Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 486: Lightning And Thunder [III]

Thalia felt like she was watching something out of a legend, both horrified and in awe.

She swayed a little then collapsed to one knee.

“M’lady, are you okay?!” came Moria’s concerned shout.

Of course she wasn’t okay.

She had thrown everything she had into taking out Samael. And nothing proved to be enough.

Down there in the clearing, Samael was moving like a wraith, weaving between attacks, hacking and slashing monsters with his claw. Weirdly enough, not a drop of blood had spilled yet. Not even his own.

Anytime blood was drawn, his dark limb would absorb it on contact.

Weirder still, Thalia was sure that wasn’t a Transformation Card. She didn’t see him draw one.

It’s a graft, she realized. So Aunt has already chosen her side.

Not a surprise. Morgan never favored either of her nieces. According to the Queen of Smiles, one was too indecisive in her softness and the other was too mindless in her cruelty.

But still, to give Samael a graft…

Soulmancers were already so rare.

Soulmancers as skillful as Morgan Kaizer Theosbane were outright non-existent, meaning the gift she had bestowed upon her nephew was as priceless as at least a Mythical-grade weapon. Maybe even more.

And yet, that still wasn’t where the real terror lay.

What truly sent a chill up Thalia’s spine was… just… how easily Samael shrugged off the biggest lightning bolt she threw at him.

No B-ranker should’ve survived that attack! None!

He’s projecting Essence outside his body.

That’s the only explanation that made sense. But, at the same time… it didn’t.

While B-rankers could sense and manipulate Essence, they could only do so within the bounds of their own flesh. Only A-rankers could project Essence outside their bodies.

Was Samael using some kind of Circulation Technique that allowed him to bypass that rule? Did such a thing even exist?

“M’lady! We need to pull back!” Moria’s voice piped up again, higher this time, tinged with panic. “Yasmeen’s thralls are falling apart! She can’t hold the perimeter much longer!”

Thalia forced her gaze back down to the smoking scar of the clearing.

It was a slaughterhouse.

The rotting stag lay motionless, its festering torso completely caved in and drained to a hollow husk. The giant serpent’s head had been blown to smithereens by one of Vajra’s lightning blasts.

Samael was shirtless, lean muscles on full display. A jagged scar married his back, probably the result of taking a direct hit of Thalia’s lightning.

The dark, charcoal-rough flesh of his right arm was cracked in patches, ember-bright veins pulsing beneath the blackened skin like magma trapped under cooling obsidian.

There was no anger on his face. No desperation. He was amused. He was… dancing! He moved to evade and strike with such smoothness it felt like he was dancing, theatrically running a hand through his golden locks from time to time.

One minute was almost up.

Moria was right. They needed to pull back.

But pull back to where?

If Thalia stormed the Ebony Castle right now, she would find Alexia Von Zynx guarding the crown there.

Thalia really didn’t want to fight that freaky blind girl, especially when there was a chance that Samael would wrap things up here soon and chase them from behind.

They would be caught in a vice, pinched between a rock and a hard place.

No. There was no pulling back now.

This had to be her last stand.

“Hit me again,” Thalia coughed out, lifting herself up.

Moria blinked, her deep violet eyes widening in uncertainty and fear behind her thick lenses. “L-Lady Thalia?! You’ll die! Your body can’t handle another hit — your pathways are already burning! You’re coughing blood!”

“I said hit me again!” Thalia barked, wiping a red smudge from the side of her bloody lips. But when Moria didn’t immediately comply, Thalia turned to see that the girl looked genuinely worried for her. Thalia’s glare softened. “Hey, I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.”

But it was hard not to worry about her.

Redirecting natural lightning with nothing but one’s internal Essence Circulation was a miracle. You needed to split the charge — letting a fraction of it pass into your own body to form a closed circuit before venting the rest through your weapon.

Your Essence control needed to be perfect down to the microscopic level if you didn’t want the current to fry you from inside out.

Pulling it off once was lucky. Pulling it off twice was a miracle. Pulling it off thrice was self-destruction. But pulling it off again and again at will like Thalia was doing right now was… beyond logic.

It was statistically impossible.

What kind of generational prodigy do you have to be able to turn yourself into a literal living conduit for the wrath of the heavens?

Moria bit down on her lip until it bled, but she didn’t argue further. She raised her ornate wooden staff toward the sky once more and wept. “Forgive me, Lady Thalia!”

Up in the clouds, the artificial tempest howled.

The swirling clouds turned a shade darker, churning with a terrifying amount of electrical tension.

To an outsider, the situation might’ve looked hopeless.

Even if Thalia shoots down another lightning bolt, Samael would just dodge it. Sure, he couldn’t outrun lightning, but he could make Thalia miss.

Moreover, nearly all of Yasmeen’s tamed beasts were already butchered.

The battle was all but over.

…But Thalia knew better.

Though Samael had easily tanked the first hit, he didn’t escape it entirely unscathed. The smoking scar across his back and the faint tremor in his legs right after impact were proof.

Proof that while he was a monster, he was a monster of flesh and blood. If he could be hurt, he could be brought down.

All Thalia needed was someone to hit him with an attack of the same magnitude as hers at the exact time her lightning descended.

A synchronized strike he couldn’t dodge, deflect, or tank simultaneously would break his defense.

The only problem was that no one here could match the level Thalia was currently operating at.

Thanks to Moria and her innate ability, Thalia’s damage output was comfortably pushing past the limits of a peak B-rank, verging on the threshold of a weak A-rank attack. None of the remaining Cadets under her command had that kind of firepower.

None except one.

Using Vincent Cleverly’s pact imposition, Alice had traded off the use of her own innate ability for the next the two fights she’d be in, in exchange for one enormous surge in her Essence reserves.

But since she only got one shot at it, she had been holding back, lurking in the treeline just out of sight and waiting for that precise moment when Samael finally slipped.

It almost felt like that moment would never come.

…Then it finally did.

One of the few remaining creatures, a large dire wolf with a scorpion tail, lunged at Samael from behind.

The golden-haired boy, having already sensed the danger, jumped. It looked like he was performing a vaulted backflip— until he twisted himself mid-air and brought down his predatory claws on the back of the beast’s exposed neck.

The snappy momentum of his sudden twist helped Samael tear through the wolf’s tough hide, but it also sent him spinning off-balance.

Being the exalted fighter that he was, Samael would easily catch himself and stick the landing.

He just needed a split second.

Coincidentally, his sister also needed this exact split second.

In the air, you could change your position but not your trajectory. Samael was already falling. They knew exactly where he would land, and that was all they needed to not miss.

“Now!” Thalia cried out.

The tempest answered her.

A brilliant arc of azure lightning ran across the dark clouds above with a deafening crack, illuminating the entire cliffside in a flash before plunging to meet Thalia’s raised sword.

Her body shuddered from the impact, but she held her ground, forcing the immense current into the cruciform blade.

For the briefest instant, the sword became brighter than the sun.

Then Thalia swung it downward.

The accumulated lightning erupted from the tip and raced toward the clearing below with enough force to turn the air itself into a vibrating haze.

At almost the exact same moment, deep within the thickest cluster of mangroves, something else began to glow.

Alice had both hands extended in front of her, and directly above them hovered a sphere of fire that grew larger and larger with every passing second.

The churning flames were initially the same shade of red as her hair, burning so intensely that the surrounding mangroves were bathed in their bloody radiance. Gradually, however, the fire compressed inward, shifting from red to orange.

But it didn’t stop there. The sphere kept on compressing, the flames burning hotter by the second until the fire finally turned blue-white.

Then the sphere began to deform.

One side of the fireball stretched forward, elongating into a long, conical spike. At this point, the entire fiery projectile was resembling the warhead of some monstrous missile.

It then started spinning faster and faster, the rotating flames twisting into a blazing drill as Alice poured everything she had into it.

At last, with a scream, Alice thrust both hands forward.

The flaming drill exploded out of the mangroves.

It ripped through the forest like a cannonball, vaporizing leaves and branches in its path as it raced toward the exact point where Samael would land.

And Samael saw both attacks coming. The lightning descending from above. The flaming projectile screaming toward him from the side.

There was nowhere to dodge.

Funnily enough, he didn’t even try to dodge.

Instead, Samael brought his own clawed hand toward his chest… and drove it straight into his own chest.

KACH—!

He… stabbed himself!

The next microsecond, world-ending destruction swallowed the clearing. ​The azure lightning and the blue-fire warhead detonated simultaneously upon impact.

The resulting explosion swallowed the clearing whole.

KRAAAAAAAAA-BOOOOOM—!!!

A thundering firestorm erupted from the point of impact, crackling lightning and blazing blue-orange flames twisting together into a whirlwind.

A searing heatwave rolled across the marshlands, bending trees and sending burning fragments flying in every direction while sparks danced through the air like a swarm of incandescent insects.

Mud, stone, and mangrove roots were blasted apart as the impact carved a massive crater into the earth, sending a column of smoke, dust, steam, and chunks of charred rock geysering into the night.

For several seconds, nothing could be seen.

The clearing had become a scene from hell.

Thalia stared down from the cliff, barely breathing as the smoke continued to billow upward. She waited. And waited. And waited.

The silence stretched on for what felt like minutes when barely any time at all had passed.

Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen.

The silence dragged on for an uncomfortably long time until a powerful gale suddenly swept through the crater, pushing the enormous cloud of dust and ash outward and revealing the destruction beneath it.

Thalia’s breath caught.

Standing in the center of the crater was Samael.

He looked almost exactly as he had before the attack. Shirtless, golden hair slightly tousled, holding his stance in the charred mud.

Except… something about him had changed.

The air around his body was visibly bending and rippling, warping light like heat rising off desert asphalt.

It was as if the space immediately surrounding him had become slightly distorted.

A few burning embers drifted toward him from the surrounding wreckage, only to stop several inches away from his body and hang there motionless, as though they had collided with an invisible wall. One by one, they simply went dark.

Thalia felt cold sweat on her spine, her mind struggling and refusing to understand what her eyes were showing her.

It took her an embarrassingly long second to come to terms with reality.

Using the blood of his own heart, paired with the forced 40% increased Essence Regeneration against his debuff, he had broken through his limit under pressure.

Samael had just ascended to A-rank.

The air distorting around him was the result of his Spiritual Pressure fully manifesting. That was how he blocked those attacks.

It… was over.

The daunting realization hadn’t even fully settled in her mind when Samael moved. There was no sound of footsteps and no burst of wind.

He vanished from his spot so fast he left behind an afterimage. Even Thalia couldn’t track his movement at all.

Yasmeen didn’t know what to make of anything either as Samael materialized directly in front of her nearest thrall — the tall, long-limbed humanoid woman protecting the puppeteer.

What happened next was just humiliation.

With a casual flick of his dark claw — wrapped in the same distorted air that surrounded the rest of his body, the Spirit Force — he literally shredded the nightmarish abomination apart.

Yasmeen, for the first time since her appearance, showed emotion. She gulped in fear.

Her face turned a shade paler than the dead flesh around her stitches. Trembling, she tried to take a single step backward, away from the golden-haired demon that had just erased her strongest thrall in a breath.

She turned around to run—

But gasped when she saw Samael was somehow standing right in front of her. Pain flared in her tummy, sharp and stinging. She looked down and saw his dark claws were already buried deep into her midsection.

“You’re fucking annoying,” he said to her, nonchalant in his demeanor as if this was just another Sunday for him. “We need to have a talk after this Mock War is over.”

Then her vision went dark.

He must’ve deliberately missed her vitals, because the moment her eyes rolled back and her body began to topple over, a shadowy blur whisked her unconscious form away from the field.

Before Yasmeen’s fading shadow had even fully vanished from the air, Samael was gone again.

In a display of utterly supernatural speed, he vanished and materialized at the treeline — standing tall and unbothered directly in front of a wide-eyed, completely petrified Alice.

“Now then,” he purred, his voice echoing with the mountainous Spiritual Pressure of an A-ranker. “Where were you until now?”