13 Heavens: Rise Of The Bloodline Dreg

The Painted Ghost

Cora’s hand, wrapped in sharp, geometric light, punched into Leo’s chest.

The impact was a thunderclap in the small alley. But the sound wasn't of tearing flesh. It was a deep, resonant CLANG, like a hammer hitting the world's strongest bell.

Cora’s confident smirk vanished, replaced by shock. Her fingers hadn't pierced skin. They had hit something impossibly hard, and the recoil shot pain up her own arm.

Leo grunted, the force driving him back a step, but he didn't fall. He looked down. Where her strike had landed, his grey Aetherius shirt was torn, revealing the skin beneath. It wasn't cut. It wasn't even bruised. A faint, diamond-like shimmer faded from the spot.

His Level 13 Diamond Hide had held.

Cora stared, her stormy eyes wide. "Impossible... That was a Piercing Star technique. It cuts through reinforced steel!"

[Critical Impact Sustained. Diamond Hide Integrity: 94%.]

[Warning: Cannot withstand a second direct strike of that magnitude.]

"You talk too much," Leo growled, and he moved. Not with her elegant, disappearing speed, but with raw, brutal power. He didn't throw a fancy punch. He dropped his shoulder and charged, a bull made of flesh and bone.

He slammed into her before she could recover from her shock.

It was like hitting a wall of solid water. Her Qi swirled around her, absorbing and dispersing the force, but it still knocked the breath from her lungs and sent her stumbling back into a pile of moldering trash bags.

She hissed in anger, the first real emotion he'd seen from her. Her hands came up again, the geometric light forming into sharp, rotating discs of energy. "A tough hide. Let's see how you breathe without lungs!"

She flung her hands forward. The two Qi discs shot out, not at his body, but spinning toward his head in a buzzing, intersecting pattern, aiming to shear it from his shoulders.

Leo didn't try to out-think them. He dropped flat to the filthy ground. The discs screamed over his head, slicing clean through a metal dumpster behind him with a terrible shriek.

He scrambled up as she summoned more discs. He was outclassed. He couldn't match her technique or speed. He had one advantage: she still saw him as a simple, tough brute.

He needed to use it.

He turned and ran, not out of the alley, but deeper into it, toward a dead-end brick wall.

"Running? How disappointing!" Cora called, floating after him on jets of concentrated air, her movements graceful and effortless. She was toying with him now.

He reached the dead end and turned, his back to the wall, seeming trapped.

Cora landed lightly a few meters away, the buzzing discs of light circling her like deadly moons. "The game is over, Leo. Come quietly. Your resilience makes you even more valuable."

Leo was breathing hard, but not from fear. His Zephyr Lungs were pulling in huge amounts of the alley's foul air, filtering it, charging his blood with oxygen and the thin, wild ambient Qi. He was a spring coiling.

"I told you," he said, his voice low. "I'm done with your offers."

He slammed his palms against the brick wall behind him.

Not to push it. To resonate.

He poured every ounce of his focused will into his hands. He wasn't trying to shatter the wall. He was using the System's calculations from the crystal, applying it to the mortar between the bricks.

He found its frequency a low, gritty, crumbling note and screamed it through his skin into the wall.

CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

The mortar in a six-foot-wide section of the wall turned to dust instantly. Two hundred pounds of loose, unstable bricks lost their binding.

Cora's eyes went wide. "What—?"

Leo roared, and with all the strength of his Phoenix Marrow and Diamond Hide, he shoved.

The entire section of wall collapsed outward, not onto him, but forward, a cascading avalanche of bricks and dust directly toward Cora.

It wasn't an attack she could cut with a Qi disc. It was a ton of falling masonry.

She cried out, her precision shattered. She threw up a hasty Qi shield, a glowing hexagon of light. The bricks smashed into it, shattering, piling up. The shield held, but the impact and the blinding dust cloud drove her to her knees, trapping her for a moment under the debris.

It was the only opening he'd get.

Leo turned and sprinted out of the alley the way he'd come, his heart hammering. He could hear her furious scream and the sound of exploding bricks as she blasted her way free.

[The energy tag is emitting a constant signal. She will track you anywhere.]

[The tag is integrated with your bio-signature. Removal is not possible with current knowledge.]

He was a painted ghost. Nowhere to hide.

He burst out of the alley network and into a wider, ruined street. He had to think. He couldn't outrun her tracking. He couldn't fight her.

He needed to go where she wouldn't follow. Somewhere even the Aetherius Clan feared.

His mind raced. The System pulled up a map of the city's danger zones, data scavenged from Hunter forums and old Reclaimer briefings.

One zone glowed red, marked with skulls. It was a nexus of chaotic energy, a place where the Revival had twisted space itself.

A place the Hunters called The Screaming Chasm. It was suicide to enter. The wild, unstable energy there scrambled all instruments and drove beasts mad. It would definitely scramble a tracking signal.

It was also a one-way trip. No one who went in deep ever came out.

He heard a sonic boom from above. Cora was in the air, searching.

It was his only chance.

He changed direction, ducking under collapsed fire escapes, leaping over rusted cars, heading for the edge of the known zones, toward the deepest part of the Central Park Tangle, where the map ended and the red zone began.

After twenty minutes of desperate, all-out running, he reached the edge. It wasn't a fence. It was a... change. The air warped, shimmering like a heat haze.

The plant life wasn't just big; it was wrong, twisted into impossible, glowing shapes. The very light was a sickly purple. A low, constant hum vibrated in his teeth, a sound that felt like madness.

The Screaming Chasm.

He looked back. A speck in the sky was growing. Cora.

He took one last breath of semi-normal air and stepped across the threshold.

The change was instant and horrifying. The hum became a thousand whispering voices in his head.

The air tasted of metal and decay. His senses, so heightened, were assaulted by a carnival of wrongness. Gravity seemed to shift, pulling him sideways for a moment.

He stumbled forward, deeper into the twisted, purple-lit woods.

Behind him, at the very edge of the zone, Cora landed. She stared into the warped landscape, her face a mask of fury and frustration. She raised her wrist scanner.

The signal from Leo's tag was there, but it was flickering, breaking up into static, drowned out by the chaotic energy of the Chasm.

She couldn't follow. Not without insane risk. The clan would not approve such a gamble for one asset, no matter how unique.

She let out a sharp breath of disgust. "Fine. You choose the grave over the gilded cage." She spoke into her comms. "Asset Kaelen is presumed terminated. He fled into the Screaming Chasm. Signal is degrading. I am returning to base."

She took one last look at the shifting, nightmarish trees, then turned and shot back into the sky.

---

Deep in the Chasm, Leo collapsed against the pulsating trunk of a tree that wept glowing sap. He was safe from Cora. But he was not safe.

The whispers in his mind were getting louder. The air was so thick with wild, chaotic Qi it was choking him, even with his Zephyr Lungs. He felt his own energy, so perfectly refined, start to churn and rebel inside him, reacting violently to the corruption around him.

[Warning: Environmental Corruption Level Critical.]

[Host's refined Qi is incompatible with chaotic ambient energy. Qi Deviation Imminent.]

[Prognosis: Without stabilization, system failure and cellular breakdown will occur within 12 hours.]