Chapter : 553

A flicker of the old despair, the old inadequacy, threatened to rise within him. But the Major General, the man who had faced down impossible odds and refused to break, crushed it ruthlessly. This was not a defeat. This was data. A baseline assessment. His father had just shown him the goal, the pinnacle of the power he himself possessed. And it was a mountain he would, one day, learn to climb.

But for today… for today, the lesson was not about winning. It was about surviving. And about showing his father that the rapier, while small, still had a few very, very sharp, and very, very unexpected, tricks up its sleeve.

He took a deep, steadying breath, his resolve hardening. The first round had been a test of steel against steel. And he had lost. Decisively. Now, it was time for the second round. A test of fire.

The silence in the training ground was a heavy, oppressive thing. The echo of shattering steel, of Lloyd’s best, most refined attack being contemptuously swatted from the air, still seemed to hang in the quiet afternoon. He stood panting slightly, not from physical exertion, but from the raw, psychic shock of the power backlash. It felt like he had thrown his hardest punch against an unyielding fortress wall and had only succeeded in shattering his own knuckles.

His father, Arch Duke Roy Ferrum, stood opposite him, a pillar of calm, unassailable power. He had not moved. He had not broken a sweat. His expression was still one of cool, clinical assessment, the look of a master observing the clumsy, predictable efforts of a novice. The words echoed in Lloyd’s mind, a cold, hard, and undeniable truth: You wield a rapier. I wield a mountain.

The gulf in their raw Steel Blood power was not just a gap; it was a chasm. A vast, humbling, and seemingly unbridgeable abyss. Any further attempt to challenge his father on that front, to engage in a duel of chains, would be not just futile, but foolish. It would be like a small river trying to erode a granite cliff face. He would only exhaust himself, chipping away at an obstacle that was, for now, absolute.

From the edge of the training circle, Ken Park watched, his face the usual impassive mask. But Lloyd, who was becoming increasingly attuned to the subtle tells of the stoic bodyguard, saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Not pity. Not surprise. But a kind of quiet, professional respect. He had seen Lloyd’s attack—the speed, the precision, the sheer number of chains—and had recognized the immense skill it represented, even in its failure. And he had seen the Arch Duke’s response, a casual display of overwhelming power that few in the world had ever witnessed. Ken was not just a spectator; he was a silent, analytical witness to a lesson in the absolute, terrifying hierarchy of power.

Lloyd felt a familiar, bitter taste in his mouth—the taste of inadequacy, a ghost from his first, failed life. The feeling of being hopelessly, comprehensively, outmatched. The old Lloyd would have crumbled. He would have conceded, his spirit broken, his already fragile confidence shattered. He would have accepted his own inferiority as a fundamental, unchangeable fact.

But he was not the old Lloyd. He was a man of three lifetimes, a soul forged in the fires of failure, of grief, of war, of innovation. And he had learned a crucial lesson, a lesson that transcended worlds, a lesson that was as true on a high-tech battlefield as it was in a magical duel: if you cannot win a battle of attrition, if you cannot overwhelm the enemy with superior force, then you do not engage on their terms. You change the rules of the game. You introduce a new, unexpected variable. You attack from a different, unforeseen, angle.

His father expected another, perhaps more desperate, attempt with the Steel Chains. He expected a tactical retreat, a concession of his son’s inferior power. He was waiting for the rapier to try, foolishly, to strike the mountain again.

He was not expecting Lloyd to set the mountain on fire.

A slow, grim, and deeply, profoundly, dangerous smile touched Lloyd’s lips. The despair vanished, replaced by the cold, exhilarating thrill of a gambler about to go all-in on a single, audacious, and utterly unpredictable, hand.

“Your mastery of the Steel Blood is… absolute, Father,” Lloyd acknowledged, his voice calm, steady, betraying none of the internal turmoil. He even offered a slight, respectful bow, a gesture of a student conceding a point to his master. “In a contest of pure Void Power, of our shared bloodline, I am, as you say, a child before a giant.”

Chapter : 554

Roy’s expression didn’t change, but Lloyd saw a flicker of something—disappointment? satisfaction?—in his eyes. He thought the boy was about to yield.

“But,” Lloyd continued, his voice dropping, acquiring a new, strange, and almost predatory, intensity, “you said this was a test of my full progress. Of all my abilities.” He straightened up, his eyes, which had been downcast in feigned deference, now blazing with a new, fierce light. “And my Steel Blood… it is no longer my only strength.”

Before Roy could even process the words, before he could formulate a response to his son’s cryptic, almost challenging, statement, Lloyd acted.

He threw his head back and roared.

It was not a roar of rage, or pain, or defiance. It was a roar of summons. A raw, primal call that resonated not just in the air, but in the very fabric of the spiritual plane. And in that same instant, he opened the floodgates of his will, not to his Void power, but to his bonds. His two, secret, and unimaginably powerful, Transcended spirit partners.

The training ground, which had been a stage for a simple, if brutal, duel of steel, became the epicenter of a cataclysm.

The world erupted. It was not a single, clean manifestation. It was a violent, chaotic, and utterly overwhelming, declaration of war from two different dimensions at once.

To Lloyd’s left, the air tore apart with a sound like a thousand striking whips, a silent, silver-and-azure rupture in reality. Fang Fairy materialized, not as a gentle, ethereal goddess, but as a being of pure, untamed, elemental fury. Her silver-grey hair was a raging storm cloud, crackling with raw, uncontrolled lightning. Her golden eyes were not just intelligent; they were blazing, incandescent suns of pure, predatory rage. And her Lightning Cloak, her defensive aura, was no longer a gentle, humming nimbus; it was a raging, white-hot, and blindingly brilliant inferno of azure plasma, so intense it scorched the very air around her, leaving trails of superheated ozone in its wake. She let out a silent scream, a concussive blast of pure spiritual pressure that made the stone walls of the training ground groan, her entire being a focused, singular expression of her master’s will to fight.

And to his right, a second, even more terrifying, miracle of destruction occurred. The ground itself seemed to blacken, to char, as an intense, suffocating wave of pure, dry heat erupted from a point of nothingness. A vortex of swirling, crimson-red light and black, oily smoke tore its way into existence, a gateway to a realm of pure, eternal fire. And from that gate, Iffrit stepped forth.

The nine-foot-tall demon of magma and flame was no longer the silent, contained statue from the Soul Farm. He was a god of war, unleashed. The crimson veins in his jagged, obsidian-like armor pulsed with the furious, rhythmic beat of a volcanic heart. The two points of white-hot fire in his faceless helmet blazed with a terrifying, sentient malice. And his colossal, twelve-foot-long zanbatō was no longer sheathed in a gentle, licking caress of flame. It was a roaring, chaotic, and all-consuming, wildfire, a river of molten plasma that roared with a silent, spiritual sound that promised only one thing: utter, complete, and glorious, annihilation.

The two spirits materialized simultaneously, flanking Lloyd, a breathtaking, terrifying tableau of elemental devastation. On one side, the storm. On the other, the inferno. And in the center, the quiet, unassuming nineteen-year-old boy who was their master, his face a mask of cold, hard resolve, his dark eyes burning with the reflected light of both lightning and fire.

The sheer, combined spiritual pressure of two fully manifested, combat-ready, Transcended spirits slammed into the training ground like a physical tidal wave. The very air grew thick, heavy, hard to breathe. The ground trembled. The ancient stone walls of the arena, which had withstood centuries of duels, began to groan, to crack, under the sheer, overwhelming weight of so much concentrated power.

And for the first time since Lloyd had returned to this life, for the first time in what was likely decades, he saw his father, the unshakeable, indomitable, Beyond-Rank Arch Duke Roy Ferrum, falter.

Roy’s eyes, which had been a mask of cool, analytical assessment, were now wide with a look of pure, undiluted, and absolutely, comprehensively, stunned disbelief. His jaw, which had been set in a line of stern authority, had gone slack. He took an involuntary half-step back, his body reacting with a primal, instinctual shock that his powerful, disciplined mind could not suppress.