Arc stared at the creature ahead.
A hyper-evolved bipedal rhinoceros beetle, thick brass-colored plating sheathing its hulking frame. It stood on four limbs, posture low and grounded like a silverback gorilla, the muscles in its arms twitching beneath chitinous armor. Blade-like mandibles jutted from its wrists, edges ragged with use. Its horn, curved and jagged, gleamed faintly under the forest's filtered light. On its back, a fused structure—like the malformed head of a Hercules beetle—bulged upward into a twisted cannon, pulsing with internal pressure.
Its breath rasped through vents along its thorax. Its massive body tensed. No roar, no posturing.
It recognized the intruder.
It charged.
The canopy above trembled as the monster surged forward, arms carving through underbrush, horn aimed to gore and pin. Its weight cracked roots and tore soil, momentum shoving the world aside as it barreled forward with ruthless instinct.
Arc moved.
No wasted motion. No hesitation.
He met the beetle mid-charge. One foot braced. Both knives drawn. Electricity surged faintly down the hilts, enough to disrupt nerve signals and soften the outer shell. He struck clean—blades slicing past the bladed arms to embed at the base of the beast's forward joint. The kinetic force jolted through its limbs. The creature howled—not in pain, but reaction—reeling back, smashing through a tree in its stagger.
Arc was already circling.
No pause. No commentary.
It turned—swiped with a mandible arm.
He ducked, pivoted under, planted a palm to the ground, and launched upward. Both legs slammed into the creature's side. A jolt of bio-electricity arced on impact. The nerves around the cannon twitched violently. Its shell cracked, not deeply—but enough.
It lunged blindly.
Arc threw both knives again—spine-aimed. They lodged in hard plates.
A surge.
The electricity erupted from the knives into the creature's spine like rods grounding a storm. The monster twitched violently, dropped to one knee, its body spasming under the current.
He advanced.
No ceremony. No words.
The final strike came fast—a pulled short sword driving into the upper thorax, deep into exposed nerve matter. The pressure collapsed. The beetle slumped, twitching once more before falling silent.
Arc stepped back, blood soaking into the moss around his boots.
Another breath.
Another kill.
Nothing more.
The corpse twitched.
Arc tilted his head slightly, watching with a detached stillness as the weaponized structure on the beetle's back convulsed—then ignited.
A blast of force churned the ground as the cannon-like horn snapped upward, electricity crackling across its length. For a fraction of a second, energy coiled at its tip—then launched forward in a brutal railgun shot, a bolt of compressed magnetic force howling through the air.
Arc moved.
No theatrics. No pause.
The blast struck the flat of one of his short swords, angled precisely. The blade shuddered under the impact, arcs of static dancing along its surface, but held. The ground behind Arc split open in a razor-straight line from the redirected force.
The beetle twitched again, attempting to fire a second time.
Arc was already on it.
In a blur, he stepped into the corpse's space, bypassing the still-heating cannon. His fingers found the gaping seam along the beast's armored side, where his knives had earlier carved channels.
Without hesitation, he plunged his hand into the weakened tissue, feeling for the still-pulsing core—the half-dead engine of energy trying to reignite.
He crushed it.
A dull thrum died instantly. The light in the beetle's body winked out. The railgun structure sagged uselessly.
The corpse was finally still.
Arc adjusted his grip on the dead weight, drew a thin combat knife from his hip sheath, and slit open a thick vein along the beast's shoulder—one surgically chosen, where the lifeblood of the creature's power channels converged.
A line of black-gold blood oozed out.
He flexed his fingers, allowing thin tendrils of alkanite to seep from the pores across his palm. The alkanite crept along the surface of the corpse like intelligent vines, embedding itself into the open vein. In seconds, the material was siphoning.
Not the flesh. Not the broken organs.
Only the residual Ura—the distilled signature of power, muscle structure, instinctive combat traits, and the biological design needed to employ them.
Arc's body absorbed the extracted essence through the alkanite feed lines, integrating only the necessary data.
He didn't need the shell.
Only the use.
The beetle's remains dried up, desiccated and brittle, its entire potential stripped cleanly, leaving nothing but a dead husk with shattered limbs and cracked armor.
Arc stood in silence, removing the alkanite threads from his skin.
The weapon horn was still faintly glowing.
He left it behind.
A carcass was a carcass.
He looked down at his exposed arm.
The sleeve had been incinerated—burned away from the earlier blast. His flesh, untouched by the heat, now shimmered with transformation. The alkanite had responded.
From the back of his hand down to his elbow, it had reshaped itself—a jagged, shell-like mandible, four feet long, curving outward with brutal elegance. It split open with a clack, mimicking the Hercules beetle's jaw, complete with serrated inner ridges that gleamed under the filtered light of the canopy.
He flexed.
The mandible snapped shut in a blur, cleaving through a fallen tree trunk nearby. The wood didn't splinter—it sheared, clean as a blade through bundled wire.
He turned, testing further.
The alkanite pulsed, responding to intent. The mandible shuddered—then thickened. Expanded. The entire construct grew, overtaking his arm, swallowing it whole in segments of armor-like plating and angular ridges. The transformation wasn't fluid—it was mechanical, like the locking of a siege weapon.
From the center of the construct, a barrel emerged, lined with four protruding spines, each glowing faintly. Cyan arcs of lightning began to build between them, crawling over the surface like static itching for violence. Inside, a single point of light pulsed—the eye of the core, gathering his stored Ura.
He braced.
Feet planted, arm forward, torso rotated with muscle-memory precision.
The hum deepened.
The forest trembled.
Then it fired.
A bolt of concentrated energy, compressed and refined, tore through the valley in a scream of cyan light. The air behind it warped from the raw discharge. Trees along its path didn't burn—they simply ceased, reduced to vapor and memory.
Silence followed, broken only by the hiss of the cooling construct as it receded, returning to his arm in fractal pieces of armor that folded neatly away.
He exhaled once through his nose.
No wasted motion.
No awe.
Only evolution.
His legs gave slightly beneath him, and he dropped into a low crouch, then sat, steadying his breath as the hum of discharging energy faded into the sounds of the wild.
The alkanite was still moving—settling.
He watched the dark grey metal retract and harden, fusing seamlessly into his forearm. It didn't vanish entirely; it rested there like a dormant weapon. But now, under the dim light filtering through the canopy, he saw more detail.
White accents, thin and sharp, had surfaced along the length of the construct. Interlocking patterns. Fractal etchings. They contrasted against the matte black underlayer that wrapped his forearm like second skin. It gave the construct a stylized finish—refined, deliberate, almost ceremonial.
A design language he hadn't chosen.
Not consciously.
Was it subconscious influence?
He didn't know.
He stared at the limb, flexed his fingers once, then again—muscle and alkanite responding in unison.
Whatever it was becoming, it wasn't done yet.
He watched silently as the biome began to collapse.
It didn't shatter. It shrunk.
Reality pulled in on itself, warping with a low hum as the pseudo-world condensed. The glowing dome folded like glass under pressure, vanishing into a pinpoint of light—gone, leaving behind only a parch of native biome soil beneath his boots.
Fifteen of the biome's towering, unique trees remained—monolithic, dark-barked titans with yellow leaves that fluttered quietly in the night air. The falling foliage was almost ceremonial, drifting in silence, catching moonlight as it swirled.
He said nothing as the armored vehicle emerged from the shadows.
He stepped in without resistance, the doors hissing shut. The interior was sterile, lit by low red strips that traced the ceiling. No one spoke.
Then, a hum.
A pulse in the fabric of space.
Portal jump.
Outside the reinforced windows, the forest blurred, and in its place came gleaming walls of white steel and black glass. The Amaterasu facility.
Arrival confirmed.
The hunt was over.