Immediately without anyone time Lewis rushed forward on shaking legs to get a closer look at what had just happened. His mind couldn't process what his eyes had seen. There was absolutely no way Alex should have been able to destroy that golden bell with just his bare fist. Especially not after Henry King had secretly made it five times stronger than normal.
Lewis tried to calculate in his head what kind of power it would take to completely shatter a bell with that much magical energy flowing through it. And to do it with a single punch using no weapons or spells. The numbers didn't make sense to him. That level of strength was completely off any chart he knew about. “I told you I passed beyond the Warrior Realm a long time ago.” Alex brushed the golden dust off his knuckles and started walking back toward the platform like nothing unusual had happened. Master Lawrence and Mrs. Lawrence stood frozen in place, staring at the scattered pieces of metal on the floor. Their minds struggled to accept what they had witnessed with their own eyes. Both of them had reached the fourth stage of the Warrior Realm after years of training. On their best day, they might be able to put a small scratch on a bell like that. But to completely destroy it with bare hands in a single hit? That was impossible for people at their level. A terrifying thought crept into both their minds at the same time. Did that mean Alex, the nobody they had looked down on yesterday, was actually stronger than both of them combined. King of War Henry King stood completely motionless, his mind racing faster than his body could keep up with. Everyone else in the room had seen Alex destroy the golden bell with his bare fist. But Henry King's trained eyes had caught something much more significant. There had been a technique woven into that punch - an ancient fighting style that very few people in the world even knew existed. He had heard stories about this technique before. He had even watched other warriors attempt to copy it after hearing the legends. But none of them could ever master it properly. They all failed to capture the true essence of the movements like the original owner could perform them. The original owner was the Dragon King himself. The only man alive who was said to stand above every other fighter in all the magical realms combined. People called him the Lord Supreme. He had appeared out of thin air five years ago like he had dropped down from the heavens. Most people believed the gods had sent him to earth specifically to save mankind from destruction. Anyone who had been lucky enough to witness him in battle would swear that was the truth. Stories said he could face down a thousand demons at once without even working up a sweat. At that moment Henry King felt his legs begin to tremble beneath him. A cold realization hit him like ice water. Alex had been gone for exactly five years. The same amount of time since the Dragon King had first appeared. That couldn't just be some random coincidence, could it? But then he looked at how Master Lawrence and his wife had been treating Alex like he was nobody special. There was absolutely no way a regular person could climb from nothing all the way up to Dragon King level in just five years. The idea was so ridiculous it made him want to laugh out loud. Henry King stared hard at Alex and forced himself to push the crazy thought out of his head. If Alex really was the legendary Dragon King, he definitely wouldn't have come back here empty-handed like this. He would have arrived with his full title and army behind him. And he sure as hell wouldn't have sat there listening to all the disrespectful garbage everyone had been saying to him. If Alex was truly the Lord Supreme, every single person in this room would already be dead for the way they had spoken to him. Still, there was no denying that Alex had to be incredibly powerful to completely destroy that golden bell with nothing but his bare fist. “How did you do that? How did you destroy that bell with just your bare hands?” Rose finally climbed down from the platform, her legs still shaky from everything she had just witnessed. Everyone around her remained frozen in amazement, their minds still trying to process what Alex had accomplished. Alex shrugged his shoulders like nothing important had happened. “I just hit the golden bell with my bare hands. It wasn't that strong to begin with.” His casual words sent the entire hall into chaos. People started shouting and arguing with each other. Some pointed at the scattered pieces of metal on the floor. Others threw their hands up in disbelief. Henry King stepped forward through the crowd, his voice cutting through all the noise. “I saw what you really did. You were imitating the Dragon King's combat technique. Just copying that fighting style can boost someone's power by up to 1000% depending on how well they can replicate the movements.” The moment Henry King said “Dragon King,” the whole room went dead silent. Then people started backing away from each other in pure terror. Some covered their mouths with their hands. Others looked around frantically like they expected demons to burst through the walls at any second. The Dragon King was the most powerful man in their entire country. Everyone knew the stories about how the gods themselves had sent him down to earth to save humanity from the age of demons. People stared at Alex with a mixture of fear and amazement. The fact that he could copy even one of the Dragon King's combat techniques was incredible. Where in the world had he learned something like that? The Dragon King's fighting methods were supposed to be completely secret. No one had access to training manuals or teachers who knew those moves. At that moment Rose felt her heart racing as she processed what Henry King had just explained. She couldn't believe that simply copying the Dragon King's attack style could create such devastating power. And somehow Alex had managed to pull it off perfectly. Even though she now understood it was an imitation and not Alex's own natural strength, she didn't think any less of him. If anything, she was more impressed than before. Lewis stepped closer to get a better look at Alex, his voice filled with reluctant respect. “Being able to use the Dragon King's skill means he has to be a real awakener.”Latest Chapter
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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