CHAPTER 9: THE FIRST BIOME

He sat in silence within the armored transport, the low hum of the engine barely audible over the heavy quiet that filled the cabin. The vehicle carved its way toward the Argen Valley—a dense stretch of forest where the trees stood like titans, their trunks thick and knotted, stretching fifteen meters high to form a tangled green canopy above. Fog curled between the trunks like breath from a slumbering beast.

When the vehicle halted, he dismounted wordlessly, surrounded by the guards he'd come to recognize by silhouette alone. Their blank white masks gleamed faintly under the muted light, their black armor seamless and unmarked, melting into the valley's low shadows like wraiths born of the mist.

Arc glanced down at his own attire. Folded, paneled body armor clung to him like a second skin, reinforced over a custom-made undersheath. His face mask sat snug, sleek and expressionless. Concealed knives were tucked in dozens of places—under the sleeves, around his ribs, in the lining of his cargo-style pants. Two short cleaver-shaped swords were sheathed at his back, their sharpened tips designed for puncture as much as slashing. The metal—dark gray tinged with matte black—absorbed light, not reflected it.

His pants hung loose but calculated, layered with external leg braces that offered both protection and spring. Armored shoes cushioned each step, silent over the damp forest floor.

Ahead, the guards formed a perimeter as they neared a fenced enclosure. The gates parted slowly to reveal a spinning semi-globe, glowing with a soft yellow shimmer that bled out across the clearing. It hovered just above the ground, humming faintly as it rotated—a biome seal.

It spanned a perfect thirty-meter circumference. The air here felt thicker. Charged. Watching.

Arc stepped forward.

He didn't ask what was inside.

He already knew.

This biome wasn't wild—it was acquired. Secured through a shell guild operating under a sanitized name: Solaris Guild. On paper, it was just another offshoot of Solaris Enterprises, a megacorp that controlled one of the Ten Major Guilds sanctioned by the Empire.

In reality, it was a veil—one of many used by Amaterasu to bury their true operations under layers of corporate legitimacy. Out of the Empire's fifteen licensed guilds, Solaris was a golden child, publicly celebrated for ecological preservation and anomalous research. But Arc had seen the darker threads beneath the banners.

Whispers said Solaris was holding onto dormant biomes—like this one—not for preservation, but for containment. Weaponization.

The air here didn't just hum. It listened.

Their heir, a prodigious figure born into golden privilege, was next in line to inherit the entire Solaris Empire—if you could still call it that. Their family head had disappeared under suspicious circumstances almost a year ago, leaving a power vacuum dressed up in silence and internal reshuffling. But Arc had read between the lines. That wasn't a disappearance.

That was a removal.

Someone wanted control of Solaris. Someone like the Amaterasu.

Arc's gaze lingered on the slow spin of the semi-globe. It wasn't just a biome.

It was a vault.

And something inside it had teeth.

It was only a C-rate biome, low-tier by classification, and intentionally selected to match his current power and skill level. The handlers had calculated every parameter—environmental hazards, energy density, potential threat entities—all capped to ensure survival. It was his first exposure, after all.

But even with those limits, there was a weight to the air that defied the sterile logs and safe numbers.

He stepped forward.

The spinning semi-globe flickered as his presence was registered. Its glow sharpened into vertical beams that curved along its borders, and the gateway unfolded, not as a door but as a distortion—a malleable veil that bent around him like liquid glass.

Reality folded.

Not shattered. Not burst.

Folded-as if space itself had always expected him.

And as he crossed the threshold, the biome accepted him without protest, its energy surging against his skin. Not hostile. Not warm. Just watching.

Inside, the world realigned into towering fungi-coated trunks, jagged stone mounds, and slow-ticking fauna that seemed pulled from memory rather than biology. A controlled hallucination wrapped in environmental code.

This was his first step into the system's forge. The first test.

The air snapped-a sharp, wet crack.

From the canopy above, a jagged, muscular tongue lashed down, missing his face by a whisper. Yellow leaves burst into motion, rustling like panicked birds as something shifted in the treetops.

Two massive eyes emerged from the foliage—bulging, asymmetrical, constantly swiveling in independent directions before locking together and settling on him. Their sclera shimmered faintly, mirroring the canopy's golden hue, as though mimicking the light itself.

Then-nothing.

The creature blinked out of view without a sound.

No scurry. No retreat.

Its presence simply... ceased.

But Arc could feel it.

This wasn't a monster from the wilds. This was engineered silence. A hyper-evolved predator—something that had shed all noise, all heat, even identity. A chameleon, yes, but one reshaped by the biome. Purpose-built.

It hadn't missed.

It had measured him.

His eyes lit up, glowing a brilliant white, refracting off the canopy's gold-tinted shadows.

In one smooth motion, he drew two knives, their handles molded to the contours of his grip.

He didn't hesitate.

He slit both palms, dragging the edges of the blades across his skin. The red blood spilled, but only for a breath—then it sank into the metal, reacting instantly.

The blades darkened, shimmered, then faded to silver, humming with awakened edge.

The ground beneath him cracked with a muffled thud.

It was back.

The tongue, now coated in flesh-moss and glimmering saliva, burst upward from the forest floor—reversing its own biology, coming from beneath this time like a spike trap. But Arc didn't flinch.

He twisted low, then struck mid-turn.

The silver-coated blades cleaved through the tongue mid-lunge, chunks of it shrieking as they hit the air, sizzling from the contact. Ichor burst out, not red, but a fluorescent black-violet, stinking of iron and something far older.

The jungle stilled again.

But Arc didn't.

He was already moving—tracking the withdrawal path of the tongue, eyes blazing like two vengeful suns in the dark.

It charged—a blur of muscle, scale, and distortion—crashing through the underbrush with a low-frequency growl that vibrated the air itself. Its limbs bent wrong, then righted themselves mid-run, as if reshaping to fit the kill.

Arc moved just as fast.

He zoomed forward, boots barely touching the moss-covered soil, eyes locked onto the rippling shimmer of its camouflaged bulk.

They collided—his silvered blades clanging against the creature's outer shell with a crack that split the quiet like thunder under silk. The impact rippled through him, arm to shoulder, but he kept going, dragging the tip of one blade across its side.

The monster let out a fractured shriek, something between a birdcall and a modem's death rattle.

Then it retaliated.

Three more tongues erupted—one from the creature's shoulder, one from its underbelly, and one snaking from the wound he'd just carved. They struck in a heartbeat, sharp, fast, and slippery with a paralyzing enzyme that sizzled on contact with the air.

And worse?

The original tongue—it was already regenerating.

Torn flesh rewove itself in real-time, lacing together with sinew and bioluminescent tissue, like watching evolution in fast-forward.

Arc grinned beneath the mask, silver eyes burning brighter.

"Adaptive regen and multi-vector assault. Cool."

He twisted midair, blades crossing into an 'X' to slice clean through two tongues while his foot caught the third—heel plating igniting—and shattered it with a kinetic burst.

Arc landed low, knees pressing into the mossy earth. The beast's tongues writhed, regenerated, ready to strike again. But the moment it twitched—

Flash.

His arms flared with stolen voltage—Strom's augment igniting like a sleeping storm suddenly waking. Arcs of blue-white lightning surged across his skin, weaving down to his hands. Fingers gripped the hilts of the knives now embedded in the creature's underbelly.

He struck the hilts—both at once.

CRACK.

The knives lit like rails—pure current flooding through the beast's frame. It buckled, its limbs locking mid-motion. Tongues spasmed, body twisting as violent seizures tore through its form. Steam exploded from its joints. A split-second howl tore through the valley and cut short—silenced by its own shutdown.

Smoke curled into the canopy.

Arc stood, eyes dimming from silver to steel grey, expression unreadable. A breeze swept through the leaves. His silhouette remained still.

Then he moved on.

Arc slid the two knives free from the twitching carcass at his feet, the fading heat of the kill still rising through the air like smoke after a storm. He didn't pause. No satisfaction, no hesitation. Just movement. He sheathed the blades in smooth, practiced motions, his breath steady as the last of the creature's lifeforce coiled into his bloodstream like a phantom current. His eyes dimmed from white to a low, reflective yellow—subtle but primal, like a predator adjusting its sight after a feast.

From the backs of his hands, Alkanite began to seep, slow at first, then thickening with intent. The living metal responded to what he'd taken in—responded to him. It wasn't conscious. It didn't need to be. It was simply his. It surged up in jagged strips, outlining the bones of his hands in a subtle, natural armor, as though evolution had decided it liked what it saw and would keep it.

He peeled off his gloves and tossed them aside, no longer useful. The skin beneath pulsed—taut, reactive, and no longer entirely human. His pores shimmered faintly with a metallic sheen, the outer layer of his body now dancing on the border between biology and something far more constructed.

Ahead, the trees loomed like watchful sentinels. Their trunks were thick, bark like charred bone, canopies forming shifting shadows above. He crouched slightly, tagged the tree line with a flick of his wrist, and watched as streams of Alkanite burst forth, thin, flexible, and barbed along the edges. They shot outward, snapping around two high branches, the contact silent, clean, and deliberate.

With a sudden pull, his body launched upward.

Two more creatures stirred above, their eyes flickering in the dim light, flesh warping to camouflage them into the canopy. But camouflage meant nothing to him now. He'd seen through it once. That was enough. The Alkanite strands shifted midair, snapping sideways to latch onto the hidden masses. He felt the brief resistance of their bodies straining against the grip.

And then—surge.

His bioelectricity surged along the metal conduits like lightning on wire. It struck them not to kill, but to paralyze—momentarily. Long enough for him to drag them into the open, their bodies spasming as energy raked through their nerves.

They thudded against the branches, twitching and drooling, jaws seizing.

By the time he landed, they were still. Arc dropped them to the ground and placed his hands over their chests. He didn't absorb like a vampire. There was no ritual, no drama. He just took—consumed.

Their strength, their instincts, their encoded memory—all of it bled into him like data, like echoes being fed through marrow.

And his body listened.

His fingers turned a darker shade, bordering on blackened silver now. The texture hardened further, like stone molded with muscle memory. Then came the fluid—a thin, syrupy yellow secretion forming at his fingertips. It glistened under the canopy light, viscous and unknown. It steamed faintly as it dripped to the forest floor, carving minute trenches into the bark and dirt.

It wasn't planned. It wasn't tactical.

It was a result—the inevitable byproduct of what he was and what he'd made himself into.

He stared at his hand. Not in confusion, not in awe. Just observation.

One more evolution added to the ever-growing design.

This was what adaptation looked like—Not theory. Not practice.But survival made flesh.

Arc stood at the edge of the clearing, the light from the canopy fractured and uneven above him. Around him, silence. Not the peace of a tranquil forest—but the vacuum that followed after something had ended. He had cleared it. The biome, a C-rate environment by classification but still lethal in its intent, now lay dormant. Every native predator—drained. Every trap—disarmed. Every echo of hostility—swallowed into the growing forge of his evolving self.

The lifeforce he'd harvested from its inhabitants still simmered beneath his skin, metabolizing into reflex, instinct, and control. He wasn't just stronger—he was sharpened. Like a knife knowing how to cut on its own.

But the biome wasn't finished.

Ahead, the terrain shifted—the forest opening like a wound in the land. The trees bent back, and the dirt deepened into a circular basin, overgrown with luminescent moss and half-swallowed by ancient vines. The light here was yellow-green, unnatural, humming with a frequency that made his bones resonate.

The core.

Every biome had one. The central anomaly. The heartbeat. And in this one, nestled within layers of distortion and defense mechanisms, was a boss-class entity—twice as old and far more complex than the wandering beasts he'd consumed.

It didn't announce itself. No roar. No tremor.

Just the sudden twist of the air.A pulse—low, guttural—like a throat preparing to speak in a language not meant for humans.

Arc stepped forward, each movement quiet, but undeniable. His fingers curled slightly, silver-stained and trailing the faint glimmer of yellow biofluid. His posture had changed—more upright, yet looser, like something had cracked open inside and refused to reseal. He was no longer moving through the biome.

He was hunting its center.

In the basin, a form began to manifest—shimmering, refracting, reality peeling back like hot wax. Muscles beneath armored skin, compound eyes shifting between hues, and a ridged body that flowed with every breath like a serpent sculpted from tree bark and obsidian. Its mouth unfurled sideways, and jagged mandibles clicked with a metallic groan.

It was watching him. Not with hunger. Not with rage.But with the one thing Arc knew best.

Caution.

Because even a monster could smell a predator.