Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 33: The Deal. (2)

Chapter 33: The Deal. (2)
Marcus’s scarred face shifted into something that might have been approval.
"Smart. I was hoping you’d be smart."
The flame wall behind Zeph extinguished instantly, plunging the tunnel back into dim emergency lighting. The temperature dropped from "forge" to "uncomfortable" in seconds.
"Put the axe down," Marcus said. "If I wanted you dead, I wouldn’t have wasted an hour following you through these tunnels."
Zeph’s fingers tightened on the weapon’s handle.
’He’s right. He had a dozen opportunities to kill me. He let me kill the bug brothers without interfering. He watched me use Temporal Fracture and didn’t stop me. Despite definitely having the means to do so.’
’Which means he wants something. And that’s leverage—the only leverage I have.’
Slowly, deliberately, Zeph lowered the axe. Not dropping it. Not putting it away. Just moving it from an aggressive guard to a neutral position at his side.
"You have sixty seconds," he said. "Then I’m gone."
Marcus actually laughed—a genuine sound of amusement that echoed off the tunnel walls.
"You think you can leave if I don’t let you?" He shook his head, smile widening. "That’s adorable."
The words should have been threatening. Somehow, coming from Marcus, they just sounded... honest.
"Let me explain your situation, anomaly." Marcus took a step closer, but not into striking range. "Maybe then you’ll understand why negotiation is your only option."
"First: The owner of that storage ring." He gestured at the ring on Zeph’s finger. "He’s three hundred meters that direction with seven of his hunters. They’re searching the Bazaar for you right now. I can sense their soul signatures from here—can you?"
Zeph’s jaw tightened. Enhanced Hearing picked up distant movement, voices, the scrape of boots on stone. But specific soul signatures? That was beyond his current capabilities.
Marcus read his expression and nodded.
"Didn’t think so. They’ll find this tunnel system eventually. Probably in the next ten minutes."
"Second," Marcus continued, voice taking on a lecturing tone, "the System Event. It flagged you as a Regional Extinction Threat. That classification doesn’t disappear just because you reverted to human form. Every awakened who responded to that event has your spiritual signature memorized now. They’ll recognize you if they get within a hundred feet."
He let that sink in for a moment.
"Third: Northern Bastion’s gates are a few miles away. You’ll need to pass through security screening to enter. They scan for criminal records, outstanding warrants, and—most importantly—they scan for System anomalies and irregular classifications."
Marcus’s expression remained calm, but his eyes were sharp, calculating.
"Want to guess what happens when an unregistered Level 35 with no citizenship papers tries to enter while flagged as a former extinction event?"
Zeph’s mind raced through possibilities. None of them ended well.
"I’ll find another way."
"There is no other way." Marcus’s voice was flat, stating fact. "The six other Sanctuaries are farther away, more heavily guarded, and you don’t know their layouts or security protocols. The ruins will kill you eventually—you’ve survived some years, but how much longer? A month? A year before something gets lucky?"
The S-rank’s gaze intensified.
"And that’s assuming the System doesn’t re-classify you as an anomaly. Because whatever caused your transformation?" He gestured at Zeph with one hand. "I can still sense the residue in your soul. It’s faint, but it’s there. Dormant. Waiting."
The temperature in the tunnel seemed to drop despite the lingering heat from Marcus’s earlier display.
"So here’s your reality," Marcus said, voice taking on an edge of finality. "You can’t enter any Sanctuary without help. You can’t survive in the ruins forever. And you can’t run from me."
He let the silence stretch for three heartbeats.
"You have two choices. Work with me, or die slowly outside the walls while Viktor and every other bounty hunter in the region takes turns trying to collect your head."
Zeph stared at the S-rank awakened, his analytical mind processing every word, every implication.
’He’s not offering me a choice. He’s telling me I have no options, then pretending it’s a negotiation.’
Something in Zeph’s expression must have shifted because Marcus tilted his head slightly, studying him with renewed interest.
"You’re not offering me a choice," Zeph said quietly. "You’re telling me I have no options, then pretending it’s a negotiation. There’s a difference."
For the first time since the confrontation began, Marcus’s expression showed something other than calm confidence.
A flicker of surprise.
Then respect.
"Most people don’t notice that," Marcus said slowly. "They just hear ’work with me’ and think they’re getting a deal."
"I’ve been surrounded by people trying to kill or use me since I was thirteen," Zeph replied, his voice carrying the weight of three years spent in constant survival mode. "I recognize a cage when I see one—even if it’s made of reasonable-sounding arguments."
He met Marcus’s gaze directly, storm-gray eyes refusing to flinch away from the S-rank’s intensity.
"So stop pretending this is a negotiation. Tell me what you actually want."
The change in Marcus was immediate and striking. The "patient recruiter" facade dropped like a discarded mask, replaced by something sharper, more genuine, more... human.
"Fine." Marcus stepped closer—not threatening, but engaged. "No more sales pitch."
He crossed his arms, his entire posture shifting from intimidating authority to something closer to professional assessment.
"I run an organization called the Vanguard. We handle threats the Sanctuaries won’t acknowledge publicly. Dimensional breaches... and anomalies."
Marcus’s scarred face was serious now, all traces of his earlier amusement gone.
"You’re the fourth anomaly this year. Four. Three years ago, we’d see maybe one every eighteen months. The rate is accelerating, and nobody in the official channels wants to admit what that means. Something is wrong with the System itself, and I need people who can operate outside normal parameters to figure out what."
Zeph’s enhanced hearing picked up the truth in Marcus’s voice—no deception, no evasion. Just cold, practical honesty.
"What happened to the other three?" he asked.
Marcus’s expression hardened.
"One went insane from Soul Mark corruption within six weeks. Had to be terminated before he killed an entire settlement. One is in a medically induced coma in one of our facilities because we can’t figure out how to separate the parasitic entity from his soul without killing him. The third..."
He paused, and for just a moment, something that might have been regret crossed his features.
"The third completed her transformation. Became something that isn’t human anymore. She’s still alive, still functional enough to hold a conversation. But she’s not the person she was. The entity wearing her face remembers her life, uses her memories, mimics her personality. But it’s not her."
Ice settled in Zeph’s stomach.
’That could have been me. If the Soul Mark hadn’t shattered when it did...’
"Why are you telling me this?" His voice came out quieter than he’d intended.
Marcus’s gaze bored into him.
"Because you reverted. You survived the transformation and came back human. Kept your personality, your memories, your sense of self intact. In fifty years of tracking anomalies across three continents, I have never seen that happen."
He let that statement hang in the air between them.
"Which means you either got incredibly lucky with timing and circumstances, or there’s something fundamentally different about you compared to every other anomaly I’ve documented. And I need to understand which, because if it’s the latter, you might be the key to saving the next one."
The honest stakes laid bare.
"I’m not recruiting you because you’re strong," Marcus said bluntly. "Level 35 with good combat instincts? I can find ten thousand awakened like that in any major Sanctuary. I’m recruiting you because you’re a data point.
You represent something that shouldn’t be possible according to everything we know about anomaly progression, and that makes you valuable in ways raw combat power isn’t."