Chapter 51: I Am The Beast
With a brutal twist of his torso, Lucien threw the boy with immense, reinforced strength. The student sailed through the air like a stone from a catapult, passing through the camp’s defensive barriers entirely before crashing with a massive splash into the blue ocean bordering the edge of the island camp.
A collective gasp echoed through the crowd. One of the nearby girls stepped back, her voice trembling with indignation.
"They... there might be high-tier sea monsters out there! How could you do something so reckless? You’re a priest candidate! You shouldn’t act so impulsively and violently!"
Lucien slowly turned his gaze toward her. He walked up to her, his steps completely silent. The moment he stopped directly in front of her, the girl’s breath hitched.
Her spine went completely rigid, and she found herself entirely frozen to the spot, utterly unable to move or break away from the sheer, suffocating pressure of his greenish-blue eyes.
"Would you like to retract what you just said?" Lucien murmured, leaning down slightly so his breath brushed her ear. His voice carried a dark, velvety promise of violence.
"Because I won’t waste a single second snapping your neck right here. And if anyone else follows your little mode of speech... I will do the exact same thing to them."
Pulling back, he let a cunning, sharp smile play on his lips as the girl frantically nodded her head in absolute silence, her entire body shaking.
Lucien turned back to the rest of the silent, terrified crowd, gesturing toward the dark treeline. "Besides... he has his little circle of boys to go pull him out of the water. Now... let’s go kill some beasts."
The Dominion side of Lucien searched everywhere in the forest, his fingers tightly anchoring Serena to his side.
His heterochromatic eyes darted across the fractured terrain, desperately scanning for any residual of her or displacement patterns left by Isolde.
But the trail had completely vanished into thin air, leaving nothing but the damp scent of decaying leaves and ancient stone.
Suddenly, a heavy, suffocating pressure dropped over the clearing. Step by step, a group of high-ranking students emerged from the thick shadows of the canopy, led by a familiar, green-haired figure.
Damian stepped out into the open, a sharp, arrogant smirk plastered across his face as his crew fanned out behind him in a flawless combat semicircle.
"Well, well. Look who decided to show up," Damian mocked, his eyes glinting with a toxic, unchecked malice. "I’ll just have to kill you right here and now, so that Adeline never has to look at your pathetic face ever again."
His gaze then drifted to the side, landing on the trembling girl clutched in Lucien’s grip. "And who’s that little bird you’ve got there? Oh Serena, a surprise you choose the fool over all the guys who wanted you, such a pure waste of your time?"
Lucien gritted his teeth, an ominous, low growl vibrating in his chest as his dark mana began to flare erratically.
Damian chuckled, thoroughly enjoying the rise he was getting out of his rival. "Well... I might have ’mistakenly’ cast a highly volatile, magically holy displacement array earlier. It seems it only targeted the brown-haired one.
And guess which foul creatures absolutely detest pure, unadulterated holiness? Fallens and devils. And she just so happened to be one of them. So, here is your choice: if you decide to step aside, walk away, and never think of Adeline again, I’ll graciously order my contacts to free her and we can pretend this ever happened.
Though, I still deeply wonder why a wretched devil is associating with you in the first place. But... if you choose to still pick a fight with me today, I’ll kill her with a high-grade holy execution spell right after I finish slaughtering you."
Something inside Lucien snapped.
An unbridled, primordial fury shattered his emotional constraints. The heterochromatic irises faded away entirely as both of his eyes bled into a violent, bloody crimson.
The sclera of his crimson eyes turned a terrifying, pitch black, completely devoid of human emotion, mercy, or restraint. Thick, pulsing veins bulged violently across his temples and forehead as his sword coated itself in a dense layer of abyssal fire.
Without uttering a single syllable, Lucien executed an instantaneous spatial displacement. He materialized directly in the center of Damian’s crew.
"Die!" one of the boys shouted.
Three of Damian’s top fighters instantly lunged outward, completely bypassing Lucien to strike directly at Serena.
Serena, being a pure support candidate who had only mastered the arts of divine restoration, had absolutely zero front-line combat experience. As a massive, heavy-bladed claymore descended toward her skull, her breath hitched, her body freezing in terror.
Clang!
Before the blade could even brush her hair, Lucien appeared like a ghost. His dark sword intercepted the claymore, shattering the reinforced steel into a thousand floating shards.
With a brutal twist of his heel, Lucien channeled his Overlord Dominion aura, throwing a devastating telekinetic shockwave that sent the three attackers crashing through the surrounding boulders, their ribs breaking upon impact.
"No one touches what’s mine."
The remaining crew members, all peak-stage Arch Priests surged forward simultaneously, weaving a complex web of high-density light spears and golden binding chains.
The forest illuminated with brilliant, blinding holy energy. Lucien moved like a shadow through a thunderstorm. He parried three light spears in a single breath, his movements completely blurred by his Saint-tier reflexes.
He slid underneath a horizontal slash, drove the pommel of his sword directly into a priest’s sternum collapsing the boy’s chest cavity and spun on his heel to sever the spell-casting arms of two more vanguard members who tried to ambush him from the left.
Blood splattered across the emerald pasture as the peak-stage Arch Priests fell one by one, completely outclassed by the raw, unbridled violence of Lucien’s dual-node capabilities. Within minutes, the once-arrogant crew lay incapacitated and groaning in the dirt.
Only Damian remained standing.
Damian adjusted his stance, his smirk wavering slightly, though he maintained his rigid, defensive guard. "Well... I see I didn’t entirely underestimate you."
Lucien took a slow, deliberate step forward, his pitch-black sclera locking onto Damian like a predator tracking its prey. "Tell me where they are," Lucien whispered, his voice resonating with a terrifying, dual-layered echo. "Tell me where they are right now, or I will slowly, piece by piece, rip your heart straight out of your chest while you scream the coordinates to me."
Damian’s eyes narrowed, a dark grin returning to his lips. "Well... you could certainly try."
With a violent roar, Damian threw both of his hands forward, channeling his early-stage Saint mana. A massive, devastating ball of compressed elemental fire magic erupted from his palms, tearing a path of scorched earth directly toward Lucien’s chest. The heat was so intense it withered the surrounding trees instantly.
Lucien pivoted his torso with microscopic precision, the roaring inferno grazing the fabric of his cloak as he dodged it entirely.
Damian drew his own enchanted rapier, the tip glowing with a sharp, piercing holy light. "Well then... let the real fight begin!"
Meanwhile, far on the other side of the hunting sector, the Priest side of Lucien was leading the massive group of Class A girls deep into the heart of the overgrown forest.
The dense canopy blocked out the daylight, plunging the environment into a perpetual twilight. The girls marched in a tight cluster behind him, their eyes nervously darting toward the empty bushes.
"We still aren’t seeing any beasts," one of the elite girls murmured, her voice laced with growing anxiety.
"We’ve been walking for twenty minutes. If the S-rank or the Elite class is really pulling them all away, we’re wasting our time."
Lucien stopped walking. He stood at the center of a wide, enclosed clearing, his back turned to them. A slow, incredibly cunning smile spread across his handsome face as he turned around to look at the dozens of girls gathered before him.
His greenish-blue eyes held a strange, hypnotic gleam. "Yeah," Lucien said softly, his voice echoing perfectly in the quiet clearing. "There are absolutely no beasts out here."
He took a slow step forward, a heavy, intoxicating aura beginning to seep out from his very skin. "That’s because.....I am the beast."
Before any of them could question his words, Lucien unleashed his hidden, leathery system skill, a potent, high-density aphrodisiac wave of raw, unadulterated primal magic that flooded the entire clearing in an instant.
The effect was immediate and overwhelming. The magic bypassed their standard mana barriers entirely, sinking deep into their nervous systems.
The girls gasped collectively, their faces instantly flushing a deep, crimson red. Their breathing turned shallow and ragged as a sudden, violently intense wave of pure, unchecked desire wrecked through their bodies.
The sheer, intoxicating power of the skill had them completely dropping to their knees on the damp grass, their legs trembling uncontrollably as the heat pooled between their thighs.
"Lucien... please..." the front girl whimpered, their fingers clutching desperately at the hem of his cloak as she looked up with wide, completely glazed, submission-filled eyes. "Fill me... plekase... I can’t breathe... we are yours... your perfect servants..."
The surrounding girls echoed her cries, completely stripped of their pride and academy status, reduced to begging for his touch at the center of the dark forest.
Lucien looked down at the sea of beautiful, pleading faces, a thoroughly mischievous, triumphant smirk spreading across his lips.
"Well," Lucien whispered, his voice dripping with absolute control. "You asked for it."