Chapter 50: You Bastard
When Lucien snapped his gaze back to the ground beneath his sword, Isolde was already gone, her body dissolving into a faint cloud of golden dandelion petals.
"Oh... This can’t be happening," Lucien muttered, his dual-colored eyes burning with an immediate, lethal rage.
Lucien stood in the empty clearing, his dual-colored eyes burning with an icy, dangerous precision.
The golden dandelion petals were already scattering into the wind, leaving no physical trace of Isolde’s presence.
He was caught in a brutal tactical vice. He hadn’t killed a single beast yet, and if his score remained at zero, it would drag his entire group down to the very bottom of the rankings.
In an academy where a collective failure could lead to complete demotion, resource stripping, and expulsion, letting his rank tank would directly sabotage everyone.
The other boys in Class A would quickly turn on him for dragging their averages into the dirt.
Yet, he couldn’t simply ignore the fact that Adeline and Meghan had been forcefully displaced.
He had to hunt, he had to track, and he had to teach that golden-haired witch a lesson she wouldn’t survive.
Serena paced beside him, her face pale and filled with deep, anxious worry. "Lucien... what are we going to do? They’re gone, the beasts are not coming, and the instructors are monitoring the grids. We can’t search the entire dimension alone!"
"We aren’t alone," Lucien said calmly.
Closing his eyes, he centered his expanded mana core. The synthesized dual-node matrix inside his chest vibrated, separating the two diametrically opposed forces he had masterfully bound together.
With a sudden, silent eruption of energy, the space beside him split. The ambient light fractured, and when it settled, two identical versions of Lucien stood side-by-side in the clearing.
He had divided himself completely, one clone embodying his dark Overlord Dominion persona, and the other carrying his pristine Saint Priest alignment.
The Dominion clone, radiating a heavy, predatory aura, turned his heterochromatic eyes toward Serena. "Come with me," he commanded smoothly.
Serena blinked in absolute awe, but she quickly nodded, stepping close to his side. Without wasting another second, the Dominion Lucien seized her waist and vanished into the thick foliage, tracking the residual spatial distortion left behind by Isolde’s displacement spell.
Left behind in the clearing, the Priest version of Lucien remained standing. His physical appearance altered slightly; the fierce crimson in his left eye dissolved, leaving both of his eyes glowing with a brilliant, mesmerizing greenish-blue hue.
’We aren’t seeing any beasts in this entire forest,’ Lucien thought, analyzing the unnatural stillness of the forest.
’The rest of the A-rank students have likely retreated to the base camp out of pure frustration. If the monsters are being pulled away, I need to figure out exactly which high-tier rank has deployed an attraction array to hoard the spawns. But before I do that... I need to take complete control of the remaining A-rank forces. And the easiest place to start is with the girls.’
With a single fluid step, he utilized a flash of holy speed, disappearing from the woods and reappearing directly at the center of the A-rank class camp.
The moment his figure materialized, every girl in the immediate vicinity stopped what they were doing and stared.
Even with his eyes shifted to a uniform greenish-blue, his otherworldly, exquisite features were entirely undoable.
They looked at him with confused, wide-eyed wonder, yet they still drooled over his handsome face, entirely captivated by his presence.
A few yards away, the boys of Class A simultaneously rolled their eyes, muttering curses under their breath.
They utterly hated him for possessing such an absurd level of handsomeness, it looked as though the heavens themselves had personally, unfairly blessed him with perfection, it was so unfair.
Lucien ignored the murmurs, stepping up to a central crates platform. "Can all the girls gather around?" he called out, his voice smooth and entirely commanding.
"We are going to take a walk into the deep forest to find the hidden beast caches. The rest of the boys in this class are clearly just lagging around, bossing you all around and forcing you to stay behind in a barren zone with them."
His words instantly caught the girls’ attention. They shifted uncomfortably, looking at the stagnant camp around them.
One of the bolder girls stepped forward, her cheeks slightly flushed. "Do you... do you actually know where we could find the beasts? The scouting teams said the entire forest is empty."
Lucien simply shrugged, a faint, confident smile playing on his lips. "Follow me, and you’ll see."
"What the fuck do you think you’re doing?"
A sharp, angry voice cut through the gathering. One of the dominant boys of A-rank Class stepped out from the main tent, his face twisted in rage.
He marched right up to Lucien, pointing a finger at his chest. "Do you think we’re sitting here doing nothing on purpose? The Elite class and the S-rank bastards found a forbidden way to attract every beast in the zone to their respective boundaries! We have absolutely no spawns left here. So thank you for telling us we weren’t thinking straight, you arrogant prick!"
Lucien looked down at the boy’s finger, his greenish-blue eyes turning incredibly cold.
"Well, if you were actually thinking straight, you would have already found a way to counter their array instead of whining in a tent. Now... why don’t you run along and go meet the remaining losers of this class while I resume exactly what I was doing?"
The insult pushed the boy completely over the edge. "You bastard!" he roared, channeling his mana instantly.
A sharp, localized gale of wind magic swirled around his fists as he lunged forward, intending to strike Lucien right across the face.
Lucien didn’t even flinch. Moving with swift, terrifying precision, his hand shot out like a striking viper.
He bypassed the boy’s magic entirely, his fingers wrapping around the student’s neck with an iron grip. With a single, effortless motion, he hoisted the boy completely off the ground.
The boy’s wind magic instantly shattered. His legs kicked wildly in the air, his hands clawing desperately at Lucien’s unyielding wrist as his face turned a dark, suffocating purple.
"Please... let... me go..." he choked out, his eyes wide with sudden, absolute terror.
"Okay," Lucien said softly.