Free Web NovelChapter 108: An offer to Kenji
A month passed after humanity’s Crusade Front had almost completely fallen into the jaws of the Void.
The catastrophic scale of the internal betrayal and the silent erasure of the Solgrace vanguard barracks were quickly and heavily suppressed from the public eye.
The common citizens on Earth and the low-level rankers inside the Crusade remained entirely oblivious to the near-extinction event.
Only the supreme Ascendants of humanity—those absolute powerhouses who sat far above the worldly Crown rank—knew the true details of the terror that had almost unfolded.
To clean up the aftermath and secure the compromised sector, the Ascendants had immediately sent a legendary Ace-ranked Crusader down to the Solgrace fortress to initiate a deep, classified investigation.
Kenji walked slowly down the sterile, quiet corridor of the central hospital wing, his leather boots clicking lightly against the polished white floorboards.
He stopped in front of the heavy, reinforced wooden door of his grandfather’s private recovery room. He pushed it open without making a single sound and stepped inside. frёewebnoѵēl.com
General Roric Vale lay perfectly motionless on the luxurious, white medical bed. A complex array of glowing green system monitors hovered quietly around his pillow, tracking his vital statistics with a steady, soft hum.
Although the old man had been successfully saved from the Voidlings because the investigating Ace-ranked powerhouse had taken direct action personally, his soul had been severely injured during the forced contract attempt.
The microscopic friction of the Void’s corruption had left deep, jagged scars across his spiritual lines, meaning the old general would likely stay in a deep, vegetative coma until a high-tier soul restoration core could be discovered to permanently fix the damage.
Even after a full month had gone by, the human government stubbornly refused to allow Kenji’s mother or father to travel to the Solgrace sector to visit the bedside.
The political high command had completely sealed the military lines under the guise of an ongoing national security quarantine.
Kenji was entirely alone here. He was the sole representative of the Vale lineage left to guard the shattered remnants of their family’s base.
Kenji walked over to the side of the bed, his hazel eyes locking onto his grandfather’s pale, weathered face. freeweɓnøvel.com
For a brief moment, a deep, uncharacteristic trace of worry and psychological insecurity etched itself across his usually cold, clinical features.
It had been a full month since Ayla had gone into isolation to finalize her breakthrough into the higher ranks.
Kenji’s fingers tightened slightly against the fabric of his uniform jacket as he remembered the bizarre, staggering moment the Nexus system interface had manifested directly inside his mind to explain her sudden disappearance.
The female, highly melodic voice of the world administrator had broken through his conscious thoughts with an annoying, teasing laugh, casually informing him that his woman had successfully devoured a silver rankedApocalypse core and was currently deep within an evolutionary cocoon, advancing her parameter lines at an absurd pace.
An intense, suffocating sense of personal insecurity slowly began to chew at the edges of Kenji’s logical mind.
Ayla had officially become a Silver-ranked powerhouse. Her unique, monstrous traits had already skyrocketed her raw combat capabilities to a level that could easily challenge Diamond-ranked elites, and now her baseline data profile was permanently leaving the lower tiers behind.
Meanwhile, he was still stuck at the very bottom of the Crusade hierarchy. He was still just an Iron-ranked Crusader, completely dependent on his clinical conditioning, his ancient bone fragment, and his Death Looper trait to survive the chaotic shifts of the timeline.
Every single time a new loop initiated, he was the one who was supposed to formulate the master strategies.
He was the one who was supposed to act as the rational, protective anchor for their shared journey.
But the sheer mathematical reality of their current statistical gap was becoming impossible to ignore.
She was a literal god-devouring mimic slime growing at an exponential rate, while he was running out of tactical options to keep pace with her monstrous evolution.
If he remained a weak Iron ranker for too long, the day would eventually arrive when he would become nothing more than a useless background asset, a fragile burden that she would have to constantly carry through the fights.
’I have to improve my own strength,’ Kenji thought, his jaw clenching so hard that the bone visibly strained beneath his skin.
’I cannot allow myself to lag behind her. The future we encounter will be exponentially more lethal, and a my strength will eventually reach its breaking point.’
He turned away from his grandfather’s sleeping form, walking over to the large glass viewport that overlooked the barren, gray valleys of the Solgrace perimeter.
The distant spatial transport gates were flickering with a quiet, blue light, indicating the system’s steady maintenance of the border lines.
As he stared into the horizon, his mind involuntarily recalled a highly confidential offer that the Nexus system had dropped into his consciousness during that exact same mental conversation a month ago.
The melodic voice of the administrator had completely shed its playful, mocking tone for a single millisecond, presenting him with a hidden pathway to power.
It was a choice that carried an unimaginable, terrifying weight, a pathway that no ordinary Crusader within the history of the Crusade had ever been permitted to touch.
The system had explicitly warned him that entering that specific contract would permanently alter the running script of his existence, forcing him to face an entirely separate, brutal trial that existed completely outside the standard progression lines of humanity.
Kenji had not given the Nexus his final answer yet. He had spent the last thirty days meticulously running millions of clinical simulations inside his head, trying to calculate the risks and the potential structural rewards of the offer.
He knew that accepting the system’s hidden pathway would mean stepping into an absolute unknown, a dangerous territory where his Death Looper trait might be stretched to its absolute absolute limits.
But as he felt the lingering, heavy silence of the empty hospital room, his resolve completely hardened.
He could not afford to be a coward. He could not sit idly by in a comfortable military room while his grandfather slept in a coma, and he certainly could not tolerate the deeply frustrating feeling of being inferior to the silver-haired girl who was currently sleeping inside an evolutionary cocoon.
If he wanted to permanently secure his position as her partner, he needed to possess a power that could command the respect of the world itself.
Suddenly, a very faint, freezing ripple resonated deep within his shared soul bond.
Kenji’s breath completely stopped for a fraction of a second.
He immediately raised his left hand, his hazel eyes widening as he tracked the telepathic link connecting his mind to the upper fortress chambers.
The cold, distinct fragrance of fresh wild berries began to quietly seep through the spiritual channel, vibrating with a massive, near-Crown ranked pressure that made the green medical monitors around the room momentarily glitch.
The cocoon was breaking. Ayla was finally returning to the material plane.
Kenji let a very subtle smile break through his anxious filter, his mind instantly locking down his doubts as the familiar presence returned to his awareness.
He turned his back to the glass viewport and began walking toward the door, ready to meet his newly advanced Silver partner, while his internal thoughts firmly locked onto the hidden offer of the Nexus.
The time for passive observation was officially over; he was going to rewrite his own parameters, no matter what kind of price the system demanded from his soul.
