Lohan stood motionless for a moment, watching the reflection of the holographic interface in his own eye before refocusing his attention on the pathetic scene before him.
Oscar, the once-arrogant landlord who had acted like the King of Sector 4, was now nothing more than a trembling, bloodied mass of flesh in the shallow water of the pool.
The man babbled about gods and forgiveness, but Lohan, operating with the coldness of a Level 12 Predator, felt no trace of hesitation left.
To ensure Oscar didn’t attempt any neural emergency protocol or "leak" information, Lohan approached the edge of the pool.
Without even bothering to use Magic for it, Lohan simply fired a shot into the man’s fat chest, silencing Oscar’s sobs and erratic breathing permanently.
Lohan then turned to the three girls he had knocked out earlier.
They lay sprawled across the designer furniture, in a state of unconsciousness induced both by Lohan’s precise blows and the excess of Dream Mist in their bodies.
Some of them had their silk robes askew, exposing their breasts clearly to catch Oscar’s attention, an image of vulnerability that made Lohan feel a fleeting pang of pity.
He knew that when the drugs wore off and they woke up surrounded by silence, with Oscar vanishing from the universe and the police treating them as suspects, it would likely be the greatest trauma of their lives.
However, Lohan’s rational side quickly suppressed that feeling.
Oscar didn’t keep slaves; those girls were there of their own free will, lured by the gold and the luxurious lifestyle the man provided with the money extorted from people like the former owner of his body.
They had chosen the "benefit" of being parasites, and now they would have to bear the consequences of their host’s downfall.
Lohan simply ensured they remained asleep, injecting a subtle pulse of soothing mana into their nerve channels to prevent them from waking prematurely.
"After all, I didn’t come here to be a savior, right?" Lohan muttered into the void.
He began to search the penthouse, using Instinctive Perception and Spatial Echo-Location to map every inch of the walls.
Lohan ignored the useless designer items and the locked data terminals.
Behind one of the tacky polymer statues imitating a god with an abnormally large penis, his thermal sensor picked up a rhythmic fluctuation of electrical energy: a safe embedded in the reinforced concrete wall.
The safe was a masterpiece of security engineering, designed to withstand kinetic break-ins and AI hacker intrusions. For an ordinary thief from the Lower Zone, that was an insurmountable barrier. But Lohan was no ordinary thief.
He approached the metal door and extended his hands, shaping small strands of his biomass to wrap around the hidden hinges.
Lohan concentrated the Mana from his Superior Magic Core and activated Efficient Digestion and Digestion at maximum power, focusing them specifically on the metal’s pivot points.
Unlike an Elite monster, the metal alloys of the safe were inorganic materials and extremely low in biomass.
However, for Lohan’s organism, this "poverty" made digestion even easier. Unlike the bodies of Level 12 monsters that took several minutes to digest, the structural steel offered only a rigid molecular lattice, but one far more fragile to Lohan’s mana-infused acid, which corroded it as if it were paper on fire.
Even with the low efficiency of his digestion in the real world, which was far weaker than in Elysium, in just over five minutes, the sound of metal disintegrating into a chemical hiss vanished from the office.
The hinges simply ceased to exist, and the heavy yet small reinforced door toppled forward, held up by the wires and Lohan’s strong arm before it hit the floor.
The interior of the safe revealed the true treasure Lohan was seeking.
Stacked in thick bundles, Lohan found $40,000 in physical cash, high-denomination bills that lacked real-time digital tracking by Atlas Bank.
In addition to the money, there was a collection of jewelry, solid gold rings with precious stones and heavy necklaces that Lohan found incredibly ugly and tacky, but which his Digestive Filter identified as materials of high mineral purity.
Lohan gathered everything, transferring the money and jewelry into the inner pocket of his overcoat.
He felt no guilt about taking the jewelry; leaving it there would simply be a gift to the corrupt police officers who would arrive to "investigate" the incident and who would likely keep whatever remained of the loot for themselves.
With the looting complete, Lohan returned to the pool.
It was time for the final processing.
He extended his mana filaments over Oscar’s corpse and began the total assimilation. As he penetrated the landlord’s mind, the Memory Resonance triggered, but this time what Lohan picked up were not deep secrets, but rather the absolute fear Oscar had felt in his final moments.
Through Oscar’s eyes, Lohan saw himself. In the drug-induced bad trip, Lohan wasn’t a hoodie-wearing kid; he was a silhouette of infinite darkness with blood-red eyes, whose movements were so fast they seemed like teleportation. The terror Oscar had felt upon seeing the soldiers being slaughtered so easily created an extremely potent kind of primal dread within the man.
Suddenly, Lohan felt a flood of information in his mind!
Analyzing the information received, Lohan quickly understood what the new evolution entailed and was able to practically visualize the warning message of this new evolution.
[Evolution Unlocked: Killing Intent Lv 1]
[Description: The user is able to project Mana saturated with their predatory will. The target experiences an amplification of fear and atmospheric pressure based on the intensity of the user’s death wish against them.]
Lohan was surprised.
He had never imagined that the terror of a prey could be converted into such a useful tool of control for both worlds.
However, the rest of Oscar’s memories began to flood Lohan’s mind: images of decadent orgies, extortion of the elderly, and the futile life of that "pig" from the Lower Zone.
The revulsion was so great that Lohan, mimicking the gesture of someone discarding trash, immediately erased the memory, closing the resonance channels before his mind could be contaminated by Oscar’s mediocrity.
He rose from the water, which was now clear again after Oscar’s body had been converted into pure biomass and expelled as inorganic waste.
Lohan felt the urge to kick the corpse of the man who had humiliated him so much, but when he looked down, he realized there wasn’t even a single bone left to strike. Oscar had been completely processed.
Without wasting any time, Lohan moved through the penthouse, repeating the process with the four dead guards.
They, too, were reduced to nothing, serving as fuel to replenish the energy Lohan had expended in combat and in opening the safe, as well as providing a pleasant surprise by subtly improving his control over firearms!
The air in the penthouse, previously saturated with the smell of blood and drugs, now seemed strangely pure, as if Lohan had filtered the environment.
Lohan adjusted his hood and glanced at the holographic watch in his left eye. The Monday sun would soon rise, and he now had the resources necessary to never again have to look at Sector 4 as his home.
’Next stop: Upper Zone.’ he thought.