a staggering expanse of dense, uncompressed primordial starlight, casting a brilliant, silvery-blue luminescence over the jagged landscape. The silver light carved deep, ink-black shadows across the trenches, creating an eerie, high-contrast theater of war.
At precisely 0200 hours, the background spatial metrics shifted violently.
The trailing Tier 4 guards had finally made their move. Utilizing a highly volatile, concentrated alchemical attractant—Feral Pheromone Paste—the guards coated the high ridges surrounding the vanguard's camp, deliberately drawing the sector's nocturnal apex predators directly to their coordinates.
Within minutes, the low-frequency rumbling of shifting stone echoed through the ravine. A pack of Tier 4 Shadow-Stalker Drakes—reptilian monstrosities with scales like polished obsidian and claws infused with corrosive shadow mana—emerged from the dark crevices, their slavering jaws catching the bright starlight.
The girls, whose Primordial Human sensory pathways were now hyper-attuned to physical displacement, snapped awake instantly. They didn't panic. They drew their weapons in perfect silence, their gold-flecked pupils reflecting the cold starlight as they stepped into formation.
As the drakes charged down the ravine walls, the six Tier 4 town guards crept onto the northern ridge, drawing their weapons to strike the vanguard from behind while they were heavily engaged.
They never took a step.
Markus stood atop a central basalt pillar, completely detached from the chaotic skirmish below. He raised his left hand, his 100% Space Mastery compressing the ambient starlight and cosmic cosmic dust directly into his palm, manifesting a sleek, semi-translucent Starlight Bow. The weapon radiated zero mana fluctuations, completely invisible to the guards' unrefined scanning arrays.
To execute a silent, instantaneous assassination that bypassed the world's dense atmospheric friction and physical wind resistance, Markus mapped a flawless hyper-compressed spatial vector.
Thrum.
The bowstring didn't release a sound. Instead, six beams of pure, white-hot spatial starlight erupted simultaneously from the cosmic construct. The projectiles didn't travel through the air; they folded space, instantly materializing inside the skulls of the six Tier 4 guards.
[SPACE MASTERY: VECTOR ELIMINATION]
>> Targets Neutralized: 6/6 (Tier 4 Town Guards)
>> Execution Method: Cranial Spatial Piercing
>> Acoustic Footprint: 0.00 dB
The six elites dropped instantly, their bodies collapsing into the dirt like puppets with their strings cut, completely dead before their brains could register the displacement of mass. With the rear threat cleanly erased, the vanguard girls were left entirely safe to manage the drakes, their heavy shields and plasma blades cleaving through the monsters under the brilliant night sky.
Markus drifted down from the basalt pillar, his boots landing silently beside the fallen guards on the high ridge. While the thunderous sounds of the girls' battle echoed below, Markus systematically went to work on the corpses.
First, he emptied their pockets, stripping their spatial storage rings, family signets, and premium gold supplies, reallocating the assets directly into his private ledger. Then, drawing a standard steel military blade, he began to methodically lacerate the bodies.
He executed deep, jagged tears across their throats, chests, and thighs, ensuring the unrefined primordial blood poured out heavily over the dry soil. The thick, copper-rich scent of Tier 4 blood immediately billowed into the midnight air, acting as a secondary, irresistible beacon for the remaining wilderness predators.
By the time the vanguard girls finished exterminating the primary drake pack below, the first scavenging beasts were already slithering toward the ridge, drawn by the fresh carnage Markus had meticulously engineered. To any investigator from the Tan Mansion, the scene would be mathematically absolute: the guards had been entirely consumed and mangled by the wild fauna after a failed wilderness operation.
With the scavenging beasts cleanly executing the final stage of his staged ambush, Markus withdrew from the ridge line. He bypassed the gory scene entirely, his attention shifting to the six confiscated spatial storage rings resting in his palm.
Cracking the primitive spatial signatures of the Tier 4 town guards required zero effort. With a faint flex of his 100% Space Mastery, Markus sent a micro-frequency ripple through the rings' runic arrays, instantly snapping the security locks without triggering a localized collapse of the internal storage pockets.
He inverted the arrays, spilling the contents into a structured sub-spatial window for immediate data classification.
While the guards carried a predictable baseline of standard currency and local supplies, it was the raw, unrefined material extracted from the deeper continental shelves that caught Markus's attention. Tucked away in the Mayor's personal enforcement rings were several high-density geological specimens that had not yet been processed by the town's primitive smiths.
He brought the glowing items into a clean data readout.
[COVERT ASSET LOG: METROPOLIS ROUTE EXTRACTION]
- 4x Void-Infused Pyrite Shards
* Structural Feature: Absorb local kinetic impacts up to Tier 5.
- 2x Compressed Tectonic Agate
* Structural Feature: Latent gravity-stabilization matrices.
- 1.5kg Unrefined Astral Mercury
* Structural Feature: High spatial conductivity; volatile fluid law state.
"These aren't local trade assets," Markus murmured, pocketing the minerals into a highly secure, insulated storage vault within his coat. "These are foundational alloys of this continent. They require a full laboratory analysis."
The results were staggering. The Void-Infused Pyrite possessed a structural lattice that was over three hundred percent more dense than any defensive alloy currently utilized by the Valerian military. If Grandma Isolde could refine this raw material using the private Blackwell arrays, or if Headmistress Elena could run it through the mass-production furnaces at Laboratory Omega, the home world's defensive armor metrics would undergo a permanent evolutionary leap.