The slate quarry three hundred miles north of Bastion had ceased to look like a geological feature. After two weeks of incessant summoning, it looked like a crater on the moon that had been chewed on by something angry.

  The rocks were scarred with scorch marks that defied spectrum analysis. Pools of vitrified sand glinted like black glass under the sun. The air smelled permanently of ozone, void-discharge, and the strange scent of alien blood.

  “Target down!” Rexxar roared, putting a boot on the neck of a creature that looked like a praying mantis made of liquid mercury and spite. “It crumbles before the Golden Lion!”

  I floated down, my feet touching the pulverized ground without making a sound. My control was absolute now.

  “Another Tier 7 Void-Stalker,” I noted, scanning the dissipating corpse. “Efficient kill, Rexxar. You blocked the dimension-shear with your face, though. Again.”

  “My face is sturdy!” Rexxar argued, wiping purple fluids from his helmet. “And the Lion’s Mane reflects such petty magic!”

  Leoric’s drones swooped in, disassembling the mantis with terrifying speed.

  “Add it to the pile,” I signaled Jeeves. “Conversion rate?”

  “Steady, Master,” Jeeves’ voice replied via the neural link. “We are averaging twenty thousand Quintessence Shards per entity after liquefying the materials in the System Exchange. Current balance stands at seven hundred and forty thousand.”

  I grit my teeth. “It’s still too slow.”

  Two weeks of grinding. Fourteen days of inviting monstrosities into our backyard, killing them, and selling the unused material from their corpses. It was lucrative beyond belief for any other faction — we were effectively printing money — but I needed more. A single skill, albeit a Mythic one, costs a million, not even mentioning the massive sums I needed to even think about entering the 'Auction' I have a ticket for. And the clock in my head was ticking louder than the battles. Every day we spent farming was a day the Kyorian fleet in Alpha-Prime dug deeper.

  “Zareth,” I called out.

  The Summoner was sitting on a floating rock, drinking tea from a cup that definitely hadn’t been there a minute ago. He looked bored.

  “Sovereign?”

  “We need to upscale. The small fry aren’t cutting it. I want a whale.”

  Zareth put his tea down. His galaxy-eyes spun a little faster.

  “A whale implies size, Sovereign. Do you want a Baron?”

  “Tier 8,” I clarified. “I want you to ring the big bell.”

  The team paused. Anna lowered her bow. Lucas shifted his shield.

  “Tier 8,” Anna repeated flatly. “Eren, a Tier 8 is a localized natural disaster. None of us have ever seen one…”

  “I can feel it, I know I am capable of facing one,” I countered calmly, feeling the density of my cores. “Syntheia didn’t spend five years beating the weakness out of me just so I could wrestle bugs. I’m ready.”

  “Preparation for a Greater Call requires time,” Zareth warned, floating closer. “To annoy a Baron enough to cross the threshold… I need to build a resonance chamber. I need to insult its mother in a language that breaks physics. It will take a week.”

  “Do it,” I ordered. “I’ll use the downtime to upgrade my gear.”

  While Zareth turned the quarry into a complex ritual site involving geometric chalk circles and what appeared to be jars of fermented void-blood, I retreated to Leoric’s forge.

  “You have the materials from the hunts,” I told the Artificer, dumping a subspace inventory worth of high-tier loot onto his workbench. “Void-chitin. Space-time glands. Null-steel. I need armor that doesn’t just protect. I need more armor like the Raiment, armor that further amplifies my Affinities and Mana.”

  Leoric vibrated. “Yes. Yes! I have been waiting for this!”

  For six days, the forge didn’t sleep. Neither did I. I stood in the heat, using my [Apex Mana Authority] to help Leoric mold materials that refused to bend to normal tools. We forged plating from the compressed carapaces of the Tier 7s. We wove circuits from the nerves of Phase-Spiders.

  When it was done, it didn’t look like armor. It looked like solidified shadow.

  [Item: Abyssal Sovereign’s Carapace]

  [Tier: Legendary (High Tier 7)]

  [Description: Armor forged for a Lord of the Deep. Crafted from Null-Steel and Void-Chitin, infused with star-dust circuitry.]

  [Active Skill - Void Well: The armor contains micro-singularities in the pauldrons. Can store massive amounts of excess ambient mana for usage.]

  [Passive Skill - Null-Refraction: The armor naturally bends light and mana-scans away from the wearer, aiding in conceptual stealth.]

  [Passive Skill - The Anchor: Grants high resistance to forced teleportation or spatial displacement.]

  I put it on. It was heavy, dark, and matte. The light didn’t reflect off it; it sank into it. It fit my new philosophy perfectly.

  “Still a no on the Flame integration?” Leoric asked, holding a canister of condensed Soulfire.

  “No,” I shook my head. “We keep the Flame hidden. The Kyorians know I have Primordial heritage, but to their knowledge it's just a connection to the Void, a strange, rare anomaly, but nothing world shattering. If I start throwing around the Ashen Flame casually, it’ll invite a whole new set of problems. So, I will remain a Void specialist until I absolutely need to burn them.”

  “Seven days are up,” Zareth’s voice whispered through the Sanctum. “The guest is knocking.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  We gathered at the quarry.

  It was unrecognizable. Zareth had etched a massive rune-circle into the bedrock, five hundred feet across. The air hummed with a low, vibrating thrum that rattled my teeth.

  “Everyone back,” I ordered the team. “Way back. Observation only. If this thing breaches the containment circle, I handle it. Do not engage unless I call it.”

  “Understood,” Anna said, leading the squad to the ridge line miles away.

  I stood at the edge of the circle. Zareth stood in the center.

  “I feel one,” Zareth said, his voice giddy. “A Void-Titan. A Baron of the crushing deep. He is very… possessive of his territory. I have spent the last six days projecting the concept of ‘Trespasser’ directly into his lair.”

  “Bring him out.”

  Zareth slammed his hands onto the ground.

  “I DENY YOUR RIGHT TO SLUMBER!” he shrieked.

  The reality within the circle shattered.

  It wasn’t a portal. The sky above the circle simply fell. A tear opened in the atmosphere, wide enough to swallow a cruiser.

  Out of the tear stepped… a nightmare.

  It was humanoid, if a human was made of obsidian boulders and black sludge. It stood fifty meters tall. It didn’t have a face; it had a single, vertical slit of purple light that burned with hate. Around its head floated a halo of shattered rock debris.

  [Target: Void-Baron Thal’Koz]

  [Rank: Tier 8 (Low)]

  Thal’Koz roared. The sound flattened a nearby hill.

  “YOU!” it boomed — not in words, but in pure telepathic rage.

  It looked at Zareth. It raised a fist the size of a house.

  Zareth bowed. “And I bid you adieu.”

  He sank into the ground, vanishing.

  The Baron looked around. It saw me. A speck in black armor.

  It swatted.

  The hand came down like a meteor.

  I didn’t dodge.

  I activated [Apex Mana Authority]. I grabbed the gravity well the Baron was using to accelerate his fist and reversed it.

  The giant hand froze ten feet above my head, vibrating against an invisible wall of my Will.

  The Baron paused, its eye-slit widening. It pushed harder. The ground beneath me cracked, liquefying under the pressure.

  “My turn,” I whispered.

  I engaged [Void Walk].

  I vanished. I didn’t reappear behind him. I reappeared on his arm. I ran up the limb, my boots finding traction on his shifting obsidian skin.

  He tried to swat me with his other hand. I jumped, twisting in the air.

  I conjured a sword. I channeled pure Void mana into the edge, sharpening it to a single molecule width.

  I slashed his shoulder joint.

  The blade didn’t bounce. It slid through the Tier 8 carapace like hot knife through butter. I didn’t cut the rock; I cut the spatial connection holding the arm to the body.

  With a sound like a cracking mountain, the massive left arm detached and fell to the ground, causing an earthquake.

  The beast shrieked.

  It wasn’t just pain; it was disbelief. It generated a pulse of Omni-Directional Gravity. Everything within a mile was instantly subjected to a hundred times Earth’s gravity.

  I felt my knees buckle. The Abyssal Armor groaned.

  This was a Domain battle. He was trying to crush me with Authority.

  But I had spent five years sitting under a Tier 9 Goddess’ anvil.

  “Weak,” I growled.

  I stood up. I flared my cores. I expanded my own Domain, pushing back against his heavy field.

  “I denied the Mother,” I roared, jumping towards his face. “You are just a pebble!”

  I didn’t use the Flame. I used pure mass. I focused my entire gravitational density into my fist.

  I punched the Baron in his singular eye.

  The impact created a sonic boom that reached all the way to Bastion, three hundred miles away.

  The Baron’s head snapped back. The purple light in his eye fractured.

  He stumbled, the massive body losing cohesion as I disrupted his core.

  I landed on his chest. I drove my sword deep into his heart.

  “Dissolve.”

  I pumped large amounts of disruptive Void mana directly into his lattice.

  The Baron convulsed. He tried to grab me, but his fingers crumbled into dust. He screamed one last time, a sound of pure cosmic frustration, and then exploded into a rain of black particulates and high-tier materials.

  I landed on the ground, dust settling around me.

  Silence returned to the quarry.

  “Target neutralized,” I announced over the comms, my breath steady.

  The team came down from the ridge. They were looking at the crater.

  “Tier 8,” Lucas murmured, kicking a piece of the Baron’s obsidian heart. “You just singlehandedly took down a Tier 8 in minutes.”

  “Well, I would have to, assuming the Kyorians have a Tier 8 of their own. Besides, it was definitely weakened, so I did get some help,” I pointed to Zareth, who popped out of a shadow, looking smug.

  “Excellent choice of guest, Sovereign,” Zareth preened. “He was very nutritious.”

  Leoric descended with an entire fleet of cargo drones. “The loot… look at the Essence density! This is Primal Void Essence!”

  We harvested it. It took hours. The Baron left behind enough materials to upgrade the entire city’s defenses.

  But I cared about one thing.

  “Liquidation,” I ordered. “Sell the core. Sell the excess. Sell everything we don’t absolutely need.”

  Jeeves processed the transaction. It was the largest single sale in the history of our trades.

  [Transaction Complete.]

  [Balance: +310,000 QS.]

  [Total Quintessence Shards: 1,050,000.]

  “A million,” I whispered.

  I didn’t wait. I stood there in the dust of the dead Titan, opening the System interface.

  There it was. The skill that Syntheia had feared.

  [The Void-Star’s Hunger.]

  [Cost: 1,000,000 QS.]

  [Purchase?]

  This was it. The solution to my stamina problem. The key to the Endless Engine.

  I agreed, confirming the purchase.

  The Shards vanished from my account. A million shards of wealth gone in a second.

  [Skill Acquired.]

  [Assimilating: The Void-Star’s Hunger.]

  I felt it instantly. A hollow ache opening in my stomach — not biological, but spiritual. A maw opening in the center of my Soul Palace. It wasn’t painful; it was… expectant. It wanted to be fed.

  And then…

  On my wrist, the rusty iron bracelet vibrated.

  It wasn’t a rattle. It was a pulse. For the first time ever, the oxidized metal grew warm against my skin.

  I stared at it. It was drinking the residual energy of the skill assimilation. It was reacting to the Void-Star.

  “Finally awake?” I whispered, watching a faint, hairline crack of golden light appear in the rust.

  The bracelet pulsed again, stronger this time. Like a heartbeat coming out of a coma.

  I looked at the notifications, then at the glowing crack on my wrist.

  The Hunt was over. The Meal was beginning.