Not speedster-vanished. Not even teleportation. One moment there, the next gone, leaving only a fading electrical signature.
His enhanced senses screamed warning milliseconds before impact. From above—the one angle he hadn't been watching because who expects wolves to fucking fly?
Time dilated as his speed kicked in involuntarily. The world became honey-thick, each moment stretching like taffy. He could see everything—the wolf descending from the canopy where it had been hiding, not hunting. Saliva droplets frozen like diamonds. Each claw rendered in pornographic detail. The Genesis Energy pumping through its mutated heart in slow-motion spurts.
"Move," his brain commanded.
His body obeyed with excessive enthusiasm.
He blurred left—too far, slamming into a crystal tree. Corrected right—way too fucking far, through a bush that disintegrated. Back again. Forward. Up somehow.
He was ping-ponging through space like a coked-up electron, leaving afterimages of blue lightning and confused physics.
The wolf's claws missed by millimeters as Jayden accidentally existed in three different positions simultaneously.
"Too fast!" The words came out as electronic static. "Too fucking fast!"
The wolf landed with practiced grace, already pivoting for another attack. It had expected the dodge. Planned for it. These weren't random swipes—this was calculated predation.
Jayden tried to throw lightning, but his aim was fucked. Moving at hyperspeed meant his targeting was always a fraction off. Blue bolts scorched trees, carved trenches in the ground, lit up the canopy like a disco from hell.
Everything except the wolf, which grounded itself against the crystallized earth with contemptuous ease.
This was supposed to be easy. He was supposed to walk in here and dominate. Instead, a Level 3 trash mob was making him look like he'd never been in a fight in his life.
Which, technically, he hadn't. Street racing didn't prepare you for combat. Trading forex didn't teach you how to fight something that treated physics as a suggestion.
Twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes of him blurring around like an ADHD lightning bolt while this wolf—Level fucking THREE—methodically worked out his patterns. Because even chaos had patterns when you moved fast enough to repeat your mistakes a thousand times per second.
The really fucked up part? He wasn't tired. Twenty minutes of moving at speeds that should have liquified his organs, and he felt fresh as morning coffee. The Genesis Energy poured in faster than he could spend it. Infinite stamina. Perpetual motion. He could do this worthless dance until the heat death of the universe.
But he couldn't land a single fucking hit.
The wolf was learning. When Jayden blurred left, it was already moving right. When he tried an overhead lightning strike, it had already shifted position. It wasn't predicting—it was *knowing*, reading the electromagnetic buildup of his attacks before he fully committed.
"Motherfucker!" Another wild lightning burst turned a tree into modern art.
Then it happened. The lesson he should have seen coming.
The wolf's tail caught him mid-blur. Not hard—didn't need to be. At the speed he was moving, any impact became catastrophic. He went flying like his strings had been cut, tumbling through the air in a tangle of limbs and profanity.
The crystal tree he hit had opinions about his ribcage. Pain bloomed like an old friend, sharp and immediate. He slid down the trunk, leaving a trail of bark and blood.
All that speed. All that lightning. And his actual muscles were still seventeen-year-old rich kid soft. Enhanced, sure. But not strong. Not tank-a-hit strong. Not laugh-off-a-tree strong.
The wolf padded closer, electricity dancing between its teeth. Its expression—if wolves could smirk—suggested deep satisfaction. The apex predator turned out to be apex prey.
Jayden spat blood that sparked when it hit the ground. His ribs screamed. His pride was somewhere back there in pieces.
But his brain—that trader's brain that had made millions reading patterns—was finally catching up to his new reality.
He couldn't outspeed something that could read his moves. Couldn't outpower something that grounded his attacks. But he'd been thinking about this wrong. Treating his powers as separate things—speed here, lightning there.
What if they weren't?
What if speed was lightning was force was everything?
The wolf charged for the killing blow, confident in its pattern recognition. This time, Jayden didn't panic-blur. Didn't try to aim lightning. He planted his feet, locked onto that bioelectric signature like a targeting system, and waited.
The wolf leaped.
Jayden moved.
Not randomly. Not desperately. He moved with *purpose*, accelerating his fist from zero to significant fraction of lightspeed in the space of six inches. His knuckles broke the sound barrier with a crack like God's own whip. Blue lightning didn't just coat his fist—it became his fist, kinetic energy and electrical force merging into something that made physics cry.
The punch connected with the wolf's skull at the exact moment its own momentum peaked.
The wolf didn't die.
It fucking deleted.
The front half vaporized into red mist and Genesis particles, a cloud of what-used-to-be-wolf expanding in a perfect sphere. The back half, suddenly freed from the burden of having a front, flew into the forest like a meat missile, carving a trench through crystal trees before embedding in something that crunched.
[Thunder Wolf Slain]
[+15 XP (First Kill Bonus Applied)]
[Experience: 15/100]
[Achievement Unlocked: "First Blood" - +5% XP for 24 hours]
[Achievement Unlocked: "Overkill" - Dealt 1000% creature's HP in single blow]
[Warning: Excessive force detected. Recalibrating threat assessment...]
Jayden stood in the aftermath, knuckles steaming, watching Genesis mist settle like radioactive snow. His ribs still hurt. His pride was still bruised. But something fundamental had clicked.
Fifteen XP.
Twenty minutes of humiliation for fifteen fucking XP.
But the real lesson hit harder than the wolf had. He wasn't two things—fast guy and lightning guy. He was one thing. A living physics equation where speed and electricity merged into something that made the old rules sob quietly in a corner.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
And he was made of acceleration now.
The forest stretched out before him, full of monsters that didn't know they were already dead. His lightning cells mapped more signatures—a pack to the north, something bigger to the east, and that large presence from earlier, still watching, still waiting.
Jayden wiped blood from his mouth, the crimson sparking with residual charge.
"Alright then," he said to the dungeon, to the System, to himself. "School's in session."
Time to learn what being a lightning god actually meant.