Chapter 118: Grave of the Forgotten II...
The Grave of the Forgotten was not a place meant for solo D-Rank hunters.
Under normal circumstances, clearing this Fracture Zone required a balanced team of at least five C-Rank professionals: a vanguard to hold the line, an elementalist for crowd control, a rogue for flanking, and a dedicated priest to handle the Void corruption.
Zen was none of those things. He was a man with a pair of non-magical trench knives, a modified drone, and a mana pool artificially choked down to a trickle.
But what the system didn’t measure was experience.
Zen moved through the swarm of Void-Knights like water flowing through jagged rocks. He didn’t waste mana on energy shields or explosive aura bursts.
Every single drop of his D-Rank output was channelled directly into his muscular structure and nervous system, pushing his kinetic reflexes to their limit.
A skeletal spearman thrust its rusted weapon toward his chest. Zen didn’t retreat. He stepped into the strike, his shoulder rolling just a fraction of an inch to let the spear graze harmlessly past his jacket.
Using the creature’s forward momentum, Zen grabbed the wooden shaft of the spear, turned on his heel, and hurled the spearman directly into the path of three charging broadsword-wielders.
The resulting collision shattered all four skeletons into a tangled mess of brittle bone and rusted iron.
Before the dust could even settle, Zen was already moving to his next target.
He dropped into a low crouch, sweeping a Void-Knight’s legs out from under it, then drove his knee into its ribcage as it fell, crushing the corrupted core hidden within its chest cavity.
Duck. Weave. Strike. Pivot. Disarm. Shatter.
His movements were not flashy; there were no blinding flashes of light, no roaring dragons of fire, no dramatic battle cries.
It was just pure, unadulterated violence stripped down to its most efficient, mathematical components. He was fighting with the minimum amount of effort required to kill.
The viewer count on the Ghost Scrapper stream skyrocketed past a hundred thousand.
The chat, which had been filled with skepticism just ten minutes prior, was now moving so fast that the text was a continuous, illegible blur.
[xX_Hunter_Pro_Xx]: What am I watching? What is this footwork?!
[VanguardFan1]: Ghost Scrapper is the GOAT mahn!
[ScrapRat]: I’ve been following him since Day 1 and still amused everytime.
[Ares_Alumni_04]: He just parried a two-handed C-Rank broadsword with a six-inch steel combat knife. That’s physically impossible without A-Rank aura reinforcement!
[Void_Walker_99]: Look at his footing! He’s not even looking at the enemies behind him! He just steps out of the way right before they swing! It’s like he can see the future!
[GuildMaster_Rex]: I have been a Vanguard for twenty years. I have never seen kinetic efficiency like this. Who is this guy? Who trained him?
[System Alert: User ’Vanguard_Queen’ has donated 1,000,000 Mana Credits!]
[Vanguard_Queen]: See that, @GuildMaster_Rex? You wish your guild had vanguards with that kind of spatial awareness. Don’t waste your breath analyzing him. You couldn’t replicate that even if you trained for a century.
Back in the Ares Academy residential district, on the second floor of the heavily warded townhouse, Valeria was currently failing to contain her excitement.
She sat cross-legged on her massive, king-sized bed in the master suite, staring at the sixty-inch holographic display she had projected against the wall.
The volume was muted, but her crimson eyes were wide, tracking every single micro-movement Zen made on the screen.
"Perfect," Valeria breathed, her chest heaving as she watched Zen seamlessly transition from a defensive weave into a lethal, dual-knife throat strike. "Absolutely perfect. Look at his centre of gravity. He’s shifting his weight to his back foot exactly 0.2 seconds before the impact. He’s not relying on his core at all. It’s all hips and shoulders."
For a Vanguard like Valeria... a Goddess who literally defined the pinnacle of physical combat in this world, watching Zen fight with such extreme kinetic limitation was like watching a master artist paint a masterpiece using only a single brush.
She knew exactly how hard it was to fight without relying on overwhelming magical power.
She leaned forward, her hands gripping the edge of the heavy oak nightstand next to her bed.
On the screen, Zen was surrounded by eight Void-Knights simultaneously.
But he didn’t panic.
He tossed one of his trench knives into the air, grabbed a fallen spear from the ash, vaulted off the nearest tombstone, and drove the spear downward, pinning three skeletons to the ground.
As he landed, he caught his falling trench knife and seamlessly sliced the heads off the remaining five in a single, fluid 360-degree spin.
"YES!" Valeria roared, her S-Rank aura accidentally flaring for a fraction of a second.
CRACK.
The solid oak nightstand she was gripping exploded into splinters.
Valeria blinked, looking down at the pile of expensive, shredded wood in her hands. She brushed the sawdust off her sweatpants, completely unbothered, and immediately went back to typing frantically on her tablet.
[Vanguard_Queen]: Flawless execution on the aerial disarm, Scrapper. But you left your left flank exposed for a quarter of a second on the landing. Next time, follow through with your dominant shoulder.
One floor below her, in the townhouse’s study, Lyra was having a completely different kind of breakdown.
The study looked like the control room of a nuclear submarine. Lyra had set up six different holographic monitors, completely covering the bookshelves.
The GE Link-Eye Drone’s feed was playing in the center, but the other five screens were entirely filled with rapidly scrolling numbers, spatial graphs, and complex geometric equations.
Lyra sat in a high-backed leather chair, her long silver hair falling over her shoulders. She was rapidly tapping on a glowing Aether-keyboard, her violet eyes dilated as she tracked Zen’s coordinates on a three-dimensional grid.
"Incredible," Lyra whispered to no one. She wasn’t looking at the violence; she was looking at the math.
To the untrained eye, Zen’s movements looked like elite martial arts. But to Lyra, the Goddess of Aether and the undisputed master of spatial physics, Zen was drawing equations in the air with his body.
"He’s calculating the ambient gravity of the Fracture Zone in real-time," Lyra muttered, typing frantically. "The Void energy is increasing the atmospheric pressure by twelve per cent, but he’s already adjusted his step cadence to compensate. Look at his vector alignment. When he ducks under that spear, he is aligning his spine perfectly parallel to the weapon’s trajectory. The margin of error is less than three millimetres."
She pulled up a secondary screen, running a predictive algorithm on his next move. The computer spat out three optimal evasion routes for a D-Rank hunter facing a multi-directional attack.
On the main feed, Zen ignored all three predicted routes.
Instead, he simply stepped backward into a blind spot, causing the two Void-Knights to accidentally impale each other, then casually decapitated them both while they were tangled.
The predictive algorithm on Lyra’s screen flashed red, indicating a logical paradox.
Lyra let out a soft, shuddering gasp. Her cheeks flushed a deep, vibrant pink.
"He just broke the algorithm," Lyra whispered, clutching the fabric of her uniform over her chest. Her heart was racing. "He found a spatial blind spot that the Aether supercomputer didn’t even register. His logic core... it’s mathematically perfect. It’s so beautiful."
She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.
For someone who worshipped cold, hard logic and mathematical perfection, watching Zen fight was like staring directly into the face of a god. She reached for her tablet, her fingers trembling slightly as she logged into the streaming platform.
[System Alert: User ’Aether_Logic_Prime’ has donated 2,000,000 Mana Credits! User has achieved VIP Tier 2 Status!]
[Aether_Logic_Prime]: Your vector alignment on the multi-target evasion was statistically improbable, Ghost Scrapper. The angular velocity of your secondary strike exceeded theoretical D-Rank limits by 4.2%. It was a mathematically perfect execution. Please continue.
The chat, already reeling from the massive donations from the Vanguard and the Empress, completely lost its mind at the sudden appearance of a third multi-millionaire VIP dropping a massive wall of advanced physics text.
[Iron_Fist_Dan]: WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?! WHY ARE THEY THROWING MILLIONS AT A SCRAPPER?!
[xX_Hunter_Pro_Xx]: Did that guy just calculate the streamer’s angular velocity from a drone feed?! What is happening on this channel?!
[System Alert: User ’Golden_Empress’ has donated 3,000,000 Mana Credits!]
[Golden_Empress]: Stay out of this, Aether_Logic_Prime! He doesn’t need your boring math! Ghost Scrapper, your elegance is unmatched! I am buying you a new jacket the moment this is over! That one has ash on it!
Back in the dungeon, Zen wiped a smear of dark, corrupted blood off the blade of his trench knife.
The courtyard was silent.
The horde of fifty Void-Knights had been reduced to a massive pile of shattered bones and rusted armour. The ambient purple glow of the corrupted mana had dimmed significantly in this sector, the heavy, suffocating pressure lifting slightly from the air.
Zen hadn’t taken a single hit. He wasn’t even breathing heavily, though the muscles in his arms and legs burned with a dull, throbbing ache from the sheer strain of forcing his D-Rank body to move at such extreme velocities.
He walked slowly through the bone piles, using the tip of his knife to expertly flick the small, glowing Void cores out of the ribcages of the fallen knights. He didn’t bother picking them up by hand; he just kicked them into a small pile.
At C-Rank, they were worth a decent amount of money on the scavenger market, but to Zen, they were just proof that the degradation in this sector was dropping.
The drone hovered closer, the chat going wild as the camera zoomed in on his masked face.
Zen glanced at the chat window in his HUD. He saw the ridiculous donation war happening between Valeria, Aurelia, and now Lyra. He saw Nyx silently banning hundreds of people in the background.
’Aether_Logic_Prime?’ Zen thought, his eye twitching beneath the digital blur. ’Lyra, you really couldn’t come up with a better username? You literally just put your domain and your personality trait in the title.’
He ignored them. He had a job to do, and the real threat was still waiting for him.
Zen turned away from the courtyard, looking toward the massive, obsidian doors of the central mausoleum at the far end of the graveyard.
The doors were covered in jagged, pulsing purple veins of raw Void energy. The temperature around the structure was freezing, the air crackling with necrotic power.
That was the boss room.
And whatever was waiting inside had absorbed the lion’s share of the Abyssal Trench’s corruption.
Zen adjusted his grip on his trench knives, rolled his shoulders, and walked toward the obsidian doors, the silent, invisible drone trailing faithfully behind him.