Jolie scrambled backward until her spine hit the freezing wood of the door. Her hands flew over the surface, desperately searching for the interior release panel. Her fingers found the smooth glass of the scanner. She pressed it.

A small LED light flashed angry red. Catina had locked it from the outside using maximum security clearance. The door was a dead end.

Jolie didn't waste a single breath panicking. She reached down and unbuckled her high heels, tossing them silently aside. She pressed her bare feet into the thick wool carpet, eliminating any sound her footsteps might make.

Deep inside the suite, the heavy breathing grew louder. It was accompanied by the sound of fabric ripping and the heavy, wooden frame of a bed groaning under immense weight.

Jolie forced her eyes to adjust to the pitch-black room. A sliver of pale starlight bled through the gap in the heavy blackout curtains, casting a faint, silvery line across the floor.

It was a massive, opulent suite. In the dead center of the room sat a circular king-sized bed. A towering male figure was writhing on the mattress. The air in the room was thick, suffocatingly hot, and reeked of aggressive male pheromones mixed with the sharp, chemical tang of a military-grade aphrodisiac.

Jolie held her breath. She kept her back to the wall, sliding inch by inch toward the marble wet bar on the left side of the room. She needed a weapon.

Her hip brushed against the edge of the bar. A metal cocktail shaker wobbled and tipped over, striking the marble counter with a sharp clink.

The sound was microscopic, but in the silence of the room, it was a gunshot.

The man on the bed froze. The writhing stopped instantly.

General Aloys Patterson sat up. In the darkness, his eyes glowed with a terrifying, feral gold light. He locked onto Jolie's exact position with the precision of an apex predator.

Jolie's stomach dropped to the floor. Her hand scrambled blindly across the bar top until her fingers closed around the cold, sharp handle of a metal letter opener. She gripped it in a reverse hold, bending her knees into a defensive stance.

Aloys let out a roar that vibrated the glass in the windows. His feral index was completely redlined. The drugs pumping through his veins were destroying his sanity, demanding release.

He launched himself off the bed. He didn't run; he moved with a terrifying, supernatural speed that defied human physics. The sheer air pressure of his movement hit Jolie a second before he did.

Operating purely on adrenaline, Jolie threw her body to the right, diving into a harsh roll.

Aloys's massive hand swiped through the empty air where her throat had been a millisecond prior. His palm slammed into the solid marble of the wet bar. The stone exploded. Shards of marble shrapnel flew across the room, raining down on the carpet.

Jolie gasped, her lungs burning. The physical power of a high-level Primal was absolute. She couldn't fight this.

Aloys spun around. His chest heaved. The drugs were screaming at him to mate, but his severe mysophobia-a deep, psychological disgust of females-was violently rejecting the urge. He caught the scent of her female pheromones. A look of absolute revulsion twisted his handsome, sweat-slicked face.

He grabbed his own head, his fingers digging into his scalp as he let out an agonized groan. The contradiction between his biological drive and his psychological hatred was tearing his mind apart. He slammed his forehead into a concrete pillar, trying to use the physical pain to clear the chemical fog.

Jolie didn't wait. She bolted toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, praying she could use the letter opener to shatter the glass and climb out.

She only made it two steps.

Aloys stopped hitting the pillar. His golden eyes snapped back to her, completely devoid of human reason.

He lunged. His massive body tackled her to the floor. The impact knocked the wind out of Jolie's lungs in a violent rush. He pinned her to the carpet, his weight crushing her ribs.

Jolie screamed, thrashing wildly. She brought the letter opener down, driving the metal blade straight toward his broad shoulder.

The tip pierced his military-issued shirt, but the moment it hit his skin, it stopped. His muscles were as dense as titanium. The blade bent, completely useless.

Aloys felt the sting. His jaw ticked violently. He ripped the letter opener from her hand, crushing the solid metal into a crumpled ball of foil with his bare fist, and tossed it aside.

His burning hands clamped down on her wrists, pinning them to the floor above her head. His face lowered, his ragged, scorching breath ghosting over the sensitive skin of her neck.

Jolie couldn't breathe. The heat radiating from his body was unnatural. The drugs were taking over, and she was about to be torn apart.

Her survival instinct shattered her limits. Deep within her chest, a strange, dormant lock snapped open. A rush of pure, icy-green energy flooded her veins, racing toward her fingertips.

The green energy felt like a freezing river bursting through a dam. It surged through Jolie's bloodstream, overriding the weakness of her zero-GCI body.

In the pitch-black room, Jolie's eyes flashed with an eerie, luminescent emerald glow.

Aloys felt it. Even through the haze of the aphrodisiac and his feral madness, his combat instincts flared. The aura of the female beneath him had mutated from prey to something highly dangerous. His jaw clenched, and he tried to crush her wrists to neutralize the threat.

Jolie let out a guttural scream. She channeled every ounce of the freezing green energy into the palms of her hands and pushed it outward, flooding the environment.

In the corner of the suite, three expensive, decorative potted vines reacted instantly. The Arborgenesis Gift-a power she didn't even know she had-injected them with terrifying vitality.

The fragile, decorative stems exploded in size. Within half a second, they mutated into massive, thigh-thick vines covered in dark, pulsing veins.

Four of the colossal vines slithered across the carpet like giant anacondas. They whipped through the air and snapped around Aloys's thick ankles, locking on with the grip of a vice.

Aloys roared in shock and fury. He tried to yank his legs free, his muscles bulging as he applied thousands of pounds of force.

The vines didn't snap. His brutal strength only managed to leave faint white stress marks on the bark.

The distraction cost him his leverage. Jolie seized the split-second opening. She drove her knee upward with brutal precision, slamming it directly into his groin.

Aloys let out a choked grunt. The crushing grip on Jolie's wrists loosened just a fraction of an inch.

Jolie ripped her hands free. Her palms glowed brighter, casting a sickly green light over Aloys's enraged face. She directed the remaining vines straight at him.

Two thick branches lashed out, wrapping around Aloys's biceps. With a violent jerk, the vines hauled his massive body backward, ripping him off Jolie and dragging him through the air.

Suspended above the floor, Aloys's survival instincts took over. His body erupted in blinding, crackling blue lightning. The Thunder-attribute power of a top-tier Primal illuminated the suite in strobe-like flashes. He channeled the high-voltage electricity directly into the vines, trying to incinerate them.

Jolie's heart skipped a beat. She instinctively activated her secondary Gift: Sylvan Soul. A shimmering, translucent membrane of life energy coated the vines, acting as a perfect biological insulator.

The blue lightning exploded against the membrane. The outer bark charred and smoked, filling the room with the smell of burning wood, but the core of the vines held strong.

With a flick of Jolie's wrist, the vines slammed Aloys into the far wall.

CRASH.

The impact shook the entire hotel suite. The expensive silk wallpaper tore, and the drywall fractured into a spiderweb of cracks.

Aloys was dizzy, his vision swimming. The combination of the aphrodisiac, his psychological revulsion, and the massive over-exertion of his lightning power pushed his feral index past the point of no return. His body was shutting down.

His eyes bled crimson. With a final, inhuman bellow, he flexed his left arm so hard the bone popped, physically snapping one of the charred vines in half.

Jolie's breath hitched. She couldn't let him get loose. If he touched the floor, she was dead. She slammed her hands together, focusing all her remaining mental power into the ultimate Arborgenesis execution.

The hardwood floor beneath Aloys splintered and erupted. A massive, primary root burst from the ground directly behind him. It split into a hundred smaller, razor-sharp branches that wove together at blinding speed, forming a dense, inescapable wooden cocoon that pinned Aloys flat against the cracked wall.

Aloys thrashed wildly, his lightning sparking weakly against the wood.

The tiny thorns lining the vines dug deep into his skin, injecting a potent, plant-based neurotoxin.

Aloys's movements grew sluggish. His chest he heave as he fought the paralysis. His golden eyes, burning with a lethal promise of murder, locked onto Jolie's silhouette in the dark. He memorized her scent, her shape.

Then, the toxin won. Aloys's head rolled forward, his chin hitting his chest as he slipped into total unconsciousness.

Jolie collapsed onto the carpet. Her clothes were soaked in cold sweat. Her chest heaved as she sucked in greedy lungfuls of air.

She stared at the terrifying man cocooned on the wall. She had actually survived.

Suddenly, a crisp, mechanical voice echoed directly inside her brain.

[System Alert: Ultra-high concentration of feral regulatory energy detected. Do you wish to absorb? ]

Jolie froze. She looked up at the unconscious Aloys. The terror in her chest evaporated, instantly replaced by a cold, calculating greed.

Jolie pushed herself off the ruined carpet. The mechanical voice in her head chimed again, more urgent this time.

[System Alert: Energy dissipating. Do you wish to absorb? ]

"Absorb," Jolie whispered into the dark.

Instantly, she felt a violent, rushing sensation. A torrent of raw, crackling energy was being siphoned directly from Aloys's unconscious body, traveling down the vines and flooding into her palms.

The exhaustion that had been crushing her bones vanished. Her stamina fully restored in a matter of seconds.

A translucent blue interface materialized in her field of vision.

[Arborgenesis Proficiency +500]

[Sylvan Soul: Basic Healing Attribute Unlocked]

Jolie's lips curled into a sharp smirk. She looked at the terrifying General pinned to the wall not as a threat, but as a massive, walking battery.

She walked over to him. The faint starlight caught the sharp, aggressive angles of his face. He was devastatingly handsome, but Jolie didn't care about his face. She cared about his pockets.

She reached out and patted down his torn military shirt. Her fingers brushed against a hard lump in his inner pocket. She pulled out a heavy silver ring engraved with a complex military crest. A spatial storage ring.

Drawing on the original Jolie's memories, Jolie knew these rings were locked with a mental signature. But Aloys was unconscious, his psychic defenses completely shattered by the feral state and the neurotoxin. Jolie pushed a sharp spike of her newly leveled mental energy into the ring, violently shattering his temporary seal.

She projected her consciousness into the storage space and gasped.

It was a treasure trove. Piles of high-tier monster cores glowed with raw power, sitting next to a stack of untraceable, bearer-bond credit cards.

Jolie didn't hesitate. She grabbed the entire stack of credit cards and a handful of the brightest, highest-quality cores, shoving them deep into her own pockets.

As an afterthought, she unbuckled the sleek, black military-grade stealth communicator from his wrist. It had anti-tracking tech. She needed it.

Her looting complete, Jolie looked at Aloys. His shirt was shredded, his chest bare. With a flick of her wrist, she commanded the vines to adjust his posture, leaving him bound in a highly humiliating, spread-eagle position against the wall.

She turned her back on him and walked straight to the suite's central control terminal. She pulled a microscopic hacker chip from her hairpin-a rare, black-market tool she had secretly purchased just days ago with her meager savings, a desperate last-resort measure she had planned to use to escape the Pennington estate-and jammed it into the console.

Her fingers flew across the holographic keyboard. She bypassed the hotel's basic firewall and accessed the security mainframe. She isolated the footage from the VIP elevator and the top-floor corridor for the past hour.

With a single keystroke, she permanently shredded the data. Every digital trace of her and Catina entering the floor was wiped from existence.

Jolie moved to the suite's dressing room. She found a spare black uniform meant for the hotel's cleaning staff. She stripped off her torn dress, pulled on the uniform, tied her hair back, and slipped on a surgical mask and a cap. She looked like a ghost.

She checked the clock. Three hours until dawn.

Jolie ignored the main door. She walked to the service corridor attached to the suite and pried open the heavy metal door of the laundry chute.

She summoned a thick vine, wrapping it around a structural pipe, and used it as a rappelling rope. She slid down the dark, narrow shaft, dropping dozens of floors until she hit the soft pile of linens in the basement laundry room.

The basement was empty. Jolie slipped out the back loading dock and into the damp, garbage-filled alleyway.

A beat-up hover-shuttle used for hotel procurement was idling near the dumpsters, the keys still in the ignition.

Jolie hopped into the driver's seat, slammed the door, and punched the accelerator. The shuttle shot out of the alley with a screech of repulsors, leaving the Sovereign Grand Hotel far behind.

As she navigated the dark, neon-lit streets of the lower city, her heart rate finally began to settle. She was rich, she was free, and she had power.

Suddenly, the military-grade communicator she had stolen from Aloys let out a deafening, high-pitched siren. The screen flashed a violent, blinding red.

Jolie slammed on the brakes. The shuttle skidded to a halt in the middle of an empty intersection. She stared at the holographic projection hovering above her wrist.

[Commonwealth Mandated Pairing System Alert: Your new mandated partner has been confirmed. Name: Keanu Robertson. Please report to the registry within 24 hours. ]

Jolie stared at the name. The original Jolie's memories provided the context instantly. Keanu Robertson. The most feared assassin in the Shadow Sector. A man who had literally torn his last three mandated wives to pieces.

Jolie gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. "Son of a bitch," she cursed into the empty cabin.