Before shifting his personal coordinate anchor backward, Markus unclasped three of the confiscated Tier 4 spatial rings from his belt. He tossed them directly to Rosanne, who caught them with the effortless precision of her upgraded reflexes.
"The team will maintain a steady marching velocity toward the continental metropolis," Markus commanded, his voice completely level against the rustling of the wilderness wind. "Inside these arrays are the unrefined minerals and the secondary beast harvests from tonight's skirmish. Catalog them into the primary transit log. I have a minor administrative redundancy to delete back at the frontier settlement."
"Understood, Boss," Rosanne nodded, slipping the rings onto her fingers. The team didn't ask questions. They knew that when Markus spoke of deleting a variable, the equation was already decided. They fell into a tight, silent formation and continued their overland march, their figures fading into the starlit steppes.
Turning his back to the road, Markus extended his hand, his 100% Space Mastery instantly parting the ambient geometry of the wilderness. He stepped backward into a razor-thin spatial fold, but as the vacuum pressure spiked, the chaotic gravitational currents of the Primordial Universe threatened to leave a residual energy signature behind.
The shadow beneath his coat surged. Nagini uncoiled herself with fluid, rapid momentum, her ink-black spectral mass wrapping tightly around Markus's arm. She injected her own raw spatial affinity directly into the borders of the rift, acting as an insulating sheath that perfectly smoothed out the dimensional friction.
[SPACE TUNNEL DIAGNOSTIC]
>> Spatial Fold Integrity: 100.00%
>> Nagini Insulation Matrix: ACTIVE
>> Residual Track Emission: 0.00% (Absolute Stealth)
With a silent compression of space, the corridor snapped shut. A fraction of a second later, Markus materialized directly within the inner courtyard of the Tan Manor, completely hidden beneath a localized layer of folded space. To the mortal eye and the estate's primitive scrying wards, the courtyard was entirely empty.
Markus utilized his spatial awareness to map the internal layout of the stone manor, bypassing the physical walls to locate the master chambers on the third floor. Moving through the stone structure like a ghost passing through paper, he stood at the threshold of the Mayor's private suite, still perfectly insulated inside his pocket dimension.
Inside, the room was thick with the scent of heavy wines and burning musk. Mayor Tan was entirely oblivious to the annihilation of his elite guard squad, thoroughly embroidered in his private indulgences and bedroom activities with one of the estate's many concubines. His focus was entirely spent, his Tier 5 wind core idling at a completely unguarded, baseline frequency.
Markus didn't utter a word. He didn't drop his cloaking field, nor did he offer the corrupt politician the luxury of an interrogation.
He simply raised his right hand, his fingers forming a precise, flat plane. Tapping into his absolute mastery over internal coordinate intersection, he bypassed the Mayor's skin, muscle tissue, and reinforced bone structure entirely, manifesting a micro-spatial blade directly inside the man's thoracic cavity.
To execute a flawless internal excision without disrupting the external physical architecture of the body until the kinetic strike concluded, Markus mapped the phase strike.
Snap.
With a localized whisper of severed tissue, the micro-spatial blade sliced cleanly through the primary chambers of the Mayor's heart, completely detaching the organ from the aortic root.
The disruption to the Mayor's circulatory system was instantaneous and catastrophic. His eyes widened into globes of pure, sudden shock, his voice choking as a massive volume of dark, hyper-dense blood ruptured upward into his throat. He let out a wet, strangled cough, splashing dark crimson across the linen sheets before his entire Tier 5 frame collapsed like a felled tree, dropping dead directly atop the terrified, screaming woman beneath him.
Markus lowered his hand, his expression as cold and smooth as carved obsidian. He didn't stay to witness the ensuing chaos as the estate guards scrambled toward the high-pitched shrieks echoing from the master bedroom. By the time the first door was kicked open, Markus had already dissolved his coordinate link, slipping back into the stabilized spatial tunnel with Nagini.
The transition was instantaneous. Two hundred kilometers to the south, the space beside the team's marching line rippled with a faint, violet shimmer. Markus stepped cleanly out of the fold, his dark traveling coat catching the crisp morning breeze as the triple suns began to break over the horizon.
"The redundancy has been removed," Markus noted smoothly, falling right back into step at the head of the formation. "The frontier settlement no longer possesses an administrative variable capable of tracking our trajectory. Maintain pace; the metropolis perimeter gates are within forty kilometers."
"Welcome back, Commander," Rosanne said, her gold-flecked pupils gleaming with quiet, absolute loyalty as the team accelerated their march into the heart of the continent.
**
The morning suns rose in a harsh, triple alignment over the frontier settlement, casting a stark light on the blood-soaked linens of the Tan Manor.
The Chief Guard stood beside the grand master bed, his heavy, ash-stained volcanic plate armor catching the morning glare. He looked down at the lifeless body of Mayor Tan. The estate's physicians and lower-tier scriers were frantically waving their arrays over the corpse, whispering in hushed, panicked tones about foreign energies and untraceable curses.
The Chief Guard silenced them with a single, heavy wave of his gauntlet. He didn't need a medical array to diagnose the cause of death. He leaned down, placing two fingers against the late Mayor's neck, noting the absolute absence of external trauma alongside the catastrophic internal structural failure.
It was a clean, absolute excision of the heart coordinates. No struggle. No resistance.
The Chief Guard stood up, letting out a long, heavy sigh that rattled the iron visor of his helm.
"Chief..." one of his elite lieutenants whispered, stepping forward with his sword half-drawn. "The wards didn't trigger. The perimeter patrols saw nothing. Should we lock down the city gates? Force The Eternity team to return for questioning?"
"Lock down the gates against an entity that walks through solid space?" the Chief Guard replied, his voice flat and tired. "Do you want to turn this entire valley into a graveyard before noon?"
He walked over to the open balcony, looking out over the bustling market square below. He remembered the dark-coated commander's words from the adventurer's guild just yesterday afternoon: A supervisor who only inspects the damage after a total structural collapse is not a leader—they are merely a cleanup crew. Markus hadn't been offering a philosophical critique. He had been stating a logistical fact.
[CHIEF GUARD'S INTERNAL DATA LOG]
>> Target: Mayor Tan (Deceased)
>> Cause of Death: Spatial Deletion of Critical Organs
>> Assessment: Natural consequence of prolonged administrative failure.
>> Case Status: CLOSED (Attributed to Wilderness Retaliation)
Tan had spent the last three decades treating the settlement like his personal fiefdom. He had extorted the independent merchant caravans, bled the local low-tier miners dry with illegal tariffs, and allowed his useless son to run rampant through the streets like an unchained beast. The Chief Guard had spent years covering up the family's messes, watching the structural foundation of the town slowly rot under the weight of their greed.
"Clean up the room," the Chief Guard ordered calmly, turning his back on the corpse. "File the report under a localized mana deviation. The Mayor's core violently destabilized due to his... excessive nocturnal activities. The Tan bloodline has officially expired."
His death hadn't been an anomaly. It had been a long, agonizingly slow time coming.
By mid-morning, the official announcement of Mayor Tan's sudden "core inversion" leaked from the manor walls and rippled through the cobblestone thoroughfares.
The reaction from the populace was instantaneous, uniform, and entirely devoid of grief.
The oppressive silence that usually hung over the commercial district vanished. Inside the Brimstone Mercenary Conclave, veteran hunters slammed their tankards onto the tables, roaring with unbridled laughter. Independent merchants openly smashed the official tax scales in the center of the market square, throwing handfuls of dried silica herbs into the air like confetti.
As dusk fell, the settlement transformed into a sprawling, unconstrained festival. Giant casks of fermented volcanic berry wine—previously hoarded under heavy imperial tariffs—were dragged into the streets and opened for anyone with a cup. Great bonfires were lit in the central plaza, their bright orange flames leaping high into the starlight, illuminating the smiling faces of thousands of citizens who had lived under the shadow of the Tan Mansion for a generation.
The celebration tore through the night and bled straight into the following day without a single moment of pause. For twenty-four continuous hours, the music didn't stop, the taverns didn't close, and the name of the Tan family was systematically toasted into complete and utter irrelevance.