Apocalypse: Every Woman I Invest In Makes Me Stronger

Following the rhythmic, pulsing signal of the Space Marker, Ethan moved through the darkened streets of Century Skyline with the silent precision of a ghost.

His boots touched the cracked asphalt without generating a whisper of sound. Three consecutive bursts of short-range Teleportation carried him across half a dozen ruined blocks, tracking the silver pinpoint of light as it cut steadily eastward toward the heart of the district’s most opulent residential sector.

Within minutes, the tracking marker came to a dead halt.

Ethan dropped into a crouch behind the low stone perimeter wall of a brightly lit luxury villa. The estate blazed with illumination from outdoor floodlights and internal generators, casting stark shadows across the manicured gardens.

”As expected,” Ethan muttered quietly, his eyes narrowing as he surveyed the grand entrance.

He had barely settled his stance when the heavy oak double doors of the villa swung inward.

Blaze stepped out onto the paved portico, flanked closely by Max Cole and followed by more than a dozen armed mercenaries clutching submachine guns and hunting rifles.

Max came to an abrupt halt, his lips curling into an arrogant, knowing grin as he spotted Ethan crouched outside the wall. In Max’s right hand rested a crude, primitive bone flute that pulsed with an eerie, sickly green luminescence. Crouched tightly at his heel was a medium-sized mutant primate~a golden snub-nosed monkey with a striking, fiery tuft of red hair framing its skull.

Its eyes were completely vacant, staring forward with a dull, glazed look devoid of all life or free will.

The exact Red-Haired Golden Snub-Nosed Monkey Ethan had tracked across the city days prior. It had fallen entirely under Max’s mental domination.

Max raised the flute to his lips, letting out a cold, sarcastic chuckle that carried across the lawn.

”Ethan, you really possess an astonishing amount of nerve. You actually dared to walk straight into our jaws.”

Max blew a short, sharp, jarring note into the bone flute.

SCREEECH!

The acoustic vibration didn’t merely sound in the air; it manifested as a direct, piercing mental assault that exploded inside Ethan’s skull.

His vision smeared into a chaotic blur of white noise, and a wave of agonizing dizziness slammed into his brain as though a sledgehammer had driven a wedge through his temples. He staggered forward, instinctively pressing his hand against his forehead to suppress the neurological shock.

A direct mental attack!

Before Ethan could recover his equilibrium or clear the static from his thoughts, Max blew a rapid second sequence into the flute.

”Rip him to pieces!” Max shouted, his voice dripping with malice.

The overgrown ornamental grass surrounding the villa rustled violently. With a chorus of vicious snarls, dozens of mutant groundhogs~each the size of an adult hound, their long, curved claws glowing with a dangerous yellowish-brown earthen energy~burst from the landscaping, swarming toward Ethan from every conceivable direction.

Despite the blinding pain throbbing behind his eyes, Ethan’s combat instincts refused to falter.

He swept his left hand outward through the air.

”Spatial Cut!”

A blinding fan of razor-thin void energy tore through the charge, sweeping across the lawn in a devastating horizontal arc. The spatial blade scythed through more than a dozen charging groundhogs instantly, bisecting stone and bone alike in a shower of dark blood and pulverized earth.

Ignoring the residual fire in his skull, Ethan locked his focus onto Max’s coordinates and triggered an instantaneous Teleportation, blinking past the swarm and materializing directly on the portico steps inches from Max’s throat.

His combat sword flashed upward, aiming to sever Max’s head in a single stroke. If he eliminated the controller, the monkey and the ground-dwelling beasts would instantly lose their tactical coordination.

Yet Blaze reacted with terrifying speed.

”Not on my watch!” Blaze bellowed.

A violent, localized tornado erupted from the cybernetic warrior’s core, sweeping across the portico like a wall of spinning razor blades. The gale slammed into Ethan mid-strike, throwing his blade off trajectory and hurling his body backward off the stone steps.

Before Ethan’s boots hit the grass, automated gunfire erupted from the mercenary line.

RATATATATATAT!

A leaden storm tore through the night air. Ethan executed rapid-fire, micro-teleportations, blinking left and right across the lawn to dodge the supersonic bullets while retaliating with continuous volleys of Spatial Cuts and Space Fissures. Five more mercenaries collapsed, their chests torn open by the void rifts.

However, Max’s bone flute and the Red-Haired Monkey’s synchronized mental screeches formed an impenetrable defensive barrier.

Every time Ethan tried to close the gap, a fresh wave of psychic agony hammered his brain, slowing his reaction times by vital milliseconds, while Blaze’s windstorms kept him pinned at a distance and the surviving groundhogs pressed their assault from the flanks.

Realizing the engagement was rapidly turning into an unfavorable war of attrition, Ethan dropped into a defensive stance behind a stone fountain.

He quickly audited his resources: seventeen uses of Spatial Cut remaining, five charges of Space Fissure left, and a forty-second countdown still ticking down before his Time Stop could be redeployed. The sheer volume of skills he had been forced to burn to clear the groundhog swarm and dodge the lead storm had drained a significant portion of his active daily reserves.

Furthermore, releasing Debbie, Daisy, or any of the other women from the Survival Space to assist in this open street battle was out of the question. Exposing his dimensional sanctuary in front of so many hostile, high-tier Ability Users would invite an unmanageable cascade of catastrophic complications.

A tactical retreat was the only logical course of action.

Time to pull back.

Ethan reached toward his belt to tap the Space Anchor Point, preparing to execute an emergency jump back to Victoria’s villa.

Then, a voice drifted down from the upper balcony of the lit villa, cutting through the gunfire and animal screeches with effortless dominance.

”With a dozen men, two ability adepts, and a mental beast, you still cannot handle a single stray human?”

The moment those words were spoken, an absolute, mountain-crushing pressure cascaded down from the sky.

Ethan’s chest seized violently. The ambient air turned as heavy as liquid lead, pressing against his ribs with such brutal force that drawing a short breath felt like inhaling shards of glass. His knees buckled slightly under the sheer weight of the absolute aura enveloping the estate.

His eyes dilated in stark, unadulterated shock.

Quasi-SS-Rank?!

There was zero hesitation left in his mind. He poured every ounce of his remaining spiritual power into his spatial anchor coordinates.

Flash.

The white light of dimensional displacement swallowed Ethan whole, vanishing him from the lawn a microsecond before a devastating shockwave flattened the fountain behind him.

Across the garden, the velvet curtains on the villa’s second-floor bay window billowed outward.

Standing framed in the glass was a tall, imposing figure draped in a tailored black tunic suit, his face concealed behind an immaculate, featureless black mask. He casually tossed a dark green, high-tier Evolved Core between his fingers, catching it lazily as his cold, emotionless eyes swept across the blood-soaked battlefield below.

Blaze and Max Cole immediately dropped their heads toward the gravel, their shoulders hunching in abject terror, not daring to draw a loud breath in the presence of their terrifying master.