Ultra Gene Evolution System-Chapter 73 – The Price on Kai Ren

The second escort saw the blood before he saw the body.

That was good.

For one fraction of a second, the big man’s eyes moved not toward Kai, but toward the absence beside the wall where his partner should have been holding the corridor line. Professionals always noticed missing weight before they noticed danger. It was one of the things that made them expensive.

Then he saw Kai stepping through the staggered lane of attendants and buyers, and the room around the east alcove changed shape all at once.

No alarm screamed. No panicked voice called the chamber to war. Foundry Twelve was too rich for that. Instead, people nearest the alcove simply moved wrong. An attendant drifted backward too quickly. A relay clerk froze with a data slate half-raised. One of the nearby buyer proxies stopped pretending not to look. In upper rooms, that was what panic looked like when it had money.

Kai kept walking.

Not rushed. Not slow. Just direct enough that the second escort had to decide immediately whether to preserve the buyer, preserve the room, or preserve himself. That was exactly the kind of decision Kai liked forcing on men who had previously believed their options were clean.

The heavier escort made the right choice for someone loyal to a contract. He shifted to block the alcove entrance rather than to attack first, one arm rising inside the coat where a hidden restraint projector probably sat and the other already drawing a compact black sidearm that looked more like lab security than market gear.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Kai didn’t reach for the system immediately. He read the man first. Broader frame than the first escort. Less elegant. More durable. Someone built to hold and survive while others killed around him. The kind of body money created when it wanted consistency, not flair.

Then Kai focused on him and let the system break the line down cleanly.

Level 4 Elite Escort

Regulated enhancement profile detected

Load-bearing combat frame

Close-quarters containment focus

Good.

That fit the body.

The escort spoke once, low and controlled, telling Kai to stop where he was. The room barely heard it. Neral, still half a step back in Ashvine’s borrowed shadow, did not waste the moment. He let his borrowed persona sharpen into outrage and snapped at the nearest attendant about security standards, access lane crowding, and whether Foundry Twelve had started admitting gutter knives into restricted corridors. It was exactly the kind of irritated high-risk noise that expensive rooms respected more than they liked.

Good man.

The distraction bought one breath.

Kai used it.

He moved straight into the escort’s containment line before the restraint projector fully opened. Blue-weighted capture bands flashed out in a fan designed to harden around chest and shoulders and drive prey backward into the wall. Good tool. Wrong target. Kai cut through the tightening seam before the geometry finished resolving and used short-burst acceleration to cross the remaining distance in one brutal step. The sidearm barked once. The round clipped his outer ribs instead of center mass. Close enough to sting. Not enough to matter.

The escort met him hard.

That was good too.

No wasted recoil from surprise. No common market panic. The man dropped his center of gravity, caught Kai’s shoulder line, and drove back with enough reinforced mass to turn the corridor into a collision instead of a duel. A weaker fighter would have lost footing and shape at once.

Kai was stronger.

Not by level alone.

By stack.

By integration.

By the simple ugly truth that everything he had stolen, survived, and forced into himself did not make him cleaner than men like this. It made him worse in exactly the ways that won.

He took the impact, let Combat Frame Reinforcement absorb the worst of it, then twisted under the escort’s weight and drove his forearm into the man’s throat while pulling the route shard from the Split Vault Case at his side. The weapon came free as if his coat itself had grown teeth. He slashed once across the restraint projector housing instead of the flesh, destroying the device before it could cycle a second wave. Sparks flared. The escort grunted and answered with a close-range body shot into Kai’s side that would have folded most same-rank hunters in half. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Good.

Very good.

Kai smiled.

That was when the bigger man understood the difference.

He saw it in the eyes first. Then in the fact that Kai did not give ground where the numbers said he should. Then in the shard angling back under his own guard while Kai’s free hand trapped the sidearm wrist and bent it outward with ugly incremental pressure rather than some elegant disarm.

Same level.

Wrong monster.

Kai headbutted him once, hard enough to crack the bridge of the nose beneath the partial faceguard. Then he drove the route shard under the armored seam at the armpit and through the upper lung.

The system flashed.

Level 4 Elite Escort eliminated

Evolution Points +12

Current Total: 81

This time the body dropped openly.

There was no saving the illusion now.

The east alcove finally broke its silence. Someone inside swore in the clipped, furious way of a person who was very used to being obeyed. Two hidden internal attendants moved at once, one for the buyer, one for the corridor shutter line. Across the room, three other escorts turned. The auctioneer did not stop speaking on the main floor, which somehow made the moment feel more expensive instead of less.

Foundry Twelve was trying to continue the sale through a murder.

Excellent.

Kai put one hand over the dying escort’s chest.

This one mattered.

Level 4. Elite. Regulated frame. Containment-built. Strong enough to hurt him. Structured enough to offer something distinct. He forced his attention through the body instead of simply pulling, letting the system check the conditions before he committed.

Devour Window Open

Target Integrity: High

Compatibility: Moderate-High

Target Type: Regulated Elite Combatant

Current Devour Saturation: Moderate

Warning: Repeated elite combat absorption may reduce integration efficiency

There.

Good.

That was exactly the kind of friction the ability had needed. Not a refusal. Not an arbitrary block. A cost curve. A reminder that worthy prey did not always go down easy, even after death.

Kai triggered Devour anyway.

The pull came harder than the first escort’s and less clean. This body had been built around controlled force transfer, pain tolerance, and containment pressure. Useful. Very useful. But the man’s regulated frame carried too much stabilization logic, too much lab-balanced suppression, too much refined sameness for full integration to slot perfectly into Kai’s wilder stack. The force hit him in a dense rush through the chest and shoulders, then scraped across the pathways with enough resistance to sting.

The system answered immediately.

Strained Devour Successful

Partial Integration Achieved

Gene Fragment acquired: Compression Guard

Integration Quality: Reduced

Evolution Points unchanged

Current Total: 81

Good.

Still worth it.

The reward settled as a harder, denser bracing instinct through his torso—not cleaner movement like the last escort, but better resistance when a fight wanted to turn into collision and crush. Useful in rooms like this. Useful in cities like this. Useful against men who expected same-rank force to matter more than lived brutality.

The alcove behind the dead escort opened fully at last.

Now Kai saw the buyer.

Not a veiled noble with too much jewelry or a district predator pretending at class. A man in a charcoal fitted coat with no visible insignia, narrow face, dark eyes, and the kind of dry expensive composure that didn’t belong to lower markets at all. He wasn’t frightened. Furious, yes. Calculating, absolutely. But the fear was buried deeper, still deciding whether the room would solve this for him before he had to feel it personally.

Behind him, half-hidden in the alcove’s inner light, stood a relay slate on a mobile stand. Not just bid records. A live contract board. The kind that updated hidden channels in real time as lots shifted ownership, private asks changed, and special bounties circulated through back systems too expensive to ever show on a public screen.

Kai saw it.

The buyer saw him see it.

Good.

That mattered more than the man himself.

One of the attendants reached for the corridor shutter. Kai shot him first with the heavy pistol from the second Split Vault Case, drawing and firing in one smooth brutal motion. The round hit center throat. The attendant went backward into the shutter panel and never touched the control.

The room reacted all at once after that.

Not with a general firefight. That would have cost too much. Instead the auction changed phase. Buyers began withdrawing from the nearest sectors. Escorts closed around principals. Hidden internal security started moving down from the gantries. And across the room, more than one private slate lit simultaneously with the same new line.

Bounty channels.

Kai didn’t need the system to identify them. He could see the change in faces. Men who had been interested in route fragments and witness lots were now interested in him.

Neral saw it too.

He moved like an old broker trying to escape a room turning expensive and somehow found time in that same motion to snatch the live contract slate from the east alcove stand and shove it toward Kai across the corpse-cluttered corridor.

"Take it!"

Kai caught it one-handed.

Good man.

The buyer in charcoal finally lost his composure enough to move backward, and that told Kai everything he needed to know. Not muscle. Not a fighter. Important because of what he knew and who he represented. Better alive maybe. Better later definitely.

More urgent right now was the slate.

Kai drove the system into it deliberately, forcing it to strip away the superficial sale view and read the active contract layer beneath.

Hidden contract board detected

Restricted bid channel exposed

Multiple live bounties updating

Then the lines expanded across his vision in sharp clean text.

Asset-Class Anomaly – Route-Linked

Priority Retrieval Tier raised

Contract Options:

Dead Confirmation Bonus

Live Capture Premium

Tissue Recovery Incentive

Route Artifact Recovery Addendum

Escort Termination Supplement

There.

Perfect.

And there it was in the language itself. Not market desperation. Not gang reward money. Corporate tone. Proxy channels. Clinical valuation. Somebody above the lower markets had started pricing him as a category, not a person.

The buyer saw enough in Kai’s face to know the slate had spoken.

Good.

Kai turned the board toward himself and pushed deeper, forcing the system to read the hidden payment trees and shell identities behind the bounties. This took longer. More resistance. More masking. The contract web did not want to be seen.

Then one line gave.

A shell recovery group tied to a gene logistics subsidiary. Another line tied to a district combine already connected to route purchases. A third masked bidder marked only by internal executive authorization and a clean sealed code with no market history at all.

Corporate proxy.

Corporate proxy.

And something higher.

The system rendered the summary brutally.

Multiple corporate-adjacent bidders confirmed

At least one direct executive authorization present

There.

Now the early Chapters and the current arc touched properly. The corporations had not disappeared. They had simply gone underground where the roads were.

Behind him, Foundry Twelve finally decided subtlety had expired. Security shutters began dropping across two side lanes. The main floor started clearing under controlled force. Buyers withdrew with the cold efficiency of people long accustomed to rooms turning into battlefields. Somewhere in the upper furnace mouths, a sharper weapon than anything yet deployed powered up with a quiet mechanical whine.

Good.

At last.

Kai snapped the slate shut and slid it under his coat. Neral was already moving toward the service lanes behind the restricted sectors, because old brokers survived not by being brave, but by noticing when bravery had stopped paying.

The buyer in charcoal tried to follow the same route.

Kai caught him by the front of the coat and shoved him back into the alcove wall.

"Name."

The man glared at him with enough cultivated arrogance to almost be admirable. "You have no idea who you’re touching."

That meant he thought the name mattered.

Excellent.

Kai didn’t waste time threatening. He pressed the route shard just hard enough into the expensive fabric below the collarbone to let the buyer feel how quickly his categories could stop protecting him.

"Name."

The man gave it finally. Not the real one. A working name. Adrast Vane. Enough. Better than nothing. Black Vane then. Or tied to it closely enough to bleed the same money.

Useful.

Kai let him live.

For now.

That was also useful.

He shoved the man down and turned away just as the first internal heavy team hit the corridor mouth. Four armored security units and one narrow woman in a hard black coat whose posture said command even before the escorts around her made space. Not a buyer. Not an attendant. Not a market enforcer.

Something cleaner.

Something more corporate.

The system would have answered if he asked.

He didn’t ask yet.

He didn’t need the name.

Not while the room itself was still screaming what mattered.

The price on Kai Ren was live now. Not as a rumor. As contract language. As retrieval priority. As an active market correction written in money and fear.

Good.

That made the next part much easier.

He looked once at Neral’s retreating back, once at the new team entering the corridor, and then at the closed alcove where a route witness had just been sold to hidden money.

The auction was no longer just a sale.

It was a declaration.

And now Helios would have to pay attention to the kind of bids it had started making beneath its own feet.