A figure in a trench coat entered a nondescript warehouse in a quiet district of Heron. The outer door had been locked. That did not matter. The chain was parted cleanly, as if it had never been there, and the alarm panel inside was dead before it could register interference.
The men inside never heard him arrive.
He crossed the floor without urgency, boots silent against concrete. One guard turned just in time to feel two fingers press into his throat. The man collapsed without a sound. Another reached for his weapon and froze as the trench coat shifted and something cold and heavy rested against his wrist. Bones cracked softly. The firearm hit the floor. By the time the others noticed, it was already over.
Ivo took a seat at the table they had prepared for someone else.
They were new upstarts in his system. Freeloaders, every one of them.
There was balance to how his kind handled organized crime. You did not prey too heavily on the people below. You did not indulge in needless killing. That sort of noise attracted vigilantes, and eventually the Knights. Scrutiny was not something he could afford, not after losing several of his preferred pawns to a single Knight.
Nathaniel Alderman.
A heat and kinetic energy based fighter. The footage was valuable, but it did not soften the reality. Nathaniel Alderman was lethal. Eighteen operatives had been deployed simply to corner him. None returned intact. The Black Order had taken notice. He was now marked, and Ivo had been instructed to account for the imbalance that followed in his wake.
Purple eyes moved across the room, measuring the men who stared back at him with poorly concealed arrogance. They had extorted local businesses beyond their allowance. They had escalated to public killings. Amateur mistakes. Expensive ones.
Ivo exhaled slowly, cigar smoke curling around his face as his fingers brushed back violet hair.
The leader lounged in a battered office chair, counting cash with practiced indifference. A firearm sat within easy reach. To his right stood an enforcer with arms grotesquely enlarged and encased in jagged metal plating. To his left was another whose presence carried a sharp acidic stench that ate at the back of the throat.
Ivo smiled.
His voice was even, almost bored, when he spoke.
"You are the Vassal."
The man looked up.
The skin along Ivo's right cheek began to fracture, thin lines spreading as a dim violet glow seeped through the breaks.
"I am Ivo," he said. "Ivo Galahad."
The room felt smaller.
"The Black Order has reviewed your conduct," he continued. "You have disrupted balance. You have drawn attention. You have cost us resources."
His eyes hardened.
"I am here to correct that."
Skin split as a hard, shell-like chitin burst outward, exploding across Ivo's arm and the right side of his face. Sparks of violet bio-energy bled from the seams as the limb reshaped itself mid-motion. He struck once.
The nearest guard barely had time to inhale.
Ivo's arm elongated and compacted into a massive clawed construct, its profile shaped like an armor-piercing round, jagged digits protruding along its length. It punched cleanly through the man's torso. The force carried the body backward, the shattered remains of ribs and organs bursting outward as the claw tore free behind him. Blood sprayed across the room, splattering the boss behind the desk in a red mist.
Ivo turned.
The acid wielder reacted on instinct, slamming a hand to the floor. The concrete hissed and liquefied beneath him, collapsing inward. Tendrils erupted from behind Ivo, dark and organic, lashing upward to anchor into the ceiling. They snapped taut, suspending him above the dissolving pit as the Vassal scrambled away.
Ivo released.
He dropped behind the acid wielder as the man ran. His hands darkened on impact, taking on a ceramic sheen as density spiked. He drove one arm forward and impaled the man through the spine, lifting him off the ground before discarding the body without looking.
His legs stretched as muscle fibers liquefied and rebounded, elasticity pushing him forward in a violent blur. The corridor ahead opened into a choke point where over a hundred men waited, rifles raised, muzzles already glowing.
They fired.
Charged beams slammed into him, tearing through the trench coat as the fabric disintegrated under sustained fire. Impacts sparked and screamed against his skin. Ivo did not slow. With every step, the chitin became more pronounced, layering thicker across his frame, plates interlocking as if responding to threat alone.
This was Kaisen.
The augment's function was simple. Pure progress.
Anything Ivo faced, anything that damaged him under sustained exposure, was learned. Studied. Internalized. Over time, his body developed defenses and counters it could deploy at will. The exposure had to be constant. Pain was required.
Stagger Shell was one such adaptation.
Blasts slammed into his expanded forearms. Flakes of chitin shattered away, only to regrow denser a moment later. His face twisted into a smile.
Then his artificial spine roared.
The structure glowed violently as it expanded, vertebrae unlocking, nerves igniting with violet current. Chitin erupted outward in a sudden surge, filling the corridor wall to wall. Spikes tore free from the mass, each one saturated with Uratsu-based bio-energy.
They fired.
Hundreds of charged projectiles launched forward faster than any sniper round. The corridor vanished into screaming motion as bodies were cleaved apart, pierced, and shredded mid-scream. Limbs separated. Armor failed. Flesh came undone.
When it ended, the mass receded.
Silence returned to the corridor, broken only by dripping blood and settling debris.
Ivo stood alone, unmarked, violet energy still crawling across his skin.
And the message had been delivered.
Ivo smiled as he looked down at the Vassal's punctured corpse. He raised his hand, snapped a single photo, then turned away without another glance.
As he moved, he thought of gold eyes.
If he was forced to fight Alderman, it would be easy. Horribly so. The thought carried no pride, only certainty. Alderman was dangerous, but danger was something Ivo adapted to. This had been little more than a light workout.
The chitin began to recede, plates folding inward and dissolving back beneath his skin. The pressure eased, though not completely. His artificial spine clicked and groaned as it collapsed back into its default configuration, forcibly compressing his frame, limiting expansion, restraining what it was designed to fear.
Ivo hissed under his breath.
"If my nerves were intact," he muttered, flexing his fingers, "this would have been effortless."
Residual pain flared as his awareness traced the locations of the implant clusters along his back and ribs. Control nodes. Limiters. Safeguards that were never meant to protect him.
They were there to slow him down.
He adjusted his coat, stepped over the bodies, and disappeared into the night, already calculating what would need to be removed before Alderman became a problem he actually had to respect.
His thoughts drifted briefly to the people he had sent out and never seen return. Magnum. Polaris. Others whose names had already begun to fade. Men he had killed himself over the course of his lifetime. Assets spent. Variables resolved.
The world beyond the walls was a man eat man ecosystem. There was no sentiment in it, only motion and consequence. Revenue followed the same rules. You hunted. You completed the job. You reaped the reward.
Those who failed simply became part of the cost.
Ivo did not slow his pace as he left.