Ayla opened her eyes feeling rejuvenated. The Apocalypse Bronze core at the base of her Iron core had spent the night settling, the way a heavy stone settled into wet sand, and the channels of her body had widened around it without complaint.

She felt larger inside herself. The space she had carried her mana in for the past two weeks had become a room rather than a teaspoon, and the room was warm and well lit and entirely her own.

Although she didn’t need mana to use her traits, having its capacity increasing was a good thing as it would help her greatly in environments without Mana.

She turned her head on the pillow.

The space beside her was empty. Her brows furrowed. Every time she had slept in his presence over the last week, Kenji had waited at the edge of the bed for her to wake.

He had never left without her seeing him leave. The arrangement had been the arrangement they had built without discussing it, the way two creatures who shared a den arranged themselves around the rhythm of the other without negotiation.

The cushion was on the carpet. The chair where Kenji had been sitting was empty. The window through which he had entered was closed, the latch reset, the curtain drawn back to the position the household staff preferred. He had left.

Ayla considered this for a moment.

She considered the events of the night before, the soft thumb at the corner of her mouth, the strange small pressure that had lingered against her lower lip, the way his breathing had changed before he had pulled his hand back.

She considered the possibility that the change in his breathing had been the reason for his absence this morning. He didn’t like that.

Would that mean she wasn’t his type? Irritation appeared on her face.

She rose from the bed. Her sleeping gown had slipped further during the night, but she did not adjust it. She crossed the carpet to the door and opened it without knocking.

A young soldier stood in the corridor. His back was to her. His uniform was the clean grey of Roric’s personal guard. A Bronze ranked Crusader.

He had been stationed at her door overnight. He had not moved since she had begun to wake. He did not turn at the sound of the door.

Ayla decided, without spending a full second on the decision, that the morning could begin here. A thin red filament gathered between her fingers.

The Bloodnet, evolved post-Bronze, had begun to respond to her with the easy familiarity of a tool she had finally finished sharpening. The filament slipped past the soldier’s collar, found the soft place at the base of his skull, and entered.

His head burst.

The sound was small. The soldier had not had time to make a sound of his own. The corridor remained quiet around her.

The blood that should have sprayed across the wall did not spray, because the Bloodnet had pulled the blood inward and held it in a small, neat pocket inside the cavity of the body, and the body folded forward onto its knees and then onto its face with the soft tidiness of a thing being placed rather than dropped.

[You have devoured a Human brain.]

[Trait Acquired: Pyromancy (Common-C).]

Ayla’s irritation grew further. She had killed a Bronze rank soldier of her grandfather’s personal guard, and the system had handed her back the trait she had been carrying since the day of her existence.

She stepped over the body of the soldier and continued down the corridor. The Jade Link in her forearm caught the corridor’s artificial light.

She had received the registration tattoo on her first morning in the human sector, when the Lightling at the gate had swallowed her identification chip and returned the small green token that had melted into her skin.

She had not paid much attention to it since. She paid attention to it now.

Inside the Crusade, the only way to see one’s status screen was through this tattoo. With a thought she summoned the holographic screen.

Although everyone said only the Nexus could read it, she preferred to believe that’s not the case. Whenever she summoned her status screen with it, she felt like a scrutinizing gaze landing on her privacy.

Name: Ayla

Race: Mimic Slime

Rank: Bronze (0%)

Core: Apocalypse Bronze Metal Core

Bone Fragment: Twin Lens of the Weaver

Vessel (1): Eight-Winged Goddess

Vessel Classification: Apocalypse

Traits

Perfect Assimilation (Defining)

Emotion Weaver (Legendary-SSS+)

Death Looper (Legendary-S+)

Eight-Wing Transformation (Epic-A)

Bloodnet (Rare-B+)

Pyromancy (Common-C)

Iron Will (Common-C)

Wind Walker (Common-C)

Life Link (Common-C)

Shadow Stride (Common-C)

Earth Bind (Common-D)

Bone Density (Common-D)

Acid Synthesis (Common-D)

Body Enhancement (Common-E)

Ayla stopped at the wall. The rarity column on her trait was new. The traits had carried, until she became Bronze, only their quality grades.

Now each one carried a rarity classification beside the grade. Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary and unique.

The information had been hidden from her since her birth. She did not know why. She suspected the system rationed information in the way the human houses rationed gossip.

The data was a privilege. The privilege was earned with rank. A Bronze, by the system’s reasoning, had survived long enough to be told what an Iron had no business knowing.

The small plus sign after certain grades meant something, too. She read it the way the Jade Link explained it: a trait marked with a plus carried the latent potential to evolve.

Some traits evolved through specific conditions. Others required treasures, the kind of treasures that did not appear on the open market and were in the deeper wilderness of the Crusade.

Five of her traits carried the plus. She filed the implication.

The Jade Link continued. Levels had disappeared.

The (0%) beside her Bronze rank was not a level. It was a saturation counter. She would advance toward her next rank by absorbing the cores of other Bronze rank creatures, slowly, until the counter reached one hundred. Attempting to absorb a higher rank core would kill her.

A breakthrough to the next rank required a metal core of the corresponding rank. A breakthrough to the rank beyond Bronze, which was Silver, required a Silver metal core.

Since her Bronze core was Apocalypse, she needed an Apocalypse Silver metal core to breakthrough. The Apocalypse cores were the reason humans had only one Conqueror.

The Human Conqueror had obtained his Apocalypse core at Ace rank. He had broken through to Conqueror with it. Every Conqueror in the recorded history of the Crusade had done the same.

The cores were not rare in the way the houses said they were rare. The wilderness held plenty of Apocalypse tunnels.

The cores were rare because the tunnels carried, at their deepest chambers, monsters of a rank above the rank the implanter had reached.

An Ace seeking an Apocalypse core for the Conqueror breakthrough would face an Apocalypse Conqueror in the tunnel.

Fighting an Apocalypse Conqueror was a death sentence. Fighting whatever lay beyond Apocalypse Conqueror was, by the system’s careful silence on the subject, the reason the Conqueror seat in human service had remained at one.

Ayla dismissed the panel as she killed another soldier.

She walked to the body of the soldier and crouched beside him. The body had not yet had time to register the death. The mana that had hung around his shoulders was already dissolving. She fed.

The trait did not change.

[You have devoured a Human brain.]

[Trait Acquired: Pyromancy (Common-C).]

The same. Ayla’s lips pressed into a thin line.

The first hour of the morning passed quickly. The Bloodnet evolved beneath her skin, fed by the bodies it processed.

The Emotion Weaver hummed along its residual threads, holding the upper floor in a small bubble of muted attention that kept the household from noticing the rate of the killings.

The Shadow Stride placed her behind soldiers who had been ordered, by her grandfather, to prevent exactly the kind of approach she was performing.

By the end of the first hour, she had killed fifty and to her dissatisfaction all of them had carried Pyromancy.

The last soldier turned into food and disappeared from the corridor in the same quiet motion the first one had used, and Ayla was alone in a long empty hallway with the small careful breathing of a creature whose temper had finally arrived.

"What is going on."

She said it to no one. The corridor did not answer. The compound, with its locked perimeter and its sealed messaging channels and its private squad of Roric Vale’s most trusted Bronzes, was silent around her.

Fifty soldiers. Fifty Pyromancers.

Ayla stood in the empty corridor with the dust of the last man already fading from the floor at her feet, and the breath she let out was the first breath of the morning that carried something dangerous in its shape.

Ayla was fuming now. And to fuming Ayla, the sound of melodic laughter arrived. She followed that voice and reached to see something that completely destroyed her sanity.

Kenji was battling with a bare upper body. That was eye candy for her. But what angered her most was whom he was battling with.

A woman with dark hair.

"So she is his type," Ayla ground her teeth watching the woman and the calm smile on Kenji’s face which he had never given her even once.