Nathaniel sat within a cleared biome, not with Squad 4. He had taken this one on solo. That was not a wild thing to consider, given his rank. Knights were allowed to pull a few strings, especially when it came to low ranked biomes reserved for private use.
He had a clean track record for the nearly six months Squad 4 had been active.
To his side lay a massive chitinous millipede, its two oversized arms pinned to the ground in hardened resin restraints. The creature gnashed violently, frothing as if rabid, its mandibles scraping uselessly against the biome's hardened surface. Scattered across the area were several smaller, more common insectoid entities, all similarly restrained.
Nathaniel sat several hundred meters away in a meditative state.
He cleared his system of Uratsu, suppressing it deliberately. As he exhaled, he drew in the ambient Ura saturating the biome. Compared to last time, the concentration was already high. He guided it inward, silver eyes beginning to glow amber as he funneled the energy into his chest instead of dispersing it through his limbs.
Ten minutes passed.
The convergent point sparked.
Dark crimson flared within his core, unstable and sharp. His eyes trembled, struggling to maintain their golden hue as threads of red bled through the glow.
He stood.
Approaching the boss monster, Nathaniel held the contained sparks of crimson forged Ura steady. He had learned something since last time. This form of Ura depended heavily on intent. It needed purpose to shape itself.
That was why he had started calling it Ura Forge.
The shit was strange. No one talked about it. There were no records. He had combed through association archives, private databases, even fringe theory boards on the net. Nothing. At least nothing accessible at his clearance level.
He stopped beside one of the restrained creatures.
Nathaniel focused, studying its aura, its brown fur, the texture of its presence. He chose an attribute in his mind and pressed his palm against its body. Dark crimson energy crackled as blood seeped from his skin, the connection forming instantly.
The creature spasmed.
Its brown fur shifted, turning green. Its aura followed, warping in color and density. Even its presence changed, something heavier and more aggressive settling into its frame as the forged energy washed over it.
Nathaniel pulled his hand back slowly.
He stared at the result.
He had not expected that.
The creature did not scream.
That was the first thing Nathaniel noticed.
It should have. Every forced mutation he had ever witnessed came with agony, with sound. This one only shuddered, its limbs locking as the green hue stabilized across its fur and aura alike.
Then it exhaled.
The breath came out slow, fogging the air faintly with a chemical tang. The creature's posture shifted, not thrashing anymore, not panicked. Its eyes, once wide and animal, narrowed with something approaching focus.
Nathaniel's pulse ticked faster.
"That's… not right," he muttered.
The resin restraints creaked.
Not cracked. Not shattered. Just strained, as if pressure was being applied evenly, intelligently. The creature tested the bonds the way a thinking thing would, flexing, pausing, recalibrating.
Nathaniel took a step back, instinct flaring.
The aura around the creature thickened. Green bled into darker shades, veins of black threading through it like roots through soil. The Ura he had forged did not dissipate. It settled. Anchored itself.
Then he felt it.
A pull.
Not physical. Not energetic in the normal sense. It tugged at his chest, at the convergent point where the crimson still simmered. The connection had not fully severed when he pulled his hand away.
His breath hitched.
"So you don't just take," he said quietly. "You echo."
The creature turned its head toward him.
Fully. Cleanly. Eyes locking onto his with intent that was unmistakably aware.
The smaller restrained entities began to react.
Their auras flickered, drawn toward the altered one like filings to a magnet. The ambient Ura in the biome shifted currents, flowing inward instead of dispersing naturally. Nathaniel felt the pressure spike against his suppressed Uratsu, warning him that the balance was tipping.
He clenched his fist.
"Alright," he said, voice steady despite the thrum in his bones. "Test phase over."
He reached inward, grasping the crimson construct at its core. Intent sharpened. Not creation this time. Severance.
The forged Ura resisted.
Not violently. Persistently.
That scared him more than if it had lashed out.
The creature rose as far as the restraints allowed, resin screaming as microfractures spidered across its surface. Green light flared, then dimmed, as if the thing were choosing restraint rather than being forced into it.
It opened its mouth.
No sound came out.
Instead, Nathaniel felt a pressure behind his eyes, a wordless imprint pressing against his awareness. Not language. Not memory.
Recognition.
He staggered back a step, shock rippling through him.
"…No," he whispered. "That's not possible."
The crimson Ura in his chest pulsed once, answering the creature without his permission.
Whatever he had forged had not just changed the thing's attributes.
He had given it a reference point.
Nathaniel severed the flow violently, cutting the construct loose. Pain ripped through his sternum as the crimson collapsed inward, sputtering out in sparks that evaporated into nothing.
The biome stabilized slowly.
The altered creature slumped, aura dimming but not reverting. The green remained. The change was permanent.
Nathaniel stood there breathing hard, eyes returning fully to silver.
He looked at his bloodied palm.
Then at the creature.
Then at the others reacting faintly to it.
"…Ura Forge doesn't just shape energy," he said under his breath.
"It writes."
He straightened, expression darkening.
And somewhere deep in the system he was not supposed to access, something had taken note of the anomaly.
He looked at the beast again.
The green fur was striking, unnatural against the biome's muted palette, but what held his attention were its eyes. Red. Not feral red. Not rage. They were focused, fixed on the source it had locked onto.
His crimson source.
Nathaniel lifted his hand, forcing the remaining traces of forged Ura to flow through his fingers. The energy stiffened immediately, tensing like a coiled muscle responding to nerve impulse. The sensation crawled up his arm, wrong and intimate, as if something had already been embedded and was now answering a signal.
Like a receiver.
He swallowed.
That was when it hit him. The impacts. The way he had taken the creature down earlier. Every strike, every forced compression of force and intent burned into its body. He had not just broken it.
He had imprinted it.
Nathaniel smirked slowly.
The amber in his irises flashed red.
The beast reacted instantly.
Its head snapped toward a nearby tree, snarling as sparks raced along its legs. The energy pulsed upward through its frame, funneling into its throat. Its jaw opened wide and expelled a web of resin in a violent burst.
The resin hardened mid-flight.
It struck the tree behind Nathaniel and elongated on impact, forming a solid spear that punched clean through the trunk and buried itself deep in the earth beyond.
Nathaniel did not flinch.
"That was mine," he said quietly.
The creature turned its head back toward him, chest heaving. The aura around it trembled, awaiting further input.
He lowered his hand slowly.
"…and you didn't steal it," he added.
Understanding settled in his gut, heavy and cold.
It had not copied the ability.
It had received it.
Nathaniel exhaled through his nose, the smirk fading into something sharper. Something more dangerous.
"On command," he muttered.
The crimson in his chest pulsed once in response.
And that was the moment he realized the line he had crossed was not about power.
It was about ownership.
He looked at the beast once more.
Nathaniel activated his Uratsu reserves, funneling them deliberately through his left arm. The moment the energy reached his palm, it bridged into the crimson Ura still threaded through the creature. The connection snapped tight, seamless.
The beast reacted instantly.
It lowered its stance, muscles coiling with practiced precision. Not instinct. Readiness.
Nathaniel's eyes narrowed.
"Move."
The command was not spoken.
The creature launched.
It tore through the impaled tree in a blur of motion, the trunk exploding outward as bark and splinters were reduced to vapor. As it emerged on the other side, pale red flames ignited across its frame.
The fire did not consume it.
It crowned it.
The flames clung tight to muscle and chitin, wreathed around the beast like a second skin. Nathaniel felt the feedback immediately, the structure of the energy unmistakable.
It was Hellcharge.
Not his.
Not exactly.
This was a modified variant, operating on Ura instead of Uratsu. And yet the fuel source was still him.
He felt his own Uratsu being broken down at the core, stripped into raw output and rerouted through the forged conduit. The biome's ambient Ura rushed in to compensate, replenishing the loss in real time.
A closed loop.
Nathaniel's breath slowed.
"…You're converting it," he said quietly.
The beast skidded to a halt several meters away, flames licking harmlessly along its limbs. It turned back toward him, awaiting further instruction, the pale red fire pulsing in rhythm with his heart.
This was not augmentation.
This was delegation.
He flexed his fingers and the flames dimmed instantly, snapping out of existence without resistance.
The creature remained standing.
Alive. Stable.
Nathaniel stared at it, chest tight.
"Imprinting."
The word left his mouth quietly as he looked down at his arm.
Nathaniel severed the connection.
The conduit collapsed instantly. The crimson thread snapped back into his core, leaving behind only fading sparks of residual Ura. The beast stiffened, then crumpled, dropping to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut, its body shuddering as exhaustion crashed over it.
The pale red flames vanished.
Its breathing turned ragged. Heavy. Animal.
The red in its eyes dulled, bleeding away as its posture slackened. Whatever focus had animated it moments ago drained out, replaced by raw instinct and confusion. It snarled once, low and uncoordinated, snapping at nothing.
Feral again.
Nathaniel watched without moving.
The creature no longer mirrored his stance. No longer matched his stillness. No longer waited.
Good.
That meant the imprint was not permanent dominance.
It was conditional.
He flexed his fingers slowly, feeling for any residual pull. There was none. No echo. No feedback. Just silence where a system had briefly existed.
"Imprinting," he repeated under his breath.
Not possession.
Not control.
A technique.
And techniques could be refined.
Nathaniel turned away from the exhausted beast, already recalculating what this meant for the next test.
Over the next six hours, Nathaniel experimented.
He applied imprint after imprint across the restrained beasts, refining each tag with methodical care. Every variation was logged mentally. Every failure mattered.
The results were consistent.
Each imprint produced roughly a twenty five percent increase in performance at best. No spikes. No miracles. Just clean, measurable enhancement. Meta Vision made the limitation impossible to ignore. The imprints amplified what was already there, but they did not rewrite structural ceilings.
The bodies themselves were the bottleneck.
He tested further.
One specimen was beaten deliberately, struck repeatedly to store kinetic energy within its frame. When he triggered Kinetic Flash through the imprint, the result was catastrophic. The creature detonated into particle motes of light, its form unable to withstand the discharge.
Too much output. Not enough adaptation.
The imprint duration mattered.
Without time to acclimate, without structural reinforcement or gradual exposure, the borrowed ability became lethal to the host. Meta Vision proved invaluable here, outlining stress fractures, energy pooling, and cellular destabilization before failure occurred.
Strength determined suitability.
Weak frames needed low yield functions.
That was when he noticed a pattern.
The most stable imprint across every subject was Impact Reverb.
The force multiplier he had taken from Magnum the previous day settled cleanly into each creature's system. No violent backlash. No cellular collapse. The ability scaled naturally with their existing mass and resilience, enhancing strikes without overwhelming the host.
Simple. Efficient. Forgiving.
Nathaniel exhaled slowly.
"These things aren't sentient," he muttered, watching one beast recover from a controlled test. "At least… not that I can tell."
No augments. No awakened characteristics. No internal systems capable of growth beyond their baseline. What they possessed instead were bastardized adaptations, crude mutations forced by prolonged biome exposure. Accelerated evolution shaped by hostile environments rather than conscious development.
Which meant something important.
Imprinting did not grant potential.
It revealed compatibility.
Nathaniel looked across the biome, at the exhausted creatures bearing traces of his work.
"…So this only works cleanly on something built to carry it," he said.
And for the first time since the testing began, the thought unsettled him more than the power ever had.
Nathaniel turned his attention to the biome's anchor being, the core entity that held the space together.
He did not hesitate.
Hellcharged flames roared from his arm, cyan and absolute. They engulfed the anchor in seconds, consuming it completely. The scream never finished. As the core collapsed, every altered creature within the biome went still, their lives ending cleanly as the system sustaining them unraveled.
Mercy, in its own way.
The world fractured.
Cracks raced across the air itself, spreading outward as the biome destabilized. Light bled through the seams, the environment breaking apart into drifting motes that dissolved into nothing. The pressure vanished all at once.
Fresh air rushed in.
Nathaniel stood in the remnants of an overgrown forest, scorched earth and shattered growth marking where the biome had once existed. The silence that followed was real. Unforced. He breathed it in slowly.
Ahead, an armored transport waited.
A truck sat nearby, already loaded with harvested specimens and altered materials pulled from the collapsed space. Several staff members moved with practiced efficiency, sealing containers and securing restraints. They had given him his time. Now they were done.
Nathaniel approached, boots crunching softly over broken ground.
He smiled.
Raising a hand, he waved at the men by the transport. One of them returned the gesture, signaling for him to get in. Nathaniel climbed aboard as the doors shut behind him.
The engine rumbled to life.
As the truck pulled away toward the nearest Knight Association branch site, Nathaniel leaned back, eyes half-lidded.
The test was over.
The data was not.