Chương 429: Chapter 417 - Humanity’s First Contender

Jack stepped out of the VR chamber, sweat running down his neck, damp hair stuck to his forehead. The hatch behind him sealed with a soft pneumatic hiss while the chamber lights dimmed. His legs wobbled for a second, the aftereffect of the neural immersion, and he dropped heavily into the reclinable chair waiting beside the pod. The suit clinging to his body peeled away in sections as the system released its tension.

Thousands of micro-actuators and conductive fibers relaxed across the fabric, the thin material loosening against his skin. ASCENT's engineers called it a neuro-responsive training mesh. Every square centimeter of it mapped muscle activity, nerve signals and joint load in real time. During immersion it could stimulate nerves, trigger pressure feedback and even contract against the body to simulate resistance or impact.

The same system that made a blade feel real in VR also forced the muscles to respond, pushing them through accelerated training cycles while the mind fought inside the simulation. A far cry from the old VR rigs people had used just a year ago, which already felt like another time entirely… as if the world had leapt forward several generations in the span of a single breath. Jack leaned back and exhaled slowly, his chest still rising hard.

The whole setup had been installed weeks ago here in the basement of Alonso's mum's mountain mansion, where he still stayed in case Alonso ever came back. Another "gift" from ASCENT. He sat there for a minute while the suit finished its cooldown cycle, heat bleeding away through the thin ventilation layer. His forearms trembled slightly from fatigue. Then he reached over and grabbed one of the recovery packs stacked beside the chair. High-protein, electrolyte loaded, engineered for post-immersion sessions.

He tore it open and downed half of it before the shaking in his hands settled. After a while he pushed himself up. His body felt… different these days. Stronger, more balanced. Speed, reflexes and strength sitting together in a way they never had before. The months of neural drills and combat simulations had carved patterns into his muscles he could almost feel when he moved. A small part of him wondered if right now he wouldn't embarrass quite a few professional fighters from the old days…

back before The Tower showed up and rewrote what "strong" meant. Then the thought faded just as quickly. Compared to even the weakest 1% SP Climber… He might as well be a toddler. Still… this was what he had. The strength itself didn't matter nearly as much as the instincts the system drilled into him. Reaction patterns, positioning, timing… thousands of simulated fights burned into muscle memory. Those things might actually matter once he got inside. And more than anything…

He just needed to feel like he was doing something. That he was moving forward. Because sitting around while his two best mates were inside that nightmare of a Tower, pushing themselves past anything a human body or mind should survive… That wasn't something he could stomach.

"MEI, any updates?" he asked, his voice tired.

"None you would find relevant," it replied. Jack let the answer settle as he leaned his head back. He still remembered the last transmission shown a couple of days ago. That fight against that giant world-ending abomination the Climbers had faced… some towering corpse-king wrapped in rusted armor, with all the coffin and ghost stuff. That was when he saw how ridiculous the scaling had become.

Compared to the earlier fight against that shifting oak with the bride, it felt like all of them had more than doubled their power. It was just… insane. Yet more than the visuals, more than the god-like destruction tearing through the battlefield, one thing had stood out to him above everything else. Why wasn't Alonso there? All the others, the six, had been in that fight. Only him missing. Heck, it had been over a month since anything involving Alonso had been shown. And yet it was clear he was still inside.

Otherwise… well, Jack was still here waiting at the spawn point. So the question remained. Where was he? What was he doing? And that wasn't just his question. The whole world was asking the same thing. As the figure widely established as humanity's strongest Climber, his absence from the broadcasts, especially during a fight of that scale, had felt… strange. Then his thoughts were abruptly cut short." High priority transmission… broadcasting now."

The calm synthetic voice echoed through the chamber, and the effect on Jack was immediate. Every trace of fatigue vanished as he straightened in the chair, eyes snapping fully open.

"What the…?" He barely finished the words before the answer appeared. A projection spread across the smooth wall of the chamber, the polished surface turning into a massive display. Jack had long ago configured the system to strip out the commentators and the flashy edits. The broadcast came through almost raw, with only the processing needed to make it intelligible to normal humans… slowed motion, stabilisation, frame correction. Everything else remained untouched.

And it didn't take long for him to understand what he was looking at. There, on the screen, half kneeling on the ground and drenched in blood… was Alonso. Jack froze where he sat. For a moment he simply stared, trying to process the image, because something immediately felt wrong. Alonso was alone. His shoulders tightened slightly as the footage continued, Jack leaning forward without even noticing, eyes locked on the projection as if afraid to blink. Then he saw it.

His friend being thrown across the battlefield like a rag doll, the impact sending debris flying in every direction. Jack's jaw clenched instinctively, and as the replay slowed he noticed Alonso's mouth moving.

"MEI, go back… enable subtitles through lip-read." The broadcast rewound instantly. A brief processing delay passed, then the footage resumed with text appearing at the bottom of the screen. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. The first line formed slowly." Who… do you think you are?"

"..." The words hit harder than Jack expected. It wasn't just the sentence. It was the way Alonso looked while saying it, battered and bloodied yet still standing there like he owned the ground beneath his feet. A cold shiver ran down Jack's spine. And that was only the beginning. Each line that followed carried even more dominance than the last, yet it wasn't really the words that struck him the most. It was the presence behind them.

Even through the projection, through the flattened colours and reduced depth of a broadcast, something about Alonso's stance, his gaze, the sheer certainty behind every movement… bled through the screen like pressure filling the room. Jack swallowed slowly. If it already felt like this through a recording, through a two-dimensional projection made of pixels and light… he couldn't even imagine what it must feel like standing there in person. Heck… would anyone on Earth right now even dare stand in his presence?

The fight continued. Blows that shattered the ground. Movements so fast the slowed footage still struggled to track them. Moments where it looked like Alonso might finally collapse under the punishment he was taking… But he didn't. And then, little by little, the momentum shifted. Until finally… it shifted completely. And in the end… Alonso won. When the broadcast ended the image remained frozen on the last frame, and Jack found himself still sitting there, staring at the screen in complete silence.

For a moment he genuinely didn't know what he was feeling. Awe came first. The presence Alonso had radiated in that fight, even through a recording, felt unreal. Words like cool or badass didn't even begin to cover it. What Jack had just witnessed felt heavier than that, something deeper and far harder to explain. He stared at the frozen image for a few seconds longer before slowly shaking his head.

"Bloody hell…" His friend no longer looked like just a fighter, or even a warrior… but something different, something greater. Someone standing against the world itself and refusing to bend. A hero, perhaps. Or maybe a better word would be… a ruler of his own fate. The destruction in this fight hadn't even matched the catastrophic scale of the last broadcast, the one where the other six had torn the battlefield apart with explosions that looked almost apocalyptic. And yet the impression this one left behind…

Felt far heavier. Jack kept staring at the screen, the image of Alonso frozen there in that final moment.

"Just… what have you become… Alonso?"

Meanwhile, across every space station, ASCENT center, and every Climber strong enough to sense it, a signal spread from The Tower." Your civilization has gained its first Contender. Native Name: Alonso Shemson, Unique Title: Wielder of the Stellar Expanse."

Alonso exhaled. Designing his own State was appealing… but it clearly wasn't easy. Even calling it hard would be a wild understatement. After a few hours experimenting, he hadn't made much progress. He had started from the foundation he now liked to call The Stellar Expanse, a name he had taken from his Unique Title. So going back to the beginning of it all, the first thing he had introduced were the stars and constellations, a structure built upon his First Combat Realm: Understanding of Duality.

Then he had expanded the model by adding the bodies without light, the quiet celestial masses that revolved around those stars. Planets, and with them he had stepped from stars to solar systems, all resting upon his Second Combat Realm: Understanding of Intent. His latest addition had come from scaling upward again. Introducing the pull that stretched beyond isolated systems and bound them together into something larger… galaxies. That layer relied on his Third Combat Realm: Understanding of Self. So now…

logic told him the next step should also move upward. Maybe galaxy groups? Clusters? And to do that, he would have to integrate his new Fourth Combat Realm somehow. A realm he had deliberately left unnamed, mainly because he wanted to see how it settled within the model first before deciding what it truly represented… and only then find the wording that matched both its combat aspect and its place within his path. All of that sounded neat in words. In practice… it was a nightmare.

It felt like letting theory run wild while ignoring whether the foundation underneath it actually held. From a biological standpoint, his Third Fusion State had already pushed his body into cellular integration with the Pillar pathways. Those pathways had branched twice after merging with his neural structure back in the First State, spreading through his system like a secondary network layered on top of his nervous system.

From what he remembered of the standard Fourth Fusion State schematics, the next step took that relationship further. Body and Pillar didn't just coexist anymore… they began weaving together at a bio-molecular level. Not entirely, of course. Only a tiny fraction of molecules were involved. But that fraction followed a pattern. A very specific one. That pattern defined the individual. And that… was where the real difficulty lay.

Because the number of possible arrangements made their enhanced superhuman brain look like a pocket calculator. There were more possible configurations than atoms in the observable universe… by countless orders of magnitude. Houston had tried to explain it once, throwing numbers around that sounded completely absurd. Something along the lines of combinations of ten to the tenth across structures on the order of ten to the twenty-six. The result was so large it barely meant anything anymore.

A 1 followed by something like 160 billion zeros. In other words… not something you could sit down and brute-force. Finding it wasn't about math. It was about resonance. About feeling the pattern that matched you and letting your body settle into it naturally. Which sounded poetic and profound… Right up until you actually tried to do it. And if that alone wasn't enough, he didn't need a pattern that resonated only with himself. It had to resonate with Houston and with Darius as well. Yeah…

If a god existed, Alonso wasn't even sure it could solve this one. Still, that was exactly where the first spark of insight had come from back when he struggled with his First Standard Pillar Path. Back then he had turned to the one thing he understood best… his swordsmanship. The way it merged physical motion and EM acceleration could almost be seen as wielding both Houston's and Darius's fields at the same time.

From there he had started building sequences, using the stars as points and translating those patterns into node arrangements within his body. Over time that approach had evolved, refined again and again until it became a solid system. By the time he faced the six-tails, everything had felt perfectly connected. But now that he needed to upgrade… That old State, which had once felt so complete, suddenly refused to accept anything new. No matter what he tried to add, it simply wouldn't click.

He had tried thinking in terms of authority, domain, control… the very ideas that formed the foundation of his Fourth Combat Realm. Maybe the answer lay in expanding the correlation between galaxies. Entire clusters of perfected sequences. But that felt wrong. His new Combat Realm had already moved beyond sequences. It turned everything into a flow he could guide instead of a chain he had to predict. So if the Stellar Expanse relied on a flow… What exactly was flowing? Gravity? Time?

He had explored both ideas, yet neither truly resonated. And the worst part was that his thinking still circled around the standard Fourth Fusion State. The molecular integration. But The Tower had clearly stated that approach was now sealed to him. Which meant he might not be able to access that layer, or even a simple variation of it, anymore… even if he wanted to. Alonso sighed. This wasn't something he would solve by sitting here for a few hours… or even a few days.

If it were that simple, The Tower would never have framed it as a challenge. Ayu, the fastest among the others, had needed 11 days to follow a schematic already laid out for her. In his case… It would probably take far longer. So for the moment, he might as well strengthen his foundation as much as possible before locking himself away like a hermit. He slowly rose from the ground.

Right now he had the strength to push his SP higher and gather better gear, now that he had at least reached the peak of Gold-rank standards. So pursuing higher stats would undoubtedly help with this search for a new State. There was no reason to rush into seclusion before he reached the point where progress through action slowed down. With that thought settled, he calmly made his way toward the Dungeon's exit. It was finally time to meet the others.