CHAPTER 37: CH-37- HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?

A collective, stunned silence gripped the chamber. . The expected script had been simple: the Hunters under Sebastian’s command would bear the remains away, a grim trophy to be presented to the Guild. The drama was over. Or so they had thought.

Reality tore itself in two.

One moment, Sebastian was standing over his prize, his voice a low, victorious growl. The next, there was a soundless detonation of force. Sebastian was simply elsewhere, hurled backward through the air as if by the hand of a god. A strangled cry was ripped from his throat, quickly drowned by a violent, convulsive spray of blood that misted the air. His teeth, a shower of white chips, clattered against the stone floor.

He seethed, a tempest of pure, undiluted rage, but even through the blinding fury, a sliver of his mind flailed in confusion.

’One minute I was talking... the next I opened my eyes to the sky.’

Disorientation was a luxury he could not afford; it was burned away by the white-hot agony in his mouth and the humiliation of his flight.

The group of hunters who had been flanking him, his personal retinue known throughout the Guild as the Notorious Five, all men graded between A and B—stared in dumbfounded shock. They were hardened veterans, infamous for the ’dungeon accidents’ that befell rival hunters and for their ruthless extortion of anyone weaker. But this? This was a language of power they did not understand, and it left them frozen.

None, however, was more stricken than Cisco. His face was a mask of despair, his mind a silent, screaming torrent of curses directed at Baelgor. You fool! You arrogant, thrice-damned fool! We could have walked away. I could have smoothed this over.

Now, the path was shattered, replaced by a precipice of all-out war. His only hope, a thin and desperate thread, was that Baelgor’s resurrection was not just a miracle of healing, but one of overwhelming strength. He prayed the man was powerful enough to survive the hurricane of vengeance he had just unleashed.

Sebastian crashed to the ground, the impact jarring another guttural groan from him. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his body trembling with more than pain. His eyes, blazing with homicidal intent, found Baelgor across the chamber. He tried to shout, to voice his threat, but his ruined mouth mangled the words into a wet, incoherent snarl.

"Yhu I wull guh yhu fur this!" he spat, blood bubbling on his lips. "Yhu wuhnt leave air alive... yhu will die a slow that..."

The specific words were lost, a garbled mess against the backdrop of his pain. But the meaning was transmitted with crystal clarity. It was in the raw hatred contorting his features, in the promise of murder that shone in his eyes. The message was received by every soul in the room, a chilling and unequivocal decree.

Sebastian was going to kill Baelgor. Slowly.

A tense silence descended, thick enough to choke on. It was broken by the synchronized scrape of boots on stone as the Notorious Five fanned out, their movements predatory and practiced. They began to close the distance toward Baelgor, a semi-circle of grim intent. The air crackled with the promise of violence.

One of them, a hulking brute with a web of scars across his knuckles, cracked his neck. A cruel smirk played on his lips, devoid of any humor.

"Kid," he drawled, the word a deliberate insult. "You are surely going to regret your actions."

That single word seemed to ignite something deeper within Baelgor. The cold anger on his face sharpened into something deadly. His eyes, which had held a weary indifference, now glinted with a dangerous light.

"Kid?"

Baelgor’s voice was low, but it carried through the chamber with the chilling clarity of a drawn blade.

"Who are you calling ’kid,’ you ape-looking bastard?" He took a single, deliberate step forward, his impatience palpable. He regarded the advancing hunters not as a threat, but as a nuisance, a parent might look upon a misbehaving child in need of a sharp correction.

Behind him, Cisco’s frantic attempts at pacification died in his throat. He saw the inevitable arc of the situation, a wagon hurtling toward a cliff’s edge. Silently, he began to withdraw, his steps slow and careful, easing himself back from Baelgor’s flank. His survival instincts, honed by years in a broken world, screamed at him to create an exit route. If this goes south, he thought, I need a clear path to run.

The thought of abandoning Baelgor caused him no moral distress. They were strangers, bound by a transaction, not blood. Even if they had been kin, Cisco’s choice would have been the same. Survival trumped heroism every time. He believed this with every fiber of his being: where power speaks, the weak must be mellow and observe. Heroism was a luxury for the powerful; for the weak, it was a prelude to a grave. This was the first and most important law of the world, the core truth that had allowed him to outlast so many others.

The Cataclysm had merely ripped away the veneer, revealing the brutal engine that had always driven humanity. In times of peace, people could afford the shackles of morality.

But the moment true hardship pressed down, those constraints evaporated, revealing the primal core beneath: survival, raw and unadorned. This was the true face of the world, and Cisco was a devoted student of its harsh lessons. He watched, ready to fade into the shadows, a spectator to the storm he knew was about to break.

The air grew thick and heavy, charged with the pent-up violence of the Notorious Five. In unison, they released their auras, a visible corona of power that shimmered around them like heat haze.

Mana boiled from their cores, a palpable pressure that made the lesser hunters in the chamber gasp and stumble back a step. They were a storm given form, ready to break upon a single man.

Baelgor did not shift his stance. He regarded the display not with fear, but with a profound, almost bored, indifference. To him, the roaring auras and boiling mana were not a threat; they were the insignificant buzzing of insects, a nuisance to be swatted away so the silence could return.

The largest of the five, the scarred man with the axe, took the initiative. With a guttural roar, he heft his massive weapon. The axe head ignited, wreathed in flames so intense they turned from orange to a searing white-hot.

A wild wind, generated by the sheer force of his mana, whipped through the chamber, causing cloaks to flap and sending dust devils skittering across the stone floor. The onlookers, hunters who barely scratched the B-rank, watched in awe. This was the true, unbridled power of an A-ranker, a force they could scarcely comprehend.

He surged forward, a comet of destruction. "Flamming Axe: Splitting Mountains!" he bellowed, the name of his technique a promise of absolute annihilation.

He launched himself high into the air, a terrifying silhouette against the chamber’s ceiling, and brought the blazing axe down with all his might, aiming to cleave Baelgor in two.

Cisco, who had already put a safe distance between himself and the inevitable carnage, winced.

It’s over,

he thought, a strange pang of regret for a life so quickly and foolishly lost mixing with his overwhelming relief at his own foresight.

Baelgor didn’t move. He didn’t brace. He simply stood there, a statue in the path of an avalanche.

The moment the flaming axe made contact, there was no cataclysmic explosion, no shriek of metal on magic. There was only a soft, almost absurd,

’POOF.’!!!

It was the sound of a candle being extinguished.

The roaring flames vanished. The terrifying aura winked out of existence. The gale-force winds died into a dead calm. The overwhelming pressure that had filled the room was simply gone, sucked away into a void.

The silence that followed was more deafening than the attack had been.

Then, a figure shot upward into the air. It was the axeman, soaring skyward as if he had been launched from a trebuchet. His weapon was gone, his arms flailed wildly, and his face was a perfect mask of stunned incomprehension. He arced against the stone vault of the ceiling before beginning a graceless, tumbling descent back to the hard floor.

A collective, silent question hung in the air, etched on every face in the chamber.

How is that possible?