Awakening! Avenger!

Its strike having failed, the Transmitter withdrew its tendrils.

Tianyang hunched forward, lowered his center of gravity, and readied himself to sprint.

The moment he leaned forward, his vision blurred. The tunnel, the walls, the Star Pillar-everything dissolved into a dazzling stream of colors before his eyes.

When he stopped, what appeared before him was the Transmitter's back!

The female face of the Children of Darkness wore a vacant expression. Just a moment ago, the boy in front of it had vanished. It was about to search for Tianyang when its entire body shuddered.

A column of blood erupted from the body beneath its cloak. The blood took the shape of a sword blade, seemingly bound by the rules of some power.

After a brief pause, the force restraining the blood dissipated, and only then did the oil-black blood spill onto the ground.

A hand held like a knife burst through the Transmitter's chest.

Tianyang's hand.

The boy had appeared behind the Children of Darkness and pierced the Transmitter's body with a single strike.

Yet an injury that would have been devastating to a human barely bothered the Transmitter. It extended two clusters of tendrils and drove them into the tunnel walls.

With a jerk of its tendrils, it pulled itself off Tianyang's hand. Those tendrils stretched endlessly like rubber, swinging the Transmitter up to the tunnel's vaulted ceiling.

The uncanny creature suddenly contracted toward a single point, its flesh and tissues folding over and over as its density increased. In the blink of an eye, the Transmitter became a perfect sphere.

Its cloak slipped off. Using the tendrils on either side as anchor points, it launched itself at him like a projectile. Midflight, the sphere spewed dense black mist, which coated its surface and streamed like flames.

The thing hurtled down like a black fireball, but Tianyang had already darted aside. The ball of dark flame struck the ground. The tunnel shook violently as though hit by a heavy artillery shell, and great stretches of the floor shattered. Sand and stones erupted into the air, only to be swept by a ring of black flame and fall as chunks of pitch-black crystal.

The boy appeared beside the Star Marrow Pillar. Tianyang reached out and touched its trunk, his five fingers sinking easily into the hard crystal.

When he lifted his hand again, he pulled out a large mass of star marrow crystal. Under the influence of some rule, the crystals swiftly fitted themselves together, forming a crystalline longsword connected to Tianyang's palm.

The boy pressed his other palm lightly against the sword and swept it along the blade. Inside the crystal, hair-thin filaments lit up one after another.

By the time the ball of dark flame on the ground extended its tendrils again and swung itself upward, the crystalline longsword attached to Tianyang's palm was shining from end to end.

From a distance, the boy looked as though he held a galaxy in his hand!

Dark flames roared as it gathered all its strength and launched its assault!

Tianyang raised his head slightly. His face showed neither sorrow nor joy, its coldness enough to make the heart tremble.

The boy raised his sword, and a galaxy swept across the tunnel.

A silver line of light lit up the tunnel.

That line split the tunnel in two.

It crossed the sphere of dark mist, passing through its exact center with millimeter precision!

Time seemed to pause at that instant.

At the touch of the silvery-white line, the black mist covering the sphere parted above and below, exposing the sphere beneath.

The silver line slid through the sphere and sank into the tunnel wall on the opposite side.

The sphere's surface, harder than alloy, and the organ deep within it that resembled a human heart both split soundlessly, like soft cheese sliced by a wire.

A ring of blood immediately sprayed from the sphere's surface.

The organ at its center had been radiating orange light. Now that light spilled outward and rapidly died, like a candle flickering in a gale.

That organ was the Transmitter's will cage.

With its will cage shattered, the Children of Darkness's life came to an end.

The split sphere fell to the ground and slid over a dozen meters, its black blood leaving a thick, ink-like trail across the tunnel floor.

Even then, a muffled rumble continued to come from the wall into which the silver line had sunk. Through the cracks in the wall, one could see that line still advancing through the darkness within, like a thin tidal front.

Only after traveling an unknown distance did the energy forming the silver light finally dissipate. If anyone later dug up the city's foundations, they would discover a fracture stretching a thousand meters near the tunnel!

The Transmitter's flesh was rotting and decomposing. Within a few short seconds, nothing remained on the ground but a puddle of black, mold-like matter.

With a series of cracks, flakes of crystal peeled away, fell to the ground, and crumbled into powder.

The starlight in Tianyang's eyes dimmed.

The energy surging through his body like a mighty river slowly receded.

Retreating with it was that foreign peripheral signal. Before returning to its source, it gently touched the boy's nerves.

It sent a signal.

Then Tianyang's lips moved, releasing the information carried by that signal in human speech. "Ascend... evolve... grow... my apostle..."

The moment the final syllable left his mouth, the boy collapsed like a puppet whose performance had just ended.

After an unknown stretch of time, Tianyang groaned and slowly woke.

He pushed himself into a sitting position and shook his head to clear it.

Looking around, he saw signs of destruction everywhere. The boy was astonished, with no idea what had happened.

Fortunately, however, the Transmitter was gone. That had been a danger level three Child of Darkness. To run into something like that and survive-what incredible dumb luck!

Wait!

Tianyang suddenly remembered that, before he lost consciousness, the Transmitter seemed to have injected something into him.

He hurriedly took off his protective suit and examined himself carefully, but found nothing abnormal.

Except for a new design on the back of his right hand.

A hazy hand formed from black flames held a crescent-shaped scythe. Along the edge of the scythe's blade was a symbol: Ⅰ!

What was this?

The thought had barely surfaced when a cold, utterly emotionless voice sounded beside the boy's ear: "This is the class emblem of the Avenger!"

Tianyang jumped and looked around. "Who's there? Who's speaking?"

No one answered.

Avenger? Class?

As he pondered those two keywords, information surfaced in his mind.

Avenger class

Class rank 1: Assassin

Class abilities: Weakness Sense, One-Strike Annihilation

Ascension progress: 14%

Next class rank: Eradicator

The tunnel was utterly silent.

Tianyang stood beside the Star Pillar like a statue, completely motionless.

A storm of emotion surged through the boy's heart!

I...

I became an Ascender?

The Avenger class? That didn't seem to be among the existing classes published by the fortress.

Could it be a new class?

An Ascender...

An Ascender!

"Ha ha..."

The boy couldn't help laughing, but he quickly covered his mouth. Tianyang had no desire to attract another uncanny creature with his laughter.

Still, he couldn't contain his wild joy. After all, being an Ascender meant so many things.

For one, it would give Tianyang an entirely new life. He could give his mother a better life and demand justice from Qin Wu, who held Upper Citizen status.

The problems that had troubled him before could all be resolved by that one word: Ascender!