That gap tore at her nerves every single time.

Even now, Pandora still couldn’t reproduce the mysterious state the System’s 【Assisted Alchemy】 had put her in.

But her stubbornness, the pain she had put herself through over and over, the near-masochistic repetition she had subjected herself to—all of it had driven her technical skill upward in objective, measurable ways.

There was a particular agony that came with growing in the shadow of something greater than yourself. The standard you’d already glimpsed made every step forward feel like it was falling short. But it also made those steps faster than they had any right to be.

Her understanding of potion theory, her command of brewing technique—set against even experienced veteran alchemists who had spent years immersed in this craft, it was enough to make them look twice.

Designing the right formulations for Aurora, condensing twenty-seven potions down to three, reconstructing the whole structure from the ground up—that wasn’t really a challenge for her anymore.

It was more like solving an equation she’d already memorized. The hand moving before the mind had to ask.

She felt no particular anxiety about the brewing itself, either.

If she could design those three formulations, she could brew them herself.

That was simply how it worked.

The only regret—the single, honest regret—was that working alone, without the System, she couldn’t bring these potions to 【Perfect-Grade】.

“One day, though...”

She watched a single drop of refined solution fall slowly through the glass tube, her gaze flickering, her voice barely a whisper in the back of her mind. The certainty in it left no room for argument.

Nearby, standing quietly in the role she had quietly adopted over the course of the morning, Unit 039’s malachite eyes held Pandora’s focused, busy figure in clear reflection.

And somewhere in the depths of those mechanical eyes, a suppressed flicker of something moved.

Disbelief.

..................

Midday.

On the outskirts of the Dead City, inside an abandoned university gymnasium that had been gathering dust for years.

It had once been the lair of a Corpse-Spider Matriarch. The air had carried the sweet-rotten stench of decay and the distinctive metallic bite of webbing year-round.

Now, it had been cleared completely.

Across the floor, the walls, the ruined basketball hoops—everywhere—lay the nauseating remnants of the nest. Severed limbs rendered in unnatural purple-black. Viscous fluid pooled in the joints between broken concrete.

Second-Rank Decay Spiders made up the bulk of the casualties, their carapaces shattered, their limbs twisted at wrong angles, green ichor spread in wide arcs around each body.

The more powerful Third-Rank variants had met similar ends. Mourning-Web Phantoms. Dirge-Weave Guards. Each one capable, if released into the open, of carving through a standard Second-Rank apprentice squad and leaving little behind. Six of them lay dead here, which was, by any measure, a staggering number.

Their deaths had been uglier. Some torn cleanly in half by brute force. Others with their skulls or chest cavities—the vital cores inside—struck with precision and destroyed.

Only one kind of force cleared a nest this strong, this efficiently.

A team that matched it.

Julian Bennett led that team.

He was standing at the center of the gymnasium floor, in what had once been the volleyball court.

Under his feet was the freshly-killed body of the Corpse-Spider Matriarch herself.

The Matriarch’s upper body retained unsettling traces of a human girl—pale skin, a slender neck, and a long tangle of dry black hair. Below the chest, that ended. What replaced it was a massive, bloated spider abdomen covered in grotesque markings and coarse bristles, eight barbed limbs splayed outward at twisted angles, every one of them still.

Julian himself looked like someone who had no business being here.

His face was clean and approachable. He wore a pair of rimless glasses. The corners of his mouth rested in a naturally gentle curve, giving him the quiet air of a well-read young professor at the start of a promising career.

But the charnel house surrounding him, and the dark hunting coat he wore—well-cut despite the faint smear of dark green fluid across one sleeve—added something to his image that couldn’t be ignored. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

An edge.

He was not the kind of scholar who only knew paper.

The force behind him was real. Enough to put most people at the same rank comfortably beneath him. Of the four other Third-Rank apprentices currently in this room, he was the strongest. He was also the one closest to crossing the threshold out of the apprentice ranks entirely and stepping into the domain of a Master Demon Hunter.

He stood at the highest point of the Matriarch’s misshapen corpse, completely unmoved by what he was standing on.

He reached to his waist and drew a curved blade with an unusual silhouette. The blade itself was the warm ivory of biological bone, inlaid with intricate gold patterns that traced along its surface. In the dim light of the gymnasium, it cast a faint, quiet glow.

He bent forward.

His movements were precise and controlled—not the movements of someone dissecting a monster, but of a surgeon performing a delicate procedure.

The curved blade opened the Matriarch’s chest. The part that still looked human.

No blood surged.

Only a viscous, semi-transparent gel oozed out, carrying a sharp acidic smell.

The blade went deeper, threading carefully past twisted organs and nerve bundles.

Then he turned his wrist.

A single rib was extracted intact—roughly half an arm’s length, semi-transparent, milk-white.

The Matriarch had only one.

It didn’t look like something that had grown inside living tissue. The surface was clean. Smooth as polished jade. Not a trace of fluid or flesh adhered to it. It gave an impression closer to a piece of fine art than a biological structure.

But regardless of how it looked, this was what Julian had come for.

The Matriarch’s Pure Bone.

He held it between his fingers—cool to the touch, harder than it had any right to be—and examined it for a few seconds.

Then he looked up.

And smiled.

It was a warm, radiant, genuinely sunny smile. The kind that made people feel immediately at ease. The kind that seemed capable of dissolving the blood-soaked atmosphere of the entire room just by existing.

Set against the grotesque horror beneath his feet, the contrast was stark enough to be surreal.

A figure stepped out from the shadows cast by the upper structural framework—a young man wearing round-framed glasses, lean in build, his footsteps carrying a slight hesitation. He stopped a short distance away.

He looked at the smile on Julian’s face.

And visibly shuddered.

Not because of the corpses. The corpses he’d apparently made some peace with.

It was the smile that did it.

Like a rabbit that had wandered deep into the forest and come face-to-face with a very large, very relaxed predator in the middle of grooming itself after a meal.

Still, Thorne forced himself to recover quickly.

He pulled in a breath, pushed the instinctive wariness back down where it came from, and walked up to Julian with deliberate steps.

“Captain.”

Julian reined in the smile that had perhaps been slightly excessive, leaving only the gentle curve at the corners of his mouth.

He passed the milk-white Pure Bone back to one of the team members behind him without looking, his voice even and unhurried.

“Oh? Thorne? How are things on Aurora’s end? Did her friend pull it off?”