Chapter : 625

The bandit leader’s mind had shattered. The world had ceased to make sense. One moment, he was the predator, the strongman in charge of a simple, profitable ambush. The next, a god of lightning had descended from the heavens and his entire crew had been annihilated in a silent, terrifying massacre. He stared at the young nobleman, who stood calmly amidst the carnage, and the beautiful, terrible spirit beside him, and he understood. He had not picked a fight with a merchant. He had kicked open the gates of hell.

His survival instincts, honed over years of brutal living, screamed at him to run, to beg, to do anything but fight. But his pride, the last vestige of the man he thought he was, refused to yield. With a desperate, guttural roar that was more fear than fury, he unleashed his own power.

“Boron!” he bellowed, and the ground trembled.

His spirit materialized beside him, a colossal obsidian-furred bear, its eyes burning with red malice. It was a powerful Ascended-level spirit, a beast of pure, brute force that had crushed countless foes. The bandit leader didn't hesitate. He slammed his fist into his own chest, chanting a dark, guttural incantation. “Merge!”

Dark energy swirled around him and his spirit. His body contorted, bones cracking and reshaping. Fur sprouted from his skin, his muscles bulged, and his face elongated into a feral, ursine snout. In seconds, he was transformed into a monstrous, nine-foot-tall humanoid bear, a terrifying fusion of man and beast, radiating an aura of raw, unrestrained power. This was his trump card, the source of his reputation.

Lloyd watched the transformation with a detached, clinical interest. An Ascended-level merge. Impressive, for a common bandit. But ultimately, it was just a bigger, slower target.

“Fang Fairy,” Lloyd said calmly. “You may stand down. This one is mine.”

The spirit looked at him, a flicker of concern in her golden eyes, but she obeyed, vanishing as silently as she had appeared. The bear-man, seeing the lightning goddess disappear, felt a surge of false hope. He thought his opponent had made a fatal error.

“You arrogant fool!” the bear-man roared, his voice a gravelly rumble. “You send your guardian away? I will tear you limb from limb!”

He charged, the ground shaking with each thunderous step. He was an avalanche of muscle and fury, a living battering ram.

Lloyd smiled. It was a cold, serene smile. “You misunderstand,” he said, his voice carrying effortlessly over the creature’s roar. “I did not send her away to fight you alone. I sent her away so she would not get caught in the crossfire.”

He closed his eyes for a single, fleeting second. He reached into his soul, not for the cold steel of his Ferrum power, but for the raging storm of his spirit. He invited the hurricane in. “Merge.”

The world exploded in a column of incandescent silver-and-azure light. The bear-man skidded to a halt, shielding his eyes from the blinding radiance. The very air warped and screamed as reality was reforged around Lloyd. When the light subsided, the young nobleman was gone.

In his place stood the storm-forged prince.

His dark hair was now streaked with veins of pure, incandescent silver that crackled with contained energy. His eyes were no longer human; they were twin pools of molten gold. Ethereal, wolf-like ears, woven from moonlight and shadow, twitched atop his head, catching every subtle shift in the air. A swirling cloak of azure lightning and starlight wrapped around his form. He was a being of terrifying, sublime beauty, a fusion of man and god.

He raised a hand, and his simple practice sword flew into his grasp. The moment he touched it, the mundane steel was instantly engulfed in a sheath of roaring, azure lightning.

The bear-man stared, his monstrous form trembling, his mind unable to process the divine being before him.

Lloyd—the new, merged Lloyd—smiled, and his voice was a perfect, harmonious dual resonance of his own and Fang Fairy’s. “The opponent you chose was a lord. The opponent you will face,” he said, his golden eyes locking onto the beast, “is a storm.”

Before the bear-man could even process the words, Lloyd attacked. He didn’t charge; he simply ceased to be where he was and appeared directly in front of his opponent. The speed was not physical; it was conceptual. He was moving at the speed of lightning itself.

Chapter : 626

The lightning-wreathed sword became a blur of azure light. The bear-man, for all his brute strength, was laughably slow. He swung his massive claws, but he was swinging at after-images, at the echoes of where Lloyd had been a microsecond before. Lloyd flowed around him, a graceful, lethal dance of death. His blade left searing, cauterized gashes across the creature’s thick hide. The smell of ozone and burnt fur filled the air.

Enraged and terrified, the bear-man roared and slammed his fists into the ground, sending a shockwave of earth and stone erupting towards Lloyd. Lloyd didn’t even dodge. He simply allowed his Lightning Cloak to flare, and the shockwave disintegrated into dust against the shimmering wall of energy.

“Too slow,” the merged voice whispered, a sound like thunder and chimes.

Lloyd appeared behind the beast. He drove his sword forward in a single, clean, decisive thrust. The lightning-sheathed blade pierced through the thick, furred hide, through the dense muscle and bone, and straight through the creature’s heart.

The bear-man froze. A look of profound, terminal shock crossed his monstrous face. He looked down at the blade of pure lightning protruding from his chest. He tried to speak, but only a gurgle of blood and black smoke emerged.

Lloyd retracted his sword. The bear-man stood for a moment, a statue of defeated rage, before his merged form dissolved in a shower of dark energy, leaving the corpse of the bandit leader to collapse onto the blood-soaked road.

The duel was over.

As Lloyd’s own merged form receded, leaving him standing once more as himself, the perspective shifted. On a high, distant ridge, hidden by the deep shadows of the forest, two figures watched through a scrying lens.

Kael lowered the device, his face pale, a sheen of cold sweat on his brow. “Did… did you see that?” he stammered. “The speed… the power… It’s impossible. He’s a monster.”

Jager, his face hidden in the cowl of his cloak, was silent for a long moment. He let out a low, appreciative chuckle. “Oh, he’s more than a monster, Kael. He’s a masterpiece.” He turned his glowing green eyes toward his nervous companion. “And that is precisely why we cannot afford to fail. A direct confrontation is, as I said, suicide. We will not challenge the storm head-on.”

His voice became a cold, confident purr. “We will poison the well. We will turn the city against him. We will let the lion’s own den be the thing that devours him. Our plan proceeds. Let him play the god-king on the battlefield. The real war will be fought in the shadows, and it is a war he has already lost.”

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The Bathelham Royal Academy was a place of ghosts for Lloyd Ferrum. Every manicured lawn, every ivy-draped stone wall, every echoing corridor held a phantom of his past self—the timid, disappointing heir, the ‘drab duckling’ who had been unceremoniously expelled. Now, he walked these same halls not as a failure, but as a Special Category Professor, a title so absurdly ironic it felt like a cosmic joke. The weight of it was both a burden and a strange, satisfying vindication.

His new office, a small antechamber attached to the main faculty lounge, was a testament to his unique and somewhat isolated position. The other professors, a collection of wizened mages and stern martial instructors, treated him with a polite but distinct distance. They had heard the whispers: the King’s personal appointee, the eccentric heir of House Ferrum who had somehow become a Royal Advisor. They saw his youth and the scandalous tales of his sudden rise and kept their professional counsel. He was an anomaly, a variable they couldn’t yet solve, and so they watched him with the cautious curiosity one affords a strange, potentially volatile alchemical compound.

Lloyd finished arranging a small set of geological samples on his desk—a piece of crystalline salt from his brine fields, a shard of high-grade iron ore, and a lump of coal. To anyone else, they were mundane rocks. To him, they were the foundational elements of his burgeoning empire, tangible reminders of the real-world power he was building to fuel his secret, otherworldly war.

He stood and walked to the large, mullioned window that overlooked one of the Academy’s many training gardens. The late morning sun cast a warm, golden glow over the scene below. A class of first-year students was gathered on a lawn of impossibly green grass, seated in a semicircle around their instructor. Lloyd recognized the teacher—a kindly, white-bearded mage named Master Horatio, who specialized in foundational Spirit Theory. Today was a practical class.

His gaze drifted over the students, their faces a mixture of earnest concentration and youthful boredom. And then, his eyes found her.

Airin.