THE UNBOUND MORTAL

Chapter 2

Logan adjusted his collar. "I am leaving. Take your hand off your sword, Brandon. You are blocking the ramp."

The crowd gasped. Several initiates laughed nervously.

"Did this blank just give an order to Young Master Cox?" someone whispered from the back.

"He must be insane. S-Rank Berserker... one backhand from Brandon could turn a normal human skull into mush."

Brandon’s smile did not fade, but his eyes turned cold and sharp. "You think you can walk away from me with your head up? A waste without an interface should know how to greet his betters. On your knees, Carter."

"No," Logan said.

Brandon took a half-step forward. The crimson letters above his head flared with blinding, furious intensity.

[Skill Activated: Warlord’s Dominion (Rank 1)]

The air inside a twenty-foot circle suddenly turned as heavy as wet sand. A red, translucent shockwave rippled out from Brandon’s boots. The pressure fell like an iron weight dropped from the ceiling.

Two civilian scribes sitting at the registry desk twenty feet away let out muffled yelps as their chairs splintered; they hit the stone floor on all fours, unable to lift their chests, their breath knocked out of them. Even the initiates with low-tier E-Rank systems staggered, their legs shaking, their interfaces flickering with danger warnings.

"Kneel!" Brandon commanded, his voice magnified by the skill’s vocal shock. "Kneel, press your forehead against the floor, and lick the mud off my iron boot! Do it, and I might let you keep your tongue to beg for bread in the Outer Ward!"

Victoria stood behind Brandon, watching with cold indifference. "Do it, Logan," she muttered. "Do not be foolish. A mortal cannot fight the weight of a divine skill."

The crimson gravity slammed down onto Logan’s shoulders.

To an ordinary man, it felt like two hundred pounds of solid lead pressing directly onto the spine. Most men would have crumpled instantly, their knee joints buckling, their faces smashing against the tiles.

Logan felt the weight. He felt the sudden crush of air against his skin.

“External force vector: seventy degrees downward,” Logan’s mind calculated with cold, mechanical clarity. “Artificial pressure. It does not touch the bones directly; it pushes the atmosphere down.”

Logan did not panic. For five years, while other boys sat in their rooms praying to the sky for an S-Rank gift, Logan had tied iron bars to his legs and climbed the steep stone steps of the Southern Mountain. 

He had studied the way oxen pulled heavy carts through thick clay. He had learned how the body carried weight not with magical mana, but with the perfect, geometric balance of bone against bone.

Logan did not bend. He shifted his right heel back three inches. He turned his hips five degrees to the left. He unlocked his knees by a fraction of an inch, tucking his pelvis inward, aligning his cervical spine with his lumbar vertebrae.

His body became an arch bridge.

Instead of fighting the gravity with his soft muscle, he channeled the downward pressure straight through the long bones of his thighs, down his shins, and into the soles of his heavy boots.

The white marble tile directly beneath Logan’s boots shattered into spiderweb fractures. Gray stone dust puffed outward around his ankles.

Yet Logan remained standing. His back was straight. His chin was level. His eyes were steady and clear.

Brandon’s smile froze.

The crimson light around Brandon’s greatsword flickered. For a fraction of a second, the noble heir’s face showed something raw, ugly, and confused.

"What...?" Brandon whispered.

In that exact moment, Logan saw it.

It was the flaw he had spent three years documenting while watching system users duel in the public arenas.

Whenever a system user activated an aura skill, their brain had to wait for the interface to display the confirmation prompt: [Skill Sustained]. For an ordinary person, half a second was nothing. But in a fight between living creatures, half a second was an eternity.

Brandon was trapped in his own system's cast-recovery window. His balance was tilted forward, his weight shifted too heavily onto his front toes to support his aggressive posture. His mana was busy projecting the aura, leaving his physical muscle fibers relaxed and unguarded.

Logan moved. He did not use mana. He had none. There was no golden light, no crimson flash, no thunderous magical hum.

There was only the violent, explosive contraction of trained human tendon and muscle.

Logan’s front foot drove into the floor, using the very downward pressure Brandon was generating to slingshot his body forward like an iron spring. He closed the six-foot gap between them in the space of an intake of breath.

He slipped straight inside the guard of Brandon’s long broadsword.

Brandon’s eyes widened. His system finally registered an approaching threat, but his fingers were still waiting for the cooldown bar to cycle. "You—"

Logan turned his shoulder, tucked his elbow, and drove the hard heel of his open right palm upward at a forty-five-degree angle directly into Brandon’s solar plexus, right beneath the edge of his crimson breastplate.

It was not a wide, theatrical punch. It was a three-inch kinetic release, throwing the entire mass of Logan's seventy-kilogram frame through a single point of impact.

The sound was not magical. It was the wet, sickening sound of an axe striking a dead tree trunk.