Chapter 21: THE UNREGULATED SECTOR
The cold midnight wind swept through the narrow alleys of District 7, carrying the metallic stench of damp iron and chemical exhaust. Neon signs flickered lazily overhead, casting harsh pools of pink and cyan light across the wet pavement.
Noah Kurtz walked through the shadows with a quiet, unhurried pace. His hands remained deep inside the pockets of his dark coat, his slouching posture giving off the complete impression of a tired, overworked laborer returning from a late night shift.
Nobody paid him any attention. Down here in the slums, an unarmored twenty-two-year-old with a slouch was just part of the scenery.
He stopped before a rusted, automated financial kiosk buried under a crumbling concrete staircase. The machine blinked with a pale yellow screen, its casing covered in faded graffiti and grease stains.
Noah pulled his wrist terminal up, connecting to the kiosk via a short-range local signal.
He didn’t use the International Hunter Association’s official banking channel, which monitored every credit flow belonging to registered awakeners. Instead, he routed the transfer through the off-grid ledger exchange Alistair Vance had set up during their transaction.
With a few quick, practiced taps on the cracked screen, Noah initiated the wire transfer.
[Anonymous External Payment Processing]
Destination Account: Rural Agricultural Credit Union (Account #4092-Kurtz)
Transfer Amount: 45,000 Credits
Memo: Personal Loan Settlement / Principal Clearance
Sender Identity: Masked
The screen buffered for two seconds before a green checkmark flashed across the terminal.
Transaction Complete.
Noah stared at the confirmation text for a moment.
Forty-five thousand credits. In the agricultural villages outside Sentinel City, that single sum was enough to completely wipe away the massive loan his father had taken out five years ago to send him to the megacity. The constant, suffocating debt notices that had hounded his parents for years—the ones that caused his father’s hands to tremble and his mother to weep quietly in the kitchen—were gone in a single breath.
Noah kept 5,000 credits on his unlogged local account for basic living expenses and gear purchases.
A quiet, almost imperceptible sigh left his lips. The heavy weight that had rested on his shoulders since the day he left his hometown felt lighter now. He had fulfilled his first promise to his family.
"Now," Noah whispered softly, his gray eyes narrowing as he turned away from the kiosk, "the rest belongs to me."
He navigated through the lower market stalls, bypassing the high-profile armories and weapon shops where C-rank and B-rank Hunters bought expensive mana-infused steel. Instead, he turned into an unregulated scrap shop run by an old, half-deaf mechanic who didn’t ask for Hunter credentials.
"Looking for something specific, kid?" the old man grunted, barely glancing up from his workbench where he was repairing a broken plasma torch.
"Two standard steel throwing daggers," Noah replied, his voice calm and steady. "Balanced, solid iron tang. No mana enchantments."
The old man snorted, reaching into a wooden crate under the counter and tossing two plain, unpolished black steel daggers onto the glass surface. They looked completely ordinary, the kind of cheap throwing blades academy dropouts used for target practice.
"Fifty credits each," the merchant grunted. "Nobody buys plain steel anymore unless they’re broke or stupid."
Noah didn’t argue. He placed a small credit chip on the counter and picked up the weapons.
The moment his fingers wrapped around the handles, his integrated Ash-Walker instincts activated naturally. His mind calculated the precise weight distribution, the center of gravity, and the aerodynamic drag of the steel within a microsecond.
Noah twirled one blade subtly between his fingers, testing the grip. His Ki shifted slightly within his meridians, flowing smoothly through his wrist. To the merchant, it looked like a clueless civilian awkwardly checking a knife, but in Noah’s hands, the simple pieces of iron felt perfectly natural.
He slipped both daggers into hidden leather sheaths pinned to the inside of his coat, right beside his cheap utility knife.
Leaving the shop, Noah headed toward the transit line leading straight out of District 7 toward the Sector 21 border zone.
According to the historical data files Alistair had decrypted from the NovaCox prime seal, the primary anchor node was located six levels beneath the ruined foundation of Sector 21’s industrial dead zone. The Association had cataloged the area as an abandoned, collapsed catacomb system after the gate imploded during Noah’s earlier run.
Because the gate was declared destroyed, no official patrols guarded the outer perimeter anymore.
It was an unregulated sector—a lawless, unmonitored zone where the city wall met the edge of the wilderness.
The train ride was long and quiet. As the high-speed mag-rail sped away from the glittering neon core of Sentinel City, the towering glass skyscrapers gradually faded, replaced by dark, monolithic concrete walls, abandoned factories, and overgrown wasteland yards.
When Noah stepped off at the final, dilapidated platform, the cool night air tasted raw, heavy with the scent of wet moss, rust, and old stone.
He pulled his dark coat tighter against the wind, stepping off the concrete platform and walking straight toward the ruined border park that separated the city foundation from the deep sub-levels.
The past was waiting for him beneath the earth, and for the first time since his resurrection, Noah Kurtz was completely ready to take it back.