I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 701: Fly, you fools!

In the Emerald dungeon, miles beneath the earth in a dungeon designed to test the limits of what mages could achieve under lethal pressure, Drakka was growing furious with Rhys.

While every other team had run right from the start, Rhys had decided to sit down and wait.

“What are you doing, Vile Blood?! We only have an hour, let’s go!” Drakka screamed as veins began to pop out of her neck and spit flew from her mouth.

Rhys turned to his team with the kind of absolute calm that came from understanding variables that everyone else was still scrambling to comprehend.

“Drakka,” he said quietly, his voice carrying across the dark stone corridor that constituted the dungeon’s first chamber, “we don’t actually have an hour. We have twenty-four. Every other team is going to race to the fights and the bosses and wear themselves out, and with a lack of food, they will be in trouble.”

Drakka froze mid-stride, her massive axe lowering slightly as the mathematical reality crashed against her consciousness.

“The Headmaster said one hour of Erebon time,” Rhys continued, his tone carrying no judgment, only a simple explanation. “Not dungeon time. The temporal dilation beneath the basin is twenty-four to one. One hour of Erebon time scales to twenty-four full hours inside the dungeon’s temporal matrix.”

He walked past her into the darkness, his footsteps echoing through the stone corridors.

“Which means,” Rhys said, “we have all the time we need. There’s no rush. We move carefully, map the dungeon, understand what we’re facing, and then eliminate the threats when the dungeon bleeds over.”

Behind him, Drakka was processing this information. Her fierce jaw had dropped slightly. Her hand had loosened on her weapon. For the first time since the preparation bay, respect was flickering across her massive Orc features.

Anya’s breathing had stabilized. Lucan’s trembling had ceased. Bastian’s ambient heat had cooled to normal baseline levels.

And as they listened, Rhys into the darkness, the Emerald pillar in the observation chamber began to climb with steady, methodical increments.

Up in the observation chamber, the masked woman leaned slightly toward her companion, her voice barely more than a whisper, audible only by supernatural means.

“He just solved the trial,” she said softly, her tone carrying absolute certainty. “Everything else is the execution now.”

Chiron Stormblood, standing nearby, felt a slight smile cross his features.

The betting line on Emerald had just become extremely profitable.

——–

The dead zone fell into absolute silence.

Not the silence of absence, but the silence of everything holding its breath before annihilation.

The compression waves Jack had been radiating outward suddenly ceased expanding. The visible distortions in the air froze in place, caught between states of reality and unreality.

Jack brought his hands together in the center of that dead space.

In his left hand, he wielded the profound gravitational force of his recently mastered Dark magic, a force characterized by its inherent lack of luminescence, its complete absence of radiance, and its fundamental existence as the antithesis of all things.

It was the void personified, imbued with his purpose and will.

In his right hand, the high-frequency chaotic current of his golden lightning crackled with each passing second.

He forced them to collide.

The contact point didn’t create light. It consumed it.

The spatial distortion resulting from the collision exerted immense pressure on his hands, a consequence of two fundamental magical principles attempting to coexist within the same spatial coordinates.

His hand slowly began to crack and turn black.

A sharp pain emanated from his hands, characteristic of the strain associated with manipulating reality rather than fracturing it.

The gold and black sparks didn’t mix. They couldn’t. Their natures were too fundamentally opposed. Instead, they were consumed by the collision itself, collapsing inward like a star undergoing catastrophic core failure.

What emerged from that implosion was something that had no business existing.

Absolute, midnight-black voltage.

Lightning that emitted no light, that cast no reflection, that existed only as a crackling vacuum in the space where sound should have been.

The wind didn’t howl through it. The ambient roaring of the descending draconic army was silenced by its mere presence, as if the very concept of noise had been invalidated.

A unique system notification broke across Jack’s vision in a distinct runic script.

One that bypassed the standard blue screens entirely. The characters were ancient, almost crystalline in their precision, etched in a language that predated modern magical theory. Slowly, the words translated into a language he understood.

[You have recreated the lost art of the Kaisers. Black Lightning: The Lost Art of Astraios.]

[Lore Fragment: He who mapped the alignment of the outer spheres and chained the moving stars did not conquer the cosmos with light, but with the binding weight of the dark void between them. The stars do not rule the night; the black storm dictates where they burn.]

[Passive Modifier: All damage channeled through the Lost Art is granted a 3.5× Damage Multiplier.]

Jack processed the notification instantaneously. Astraios, his ancestor, was renowned for mapping the celestial spheres and commanding the stars.

His lineage was known for its formidable dark magic. However, the revelation that he also controlled lightning underscored the true extent of his power.

The black lightning writhed in his palms like two black serpents coiling around his body.

Jack activated Thunder Mantle.

The mantle of black lightning spread across his skin in an instant, coating every inch of his physical form in a humming layer of crackling void.

His entire body glowed with midnight radiance. His white hair stood completely upright, suspended by magnetic pressure.

His draconic essence, integrated so thoroughly into his physical form that the distinction between human and dragon had long since ceased to matter, synchronized with the black lightning coursing through his veins.

Jack invoked the Kaiser Bloodline skill.

[Dark Nova: Ruin Pulse.]

The obsidian sphere materialized from Jack’s grasp, exhibiting a complete absence of kinetic energy. It remained suspended momentarily, positioned between Jack’s outstretched palm and the advancing draconic forces.

It was small. Barely the size of a closed fist. A sphere of midnight-black energy that seemed to absorb every photon that touched it, creating a void of absolute darkness in the center of the purple-hazed sky.

Several of the dragons at the edges of the formation laughed at what they were witnessing.

The sound was a deep, guttural roar of amusement.

The laughter of apex predators who had just witnessed a mortal attempt to threaten them with what appeared to be a particle of shadow.

The brigades continued their descent, their formations tightening as they prepared for the moment of collision.

They detected no anomalies. There was no indication of a mana surge, no magical accumulation, and no forewarning that the observed phenomenon represented an embodiment of impending catastrophe.

The young dragons in the flanking wings gestured toward the sphere, communicating via low-frequency telepathic bursts.

Their minds were expressing amusement mixed with contempt. A human throwing a shadow-sphere at creatures that had burned civilizations into ash.

The sphere maintained its upward trajectory, with a controlled, consistent velocity.

Then the Herald Red Dragon felt it. He hadn’t felt this way since Caligo had scarred his body in front of the Dragon King.

The ancient dragon at the apex of the formation, scarred and scaled with the weight of centuries of warfare, his magical senses refined through millennia of predatory existence.

He felt the moment the black sphere crossed some invisible threshold.

His golden eyes snapped wide.

His entire massive frame convulsed with the force of what his senses were registering.

The Herald’s roar split the atmosphere itself.

Not a roar of dominance or challenge. A roar of absolute, existential terror.

“FLY, YOU FOOLS!”