The scrapyard was silent, save for the wet, gurgling sound of Malina's breathing. She lay in the dirt, her hands slick with her own blood, trying desperately to hold her insides together. Her eyes were glazing over, the shock beginning to shut down her brain.
The Guut towered over her, its serrated bone-blade raised high, glinting in the moonlight. It wasn't rushing. It was savoring the moment. It was going to skewer her like an insect.
"Goodbye, little Titan," the Guut hissed.
The blade descended.
CRACK.
The sound wasn't metal hitting flesh. It was the sound of the air itself shattering.
A fraction of a second before the blade could pierce Malina's heart, a blur of violet darkness slammed into the Guut's arm.
Max stood over Malina. He hadn't just blocked the attack; he had caught the Guut's wrist.
The ground beneath Max's feet cracked into a spiderweb of fissures. His head was bowed, his hair casting a shadow over his eyes. But the air around him was vibrating. The temperature in the scrapyard plummeted, frost creeping up the rusted metal piles nearby.
"Jod," Max said. His voice was terrifyingly calm. It didn't sound like a teenager. It sounded like a grave opening up. "Take her. Now."
Jod didn't hesitate. He knew that tone. He scrambled forward, scooping Malina's broken body into his arms, pressing a compression bandage over her horrific wound. He dragged her back toward where Eren and Raina were taking cover.
The Guut looked down at Max, amused. It tried to pull its wrist free.
It couldn't move.
Max's grip was iron. The violet aura flared, eating away at the Guut's obsidian skin.
"You hurt her," Max whispered. He looked up.
His eyes were no longer hazel. The whites were gone. His eyes were two pools of absolute, infinite blackness, with a single, burning violet ring in the center.
"You tore her open."
The Guut snarled and swung its free arm—a massive claw aimed at Max's head.
Max didn't dodge. He released the Guut's wrist and ducked under the swing, driving an uppercut into the creature's stomach.
BOOOM.
The impact was seismic. The Guut was lifted off its feet and launched backward, crashing through a stack of three shipping containers. Metal shrieked and crumpled as the monster was buried under tons of steel.
Max walked forward. He didn't run. He stalked.
The rubble exploded outward. The Guut roared, bursting free. It was angry now. Its body shifted, growing spikes, its armor thickening.
"You possess raw power," the Guut shouted, its voice distorted. "But you are unrefined! I am the apex! I adapt!"
The Guut charged. It moved faster than the eye could follow, becoming a whirlwind of blades and acid.
Max met the charge head-on.
They clashed in the center of the clearing. It was a blur of violence. The Guut slashed, and Max parried with his bare hands, his skin coated in a dense layer of Void armor. Sparks flew as bone met shadow.
Max threw a kick to the ribs; the Guut turned its side into liquid, letting the leg pass through harmlessly, then solidified instantly to trap Max's leg. The Guut swung a scythe-arm at Max's neck.
Max didn't panic. He pulsed the Void from his leg, blasting the Guut back to free himself.
He backflipped, landing on a pile of cars. The Guut followed, leaping into the air, turning its arms into massive hammers.
SMASH.
The cars flattened into pancakes. Max was already gone, reappearing behind the Guut. He formed a blade of violet energy in his hand.
SLASH.
He carved a deep line down the Guut's back. Black blood sprayed.
But the Guut laughed. The wound closed in seconds.
"Useless!" the Guut mocked, spinning around and backhanding Max.
Max flew through the air, skidding across the dirt. He wiped blood from his lip. The Guut was right. It was too durable. It adapted to every type of damage. If Max used blunt force, it became soft. If he used cutting, it became hard. If he used energy, it absorbed it.
Max looked over his shoulder. Jod was frantically working on Malina, his hands covered in her blood. Eren was unconscious. Raina was holding her shoulder, pale as a ghost.
They are dying, Max thought. Because I am too weak.
He felt the leather book inside his jacket pocket, pressing against his heart.
"One will automatically level up when they use their powers with full potential."
Full potential.
Max closed his eyes. He had always been afraid of the Void. He treated it like a tool, a weapon, a battery. He was scared that if he used too much, it would eat him.
Let it eat me, Max decided. If it means killing this thing, let it take everything.
He stopped fighting the coldness in his chest. He grabbed the mental gate that held the Void back—the safety mechanism he had built in his mind—and he didn't just open it.
He tore the gate off its hinges.
CLICK.
A sound echoed in Max's soul. Like a lock tumbling into place.
The air in the scrapyard changed. The wind stopped. The sound of the distant city faded. The violet aura around Max turned a shade darker—a deep, abyssal purple that looked almost black.
Max stood up. He felt... limitless. He felt the hunger of the universe.
LEVEL 2: UNLOCKED.
The Guut hesitated. It sensed the shift. The predator instinct inside it screamed that the boy was no longer prey.
"What are you?" the Guut growled, stepping back.
Max raised his hand. His fingers were trembling, not from fear, but from the sheer volume of power rushing through his meridians.
"I am the cage," Max whispered.
He spread his fingers wide. The shadows of the entire scrapyard seemed to detach from the ground and rush toward him. The sky above them turned pitch black, blotting out the neon lights of the Rose District.
Max spoke the words that rose from the depths of his instinct.
"DOMAIN EXPANSION: VOID PRISON."
ZZZZZ-WOOSH.
Reality warped.
A sphere of absolute darkness expanded from Max, swallowing the Guut, the cars, and the ground.
They were no longer in the scrapyard. They were in a void. A place of nothingness. There was no ground, no sky, no horizon. Just infinite, suffocating darkness.
The Guut looked around frantically. It was floating in the nothingness. "Where... where is this? What did you do?"
"This is the inside of my power," Max's voice echoed from everywhere at once. "Here, there is no light to absorb. There is no matter to manipulate. There is only Me."
The Guut tried to shapeshift. It tried to turn its skin into diamond.
It failed.
"My domain negates adaptation," Max said, appearing directly in front of the Guut. He was floating, wreathed in black flames. "You can't adapt to nothing."
The Guut shrieked in terror. It lashed out with its claws.
Max didn't block. He simply looked at the arm coming toward him.
"Vanish."
The Guut's arm disintegrated. It didn't get cut off; it simply ceased to exist. The shadow matter broke down into atoms, and the atoms were swallowed by the domain.
"AAAAHHH!" The Guut screamed, clutching its stump.
"You took Eren's leg," Max said, drifting closer.
He pointed at the Guut's leg. The limb dissolved into mist.
"You tore Malina's stomach."
Max pointed at the Guut's torso. A massive hole appeared in the center of the creature, looking like it had been erased by an eraser on a drawing.
"Mercy!" the Guut begged, its form destabilizing. "Please!"
"The Void has no mercy," Max replied coldly. "It only has hunger."
Max raised his right hand high above his head. The darkness of the domain swirled, condensing into a massive, crushing weight in his palm. It was a singularity—a black hole the size of a baseball.
"Final Art: Collapse."
Max slammed his hand down.
He drove the singularity directly into the Guut's remaining chest.
CRUNCH.
There was no explosion. There was an implosion.
The massive, twelve-foot obsidian monster was crushed instantly. Its armor, its muscles, its bones—everything was sucked into the singularity. The pressure was absolute. The Guut was compressed from a giant monster into a single point of existence in less than a second.
The Domain shattered.
Like a glass mirror breaking, the black world cracked and fell away. The neon lights of the Rose District and the rusted metal of the scrapyard returned.
Max stood in the center of the clearing, gasping for air. The black aura faded from his eyes, leaving him exhausted, his knees buckling. The Level 2 power had drained him nearly to death.
He looked down at the spot where he had crushed the monster. He expected to see a pile of ash. He expected to see dust, or the dissolving shadow ichor that usually remained after a Guut died.
But the dust cleared.
And Max stopped breathing.
Lying in the center of the crater, curled into a fetal position, was not a monster.
It was a man.
He was young, maybe in his mid-twenties. He was naked, his body bruised and broken from the crushing force of Max's attack. He had blonde hair and a distinctly human face. He wasn't dissolving. He wasn't fading away.
He was bleeding red blood.
"What..." Max whispered, taking a stumbling step back.
Jod, who had stabilized Malina, looked up. His eyes widened in horror. Raina limped over, her gun lowered, staring at the body.
"That's... that's a human," Raina gasped, her voice trembling. "That's not a construct. That's a person."
Max stared at the broken body of the man he had just killed. The realization hit him harder than any punch. The "Mimic" hadn't just been wearing a disguise.
The Guut was a human.