MY SYSTEM LOADS 10 SECONDS LATE

Chapter 9 : The Gray Zone Exchange

The neon signature of the Lower East Sector didn't shine; it bled.

Down here, miles away from the pristine, glass-shielded corporate plazas of Upper Manhattan, the smog was a physical presence. It rolled through the narrow, rain-slicked alleys like a toxic fog, carrying the scent of burning copper wire, heavy industrial grease, and the faint, unmistakable ozone sting of unstable dungeon mana. This was the Gray Zone. It was a sprawling, lawless labyrinth that existed right in the shadow of the New Horizon megastructures, a place where the Hunter's Association had zero jurisdiction, and the corporate syndicates only intervened when someone threatened their bottom line.

Jaxen pulled the collar of his worn leather vest higher, his boots splashing through a puddle of water that glowed a faint, chemical green from a nearby leaking generator.

Outwardly, he looked exactly like the desperate, exhausted E-Rank utility scout he had been for the last three years. His shoulders were slightly hunched, his pace was uneven, and his eyes were cast downward toward the asphalt. But beneath the surface, hidden entirely behind the flawless illusion of his *[Chronostasis Veil]*, Jaxen's body was a loaded spring. The 51 points of Strength and 64 points of Agility pulsed through his newly reinforced muscle fibers with an effortless, coiled energy. For the first time in his life, he wasn't looking at the dark alleyways with fear. He was looking at them with calculation.

He stopped in front of a rusted steel security door tucked behind a mountain of discarded cybernetic scrap metal. Above the door, a flickering, buzzing crimson neon sign spelled out a single word: *EXCHANGE.*

Jaxen didn't knock. He reached out and grabbed the heavy iron handle, pushing the door inward.

The interior of the black-market hub was a vast, open-floor basement filled with a thick cloud of heavy synthetic tobacco smoke and the deafening, overlapping roar of dozens of lawless mercenaries, rogue appraisers, and illegal smugglers. Rows of makeshift wooden stalls lined the concrete walls, displaying rows of unregistered kinetic firearms, black-market health potions that were probably past their expiration date, and stolen dungeon cores glowing with erratic, flickering auras.

These were the Wild Hunters—men and women who had either been rejected by the major corporate syndicates or had fled their contracts to operate in the lawless underbelly of the city. They were desperate, dangerous, and utterly ruthless.

Jaxen walked through the crowd, keeping his head down. He could feel the eyes of several loitering mercenaries tracking his movements. To them, his old, stained clothes and the faint, suppressed mana signature he was projecting marked him as an easy target—a weak civilian or a low-grade scout who had somehow stumbled into the wrong room with a pocket full of credits.

He ignored them, navigating the chaotic floor until he reached a secluded counter at the very back of the basement. Sitting behind a reinforced iron mesh screen was a withered old man with a cybernetic optical lens clamped over his left eye. He was meticulously cleaning the internal gears of an old, military-grade mana pistol. This was Old Man Vance. Despite sharing a surname, they weren't related; it was just a common name in the outer refugee sectors, but the old man was known as one of the few honest fences left in the Gray Zone.

"You're late, kid," Old Man Vane said without looking up from his workbench, his raspy voice cutting through the ambient noise of the basement. "Visiting hours at St. Jude ended forty minutes ago. I was about to close the cage."

"The transit lines were delayed," Jaxen lied smoothly, stepping up to the counter. He reached into his vest, pulled out a heavy, leather-wrapped bundle, and placed it onto the steel counter with a dull, heavy thud. "I have something to appraise. A solo drop from an unmapped sector."

The old man's cybernetic lens clicked violently, zooming in on the bundle. He slowly set down his tools, wiped his grease-stained hands on a rag, and unrolled the leather.

The moment the fabric fell away, a brilliant, pulsating emerald light illuminated the old man's wrinkled face. Resting on the counter was the central mana core of the Level 120 Crypt Weaver. Even though the boss's core had imploded during the final strike, the concentrated essence that Jaxen had carved out of its frozen carcass was still radiating an incredibly dense, high-tier magical pressure.

Old Man Vance froze. The casual, dismissive demeanor vanished from his face in an instant. He reached under the counter and hit a hidden switch, instantly dropping a heavy, sound-proof steel shutter over the iron mesh screen, cutting them off from the rest of the basement.

"Where the hell did you get this?" the old man whispered, his cybernetic eye spinning wildly as it analyzed the core's internal data streams. "This isn't a D-Rank core, Jaxen. The structural density of this mana... it's a hundred times higher than anything found in the lower sectors. This is an Abyssal-tier Core from an S-Rank vanguard zone. Did you rob a Dawn Horizon logistics transport?"

"Does it matter?" Jaxen asked, his voice completely devoid of emotion. "You know the rules of the Exchange, Vance. You don't ask about the gate, and I don't ask where you sell the product. I need liquid credits, and I need them tonight."

The old man stared at the core, his hands slightly trembling as he picked up a pair of specialized brass calipers to measure the core's crystallization axis. "If the corporate authorities trace this core back to my shop, they won't just shut me down—they'll turn my marrow into cyber-fuel. But... the purity of this extraction is perfect. It hasn't been contaminated by standard corporate extraction lasers. It was harvested manually, with raw physical precision."

He looked up, his real eye fixed intensely on Jaxen. "A core like this is worth a fortune to the independent research labs in the western territories. They use them to manufacture high-tier combat prosthetics without corporate tracking chips. I can give you ninety thousand credits for it. But it'll take me fifteen minutes to route the funds through seven different proxy banks in the offshore sectors to keep it untraceable."

"Do it," Jaxen said, leaning back against the counter. "I'll wait."

The old man nodded, grabbing the emerald core and retreating into a heavily locked back room to initiate the transfer protocol.

Jaxen stood in the enclosed space, his ears tracking the muffled sounds of the bustling black market outside the shutter. He closed his eyes, checking the internal countdown timer of his *[Chronostasis Veil]*. The mask was holding, but the ambient mana from the surrounding black-market stalls was causing his newly expanded core to thrum with a restless, hungry energy. At Level 42, his perception was so sharp that he could hear the heartbeat of the mercenary standing ten feet away on the other side of the wall.

Suddenly, a heavy, metallic crunch echoed right outside the shutter door.

Jaxen's eyes flew open. His *[Perception]* attribute instantly registered a sudden, aggressive shift in the local air pressure. Three distinct, heavy footsteps were approaching the counter area. They weren't the erratic, drunken steps of standard mercenaries; they were coordinated, tactical, and fast.

*Clang.*

The heavy steel shutter was violently warped inward as a massive, reinforced combat boot slammed into the center of the metal plate, tearing it off its tracks. The shutter collapsed onto the floor with a deafening crash, kicking up a cloud of rust and concrete dust.

Standing in the opening were three towering figures clad in mismatched, dark tactical armor. Their faces were concealed behind heavy ballistic masks painted with crude, grinning white skulls. These were the "Skull Grinders"—a notorious gang of rogue hunters who operated as black-market enforcers and highwaymen in the Gray Zone. They didn't raid dungeons; they raided other hunters.

The leader of the group, a massive man wielding a heavy, concrete-crushing warhammer that glowed with a low-grade D-Rank earth enchantment, stepped over the ruined shutter. His malicious, bloodshot eyes scanned the room before locking directly onto Jaxen.

"Well, well," the leader chuckled, his voice a deep, gravelly rumble that vibrated inside his ballistic mask. "Look what we found. The little rat from the outer sector actually brought a golden goose to the market tonight. We heard the old man shouting all the way from the front aisle. Hand over the transfer token, kid, and maybe we'll let you keep both of your legs."

Behind him, the two other thugs drew heavy, jagged combat machetes, their D-Rank mana tracking across the blades in faint, flickering orange sparks. They had been tipped off by one of the spotters near the lobby. An E-Rank nobody carrying a high-tier bundle into Old Man Vance's shop was an invitation to a slaughter.

Jaxen didn't move. He didn't run, and he didn't raise his hands. He stood perfectly still, his arms hanging loosely at his sides, his face completely hidden beneath the shadow of his hood.

"You should leave," Jaxen said softly. His voice wasn't trembling. It carried an absolute, chilling lack of fear that caused the leader of the thugs to momentarily pause. "The old man is processing a private transaction. You're disrupting my schedule."

The leader blinked behind his mask, then burst into a loud, mocking laugh. "Disrupting your schedule? Hear that, boys? The E-Rank garbage has a timeline to keep! I'm going to enjoy breaking your jaw, kid."

The giant raised his massive warhammer, his D-Rank strength attribute flaring as he channeled his mana into the heavy weapon. The concrete beneath his boots cracked from the weight of his stance. With a savage roar, he swung the hammer horizontally, aiming to take Jaxen's head completely off his shoulders.

The movement was fast—to an ordinary civilian, it would have been a blur of steel and dust.

But to Jaxen, whose Agility was now at 64 and whose Perception sat at 45, the massive thug looked like he was moving through a pool of thick, viscous syrup. He could see the exact trajectory of the hammer. He could see the poor weight distribution in the thug's left knee. He could see the exposed, unarmored gap right beneath the leader's armpit where the tactical vest met the shoulder strap.

Jaxen didn't even need to use his 10-second rewind. This wasn't an Abyssal Boss; these were just low-tier street thugs who relied on raw intimidation and basic physical attributes.

Jaxen simply leaned his upper body backward by two inches.

*SWISH.*

The massive, glowing warhammer swept through the empty air right in front of his nose, the displaced wind ruffling his hood. The sheer momentum of the missed swing threw the leader completely off balance, his heavy boots sliding across the smooth concrete floor.

Before the leader could recover his footing, Jaxen stepped into the giant's blind spot. His movement was so blindingly fast, so utterly silent, that to the two remaining thugs watching from the doorway, it looked as though the kid had simply vanished from reality.

Jaxen reverse-gripped a cheap, dull iron dagger he had kept hidden in his sleeve. Moving with the fluid, calculated precision he had honed over three years of surviving at the bottom of the food chain, he drove the blade straight into the unarmored gap beneath the leader's armpit.

*SQUELCH.*

The dull iron blade tore through muscle tissue and severed the primary brachial artery with terrifying ease, driven by Jaxen's C-Rank strength.

"Argh!" the leader screamed, dropping the heavy warhammer as a fountain of dark crimson blood erupted from his side. He staggered backward, his face turning pale as he clutched the fountain of blood, his eyes wide with a mixture of agony and profound disbelief. "You... your strength... you're not an E-Rank!"

The two remaining thugs froze, their expressions instantly turning into masks of pure horror. Their unstoppable, D-Rank leader had been dismantled in less than a single second by a kid who didn't even display a visible mana aura.

Jaxen stepped over the dropped warhammer, flicking the blood off his dull iron blade with a casual wave of his wrist. He looked at the two terrified men standing in the doorway, his eyes glowing with a cold, golden sharpness from beneath his hood.

"I told you," Jaxen said, his voice dropping into a harsh, unyielding whisper. "You're disrupting my schedule."

*Beep.*

From the back room, the mechanical chime of the transaction terminal echoed through the quiet booth. Old Man Vance stepped out of the vault room, holding a sleek, silver corporate banking token that pulsed with a clean, blue encryption light.

The old man stopped dead in his tracks, his real eye wide as he looked at the bleeding, groaning leader of the Skull Grinders on the floor, and then at Jaxen, who stood there completely untouched, holding a bloody piece of scrap metal.

"The... the transfer is complete, Jaxen," Old Man Vance stammered, his cybernetic lens clicking frantically as he tried to process the scene. "Ninety thousand credits... routed cleanly into your encrypted account."

Jaxen reached out and calmly took the silver token from the old man's hand, sliding it safely into his vest pocket. He checked his phone's digital interface. His account balance now displayed an incredible **92,240 Credits**. The first phase of his urgent quest was officially secure.

He turned toward the broken doorway, walking past the two remaining thugs who instinctively threw themselves against the walls to stay out of his path. They didn't dare to breathe until his shadow had completely disappeared down the long, smoke-filled corridor of the black-market basement.

Jaxen stepped back out into the rain-slicked, neon-lit alleyways of the Lower East Sector, the cold water washing the blood off his leather boots. He looked up at the towering skyscrapers of the central district, his fist clenching around his dull daggers.

He

had the money to keep his sister alive for the next year. He had the strength to defend his choices. The mask of the E-Rank scout was still intact to the global databases, but the shadow of "Chronos" was about to grow far longer than the city of New Horizon could ever contain.