Night was Shen Cong's domain. His hypersensitive vision made darkness irrelevant — the world was as clear to him under moonlight as it was at noon.

On the bouncing stilts, in the empty silence of Heliuqu District, he staged his own private exhibition of speed.

As familiarity with the stilts accumulated, the speed climbed. Turning, shifting direction, controlling the rebound — all of it smoothed out with repetition. He tried vertical jumps, building stored energy across several bounces, and launched himself forty meters into the air.

Fifteen stories. A genuinely alarming height.

At the apex, in the brief moment of weightlessness, he felt detached from gravity entirely — floating in open air. Better than when the Antgod had carried him aloft, back at the beginning. That flight had been high but uncontrolled, his body passive. This was his own power, his own trajectory. He could tumble, twist, try aerial techniques the way a trampoline athlete might work through a routine.

"I could go higher. But the alloy's reached its stress limit. Push any more stored energy and the blade will fracture."

The Half-Activated Armor had been progressively alloyed with titanium over time, seeking the balance between low weight and high hardness. Activity reinforcement helped substantially — without it, blade springs made of any conventional metal wouldn't survive the loading. Shen Cong's nineteen-bull stride force would snap ordinary metal like a post driven into soft ground. Only the Activity-metal integration made it viable.

"Let me try combat at speed."

At the peak of one jump, descending, he twisted his body hard. The blade angle on landing changed, the rebound force redirected — and he rolled across the ground twice to bleed off the stored energy. The clumsy-looking landing was the price of too much stored force with nowhere to put it: either bleed it off slowly and controlled, or dump it fast and ungracefully.

He picked up a low-grade javelin and started a full sprint.

Wind screaming past. His dynamic vision was just barely keeping pace with his own movement — his physical coordination running at its edge to match. He…