The Hunt Begins

Gray void.

No light.

No sound.

No sense of up, down, left, or right.

The Zero-Point Dimension's Public Interstitial Zone.

A dumping ground abandoned by the Higher-Dimensional Will.

Yang Yu stood atop an endless expanse of dense gray mist.

Behind him, the Abyss Rift spewed golden Origin Matter exhaust.

The void passage allowed things out, but nothing in.

No living person could cross even half a step through it.

A bathtub with its plug ripped out could not hold a single drop of water.

Violent ripples rolled through the depths of the gray mist.

Fourteen dark figures took shape around him, their silhouettes immense.

The encirclement stopped tightening at a distance of exactly five kilometers.

Ten old vipers bared their venom-coated fangs in unison.

"Drip."

The first drop of black slime squeezed its way out of a fold in the void.

It slammed into the gray mist.

The mist corroded away, leaving a solid hole three meters in radius.

An acrid, scorched stench spread toward the center.

Murphy's black liquid body forced its way completely out of the rift.

It swelled to a full three hundred meters tall.

Its lone eye, the size of a truck, locked onto Yang Yu.

The slime beneath it churned into hundreds of arm-shaped protrusions.

Hundreds of tentacles clawed frantically at the edge of the void.

"Yang Yu."

Murphy's vocal cords rasped like sandpaper grinding crushed bones.

"Do you know how long I held back in the Coliseum?"

Slime dripped from its body twice as fast.

"I watched the sand run out of the hourglass every second!"

Yang Yu ignored it.

He did not so much as lift an eyelid.

His left hand rested in the pocket of his Black Windbreaker.

With his right index finger, he nudged his T-Rex Sunglasses up his nose.

He