Chapter 22 Void Step

Chapter 22 Void Step
It was a Monday. Who didn't hate a Monday morning?

Leo didn’t go to the office. He didn’t check the news until his heart rate had spiked and leveled out three separate times. He had rented a warehouse in an industrial pocket of New Jersey—a massive, hollowed-out space with concrete floors and high windows that let in the gray Atlantic light. It was isolated enough that he could draw the sword and move at full capacity without worrying about a security guard or a curious neighbor seeing things that defied the laws of physics.

Xan had been a firm believer in the sanctity of muscle memory. He used to say that when the world was ending, your brain would fail you, but your feet never would. Leo spent the first four hours of Monday drilling the fundamentals. He set up the training dummies he’d constructed based on the diagrams in Xan’s old journals—weighted, articulated figures that could take a hit without shattering.

Foxy was there for every second of it. The spirit didn't join in, of course; he preferred to perch on a stack of wooden pallets, his tail twitching as he watched Leo’s every move. He acted as a living stopwatch, his voice cutting through the silence of the warehouse like a whip.

"Slow," Foxy remarked as Leo finished a complex sequence of strikes. "Your weight shifted to your left heel on the third rotation. If that had been an S-rank, you’d be missing a leg."

Leo didn’t argue. He just reset his stance and started the sequence again. And again. And again.

By the end of the day, his footwork score on the system’s internal tracker hit a nine. It was the highest it had been since he’d arrived in New York. Leo wiped the sweat from his eyes and glanced over at the pallets. Foxy was staring at him, his expression unreadable. For once, the fox said absolutely nothing. No critique, no snide comment about his speed, no reminder of his mortality.

Leo stood there, breathing hard, the silence stretching between them. He realized then that Foxy’s silence was the highest compliment he was ever going to get. He nodded to the fox, sheathed his blade, and headed for the car.



By Wednesday, the physical toll was starting to manifest as a dull, constant ache in his shoulders, but the mental clarity was sharper than ever. He was halfway through a set of high-intensity drills when his phone, sitting on a nearby crate, began to buzz with priority alerts from his intelligence network.

He didn't stop. He finished the set—twelve precise thrusts followed by a low sweep—before he finally walked over to check the screen.

The report was significant. Zhang Wei had officially made his move. He had retained a law firm that specialized in regulatory crisis management—one of those "white shoe" firms where the partners were former senators and the associates were all sharks in tailored suits. They were the kind of people you hired when you needed to make a federal investigation quietly disappear into a mountain of paperwork and non-disclosure agreements.

Leo leaned against a support beam, his chest heaving as he read the details. This was a massive expenditure. Considering Zephyr’s current operating budget was effectively frozen and the stock price was still performing a slow-motion dive, Wei was dipping into the deep reserves. It was a clear signal: the Chairman was finally rattled. He was stopping the bleeding at any cost.

Foxy, who had been lazily draped across the head of a training dummy, opened one eye. "The old man is buying some expensive friends, I see."

"He’s buying time," Leo corrected, swiping through the list of lead attorneys. "But time is the one thing he can’t afford right now."

"You don't sound worried," Foxy noted.

"I’m not," Leo said, his eyes scanning the report one last time before filing it away. "The law firm is good. They’ll try to find the leak, they’ll try to discredit the journalist, and they’ll try to find a scapegoat for the grant irregularity. But the trail I built doesn't lead back to me. It leads into a labyrinth of legitimate administrative errors that I planted months ago. They can knock on all the doors they want; none of them have handles."

He tucked the phone back into his gym bag and picked up his sword. The weight of it felt right in his hand—an extension of his arm rather than a tool he was carrying.

"Wei is playing a game of influence," Leo muttered, stepping back into the center of the warehouse. "I’m playing a game of reality. The two don't overlap as much as he thinks they do."

He launched into a new drill, the sound of his blade cutting through the air echoing off the corrugated metal walls. The clock on Brooklyn was still ticking, and he didn't have a second to waste on lawyers.



Thursday evening brought a different kind of distraction.

Leo was back at the penthouse, sitting on the floor of the living room and cleaning his equipment, when his personal phone buzzed. It was a message from Priya.

He stared at the screen for a moment. It wasn't through the official project channel or the professional email threads they’d been using. It was a direct text to the private number his assistant usually kept guarded.

I know you’re not interested, the message read. I’m not going to make it weird. I just wanted to say that working with Zephyr, even at the preliminary stage, has been the best professional experience I’ve had in two years. And I think you’re extraordinary. That’s all.

Leo read the words twice. He wasn't used to that kind of blunt, unvarnished honesty. In his world, people were either trying to take something from him or trying to impress him. Priya wasn't doing either. She was just... stating a fact.

Before he could process how to respond, another message popped up. It was a meme—a grainy image of a cat sitting at a tiny desk surrounded by burning folders, with the caption: "Me pretending the quarterly report isn't due in twenty minutes."

A very small, almost imperceptible twitch happened at the corner of Leo’s mouth. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was close enough to count.

He picked up the phone and typed out a reply: Thank you.

He hit send immediately, wanting to get it over with before he overthought the social dynamics of the exchange.

Foxy, who had been curled up on the rug pretending to be fast asleep, let out a soft huff. "That was kind."

Leo didn't look up from the whetstone he was using. "It was accurate. She’s a talented architect."

"Both things can be true, Leo," Foxy said, his voice laced with that annoying, knowing tone. "You can be kind and accurate at the same time. It’s a concept humans usually learn in primary school."

Leo ignored him. He put the phone down, then paused, the cat meme still stuck in his head. He picked the phone back up, searched through his gallery for a moment, and sent the meme back to Priya with a single word: Accurate.

He put the phone down for real this time, turning his full attention back to the blade. But for the rest of the evening, the air in the penthouse felt just a little bit lighter.



Saturday night was the final test.

Foxy had vanished back to the penthouse hours ago, claiming he needed to "commune with the energies of the city," which Leo knew was just code for sleeping on the velvet sofa. For the first time all week, Leo was truly alone in the New Jersey warehouse.

The silence was absolute. The only light came from the dim overhead LEDs, casting long, distorted shadows across the floor.

Leo went through every skill in his arsenal. He started with Dead Touch, feeling the familiar, numbing chill spread through his fingertips. Then Iron Membrane, the invisible layer of reinforced energy that made his skin feel like polished steel. He moved through Stealth, a skill he’d unlocked at level 340 but rarely had the chance to use in a controlled environment. He watched as his own reflection in the darkened windows seemed to blur and fade until he was nothing more than a smudge of movement in the corner of the eye.

Then there was Iron Touch. It was a skill his sword had always possessed, but since his last level-up, his hands could activate it independently. He walked over to a stack of scrap metal in the corner of the room. He didn't strike it; he just touched the top plate. He felt the energy transfer, a heavy, magnetic pulse that bonded his skin to the metal for a fraction of a second. When he pulled away, the steel plate was dented, the shape of his palm pressed deep into the surface as if the metal had been made of soft clay.

Finally, he looked at the skill tree hovering in his vision. There was one node he hadn’t touched yet. It was glowing with a faint, ghostly white light.

VOID STEP.

It was a movement skill. Based on the description, it sounded exactly like the way Xan used to move—that terrifying, instantaneous displacement that made it look like he was teleporting. Leo had been circling it all week, hesitant to activate something that felt so fundamentally dangerous.

"Tomorrow is Brooklyn," he whispered to the empty room.

He didn't have time to be hesitant anymore.

He focused his mind on the node, feeling the mental "click" as the skill activated. For approximately ten seconds, the warehouse ceased to exist in a way that Leo could understand. The floor felt like liquid, the walls felt like they were miles away, and the air turned into something thick and cold.

When the world finally snapped back into focus, Leo wasn't standing in the center of the room anymore.

He was standing on the ceiling.

He looked down—or up, technically—at the floor ten feet below him. His boots were firmly planted against the industrial rafters, gravity having apparently decided to take a short break. He hung there for a heartbeat, his brain trying to make sense of the inverted perspective.

"Right," he muttered.

He released the tension in his legs and allowed himself to drop, twisting in mid-air and landing silently on the concrete floor in a perfect crouch. He stood up, shaking out his hands. His heart was racing, but he felt a strange, cold surge of confidence.

He added a three-hour block for Void Step practice to his Sunday morning schedule.

He was ready. The training was done, the Zhangs were distracted, and the system was waiting. Tomorrow, he was going to Brooklyn to see what an S-rank tear actually looked like. And if he was lucky, he’d be the only one who came back.

He turned off the lights and walked out into the night, the weight of the coming battle finally feeling like something he could carry.

Author Note:

Are you worried about what might happen if Leo can't master Void Step before he hits Brooklyn? I low-key am🤍