In a completely different location, Levin and Feras appeared as the white glow on their figures faded away.

The surroundings were different from where the fight had been. Forest stretched in every direction around them. This was the forest just outside Lumivale — the same one they had passed through when they first arrived.

Josh groaned as he stood up, one hand going straight to his head. Blood was still coming from the wound there, running down the side of his face and dropping from his jaw. He stood anyway and took in the surroundings once before turning to Mullark.

Mullark was getting up at the same pace, slower than usual, one hand pressed to the side of his head as well.

"Ugh..."

He got upright and looked at Josh. Josh nodded once. Mullark responded with a slight nod back before speaking.

"...That bastard. If we hadn’t prepared this beforehand we would be dead. His physical strength is way too much for an A-rank. Our daggers didn’t even cut through his muscles properly. The vital organs were out of reach from the beginning."

Josh said nothing immediately. He reached into his assassin clothes and pulled out a small vial. The liquid inside was blue. He uncorked it with his thumb and drank it down.

Gulp...gulp...gulp.

He let the vial drop from his hand. It hit the ground and lay there. Mullark did the same, pulling out an identical vial and drinking it without a word.

The wounds across both their bodies began closing after that. It was slow compared to what Atlas had shown them, but it was still faster than any natural healing. The gash on Josh’s head sealed over within a minute. Mullark’s followed shortly after.

Josh spoke once the worst of it had closed.

"We had one use of that relic. And most likely he is dead. Even if he is not, he has no information on us. He cannot trace us back."

Mullark nodded. "Yes. But we still have to retreat and inform Veyron about this man. His healing, that barrier, the physical strength — we don’t even know if he has other abilities or relics beyond what we saw. We have no complete picture of what he is capable of."

Josh looked around the forest once more and said nothing to that. There was nothing to argue with in it.

They had planned for this outcome before they even entered Lumivale. The possibility that a target could be dangerous enough to require an emergency exit was something the Martial Cleaver accounted for in every mission. What they had used was a technique they called Switch — something taught to them from the beginning of their training in the unit.

Switch allowed them to exchange their position with any non-living object within a certain range. The range depended on Spirit reserve and control. At A-rank both of them could cover roughly twenty kilometers. They had located two monster corpses in the forest outside the city before entering Lumivale and marked those positions beforehand specifically for this situation. The moment things went wrong they had switched their bodies with those corpses, placing the dead monsters at the fight location and themselves here.

The white glow Atlas had seen on their bodies just before the blast was not the cause of the explosion. That glow was the Switch technique activating. It was deliberate. They had let it show at that moment to make Atlas assume the glow was connected to whatever was about to happen so his attention stayed on them rather than on what was actually causing it.

The blast itself had come from a relic.

An Epic-grade relic called "Harbinger’s Detonation".

It was small — roughly the size and shape of an octahedron, the kind of geometric form that looked almost decorative if you didn’t know what it was. The outer structure was obsidian in color. Inside it, at the center, was a single red point where all the Spirit it had been passively drawing from the atmosphere was stored and condensed. That stored Spirit was what had released all at once.

An Epic-grade relic used at point-blank range was enough to kill an A-rank outright. It had taken Atlas’s lower leg and the only reason it hadn’t killed him was the Crowbeast Wings getting him off the ground at the last possible moment.

As both of them stood in the quiet of the forest with their wounds closing, the conversation turned to what they had actually observed from the fight itself.

Mullark spoke first.

"He was a complete beginner in terms of actual combat against another person. The way he moved, the decisions he made — it was like watching someone who had only ever fought monsters. No awareness of how a person thinks mid-fight. No understanding of coordinated techniques between two opponents. He reacted to everything individually instead of reading us as a unit."

Josh nodded slowly. "He has been clearing ruins and getting stronger without any experience in actual duels. That much was obvious from the first exchange."

They had both spotted it within the first minute of the fight. Years of training made that kind of thing visible immediately. A person who had never fought another trained human moved in a specific way that was different from someone who had, regardless of how strong they were physically.

The problem was that observation did not change the conclusion they had already reached.

Even knowing he was inexperienced, they had no confidence going back into that fight. His physical strength alone made direct combat unreliable. His regeneration made damage accumulation an unreliable strategy. His barrier had appeared without any visible activation method. And none of that accounted for whatever else he might be carrying or capable of that they hadn’t seen yet.

Informing Veyron was the only remaining option.

Both of them turned and vanished into the forest, moving back the way they had come.

- - -

Meanwhile...

Inside the Abyss-Rank Ruin Atlas had come to clear, in the deepest chamber, the Codex floated in front of him.

[ Spirit Shape Weaver — Rank A — Assimilated ]

[ Grants the ability to shape Spirit in any form when condensed into solid or liquid form. Limitation comes from the user’s imagination of what shape it should form. ]

[ Note: This ability is restricted to its own rank — meaning any weapon or object formed using it would only result at A-rank. ]

Atlas read through it and smiled.

He had been getting Traits from the outer chamber monsters that were either already in his assimilated list or only marginally useful. None of them had been worth stopping for, so he had left them on hold and kept moving through the ruin. The A-rank boss in the deepest chamber had been a different matter. Spirit Shape was exactly the kind of Trait that had real applications.

The assimilation had also gone smoothly, the same way every assimilation had gone smoothly since his attributes had reached 30. At 40 it was even cleaner than that.

Atlas turned the page to the third one.

The Bloodline percentage had moved from 1.5% to 1.6%.

The Sanguis Stylus had come back after absorbing the A-rank boss’s blood, as it always did, and as usual the Osmo ??? Bloodline had eaten it, increasing the percentage increase from it.

Atlas looked at the number for a moment.

"...At least I gained something useful from all of these." His voice came out cold and slightly rough, still carrying the edge of everything that had happened outside the ruin before he came in here.

He turned to the first page and looked at the attribute blanks.

"Now it’s finally time to reach Attribute 50 and activate the Bloodline."

- - -

[A/N: Where are the Golden tickets?...and someone who would give this Author a Supergift?...*sighs*]