Chapter 58- Fighting against a Player with an EPIC Class.
Leo managed to dodge the wide beam of concentrated flame that came out of nowhere by a hair’s width.
He looked back. The path it left was a straight line of blackened earth and cracked stone. The devastation sent chills down his spine.
I’d be dead if I hadn’t managed to dodge that.
He raised his eyes to the man who stepped out of the flames.
The stranger was young—younger than Leo. His face was sharp, his skin pale as ash, high cheekbones cutting clean lines. Hair the color of crimson fire framed a face that would have been perfectly handsome if not for the eyes.
Those eyes were the last thing anyone noticed: flat amber, half-lidded, carrying the bored look of someone watching time pass too slowly.
A long red coat hung open over a lean frame. The coat did not smolder despite the heat around him. His hands were bare.
A small mote of white light drifted and rotated at his shoulder like a patient pet.
"Oh. Something still managed to stay alive?" the man said, mild surprise in his voice as he looked at Leo standing unharmed.
[Kael "Pyre Lord" — Lv.25]
[Class: Flamecaller — Epic]
Leo read the nameplate and frowned.
Level twenty-five. Epic class. Six levels higher. He did not like the uncaring tone or the arrogance rolling off the man.
"Usually everything in my path ends up incinerated," Kael continued. "I was only passing through. You are lucky you survived. I will spare you. Move aside."
He started to walk past. Then his gaze landed on the corpse of the Direfang Warg. A sharp glint passed across his eyes.
He looked back at Leo and pointed to the corpse.
"You killed it?"
Leo stared at him, expression vigilant.
When no answer came, Kael continued, "Anyway, I am taking this corpse. I have use for its body parts. You, a low-level player, should clear out from this area. I will not be so kind if I run into you again."
His hands were already reaching for the body.
"Stop. I hunted it, so if you want it, I can sell it to you," Leo said.
Kael’s hands paused. One eyebrow rose at the unexpected bravery.
Then a smile formed—nothing friendly about it.
"A level 19 guy with an opinion, I see. You should have left when I gave you the chance. Now burn."
He waved his hand. A dense white wall of flame closed in on Leo.
Leo answered with his own Eternal Flame.
Golden waves rolled off his sword as he met the closing firewall head-on.
[Forgefire Strike — 76 DMG]
He scraped a few points of health. Kael did not even glance at the number. He simply kept walking forward at the same unhurried pace.
That barely scratched him.
Seeing the man advance without a care, Leo closed the distance himself.
He kept his center low and drove a tempered strike at the flame shield, aiming for the point where the density looked thinnest.
As expected, the shield fractured like glass.
Within a fraction of a second it rewove itself—seamless once more.
It repairs that fast?
He did not let it slow him. Two steps left, then Rising Forge. The sword slashed upward toward Kael’s exposed right side.
Kael turned his wrist a few degrees. The flame shield shifted and absorbed the blow.
He had not taken a single step back since the exchange began.
How is he reading my every move?
Leo circled the edge, testing the range of the defense.
He launched another sword strike imbued with Eternal Flame’s property of annihilation. The blow carried enough force to cut through the stone at his feet.
The moment the blade reached Kael, the man raised two fingers burning with fire and flicked it aside as if brushing away a leaf.
Leo froze for half a heartbeat.
Two fingers? That’s all it took to deflect my attack?
He recovered and followed up at once.
Kael threw a small fireball. Leo dodged it, leapt into a nearby tree, and launched himself into the air using the trunk for support.
Momentum carried him into the skill.
[Anvil Drop]
The sword slammed down toward Kael. A giant anvil manifested in the air and crashed with it.
Stone split apart in a widening ring. Shards of broken rock flew outward. Kael lifted one foot and glided along the blast, landing on the far side of the crater without a single speck of dust on him.
Leo charged up from the crater floor.
[Rising Forge]
He used the momentum of the climb to bring the sword in a rising arc aimed at Kael’s head.
The blade cut empty air. Kael had shifted half a step to his left.
He gave Leo a provocative smile.
Surtr’s voice cut through Leo’s thoughts. "He is experienced. He uses the minimum movement required to dodge or block. The gap in raw power is too large for you to close with ordinary strikes. That mote at his shoulder is not decoration. It is a condensed star-fire core. Only a handful of Flamecallers ever refine one successfully. Most who try die in the process."
Leo already knew the gap was large. Now he understood why the fire felt different.
Pure star-grade flame.
He still had to try.
He layered the sword with the Mana Blade technique learned from the Mana Breathing method, then stacked Slash on top of it with Eternal Flame and its annihilation effect.
The sword hummed. The air around it rippled.
Leo sprinted forward and slashed diagonally across Kael’s chest.
Kael dodged again—but the edge of the aura coating the blade made contact.
A thin red line appeared across his cheek.
[Critical — 1,280 DMG]
Finally. Blood.
"So you do bleed. I thought you didn’t bleed at all," Leo said, voice dry.
Kael touched the cut and looked at the blood on his fingers.
Something snapped.
He stood there staring at his own blood for a long moment, then lifted his eyes to Leo.
The bored expression was gone. Something sharper had replaced it.
"You managed to make me bleed. Interesting enough. Do you know how long it has been since another player managed to do that?" Kael tilted his head. "Since I got an Epic class at level 16, nobody has been able to touch me. Even before that, the early rankings still have my name near the top. The title of Pyre Lord was not given as a compliment. It was earned."
He cleaned his hands with a piece of cloth.
Leo seized the opening and triggered Logi’s Devour, trying to consume and burn some of Kael’s flame.
The golden fire took one solid mouthful—then choked. Kael’s flame was denser and far purer. The backlash slammed through Leo’s channels and tore a short, involuntary sound from his throat. He staggered half a step.
He activated Sæhrímnir’s Banquet while still off-balance. His body began burning residual heat from the cracked stone and ambient mana from the air, knitting the worst of the burns. Health climbed out of the red zone. Kael watched the process with mild curiosity, as if studying an insect that refused to die.
Left with no choice, Leo shifted tactics again.
He channeled the Annihilation aura and layered it over and over until he could force no more into the blade. At the same time Eternal Flame burned white and flowed into the sword.
Gray aura and white fire bloomed around him.
Wherever they touched, things disintegrated. Stone, walls, trees—everything flaked into dust.
Kael’s flame shield was no different.
Kael’s eyes narrowed with the first hint of seriousness.
"What is that? What are you scheming now?"
He looked at Leo and added, "Most players at your level fold after the first exchange. You keep standing. Annoying, but interesting."
Leo did not answer. He poured every remaining amplification into one concentrated strike—Surtr’s Twilight stacked with Eternal Burn—and drove the sword straight at Kael’s center mass.
Kael coated his hands in concentrated fire and caught the blade mid-swing. The attack splashed against his palms. Residual heat and aura left scorch marks on his skin while the ground and trees nearby disintegrated into nothing.
Leo’s eyes widened.
*Caught it bare-handed? The gap is worse than I thought.*
He sighed and stopped holding back.
[Primordial Trinity]
All effects +100% for thirty seconds. Fire damage doubled. Strength doubled. Mana capacity doubled.
His mana pool, newly doubled, dropped in visible chunks—1720, 1200, 800—and kept falling past the normal floor, drawing from the expanded well. The Forge-Heart Bracers burned white-hot against his forearms. The Seal of Gungnir woke with a sharp pulse.
This is the only card left that can hurt him. Everything else has failed.
Leo forced the skill out.
[Gungnir’s Descent]
A spear of divine lightning—Mythical-tier, shaped from the All-Father’s spear—tore through the dwarven stone and struck Kael directly in the chest.
[— 28,000 DMG]
A massive damage number floated above Kael’s head.
White light flooded the clearing. Runes flared across the trees and died.
When the light faded, Kael stood in a fresh crater of molten rock. His red coat was burned through in several places. Blood soaked the fabric across his chest. The smile was gone.
For one clear heartbeat there was only shock.
*It worked. He’s injured. I can finish this.*
Leo raised the sword for the finishing cut.
His arms shook from the mana expenditure, but the opening was there.
Kael lifted one hand.
The small white mote above his shoulder finally moved.
It swelled into a dense lance of compressed star-fire, condensing between his fingers in less than a second.
Leo felt the immense power behind the attack and tried to step back.
A pressure field pinned him in place.
The lance shot forward at terrifying speed.
Too fast. I cannot dodge it.
The lance came down.
Boom.
Leo was driven through solid stone, through the wall behind him, and into the gravel chamber beyond. The sword left his grip somewhere in the rubble. His back slammed into the floor. He stared up at a fractured ceiling.
[HP: 1]
One point remained.
He watched the red bar blink with a single digit. A single falling rock would end him. Panic flared in his chest.
Fuck. Am I going to die here?
Then Eternal Flame surged, burning away his remaining mana and stamina, and began regenerating his health slowly. Sæhrímnir’s Banquet kicked in just in time.
Health climbed in short, painful bursts—ten, then twenty. Just enough to keep him conscious.
The attack had thrown him so far that the system registered him as out of combat range. He could not move.
He checked his panel. Mana had zeroed out. Every skill had turned gray and locked—except one.
The teleportation skill to the Eternal Forge Dimension.
Footsteps approached.
Kael was unhurriedly collecting the warg’s corpse, dismantling it on the spot and picking out the useful parts.
He took it apart without haste.
"Materials of this quality are hard to find at my stage," Kael said aloud, more to himself than to anyone else. "The ranking boards still expect progress. A few more cores like these and the next refinement on the mote will be complete."
Leo knew that once the corpse was collected, Kael would come finish him.
He triggered the teleport.
[Do you want to teleport to the Eternal Forge?]
[Yes]
The tunnel blurred. The world folded.
He landed on his knees inside his own forge in Ironhaven, inside the trial chambers of the Eternal Forge heart dimension.
It was empty—but safe.
Back in the forest, Kael finished gathering the materials and walked to the place where Leo had been thrown. He found no body and received no death notification.
"Tough bastard. What are you... a cockroach? Why are you so hard to kill?"
He searched the immediate area once, found nothing, and stopped wasting time.
The other player had escaped by some means he did not understand. Kael turned and left the clearing without looking back, already calculating how the new materials would feed the next stage of his star-fire core and keep his name high on the Flamecaller rankings.
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