Alira stepped forward, her movents sleek and deliberate. The air around her seed to still—as if the world itself was holding its breath for the assassin’s strike.
She didn’t waste words.
One after another, potions t her lips—elixirs of haste, tonics of lethal precision, alchemical brews that sharpened her instincts to a razor’s edge. Then, like Neal before her, she grasped the Berserk Elixir, its crimson liquid swirling with contained fury.
She drank.
The effect was instantaneous.
Her veins darkened beneath her skin, pulsing with violent energy. Her muscles coiled like springs under tension, her breath turning sharp and controlled. Unlike Neal’s explosive transformation, hers was a silent storm—deadly, precise, humming with lethal intent.
But she wasn’t done.
Kaelen’s hands flickered, layering her with every buff he could muster— Crusader’s Resilience>, , . The air around her warped, as though reality itself struggled to contain her escalating power.
Then, she activated her skill amplifier.
The air itself seed to recoil as Alira’s daggers ignited with an impossible darkness. They didn’t gleam, didn’t reflect - they consud, drinking in the light around them until the very space between her fingers throbbed with unnatural absence.
The edges bled void-black radiance, tendrils of nothingness licking hungrily at the air like inverse flas.
She dipped her chin in a motion that wasn’t quite reverence or threatening, an assassin’s prayer.
And the shadows answered.
From the black pool at her feet, voices slithered upward - not echoes, not mories, but presences. A chorus of murmurs in dead languages, the sound of knives being whetted in forgotten places, the sigh of final breaths escaping a hundred slit throats.
The words ford in the air like a death warrant signed in vapor. A skill that didn’t pierce flesh, but phase through the very concept of existence and hit the soul.
Reality stuttered.
One fra, Alira was standing motionless, blades crossed before her.
The next mont the space where she’d been blurred, the afterimage of her outline briefly sared across vision like a blot of spilled ink.
Then—
She materialized in mid-air above the tree’s heart, upside down, her cloak defying gravity as it pooled upward like liquid shadow.
For a single crystalline mont she hung there like a dark constellation in human form,then before her body started to fall she uncoiled in a whirlwind spiral.
The daggers fell.
Not thrown or thrusted simply released, the twin daggers find their marks. They cut through space in perfect parallel, trailing cot-tails of anti-light, beautiful and terrible as twin supernovae collapsing into black holes.
Impact.
But not impact as the world understands it. The blades t bark and simply... continued, sliding through the tree’s massive girth like a hot needle through wax, like a nightmare passing through a sleeping mind.
No shockwave, no sound - just the tree’s golden glow flickering as if montarily forgotten, then surging back with doubled intensity as the daggers erged from the far side and vanished in puffs of darkness.
It was the soul of his daggers, a phantom.
Where they’d passed, there were no wounds, neither did it bleed any sap.
The tree shuddered, a pause. A heartbeat of absolute stillness.
Then—
64 fruits fell.
A cascade of shimring gold, tumbling from the branches in a silent testant to her lethal precision.
Her Epic Class, [Silent Oath], didn’t grant her raw power like Neal’s [Solari Imperial]. Her levels were lower. Her stats, inferior.
But none of that mattered.
Because Alira didn’t need brute force.
She was the refinent. She was the execution. She was the blade that cut fate itself.
She landed beside Neal, her chest rising and falling in quick, controlled breaths. Her eyes—wide, pupils dilated with adrenaline—flicked to the scattered fruits.
"That’s all I got," she said, voice barely above a whisper.
"Not bad, you did well" Derek praised him.
Then he turned towards Kaelen, signalling him that it was his turn.
But Kaelen refused saying that he needed ti to prepare for his moves.
He only nodded.
Silence hung thick in the air as Derek stepped forward—not with bravado, not with theatrics, but with the quiet certainty of a man who had long since stopped needing to prove himself.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.
And Kaelen moved.
Buff after buff wreathed Derek in radiant might—
—his skin hardened like tempered steel, glowing faintly with divine sigils.
—a golden halo of energy pulsed around him, amplifying his every movent.
—his muscles swelled with unnatural endurance, veins thrumming with borrowed divinity.
Then, he drank.
Potions first, elixirs of crushing force, draughts of unyielding will, tonics that sharpened his edge beyond mortal limits.
And then, the Berserk Potion.
Crimson fury flooded his veins.
His body did not distort like Neal’s, did not thrum with silent lethality like Alira’s—no, it simply beca more solid. More real. As if the world itself struggled to contain the weight of his presence.
He took a single step forward.
Raised his old, battle-worn blade, a weapon that had seen a hundred battles and bore the scars of each.
And whispered.
For the briefest instant, he vanished.
Not in a blur. Not in a flash.
He simply ceased to exist within the fra of ti.
And then—
The strike landed.
The air shattered. A shockwave ripped through reality, splitting the void as if the sky itself had been cloven in two. Light fractured like broken glass, the backlash sending tremors through the earth.
The tree groaned.
Not a shudder. Nor a creak.
Yes a groan, deep, resonant, like the voice of an ancient titan forced to acknowledge a power it could not ignore.
And then—
The heavens rained gold.
Fruits erupted from the canopy in a blinding torrent, a storm of shimring orbs crashing to the ground in a cacophony of thunderous impacts.
241 fruits.
Kaelen’s jaw dropped.
"What in the—?!"
Derek exhaled, slow and asured, as if he had rely completed a routine exercise. The glow of his skills faded, his blade settling back into its sheath with a soft, final click.
"That’s why they used to call the Stalwart Wall."
The others could only stare.
All of them were Gold Rank.
But Derek’s level 376 lood over them like a mountain over foothills.
This was the difference.
Derek placed his hand over Kaelen’s shoulder. "Now it’s your turn son."
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