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.

Jolie pulled the stolen hover-shuttle into the shadows beneath an abandoned mag-lev overpass. The dashboard lights cast a sickly green glow over her face as she rapidly typed Keanu Robertson's name into the stolen communicator.

The holographic screen flooded with red warning flags. Shadow Sector top-tier assassin. Callsign: Phantom. Extreme aversion to females. Suspected of murdering three previous mandated partners.

Jolie rubbed her temples, a sharp headache pulsing behind her eyes. "The Commonwealth isn't giving me a husband," she muttered bitterly. "They're handing me a death warrant."

Staying in the Core Worlds was suicide. Catina would keep trying to kill her, the military General she just robbed would hunt her down, and now a psychotic assassin was legally bound to find her.

She needed to vanish.

Jolie plugged Aloys's untraceable credit cards into the shuttle's terminal. Using the dark web routing protocols she had learned from the original Jolie's memories, she rapidly laundered the funds, scattering the millions of credits across a dozen encrypted offshore accounts.

Next, she accessed a high-end black market broker. For a premium fee, she purchased a flawless, forged identity matrix. Her new name was simply "Jo."

She pulled up the galactic map. She needed a place far from the military, far from the Shadow Sector, and perfect for her plant-based abilities. Her finger tapped on a dusty, green-and-brown planet on the very edge of the Commonwealth's reach.

Agri-World Prime.

She booked a one-way ticket in the cargo hold of an anonymous freighter leaving in exactly three hours.

While Jolie plotted her escape, the sun began to rise over the Sovereign Grand Hotel.

In the ruined presidential suite, Aloys Patterson's eyes snapped open.

The feral madness had receded, leaving behind a cold, crystalline rage. He realized instantly that he was bound to the wall. He looked down. His military uniform was shredded, his spatial ring was gone, and his secure communicator had been stripped from his wrist.

He had been robbed. By a female.

A terrifying surge of blue lightning erupted from his core. The sheer concussive force of his Thunder-attribute power blasted the dead, withered vines into fine ash.

Aloys dropped to the floor, his boots crunching on the ruined marble. His face was a mask of pure, murderous intent. He strode to the central console and punched the screen to bring up the security feeds.

Static. The logs were wiped clean.

Aloys let out a dark, humorless laugh that held no warmth. "Good. Very good. You have a death wish."

He tapped a secondary, sub-dermal comms unit behind his ear, connecting directly to his adjutant. "Issue an S-rank galactic bounty. I want every spaceport locked down. Find me a high-level Flora-Affinity user. I want them brought to me alive."

Miles away, Jolie walked through the chaotic, crowded terminal of the lower-city spaceport. She wore an oversized hoodie, her face hidden deep within the shadows of the fabric.

Above her, the massive holographic departure boards flickered. The flight times vanished, replaced by a glaring red S-rank military bounty. There was no picture, only a description: Wanted. High-level Flora-Affinity user. Armed and extremely dangerous.

Jolie pulled her hood down a fraction of an inch tighter. She kept her head down and her pace steady, walking right beneath the glaring red letters toward Cargo Bay D.

She swiped her forged ID card at the automated scanner. The light blinked green.

Jolie stepped into the dark, oil-stained belly of the interstellar freighter. She found a corner behind a stack of metal crates, sat down on the cold floor, and crossed her arms. She closed her eyes as the ship's massive engines roared to life, vibrating through her bones.

Two days later, the ship broke through the atmosphere of Agri-World Prime.

Jolie walked down the loading ramp. The air was thick, hot, and smelled heavily of turned soil and cheap fertilizer. It was a far cry from the sterile, perfumed air of the Core Worlds.

She took a deep breath. Her Arborgenesis power hummed happily in her veins, resonating with the raw, untamed nature of the planet.

Jolie walked to a rusted information kiosk on the edge of the spaceport. She pulled up the local land registry. Thousands of acres of barren, failed farmland were listed for pennies.

Her eyes locked onto a remote, isolated patch of dirt on the edge of a dead zone. Plot 313.

A slow, ambitious smile spread across her face. She turned her back on the spaceport and headed straight for the local Land Management Bureau.