The private locker room of the Vanguard Academy pavilion was sealed by a heavy, dual-layered steel security door. Inside, the hum of the station's main air filtration vents was the only sound, cutting out the deafening roar of the fifty thousand spectators still screaming in the stadium stands outside. Ren stood near the metallic decontamination basin, his uniform completely shredded from the chest up. He didn't bother looking for a replacement shirt. He casually reached into his pocket, pulled out a clean white towel, and began to wipe the residual ash and black stone dust from his arms. Beneath his dark bangs, his brown eyes were perfectly calm and level, though his skin was still pulsing with the hidden, golden warmth of his siphoned [Magma Armor]. Hiss. The heavy steel doors behind him slid open. Valeria and Isolde stepped into the room, their heavy combat armor visors sliding back simultaneously to reveal their faces. Both girls were breathing heavily, their faces pale, their

The sub-levels of the Orbital Ring didn't feel like a space station. They felt like a silent, underwater maze built out of polished black alloy and massive sheets of reinforced containment glass. This was the Deep Void Aquarium—a highly classified, corporate research sector where House Revenhall kept the most volatile, spatial mutations captured from the depths of the Tier-5 Rift. Ren stepped out of the shadow of a massive air filtration pillar, his bare feet making absolutely no sound on the freezing metal floor. Beneath his uniform, his [Atmospheric Adaptability] was smoothly filtering out the toxic, pressurized ozone filling the sub-level air. He held the sleek data-drive Isolde had given him, sliding it directly into the primary security terminal of Quarantine Vault 4. BEEP. [Access Granted: Master Override Registry — House Revenhall.] [Quarantine Shutter: Retracting... Security Sensors: Suspended for 20:00.] The massive, ten-ton titanium shutters slid back with a low hydrau

The white blizzard didn't just howl outside the bunker; it tore at the world with the force of a localized hurricane. But to the naked eye, the storm had completely lost its rhythm. BOOM! A violent sonic boom exploded across the glacial plain, shattering the dark-blue ice floor into a million tiny crystals. Ren didn't just move forward—he transformed into a flat, horizontal line of pitch-black vacuum light, propelled by the raw, electronic impulses of [Supersonic Flash]. At 127 points of Agility, his bursting velocity completely eliminated the air friction around his clothes, allowing him to cut through the sub-zero storm before the sound of his departure could even echo off the bunker walls. Towering forty feet into the sky, the Abyssal Frost-Titan sensed the sudden, impossible velocity shifting beneath its massive horizontal eye. The colossal mountain of living permafrost reacted with ancient, terrifying weight. It swung its right arm—a massive, twenty-ton column of solid dar