Chương 208: Sylvester's Shock

The scene on the main balcony of the ducal palace was closer to a surrealist painting embodying absolute contradiction between chaos and calm. While the square below was boiling with the blood of civil war, and while the blue phoenix flames were painting the sky in the colors of Judgment Day, there was one man who still maintained his composure to a degree that provoked both irritation and suspicion.

Supreme Imperial Inspector Croft, representative of the Emperor's absolute authority, remained seated in his place on his plush velvet chair with its gilded armrests. Not an eyelid trembled, and his breaths did not quicken. He was holding an elegant black quill pen, noting precise observations in a neat hand in a small leather notebook.

He was watching what was happening with extreme coolness, like an entomologist watching two ants fight in a glass box, indifferent to the blood beginning to stain the white marble columns, and to the heat emanating from Dex's flames. This deadly calm and indifference from the Inspector intensified Sylvester's frenzy and madness. Sylvester, who minutes ago had seen himself as a demigod, now stood like a worn-out rag. The tyrant collapsed psychologically before he collapsed physically.

His face, which had been pale and smiling with manufactured dignity, was now suffused with blood to the point of appearing on the verge of explosion. The veins in his neck and forehead protruded like blue worms pulsing with violence, and his bulging eyes, nearly leaving their sockets, stared at Dex standing atop the clock tower like a god of vengeance descended from ancient legends.

"Guards! You dregs of the Shadow Organization! What in hell are you doing?!" Sylvester screamed in a torn, convulsive voice entirely devoid of any trace of nobility. He pointed with his violently trembling finger toward Dex, saliva spraying from his mouth as he foamed with rage and terror.

"Kill him! Don't stand there staring at him! Kill him immediately! Bring him down from there and tear him apart!" Then, in a moment of complete loss of control over his nerves, in a state of delirium and total denial of the reality that his nephew had returned alive to hold him to account, Sylvester completely lost control of his tongue.

He forgot where he stood, forgot who was beside him, and most importantly, he forgot that the magical sound amplification crystals he had placed to carry his speech to every home in the city were still active and operating at full capacity. Sylvester screamed the words that sealed his inevitable doom: "He is an impostor! This is not Dex! Dex is dead! I know with absolute certainty he is dead! I read the assassination report personally in my office!

I paid ten thousand gold coins to that cursed Organization to ensure his throat was cut in the savage forest and his body left to the beasts! This is impossible! This is merely a demon taking his form!" A brief and lethal silence fell over the balcony, and across the vast square. Even the clashing of swords subsided for counted seconds. Inspector Croft stopped writing. He left the pen suspended above the paper and raised his thin eyebrows slightly in a genuine astonishment, rare in its appearance on his face.

He turned his face slowly toward his aide standing silently behind him, and looked at him with a meaningful glance, as though saying: Did you just hear this absolute stupidity? Sylvester had just confessed, of his own complete and free will, before the Emperor's personal representative, and before fifty thousand of his own citizens (through the amplifiers that had broadcast his words like artillery shells), that he had plotted and paid a vast sum to assassinate his nephew, the legitimate heir.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. He had torn the mask of the "grieving and loyal uncle" with his own hands and thrown it into the mud. But Sylvester did not care in that moment, he did not grasp the enormity of his political blunder, because he was utterly obsessed and terrified to the point of madness by the need to kill the blue "ghost" that haunted his nightmares, and who now stood alive before him.

In response to his hysterical screaming, and to protect the reputation of the Organization he had just accused of failure, the elite of elites moved. From between the shadows of the high palace columns, and from the palace's carved ceiling corners, four killers leaped. They were unlike those Dex had killed previously, these wore tight black leather suits and completely white wooden masks with no features whatsoever, save two narrow vision slits.

They were of a very advanced rank within the Shadow Organization, known as the White Ghosts. The four moved at a terrifying speed surpassing the ordinary human eye's ability to track. They were augmented with Wind magic to multiply their speed, and Shadow magic to conceal their trajectory. They launched into the air like invisible projectiles toward the top of the clock tower, brandishing double, twisted daggers coated in an immediately movement-paralyzing poison.

Their plan aimed to tear Dex apart from four simultaneous directions.

"Die, all of you!" Sylvester screamed with hysterical laughter as he watched the Organization's most powerful killers pouncing on Dex. But Dex, standing on the edge of the clock's brass minute hand, did not move a muscle. He did not draw his sword, and did not retreat a single step. He remained standing like a statue of blue ice while the killers approached him like arrows of certain death. His eyes tracked their trajectories with extreme precision, analyzing wind speed, mana density, and attack angles.

When the four killers reached a killing distance, a mere five meters, such that they could no longer change the course of their leap in midair, Dex smiled. It was no ordinary smile of victory, it was a savage, cold smile, fitting for a predator that has lured its prey into the perfect trap.

"Far too slow," Dex whispered, and his words traveled clearly through the charged air. In a motion unseen by the eye, Dex drove the index and middle fingers of both hands into the air before him, as though stabbing the very fabric of reality itself. He concentrated all his energy into a single point. [Phoenix Secret Art: Celestial Cage] The flames did not launch as a directed beam as they had before. Instead, they erupted from his body as a massive, complete sphere of pure mana.

The dome formed as a solid wall of transparent blue hell, expanding at the speed of light, swallowing the entirety of the clock tower's upper section, and with it the four attacking killers. The killers slammed into the wall of the fire dome. They could not penetrate it, and they could not retreat. The heat of these flames surpassed all description, it did not merely burn skin, it dissolved mana itself. Their fire-resistant magical armor melted in a fraction of a second as though made of wax.

"AAAAAAAAAH!" Everyone in the square heard terrifying, synchronized screams, stripped of any human dignity. They were brief, choked screams, as the four professional killers transformed within counted seconds into human torches writhing in the sky, striking the blue cage's walls to no avail. The blood evaporated in their veins, their rare steel weapons melted, and their bodies turned to ash before they could even fall to the ground. The blue cage dissolved in the blink of an eye.

What remained of the Organization's most powerful killers was nothing but a cloud of light black ash that began to scatter and fall slowly, like funereal snow, over the heads of the silent crowds below. Dex stood in his place, amid the aura of fire that had returned to calm around his body, not a single hair on his head singed, not a corner of his cloak creased. He coolly brushed an imaginary particle of dust from his shoulder and looked down at the crumpled Sylvester.

Dex said in a deep voice that pierced the square's silence: "Your flames are too dim, and your swords too rusted, before my inferno. Is this all you have, Sylvester? Is this the power for which you sold your family?" Absolute silence reigned. The people in the square, the trembling soldiers, and even the remaining elite guard, all raised their eyes toward the tower's peak. They looked at Dex with a sacred terror, a fear mixed with veneration.

This was no longer the gentle, book-loving, peace-inclining boy they had known. He had returned from the forest as an unconquerable monster, an absolute ruler possessing the power of gods.