Chapter 140: Thunderstrikes and Screams
BOOM!
The glass window, along with its wall, shattered as two people came out flying. Dust and debris exploded everywhere, but balls of snow hit them and froze them mid-air before transforming them into snowflakes before they hit someone.
The culprits, though, were Silas and Nelson, mostly the latter. The reason for this? Nelson was lying about being the Student Council President. Silas’s Heart Sense had stirred an interest not because the guy was interesting, but because the guy was lying so blatantly, and no one called him out.
This meant the guy was either stupid or had the kind of background to allow him to even impersonate the current strongest person in the academy. And this brings us to the current scene.
Silver lightning crackled around Nelson’s body. This was not ordinary lightning.
The silver arcs twisted unnaturally, vanishing one instant and reappearing the next several meters away. Every bolt left behind tiny fractures in space itself, causing the air to distort like shattered glass.
Silas immediately felt the difference. Space... and Lightning, and the system didn’t keep him waiting. It confirmed his suspicions.
[Ability Identified!]
[Space Lightning]
[Classification: S-Rank.]
[Warning: Spatial properties allow attacks to ignore conventional trajectories.]
Silas’s eyes narrowed.
"So there was another one."
Nelson dusted off his blazer as though being punched through a classroom wall was merely a minor inconvenience.
"You hit first."
"I asked a question."
"You were rude."
"You lied."
"Fair enough."
Students flooded into the hallway and the courtyard below, all staring upward at the gaping hole now decorating the side of the academic building.
"WHAT HAPPENED?!"
"Someone blew up the classroom!"
"Is that Silas?!"
"And..."
"Who’s the other guy?"
Teachers began rushing over. Sir Wesley was among the first. The veteran instructor stopped after sensing the mana radiating from both young men.
"S-Ranks..." He rubbed his forehead. "Of course."
Nelson stretched his neck. "I wasn’t planning on revealing this today."
Silver electricity danced between his fingers.
"But I suppose introductions are in order."
BOOM!!
The space beneath his feet collapsed, and he vanished. Silas’s Fate Thread Vision immediately expanded. Above!
He tilted his head.
A silver spear of lightning tore through the air where his skull had been a fraction of a second earlier.
CRAAAAACK!!
The classroom pavement behind him exploded, causing students to scream, while Nelson appeared thirty feet away, standing in midair atop a floating platform of distorted space.
"So..." He smiled. "Can you keep up?"
Silas answered by disappearing.
BOOM!!
The concrete beneath his feet shattered as his fist shot toward Nelson’s face. Nelson’s body flickered, causing the punch to pass harmlessly through empty air. It was a spatial afterimage.
"Too slow."
Silas instinctively leaned backward. Three silver bolts erupted from tiny tears in space around him. Instead of traveling, they just appeared, and explosions engulfed the rooftop.
But Silas emerged through the smoke without a scratch.
"Interesting." Nelson raised an eyebrow. "You dodged those?"
"I saw them."
"Impossible."
Silas smiled. "You’d be surprised."
Silver lightning erupted everywhere. This time, dozens of spatial cracks opened simultaneously. The sky itself looked fractured. Lightning poured from every direction.
Above, below, behind, and even directly in front of Silas. There was no blind spot.
"Try dodging this."
Silas didn’t. Instead, he calmly closed his eyes. His fingers twitched as invisible threads expanded throughout the battlefield. Thread Domain.
No one else could see it. To everyone watching, Silas stood still.
"What is he doing?"
"He isn’t moving!"
"Is he giving up?"
Only Chloe smiled lightly. "He’s already won."
Inside the invisible domain, thousands upon thousands of nearly imperceptible threads stretched through the air. They were not stretched randomly, but precisely.
Each one connected to another in an impossibly complex web. Nelson attacked; the silver lightning struck. Only, something strange happened. Every bolt touched one invisible thread, and stopped.
Nelson frowned.
"...?"
His spatial lightning wasn’t merely traveling anymore, nor had it actually stopped. It was changing direction.
"No..."
Silas opened one eye. "Thanks for the electricity."
He snapped his fingers, and the Thread Domain tightened. Every invisible thread shifted simultaneously like mirrors reflecting light, and rivers changing course.
The entire storm turned around, causing Nelson’s pupils to shrink.
"WHAT?!"
His own lightning vanished into dozens of spatial tears. A heartbeat later, every single portal reopened behind him, below him, above him, and beside him.
The storm returned toward its creator.
"NO, NO!"
CRAAAAAAACK!!
The silver lightning swallowed Nelson whole, and his own Space-Lightning exploded against him from every angle. His protective barriers shattered instantly. The lightning ignored them anyway, using its own spatial properties to appear inside the defenses.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!"
The courtyard echoed with his scream.
The silver-haired boy convulsed violently as thousands of volts raced across his body. His hair stood completely upright. Smoke rose from his clothes. Finally, he crashed face-first into the academy lawn, twitching uncontrollably.
Complete silence enveloped the place as everyone watched Nelson twitching on the ground, shamefully.
Silas, on the other hand, dispersed the Thread Domain and commented.
"That looked painful."
The system answered.
[Observation: It was.]
Nelson weakly raised a trembling finger.
"That’s... illegal..."
Silas walked over calmly.
"No." He crouched beside him. "You just learned an important lesson."
Nelson looked up with teary eyes.
"What?"
Silas smiled.
"If you throw lightning around, make sure it doesn’t find its way back."
Nelson groaned.
"I will kill you..."
"I’ve heard that before."
Around them, the entire academy remained speechless. An S-Rank, a genuine S-Rank with one of the rarest abilities imaginable, had just been defeated, not because Silas overpowered him, but because he’d calmly turned the battlefield itself into a trap.
Everyone could see that Silas had set a trap for him. It was too obvious.
Sir Wesley let out a long breath.
"Remind me never to fight that boy."
Chloe nodded in agreement.
"Smart choice."
As Nelson continued twitching on the grass, Silas offered him a hand.
"Now... how about we start over? My name’s Silas. And yours is?"
Nelson stared at the offered hand for several seconds before bursting into pained laughter.
"Nelson. Nelson Argent. I never said I was Student Council President... I said I was a president."
Silas blinked.
"Huh?"
Nelson sighed.
"President of City A’s Gaming Club."
"..."
"..."
Silas slowly looked toward Chloe.
"Did I punch him through a wall because I misunderstood him?"
Chloe thought for a moment.
"Yes."
Silas scratched his cheek awkwardly.
"Oops. He’s an idiot, too."