She was close. Her hand was still wrapped around his fist. She smelled like flowers and training chalk and focused intent, and she was looking at him with an expression that was doing nothing to clarify the situation.
Oh no, he thought, with the quiet resignation of someone who had accepted that some mornings simply developed a personality of their own. She's after my body.
"You should come join—"
He closed his eyes.
Fine. Come on then, you terrifying woman. I wont come join you at your house.
"—our guild."
He opened his eyes.
"...What."
"The Crimson Rose Guild," Tory said, with the breathless enthusiasm of someone who had located a solution to a problem that had been keeping them up at night and was not going to let it walk out the door. Her professional coldness had evaporated entirely and showed no signs of returning. "We need a damage-focused attacker. Monthly subsidy of 500,000 points. Equipment from hunts distributed on contribution basis. Full facility access at no charge — including the gravity chamber and holographic combat simulation system."
Nova's exit plan paused at the door and turned around.
Gravity chambers doubled or even tripled cultivation efficiency. Commercial access ran 30,000 points per hour. Holographic AI combat simulation for technique refinement without a live partner — the equipment list he had been trying to figure out how to fund was apparently available through this offer.
"Long-term or short-term contracts?" he asked.
"Either."
"That's reasonable." He considered. "There's one issue."
"What issue?"
"My energy stat hasn't officially entered Tier 1. I haven't killed any beast yet — I can't legally enter Abyssal Rifts or dungeons until I kill an abyssal beast at the Warrior Registration center."
Tory stared at him.
The information arrived and sat next to the 67,300 on the display and refused to reconcile with it. Not Tier 1. Hadn't killed a single beast. Energy stat at civilian level. 67,300 battle power.
She cycled through several expressions before arriving at something that resembled determined acceptance.
"Speak to me when your status changes," she said, producing her information tag. "Name?"
"Nova Stern."
She repeated it quietly to herself. They exchanged contact information. He turned to go. Then stopped.
He looked at the analyzer.
He had been thinking about the intent integration since yesterday's enlightenment on the balcony doorway — forty minutes of standing still while the universe handed him the peak Level 10 perfect mastery across multiple comprehended intents. He had the theory. He had the comprehension. But theory and a calibrated machine with a number he could read clearly were different propositions, and the machine was right there. Application of intent into attacks was very hard, he had to give it a try.
"One more test," he said.
Tory gestured immediately. "No charge."
Nova returned to the analyzer and began building the strike.
The Vibrational Force Technique first — blood and Qi channeling through his martial pathways in the oscillating resonance pattern. Solid. Familiar. The foundation.
Then he reached for the intents.
Vibration intent arrived first. This was the principle the Vibrational Force Technique had always been pointing toward — the fundamental law of oscillation that the technique approximated but could only go so far without direct comprehension behind it. Now that Nova understood it at the Level 10 mastery threshold, the integration wasn't forced. Absolute Insight identified the exact harmonic relationship between the intent and the existing technique structure and the two locked together as though they had always been the same thing. The energy around his fist deepened.
Speed intent layered on top. Then oscillation. Then motion. Each one integrating with the same seamless precision, each one adding its frequency to the structure, the overall field around his fist becoming something layered and dense and operating at multiple registers simultaneously.
The air around his hand changed.
Space around his fist began to distort.
It wasn't dramatic or visual in the way of special effects. It was subtle and deeply wrong — a slight warping of the light around his extended arm, the kind of spatial micro-distortion that happened when an area of localized force exceeded what the immediate environment was designed to accommodate. The crystalline surface of the analyzer, a meter away, had developed hairline stress fractures from the pressure field alone. The advanced cooling system in the hall's walls kicked into a higher operational mode with an audible shift.
Tory, standing ten meters away, felt it hit her.
Not the strike — the buildup. The pressure field expanding outward from his fist in slow concentric waves, each one pressing against her cultivation aura and making it work to maintain its boundary. She had been a Tier 2 warrior for two years. She had trained against practitioners significantly above her level as part of her cultivation. She had felt what powerful strikes felt like before they landed.
But she had not felt anything like this.
A cold sweat appeared across her skin despite the hall's cooling system running at full capacity. Her instincts, the same ones that had fired when he released his suppression earlier, were now delivering a single unified message with considerable urgency: if that strike lands on you, you will not be injured. You will cease to be a coherent physical object.
Her grip on her spear tightened without her deciding to tighten it. She was, she realized with distant professional embarrassment, genuinely frightened. Not of him — he wasn't threatening her, he wasn't even looking at her. Of the thing in his fist, which had developed its own relationship with the local physics and was apparently negotiating new terms.
Nova struck.
BOAPAOOOKATABOOOM.
The sound the machine produced was not a sound it had been designed to make. The crystalline impact surface lit across its entire face simultaneously. The metallic pillar, rated to Tier 8 absorption, groaned through its full structural depth. The warning indicators across every surface illuminated at once. The floor of the training hall transmitted the impact in a wave that Tory felt travel up through her feet and into her spine. She wondered was the analyzer her father bought a fake.
The number appeared.
1,006,000
Complete silence.
Nova looked at the display.
One million battle power. Tier 6 territory — the level at which a warrior could level a country in a sustained engagement. He was Level 0. His energy stat had not officially entered Tier 1. He had not used a single main elemental intent. He had not touched space, gravity, fire, lightning. He had not even activated one of his Martial God Exclusive skill.
He had not used his full true Qi output.
Minor intents, he thought. This is what minor intents do when mastered at Level 10 before Tier 1. Warriors don't usually begin intent comprehension until Tier 3. I did it before Level 1.
The implications stacked themselves in his mind with quiet efficiency and arrived at a sum that he found genuinely difficult to be measured about.
I am truly overpowered, he thought, with complete sincerity. This is actually unreasonable.
Behind him he heard a sound. He turned.
Tory was on the floor. Not sitting down in the way of someone who had chosen to sit. Her legs had simply made a unilateral decision and deposited her onto the practice floor without consulting the rest of her. She was staring at the display with the expression of someone whose entire professional framework for understanding what a warrior could be had just been taken apart and handed back to her in pieces.
"That number," she said, in a voice that was making a genuine effort to sound like a normal sentence, "means you could destroy this country."
"Are you sure this machine is rated to Tier 8?," Nova said.
"I think." She didn't take her eyes off the display. "That's the only reason we're still having this conversation and not having it from inside a crater."
Nova looked at his fist. One more. He had been holding true Qi back from both previous strikes — channeling blood and Qi through technique and intent, but keeping the deeper energy separate. True Qi was the foundation layer, born from the fusion of spirit and soul force with blood and Qi, and adding it to the base structure before everything else multiplied upward should add one final tier to the output.
He turned back to the machine.
Tory looked up from the floor. "Nova."
"One more."
"The machine—"
"I'll be careful."
She looked at the display still showing seven digits and then looked at him and made the specific expression of someone who has decided that whatever happens next is simply part of their life now and they have accepted this.
He rebuilt the structure — Vibrational Force, vibration intent, speed intent, oscillation intent, motion intent, all integrated and layered. Then he reached into the true Qi moving through his restructured meridians and began threading it into the base of the attack. Not replacing the existing layers. Adding beneath them. The true Qi integrating at the cellular foundation level, its 200% contribution to the base output feeding upward through every multiplied layer above it.
The spatial distortion around his fist returned. Worse this time. The hairline fractures in the analyzer's surface spread. The cooling system stopped being subtle about its operational mode. The weapons on the wall vibrated continuously.
Tory, still on the floor, was pressing herself backward without deciding to do so. The pressure field had expanded further than the previous strike. She was sweating openly. Her cultivation aura was working harder than it did in actual combat to maintain its integrity against the pressure of something that wasn't even pointed at her.
If he ever points this at a living person, she thought distantly, that person is going to need a moment to reconsider their life choices.
Nova struck.