As long as it’s within Nuwesca City, Braun is practically nigh-omniscient with his constant vision being scattered off into numerous cameras placed all throughout the city. In one look, he could observe all streets and various nooks and crannies, giving him a comprehensive insight into almost all events happening in his base of operations.

So, when he saw a rogue Super out in the wild in the form of a young kid with some ghost-like ability, there was essentially no way for the kid to escape his prying eyes.

…

Somewhere, inside a normal suburban house with cream-colored walls and large open windows, a kid happily waddled in, phasing through the wall and arriving inside the house’s kitchen.

Upon arriving inside the kitchen, they gave a wary look to make sure no one would see him, and soon, a shimmering light formed from the bottom of their feet to the top of their head, causing their vaguely transparent and blurry body to solidify and return to normal.

The kid had blond hair, large bright eyes, and a wide grin. Even though many minutes had passed since the event, the boy still vividly remembered the fight of titanic scale that had occurred mere blocks away from his home, where a giant snake fought against a whole army of some super cool organization.

Most importantly, he cannot forget the giant human that fought against the giant snake, wielding a pair of golden gauntlets and wearing a golden crown. The way the large man tussled and brawled with the watery serpent made his heart go ablaze with childish grandeur, and he jabbed a few times in the air, unable to hide his excitement.

“Hehehe, take that, snake monster!” he shouted.

His shout, however, didn’t go unnoticed.

A blond-haired woman walked in from the living room, staring at their child with a relieved look.

“Sigh, you were in the kitchen all this time. You don’t know how worried I was looking for you like always, you little sneaky boy!” the woman placed her hands on her hips, giving her son a questioning look.

The boy giggled in response, walked up to his mother, and hugged her. “Mama, did you see the giant snake back then? Wasn’t the giant man super cool?”

“Giant snake? Giant man?” The woman laughed and couldn’t help but jest, “That’s an interesting story you have there. What did those two giants do?”

“Well, there was this giant snake monster that burst out of the ground from the sewers, and it could control water like woosh!” he waved his arms as if wanting to demonstrate the snake’s ability. “And then, people wearing black clothes surrounded the monster, hunting it down!”

“There was this one guy that can control cards, then there’s also this person that can create large barriers! And then there’s this bird lady! Oh yeah, there was also this guy that can control threads!”

“But the coolest of them all is this giant person! He wore a crown and had golden hands! He fought against the giant snake, punching like this, like bam!”

Listening to her son’s wondrous imagination, she simply said, “That sounds so awesome!”

“But as cool as that is, what’s cooler is if you don’t hide so much!” She patted the boy on the head and winked. “That giant man only likes it when children don’t make their mother worry so much by being so hard to find!”

“R-Really?” he asked with a scared tone.

“Yes! That big man really hates it when naughty children don’t listen to their parents, so if you want to be friends with him, you have to listen to mommy, okay?” she reaffirmed.

“Okay!” the child nodded his head dutifully.

“That’s great!” She clapped her hands and guided her son to the living room. “Now, be a nice kid and stay here, okay? Mommy has to cook lunch now.”

“I will!” He habitually grabbed the remote and sat on the living room couch, turning on the television to watch some cartoons.

Upon seeing her son obediently follow her words, she smiled and returned to the kitchen, wiping away the sweat on her forehead.

Let’s just hope he doesn’t disappear again as usual. She inwardly sighed.

As she opened the fridge and began to take out some ingredients for the meal she was about to cook, she didn’t notice the shadowy figure staring at her near the opened window in the kitchen, with green light suffusing from those pair of dark brown eyes.

…

A few minutes quickly passed in the blink of an eye and the young boy who had been watching cartoons nonstop felt the urge to pee. His bladder had already begun to well up and he wouldn’t be able to hold it in anymore if he let time pass.

But, Mommy said I should stay here. And if I go there, I’d just disturb her from cooking. The young boy rubbed his chin and looked around sneakily.

When he saw that no one else was in the living room, meaning no one would be able to see him activate his ability, he decided to take a little gamble and turned illusory. His whole body turned translucent and almost invisible, with light passing through his skin like it’s glass.

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As he began to tip-toe his way into the kitchen with a mischievous grin, he turned to a corner and peeked into the room when he froze in shock.

Standing behind his mother was a large, muscular man clad in silvery threads from head to toe. The man was grabbing his mother by the neck, lifting her body into the air, and the tips of her toes were barely touching the ground.

“M-Mommy!” The boy shouted.

“Eddy. Run!” She turned to look at her son, shouting with a stiff voice.

“L-Let go of her! Let go of my Mommy, you monster!” he shouted and rushed forward, his body inflating in size and pale flames forming around his hands. At this moment, he unleashed the full power of a Level 0 Ghost.

“Sure…” The man laughed and let go, causing the child’s mother to fall to the ground.

Not expecting the man to listen to his request, the child remained floating in the air, dumbfounded for a while, before finally realizing what happened.

He hurriedly deactivated his ability, turning from illusory to corporeal. He ran to his mother, grabbing her body with teary eyes.

“Mommy, are you okay? Are you okay, Mommy?” He hurriedly asked, afraid that his mother would disappear in his arms.

“Yes, I am okay,” The woman responded, almost mechanically. Her voice remained stiff, perhaps because of the man’s tight grip on her neck, but the panicking child didn’t notice this minute detail.

He also didn’t notice how his mother’s face remained almost expressionless, without any sort of apprehension or fear.

As he hugged his mother and sobbed, a pair of soft, gentle arms wrapped around his neck.

“Mommy…” he called out softly, looking into his mother’s lightless eyes. “Mommy?”

Crack!

The woman flexed her arms and crushed the boy’s neck in one swift motion, with her arms turning into a mangled mess of flesh and bones. With the amount of strength she just exerted, it made her hands break in the process.

Braun chuckled at the scene as incredibly fine threads, far thinner than even spider webs, unfurled from the woman’s body and returned to his fingertips.

“Making her speak was almost impossible,” he mumbled with a playful grin and lifted the child’s body into the air, placing it on top of a nearby table. “Puppetting people to appear as normal people is becoming more and more impossible as time goes on. Unless my mind is capable of rivaling some monstrous computers, I’d better find an alternative route for this puppetry business—“

“—Fortunately, one such avenue was presented right before me.” Caressing the young boy’s face with a smile, he unleashed the power of zenith, and green flames exploded out of his palms, drilling into the boy’s lifeless corpse.

He felt his mind touch upon something strange, and with a casual flick of the green flames, the space separating the crystal from reality disappeared, causing a shimmering, radiant light to form around the boy’s mangled neck.

A pitifully small crystal appeared from nowhere, and giving an educated guess, Braun assumed the boy to be around between Level 0 and Level 1.

If he was truly Level 1 and achieved complete invisibility when transforming into a ghost, then I probably wouldn’t have been able to see him, and he’d have escaped death. Braun sighed at the incredulity of life before unhesitatingly grabbing the crystal.

A second crystal. Braun’s eyes shimmered as green flames lit up from the tips of his fingers.

The prospect of gaining a second crystal held a lot of significant mysteries for Braun, with a myriad of questions that had been brewing in his mind for how many weeks already.

Obviously. Aegis’ rule against killing not just humans but even monsters had a reason. As for what that reason was, they wouldn’t disclose it to a low-ranking member like Braun, but he didn’t need their answers to create a few highly probable assumptions.

One such assumption was about one part of history that also remained a mystery—what exactly about humanity, along with its various gods, attracted the greed of the gods from outer space, causing them to madly attack despite the death of their brethren, all in in the foolish aspiration killing humanity.

However, was it really just mindless killing? Even a lion wouldn’t hunt when it doesn’t need to, so there must have been a resource here on Earth, possessed by a vast majority of humans and gods alike that attracted their greed.

It didn’t take a genius to come to a simple conjecture with all of this information.

By proxy of prevention, Aegis members would probably never realize that crystals would reform on the corpses of supers and monsters alike. If they possess the crystal from a super’s corpse, they could absorb and assimilate the strength of the crystal into their own.

Although Braun might be an anomaly, he was still confident that others could have done the same thing as him, but the process might be radically different. It still meant though that he basically had enough evidence to believe that other supers could absorb the remains of other supers and monsters.

So, if humanity, a literal gold mine of crystals with plenty of supers, monsters, demigods, legendary creatures, and divine existences, existed, then they would most likely attract the attention of innumerable godly entities out in the void.

Besides those points, Braun had one more reason to believe that supers can absorb supers, and monsters can absorb monsters.

With more than a month of interaction with the zenithral force, the metaphysical manifestation of all progress alike, he knew all too well just what this rule enforced by reality entailed—it would give rise to an environment very much parallel to the concept of a dog-eat-dog world.

Supers hunt down supers and monsters, monsters hunt down monsters and supers.

Demigods slaughter demigods.

Gods slaughter gods.

Through the existence of a crystal that grants one the ability to embark on the path of the divine, this reality was formed in such a way that encouraged the constant development of one’s superpower, creating an environment that greatly accelerated the progress of abilities within the universe.

Even though he himself wielded the same power, the sheer scale and influence this power truly held acted as an eye-opening realization for Braun.

This godlike ability caused the desire in his heart to bloom wildly, uncontrollably growing, uncontrollably deepening. His eyes turned a dark shade of green as the flames intensified in brightness, swallowing the crystal in his hand whole.

It then reappeared in the mystical space within his body, with a green flame burning in the center and a ginormous crystal hovering around it. Green tendrils formed from the edges of the crystal as they madly crawled across his entire body, connecting both the mystical space and his body into one.

His veins lit up one by one as the energy of zenith coursed through his entire being, from his body to soul. Sickly pale flames uncontrollably spewed out of his chest and his limbs; his skin turned pale and snow white, before he then became all the more illusory; from the inside and out, Braun was once again undergoing another change, practically turning into an entirely new person with a different body and a different soul.

This was an incredibly painful process that signified the existence of a new person, but because of the weird mutation in his mind, the was greatly reduced and barely felt noticeable.

As Braun’s still body hovered in the air, he finally opened his eyes and a piercing light flashed.

So this is what it’s like to have a second superpower…