[Entity Status: Leander Hayes]
Checkpoints (Control Score): 159
Core Attributes:
Strength: 37 | Defense: 38 | Speed: 44 | Mental Energy: 38
Active Skills:
[B-Level] Metal Control | [A-Level] Bodybuilding * [B-Level] Microscopic Manipulation | [C-Level] Metal Enhancement
The Golden Path (100% Mastery): * Golden Eyes (Illusion-Shattering) | Bronze Skin | Steel Tendons | Iron Bones
[Special] Nirvana Golden Wings (Space-Stone Integrated): * Max Speed: 40x Speed of Sound (Atmospheric) / N/A (Vacuum)
Inlay Compatibility: 18% (Additional Skills Unlocked)
Leander stared at the new section of his panel, his breath hitching. The Space Stone wasn't just a battery; it had rewritten the very rules of his mobility.
[Inlay Skills Unlocked]
Space Jump: Short-range instantaneous blinking. Range: 1,000km. Cooldown: 1 second.
Space Warp: Long-distance displacement. Range: 50,000 light-years. Cooldown: 5 seconds.
Spatial Teleportation: Fixed-point transit to historical locations. Cooldown: 60 seconds.
Storage Space: A static pocket dimension (1km x 1km x 1km).
Leander slowly opened his eyes, which now held a faint, permanent sapphire ring around the iris. He raised his right hand, his fingers curling as if grasping the air. A wisp of blue energy, cold as the void and sharp as a razor, bled from his palm. It swirled into a concentrated ball of blue mist, humming with a frequency that made the nearby metal deckplates vibrate in sympathy.
"Did I actually... just tame an Infinity Stone?" Leander whispered.
He knew the history. These stones were the solidified remnants of singularities that birthed the universe. They were the primal "source code" of existence. To hold one was to invite madness or death; to wear one as part of your own body was unheard of. He realized now how close he'd come to disintegrating. Without his Golden Body and the Nirvana Wings acting as a spiritual buffer, he would have been a red smear across the stars.
The blue mist suddenly retracted into his skin, circulating through his veins like a secondary nervous system. The frantic, tearing agony of the previous hour was gone, replaced by a profound, terrifying peace. He wasn't just Leander Hayes anymore; he was a living anchor for the cosmos.
In the Cockpit
Jason was staring at Leander with wide, trembling eyes. He had watched the kid go from a "cracked porcelain doll" to a figure wrapped in a swirling blue nebula, and then finally back to a calm, shirtless young man who looked... different. Harder.
"You look like you just swallowed a star and found out it tastes like strawberries," Jason muttered, his hands white-knuckled on the controls. "Are we good? Because the ship's sensors just had a stroke trying to read your signature."
"I'm stable, Jason," Leander said, standing up. His movements were fluid, lacking the jerky hesitation of someone who had just been shattered. "The alarms... why are they still going off?"
The emergency lights in the cockpit hadn't stopped their frantic red strobe. If anything, they had intensified. Jason swallowed hard, pointing a shaking finger at the main viewscreen. "Because that wasn't just a jump-gate glitch. Look."
Leander turned his gaze outward and went perfectly still.
A shadow—vast, ancient, and utterly silent—was drifting across their path. It was a creature that defied the logic of biology, a Starry Sky Giant Monster. To Leander, it looked like a gargantuan blue whale, but its skin wasn't flesh; it was a rugged, tectonic landscape of dark rock and reinforced metal.
The creature was massive, easily three kilometers long, rivaling the size of the Great Vibranium Meteorite that sat beneath the city of Wakanda. It swam through the vacuum with slow, rhythmic beats of a colossal tail, its body a dull, obsidian black. However, running down its spine was a jagged, vertical fissure that glowed with a brilliant, menacing red light.
The sheer mass of the beast created a gravitational wake. As its tail swept past, the Ghost Shadow was caught in a localized spatial ripple, tossed aside like a toy boat in a hurricane. The jolt sent the ship spinning thousands of meters, but the creature didn't even seem to notice them.
"Jason, talk to me," Leander said, his voice dropping into a low, focused tone. "What is that thing?"
"It's a Class B Starry Sky Giant," Jason whispered, his face pale. "A Red Whale. We're lucky, Leander. Incredibly lucky. Based on that red light on its back, it's well-fed. If that light was gold... we'd already be inside its stomach."
Jason tapped a command on his tablet, bringing up the universal threat database. The AI-generated file on the Red Whale appeared, and Leander scanned it with his Golden Eyes.
[Class B Monster: The Red Whale]
Size: ~3,000 meters. (4th on the Universal Body Size List).
Diet: Metallic meteorites and spaceships.
Behavior States:
Saturated (Red Light): Peaceful. Drifts at 1km/s. Ignores all nearby metal.
Starvation (Gold Light): Extremely aggressive. Speeds up to 150,000km/min. Actively hunts any metallic signature within a one-light-hour radius.
Rage: Emits a "Golden Ray" from its forehead that transmutes solid matter into soft metal for easy consumption.
Threat Level: Extreme. The Kree Empire once lost six heavy battleships trying to scratch its hide. They failed. Xandar's 4th Fleet lost three cruisers. The beast is functionally indestructible by conventional weaponry.
Leander read the final note on the screen: 'If you encounter a hungry Red Whale, immediately perform a Wormhole Jump. Staying away from the Red Whale starts with you and me.'
The gargantuan creature continued its slow, majestic crawl through the sector, the red glow from its back casting long, bloody shadows across the cockpit of the Ghost Shadow. It looked less like an animal and more like a wandering moon made of armor and prehistoric rage.
"It's incredible," Leander said, his voice laced with genuine astonishment. "It's a living ship. A fortress that eats fleets."
"It's a nightmare with fins!" Jason corrected, his voice cracking. "We are currently sitting in a tin can made of its favorite snack. I am staying as far away as possible."
Leander stepped closer to the glass, his eyes tracking the red fissure along the whale's spine. He felt a strange pull—not just gravitational, but a resonance between the Space Stone in his back and the raw, ancient energy radiating from the beast.
"Jason, I've never seen anything like this on Earth. Our monsters are just... big lizards or angry cats. This thing is on a different scale entirely." Leander's fingers brushed the glass. "Shall we go and take a closer look? I want to see that metallic skin up close."
Jason's head snapped toward Leander so fast his neck cracked. "Are you out of your mind? Did you not read the part about the sixty million casualties? Or the part where the Kree fleet—the guys who own half this sector—couldn't even give it a papercut?"
He shook his head violently, his red hands clutching the flight stick as if his life depended on it (which it did). "Provoking a Starry Sky Giant is a fast track to becoming space dust. I don't care how many wings you have or how blue you're glowing. My ship isn't even a snack for that thing; it's a breath mint. We are leaving. Now."