2026-01-12 16:40:36At that moment Rose stood frozen on the platform, her whole body shaking with fear. Master Lawrence and Mrs. Lawrence watched everything happening below with cold expressions. They didn't care one bit if Alex got himself killed. As far as they were concerned, this nobody had already ruined their daughter's future once before. Now he was back to destroy her second chance at a good life.
“Alex, please just listen to what they're telling you. Do what they want you to do.” Rose's voice cracked as she begged him to back down. But Alex just gave her a half smile that didn't reach his eyes. “There's no way in hell I'm letting these men steal my wife away from me. As a man, I have to prove that I'm strong enough to deserve a woman like you. If I can't do that, then I don't deserve to be in the same room as these idiots!” Every face in the hall turned dark with anger when they heard Alex's words. People couldn't believe someone with no rank or power would dare talk to military commanders like that. The disrespect was beyond anything they had ever seen. Henry King felt his blood boil over. When nobody was looking, he quietly whispered a spell under his breath. Dark energy flowed from his hands toward the golden bell in the center of the room. The bell's power multiplied five times stronger than before. Now when Alex tried to punch it, the energy backlash would kill him instantly. Lewis caught sight of Henry King's secret spell from the corner of his eye. He watched the dark energy flow into the golden bell, making it five times more deadly than it was supposed to be. A sly thought crossed his mind. He could speak up right now and warn everyone about what Henry King had done. But what good would that do him? Lewis decided to keep his mouth shut and let things play out. Once Alex collapsed dead on the floor, he would tell Rose exactly what Henry King had done. He would explain how the King of War had cheated and made the bell impossibly strong just to murder Alex. Rose would be disgusted with Henry King's dirty tricks. Lewis felt his smile stretch so wide it made his cheeks bunch up near his eyes. This was perfect. With Henry King exposed as a cheater and a killer, and Alex dead on the ground, Rose would have no choice but to pick him. Alex walked straight toward the golden bell while everyone watched. Several of the head commanders called out for him to stop and think about what he was doing. But Alex ignored every single voice. His footsteps echoed through the silent hall as he marched forward with determination. Alex reached the golden bell and pulled back his fist without any hesitation. Then he threw his punch straight at the glowing metal. The sight of Alex's movement made Rose and everyone else freeze in complete shock. Alex hadn't called up any magical energy before throwing his punch. He wasn't glowing with power or chanting any spells. How could he possibly think his regular human strength would do anything to that golden bell? If Alex had been a known awakener, people might have been curious to see what kind of technique he was using. But since nobody had ever seen him show any powers before, this just proved he was lying about everything. His reckless move was going to get him killed in the next few seconds. At that moment Rose felt her legs start to move toward the edge of the platform. Maybe she could jump down, hold him and somehow stop him before it was too late. But even as the thought crossed her mind, she knew the truth. Alex's fist was already flying toward the golden bell. There was absolutely no way she could cover that distance in time to save him. Henry King shot a confident smile toward Lewis. He knew for certain that Alex wasn't a real awakener, which was exactly why he had secretly pumped extra power into that golden bell. Under normal circumstances, Alex might have had a tiny chance of surviving the energy backlash. But nobody else knew about the spell he had cast. With the bell now five times stronger than before, Alex was about to die, and everyone would think it was his own stupid fault for trying to punch magical energy with his bare fists. When Lewis saw Henry King's smug expression, his face twisted with anger. For just a moment, he had actually wondered if maybe Alex really did have some hidden powers. But now he could see the truth. The bastard was nothing but a complete liar acting purely on emotion and desperation. What a pathetic joke this whole thing was! Alex's fist made contact with the golden bell in that instant. The metal exploded into countless tiny pieces that scattered across the floor like glittering confetti. At that moment upon seeing what just happened every single person in the hall felt their eyes go wide with absolute shock. Mouths dropped open. People took stumbling steps backward. They could not wrap their minds around what they had just witnessed. Alex had completely destroyed that magical bell with nothing but his bare hand. “How is this possible!”
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Chapter 215
Her father opened his mouth.“I am not saying this to dismiss you,” Rose said, before he could speak. “I am not saying this to take his side or to be difficult or because I am not thinking clearly. I am saying it because it is true, and because you deserve to hear the truth right now rather than a version of it that makes you feel better for five minutes and then fails.” She looked at him with the direct, unflinching gaze of a daughter who loves her father and is not going to lie to him. “Those names are not the answer. You know they are not the answer. You are reaching for them because they are what you have, and I understand that, I genuinely understand that, but reaching for the wrong thing harder does not make it the right thing.”The room was quiet for a moment.Rose's father stood in the middle of it, and the fight had gone out of him not defeated, exactly, but emptied, the way a person is emptied when they have spent everything they have and found that it was not enough and do
CHAPTER 214
The frustration had been building in Rose's father since the moment Alex had opened his mouth, and it finally found its breaking point in the measured, analytical delivery of a man who was treating the potential death of his wife like a tactical assessment.“Will you shut your mouth.”The words came out hard and sudden, cutting across the room with the force of something that had been held under pressure for too long and had finally blown through whatever was containing it. Rose's father took a step forward, his hands no longer hanging at his sides but clenched, his face flushed with the particular color of a man whose fear has curdled into anger because anger is easier to inhabit than fear and he has been living in fear for the last forty minutes without anywhere to put it.“You crazy bastard,” he said, and the words were not measured or careful or constructed with any awareness of how they sounded. They were the raw output of a man who was frightened and helpless and had found a tar
Chapter 213
Rose's father made a sound that was not quite a word."The military personnel present at the ceremony were not equipped for this classification," Alex continued. "They were equipped for what the gate appeared to be initially—a minor burial gate, the kind that opens when a high-level awakener is interred in a location with concentrated spiritual energy. That is manageable. What they are dealing with now is not in the same category." He looked at the television briefly, then back at the room. "The monsters coming through a black S-level gate will not be below level fifty for the primary entity. The escort fleet will be level twenty and above. Against that, the Kings of War present—regardless of their individual levels—are going to be overwhelmed by attrition if nothing changes."The room was very quiet."What does that mean?" Rose asked, though her voice suggested she already knew and was asking because hearing it stated clearly was better than living with the implication."It means the
CHAPTER 212
Her father's mouth opened. Closed. The honest answer to the question was no, and they both knew it, and the knowing of it sat between them with the uncomfortable weight of a truth that has been asked for directly and cannot be deflected."I don't understand why you keep supporting him," her father said, and the frustration in his voice had shifted—it was less sharp now, less directed, carrying more of the genuine bewilderment of a man who could not reconcile what he believed about Alex with what he observed in his daughter's consistent, unwavering defense of him. "I don't understand it. He has done something to you. He has—I don't know what it is, but he has gotten into your head somehow, and you cannot see clearly because of it. That is the only explanation that makes sense to me."Rose looked at her father for a long moment. The look was not unkind. It was the look of a woman who loves someone and is watching them be wrong about something important and has decided that this is not t
CHAPTER 211
The living room had taken on the particular atmosphere of a space where people are waiting for something they cannot control and cannot stop thinking about—the television still running its fragmented, inadequate coverage of the mountain, the news crawl still cycling through its urgent summary of an event that was too large and too fast-moving for journalism to properly contain, the footage still showing that darkness above the peak that looked wrong in every way that darkness could look wrong.Rose stood in the middle of it and looked at her father with the expression of a daughter who has known her parents long enough to recognize the specific texture of a lie by omission—not the dramatic, constructed lie of someone trying to deceive, but the quieter, more uncomfortable evasion of someone who knows the truth and has decided, for reasons they believe are good ones, that the truth is not what this moment needs.She had seen that expression on her father's face before. Not often—he was
CHAPTER 210
The news coverage was fragmented and incomplete, as news coverage of gate events always was in the early stages—the reporters positioned at the base of the mountain, their cameras pointed upward at the atmospheric disturbance visible above the peak, their voices carrying the particular combination of professional composure and barely suppressed alarm that journalists deployed when they were covering something that exceeded their prepared categories. The gate was visible from the base. The black of it was visible even from that distance, a darkness above the mountain that was wrong in the way that all gate phenomena were wrong—too concentrated, too deliberate, too clearly not a natural weather event.The crawl at the bottom of the screen said: *S-CLASS GATE EVENT CONFIRMED — MOUNTAIN DISTRICT — MILITARY RESPONSE MOBILIZING — CIVILIANS ADVISED TO EVACUATE SURROUNDING AREAS.*S-class.Rose's father had been in proximity to the military world long enough to know what S-class meant. He had
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