The twin daggers, humming with the dark mana of the Shadow Monarch, were less
than an inch from Ren's neck.
Time seemed to warp, stretching into an agonizingly slow crawl. Ren could see
the intricate runes carved into the obsidian blades. He could feel the cold,
hungry pull of the shadow magic clinging to them. His Shadow Step was on
cooldown. His body, even with its 89 Speed, was too slow to parry both strikes
at once.
He was trapped.
In the VIP box, Lord Zilton leaned forward, a triumphant, predatory smile
spreading across his face. On the arena floor, the referee raised his hand,
preparing to call the fatal end of the match.
Ren's mind, stripped of all other options, fell back on the one unknown variable
he had left. A skill he had received as a gift. A name that tasted like death.
'System,' Ren thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. 'Activate: Grave
Eater.'
[System Alert: Activating 'Grave Eater' (Lv. 1)] [Description: A forbidden skill
that consumes the user's life force and ambient mana to temporarily grant the
power of a higher rank.] [Current Rank: B] -> [Forced Rank-Up: A] [Duration: 15
Minutes] [WARNING: Severe backlash will occur upon skill deactivation. Proceed?]
'PROCEED!' Ren commanded.
The world didn't just change; it buckled.
A wave of suffocating, black-and-purple energy erupted from Ren's body. It
wasn't a gentle glow; it was a violent, uncontrolled explosion of raw,
concentrated mass. The sand around his feet superheated instantly under the
sheer friction of his expanding aura, fusing into a smooth, ten-meter crater of
scorched, black glass.
His stats didn't just increase; they multiplied.
[Strength: 106 -> 212] [Speed: 89 -> 178] [Mana: 28 -> 156]
The pressure radiating from Ren was so absolute that Kage, still descending from
the air, felt his lungs seize. It was the aura of a true A-Rank, but wilder.
Unchained.
The twin daggers, guided by Kage's will, sliced through the erupting aura,
cutting a path toward Ren's throat.
They were about to make contact.
And then, they hit nothing.
With 178 Speed, Ren's perception of time had accelerated. The daggers were now
moving as if suspended in thick honey.
In the micro-second before the blades broke his skin, Ren took a single, calm
step backward. He didn't just dodge; he moved with such impossible, frictionless
grace that the daggers simply passed through the empty space where his neck had
been a fraction of a second prior.
He raised his left hand. As the daggers drifted past him, he casually plucked
one of them out of the air with two fingers, its lethal momentum completely
negated by his newly forged strength.
Kage landed on the glass crater, his eyes wide with horror. He had felt the
connection to his weapon sever. "What... what are you?"
Ren slowly lowered his hand, inspecting the obsidian dagger. He turned his head,
and his eyes—now burning with a terrifying, purple luminescence—locked onto
Kage.
"My turn," Ren said. His voice was different. Deeper, echoing with the stolen
ambient mana.
Kage's instincts screamed. The boy in front of him was no longer a B-Rank
anomaly. They were now standing on the same treacherous peak.
Kage didn't hesitate. He abandoned his remaining dagger and activated his
ultimate escape skill.
[Skill: Shadow Dive]
His body dissolved into a pool of liquid shadow, sinking into the ground to
blindly navigate beneath the arena and reappear at a safe distance.
But Ren wasn't just relying on his 178 Speed to chase him.
His 162 Intelligence flared, turning the stadium into a three-dimensional grid
in his mind. He didn't track Kage's physical body; he tracked the subterranean
shift of dark mana moving beneath the sand.
Ren didn't chase. He intercepted.
He dashed across the arena, arriving at the exact coordinate where the mana pool
was congregating. He got there a full second before Kage even began to
resurface.
Ren waited, his boots planted firmly on the sand. He watched the slight ripple
form in the center of the shadow pool.
He pulled his right arm back, channeling every ounce of his 212 Strength into
his fist. The air around his knuckles cracked, creating a miniature sonic boom.
But as he wound up for the strike, a sharp, tearing agony ripped through his
chest.
'Already?!' Ren gritted his teeth, tasting copper. The fifteen minutes weren't
up, but the sheer output of A-Rank stats was burning through his C-Rank
biological vessel faster than the System could sustain. The backlash was
bleeding into the active skill. Veins bulged purple against his neck,
threatening to burst.
He couldn't hold the power for another second. He had to end it now.
Kage's head and shoulders materialized from the ground. The Shadow Monarch's
eyes widened in pure, unadulterated panic as he saw Ren standing directly over
him, fist already in motion, blood dripping from Ren's chin.
Ren threw the punch.
It wasn't a martial art. It was a localized natural disaster.
The punch connected with Kage's chest at the exact moment he solidified into
human form.
CRACK.
The sickening sound of the A-Rank assassin's reinforced ribs and breastplate
shattering echoed like a gunshot. Kage was launched like a cannonball. He shot
across the arena, skipping off the sand twice before slamming into the far
stadium wall with a catastrophic impact. Spiderweb fractures shot up the ancient
marble structure. Kage fell to the ground in a broken, unmoving heap.
For three seconds, the stadium of a thousand people was dead silent.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. The visual of the unkillable Royal Assassin being
swatted across the arena like an insect short-circuited their brains.
Then, the silence broke.
It started as a gasp from the VIP boxes, followed by a sudden, deafening
eruption of chaos. Spectators leaped from their seats, screaming in disbelief.
It was a roar of pure, unfiltered shock.
The referee, pale and trembling, lowered his magical barrier. He stared at
Kage's unconscious, bleeding form, then looked back at the boy standing in the
center of the arena.
"W-Winner..." the referee stammered into his amplifier, his voice cracking.
"Ren!"
The word echoed over the roaring crowd, but to Ren, it sounded like it was
coming from underwater.
The moment the match was called, the Grave Eater skill deactivated.
The borrowed A-Rank power was violently ripped out of his cells. The 212
Strength vanished, leaving his muscles feeling like shredded paper. The world
snapped back to a terrifying, blurry velocity.
[WARNING: 'Grave Eater' Backlash Initiated.] [Status Effect: Mana Burn.] [Status
Effect: Internal Bleeding.]
Ren coughed violently, a thick spray of dark blood spattering onto the sand at
his feet. His knees buckled. He tried to take a step, to walk away with the cold
confidence of a victor, but his legs were stone.
The roaring of the crowd faded into a high-pitched, agonizing ring.
He heard a voice calling his name from the tunnel.
"Ren... Ren-ni!"
Erna.
Ren tried to turn his head, to signal that he was okay, but a new sensation
suddenly cut through the fog of his pain. It was a pressure. An aura.
It wasn't the arrogant gold of Valerius or the cold shadow of Kage. This was
different. It was a single, impossibly sharp point of malice, like a physical
needle pressing against the base of his skull. It emanated from somewhere high
in the spectator stands, cutting through the ambient noise of the stadium like a
razor.
Ren's instincts, forged in the brutal survival of Batch Two, screamed a warning
that his System couldn't even process.
It was the aura of an SS-Rank.
A cold dread, deeper and more terrifying than the physical agony tearing his
body apart, washed over him. It gave him chills that froze the blood on his
chin.
'Who...?' was his last coherent thought.
The ground rushed up to meet his face. The last thing he saw was the blurry
image of the stadium walls, and the last thing he heard was the sound of his own
body hitting the sand.
Then, everything went black.