Stat Crusher - The Gale Spear and Blood on the Cobblestones

Twenty-five minutes wasn’t much time when twenty million credits were sitting in a temporary terminal queue and the touchscreen kept stuttering every time Mason refreshed his cart. Mason was groaning loudly next to him, his fingers smudging the glass display as he flipped through heavy-striker equipment lists.

“Look at this Broadsword of the Broken Tide, Gar. Three million credits. Uses second-generation tungsten-carbide alloy. But if I buy that, I can’t afford the leather boots with the shock-absorbing heels.”

“Skip the boots,” Garrett said without looking up from his own screen.

“You can kill a beast with a rusty iron bar if your arm is heavy enough. You can’t kill shit in fancy footwear if your blade snaps on a boar’s rib.”

“Fair point.” Mason grunted, deleted the boots from his queue, and slammed his thumb onto the confirmation icon.

“Done. Three million for the Break-Tide manual, two for the broadsword. Clean sweep. What about you?” Director Harlan Cross stood near the coat rack, pulling on a heavy wool-lined tactical duster.

He checked his wrist terminal once.

“Ten minutes, Cole. After I step into that elevator, Municipal Bio-Tech locks the priority requisition lines until next Tuesday.” Garrett didn’t hesitate.

He bypassed the weapon racks, the armor sets, and the luxury transport vehicles that usually lured young recruits into spending their signing bonuses on shiny metal. He opened the biological procurement tab. The screen flared amber. Option A: Universal Gene-Optimization Cocktail (Standard Guild Allocation). Cost: Covered by Tempest Lodge ($10,000,000 value).

Guaranteed Baseline Enhancement: 40% – 60%. Failure Rate: 0.00%. Option B: Custom-Tailored Genetic Ratio Formulation. Cost: Base Serum Covered by Lodge ($10,000,000) + Custom Processing Fee ($10,000,000). Expected Enhancement: Variable (Up to 90%+). Notice: Custom ratio formulation requires dead-on user-submitted genetic parameters.

Non-matching or mathematically unbalanced inputs carry a 82.4% risk of acute cellular necrosis, irreversible neural decay, or death. Harlan Cross paused, his hand resting on the silver door handle. He looked back over his shoulder, his grey eyes sharpening as he saw the amber warning box reflecting in Garrett’s eyes.

“Don’t do it, kid,” Cross said quietly.

His voice carried the dull, heavy authority of a man who’d seen dozens of arrogant rookies die in sterile injection vaults.

“Universal fluid is safe. It gives you fifty percent across the board, turns you into a Rank-6 Junior Operator overnight, and keeps your liver from liquefying. The kids who order custom mixes are usually corporate heirs whose families spent twenty years running genetic scans on them, and even half of them end up crippled because the math was off by half a percent.”

“I’m not guessing, Director,” Garrett said.

“Everyone thinks they aren’t guessing until their lungs start bleeding through their nose.” Garrett pulled up the manual input matrix.

He didn’t need a lab scan. In his former life, decades after Earth collapsed and humanity pushed into the deep galactic sectors, he had paid a black-market star-station medic two hundred thousand stellar credits for a full molecular gene breakdown. Every percentage, every decimal point of his personal cellular receptivity was burned into his memory like a hot brand.

He tapped the virtual key-pad, his calloused fingertips moving with terrifying, robotic certainty. Kinetic Force Amplification: 42.35% Velocity Response Index: 33.91% Neural Reflex Bandwidth: 22.80% Total requested yield: 99.06%. It was a lunatic’s submission. If a normal human body took that mixture, the sheer disharmony between the kinetic and neural nodes would blow their heart valves out within sixty seconds of injection.

But Garrett knew his own soul. He knew the Silver tendrils resting in his cerebral node could absorb the neural backfire, tying the kinetic and velocity channels together like steel cables.

“Ten million for the custom mix,” Garrett muttered, pressing his thumb against the bio-scanner to authorize the deduction from his credit line.

The terminal chimed. A cold green status bar replaced the amber warning. Order Locked. Custom Formulation #882-Sterling Submitted to Municipal Bio-Tech Division. Expected Vault Delivery: 10 Days. Harlan Cross stared at the screen for three seconds, his jaw setting tight. He let out a short, rough breath that sounded almost like a laugh, though there was no humor in his face.

“Either you’re the dumbest rookie I’ve signed in five years, Cole, or you know something the Bio-Tech lab chiefs don’t.”

“Guess we’ll find out in ten days,” Garrett said, closing the portal window.

Cross didn’t argue. He pulled his duster tight around his neck, tapped his keycard against the exit sensor, and stepped into the lift.

“Don’t die in the injection vault, kid. I hate doing paperwork for dead apprentices.” The elevator doors slid shut.

Mason stood there scratching his head, looking back and forth between Garrett and the glowing green order confirmation on the terminal.

“Hey Gar,” Mason whispered, leaning over.

“That ten million… you just spent half your credit line on a bottle of liquid that might melt your insides?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” Mason nodded slowly, pulling a stale stick of gum from his pocket and throwing it into his mouth.

“Just checking.”

Bare concrete walls down on Level B2 held the cold like an uninsulated butcher’s freezer, smelling of pressurized oil, steel shavings, and stale instant coffee. Two in the morning. Most of the new recruits had gone back to their temporary dorms or crashed in the lower lounge, exhausted from the brawl and the cheap lager, but Garrett sat alone at an automated equipment kiosk near the heavy armory racks.

His thumb swiped across the glowing blue screen, bypassing row after row of highlighted sword techniques. Everyone wanted swords. The top-ranked Martial Deities on the municipal news feeds all swung three-foot steel blades, so every seventeen-year-old kid entering the lodges tried to buy broadsword manuals or rapier footwork chips.

The prices reflected the hype; even a baseline second-tier sabre manual was listed at twelve million credits plus eight hundred guild merit points. Garrett scrolled straight past them into the archived weapon vaults, filtering the list for polearms and heavy spears. He stopped at a pair of neglected, grayed-out icons tucked at the bottom of the ancient martial catalog.

Nine-Fold Torrent Spear: Volume 2 (Mid-Tier Kinetic Circulation). Price: $2,000,000 + 500 Merit Points. Nine-Fold Torrent Spear: Volume 3 (High-Velocity Point-Thrust). Price: $1,000,000 + 500 Merit Points. A red warning box flashed across the screen as soon as his fingers touched the icons. Notice: Volume 1 (Foundational Respiration & Footwork) of this series remains unrecovered from the Outland Belts.

Without Volume 1, the kinetic circulation pathways in Volumes 2 and 3 cannot be mastered and carry a high risk of tendon tearing. Purchase at user’s own discretion. Garrett let out a quiet breath, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his dry lips. Nobody bought these two manuals. They’d been sitting on the Tempest Lodge network for six years, discounted over and over again until they were practically priced like scrap paper.

Without Volume 1, buying Volumes 2 and 3 was like buying the wheels and doors for a vehicle without an engine. Except Garrett already knew Volume 1 by heart. He’d spent twelve years in his past life mastering the foundational respiration of the Nine-Fold Torrent in the outer border trenches, though he’d never been rich enough to buy the missing second and third volumes before Earth collapsed.

He also remembered that in about seven months, a scavenger squad digging through the ruins of an old military bunker near Fort Yilan would uncover the original Volume 1 data-chip. Once that chip hit the central auction house, the market value for the complete Nine-Fold Torrent set would instantly jump past a hundred million credits.

Three million bucks for two volumes that would soon be worth a fortune. He tapped the screen twice. Purchased. Next came the weapon itself. Garrett opened the physical armory inventory and tapped through the heavy polearm selections until he found a black-and-grey render of a second-generation Black-Dragon alloy spear. Seven feet four inches long, forged from high-density titanium-tungsten composite with a matte-black iron tip harvested from a deep-crust iron meteorite.

Weight: 150 pounds. Price: $5,000,000. One hundred and fifty pounds was absurdly heavy for a kid whose arms currently logged a baseline strike force under four hundred kilos. If he tried to swing it right now, he’d pull his shoulder out of its socket within two thrusts. But in ten days, when his custom gene fluid finished cooking at the Bio-Tech lab, a hundred and fifty pounds would feel like an extension of his own collarbone.

He confirmed the order. Five million credits vanished from his balance. With nine million left on his equipment credit line, Garrett didn’t hesitate. He bought a six-month pass for the Lodge’s High-Tier Physical Conditioning Gym for one million credits, granting him 24-hour access to high-gravity chambers and specialized respiration pods.

Then he opened the specialized Mind-Weaver catalog and picked five high-density alloy throwing knives—twenty-centimeter micro-blades crafted from silver-plated tungsten alloy, weighted specifically for telekinetic flight. Two hundred thousand credits a piece. One million for the set of five. He hit the final confirmation button.

Account Summary: Credit Line Remaining: $0.00. Merit Points Remaining: 2,300. Spent. Every last cent of his twenty-million-credit grant, gone in less than fifteen minutes. A pneumatic tube near the side of the terminal hissed open, dropping a small velvet-lined case containing his five silver throwing knives and a pair of encrypted neural chips containing the spear manuals.

Ten seconds later, a heavy mechanical arm rumbled along an overhead rail, lowering the seven-foot Black-Dragon spear into an upright lock-rack beside his knee. Cold iron. The matte-black alloy swallowed the fluorescent light, heavy and quiet. Garrett reached out, his fingers wrapping around the thick, textured shaft. He pulled, testing the weight.

The shaft barely budged in his un-optimized grip, heavy as an iron girder, but the coldness of the metal against his palm felt right. He keyed his private locker on the wall, slid the heavy spear into the vertical slot, locked the steel door, and shoved the five micro-blades into his jacket pocket. Outside, the rain had started again, dripping off the concrete eaves of the basement vent as he walked up the stairs toward his dorm room, his boots heavy on the wet steps.