Chương 211: The Lion's Roar

The golden dust cleared with theatrical slowness, as though the very air particles were bowing in reverence and drawing back to clear the way. The man who had been the center of this cosmic earthquake appeared. He was not that sick, pale elder confined to a wheeled chair, as the city's collective memory had known him across the past six months. No, the image that materialized before tens of thousands of stupefied eyes was of an entirely different person. Time had turned back twenty years.

He was a man of commanding height, with shoulders broad as an immovable mountain. His thick gray hair, threaded with white strands from the wisdom of battles, cascaded freely and fiercely around his neck like the mane of a furious lion. His face, chiseled by the harshness of experience and the severity of command, carried not an atom of weakness. Old scars adorned it, each telling the story of a forgotten heroism.

But the most striking and most terrifying feature was his eyes: two eyes that bore no resemblance to those of ordinary humans, blazing with the brilliance of molten gold, radiating a light that pierced souls and read the sins of hearts. He wore his legendary battle armor: "The Sun Lion's Plate."

This armor had not been seen outside the palace's display halls since the end of the great Border War, crafted from an alloy of unknown origin, gleaming with the color of aged gold, decorated with raised engravings of roaring lions.

In his right hand, sheathed in a heavy metal gauntlet, he held his great sword "Mountain Cleaver", a sword weighing hundreds of pounds that ten ordinary men could not budge from its place, held in one hand and tilted simply toward the ground, as though it weighed no more than a bird's feather. The aura emanating from him was not merely energy, it was a Domain unto itself. The aura of an absolute sovereign, an aura standing in all its majesty and supremacy at the classification of rank SS+.

This aura made the surrounding air freeze in one moment and boil in the next, a physical contradiction revealing the degree to which reality was distorted before this absolute power.

"Who..." Viper muttered in a choked, breathless voice, attempting to rise from beneath the rubble of the shattered marble statue. He was coughing clumps of sticky black blood, and his two red eyes, which had been radiating terror mere minutes ago, were now drowning in pure shock: the shock of a predator who has suddenly realized he is caged with the true king of the jungle.

"This pressure, this aura, this is impossible, there is no human in the West who possesses..." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. The golden man raised his head with extreme slowness. He did not look at Viper first, instead he directed his burning gaze, like concentrated rays of the sun, directly upward toward the main palace balcony where Sylvester trembled in a dark corner.

The two gazes met: the gaze of the returning Lion, against the gaze of the terrified hyena. Then he shifted his eyes slowly and with dignity toward the broken Viper in the square. The man spoke. He did not shout, did not raise his voice, but spoke in a quiet, deep, and settled tone. Yet his voice was laden with a terrifying weight, with a pure golden mana that made his words reverberate in the skulls of everyone in the square. A voice that Seiron had longed for and had not heard for long months.

"Who dared..." he paused for a moment, as though the words themselves were heavy, "to say that I had died?" The simple words struck those present like a hammer of hot iron on an anvil. They were not merely a question, they were a declaration that the scales had been overturned, and that the natural order of the cosmos had returned.

"Marcus!" Sylvester screamed in a thin, torn voice, saturated with absolute terror and loss of sanity.

"You, you are alive! How?! The poison, the doses, the paralyzed legs! I watched you die slowly!"

"Lord Marcus! Lord Marcus has returned!" The moment the people and the knights absorbed the truth, the square exploded with cries that were not from throats but from the depths of hearts. Tens of thousands cheered in stupefaction and overwhelming joy, some citizens collapsed to their knees weeping from the sheer force of relief, while the old Williams knights raised their swords toward the sky in a military salute not performed in years. Marcus ignored his brother's hysterical screams.

He walked slowly with firm steps and stood at the base of the towering clock tower. He raised his eyes, filled with warmth and absolute pride, toward the tower's peak, where his son Dex stood surrounded by his blue flames. Marcus gave a slight nod of his head, the nod of a father acknowledging that his son had become a man worthy of bearing the name. Then, with great deliberateness, Marcus turned to face the destruction-filled square, and to face Viper and the Shadow Organization mercenary army.

Marcus raised his right arm, and drove the tip of his great sword "Mountain Cleaver" into the marble floor before him. The moment the blade touched the ground, radiant golden cracks extended through the paving like the roots of a tree of light, crawling beneath the feet of the surrounded mercenaries. The moment this extending golden light touched them, their bodies shook with uncontrollable violence, and their weapons fell involuntarily from their hands as though they were burning embers.

Marcus spoke in a tone of warning as cold as the northern frost, his eyes burning with a sacred fury surpassing human limits: "You, dregs of the Shadow Organization, you took the corrupt gold of my treacherous brother, dared to cross the borders of my province, defiled my den with your footsteps, and above all, you attempted to kill my cub before my eyes." Marcus drew the sword slowly from the ground.

With every inch the blade emerged from the marble, it blazed with a steadily intensifying brilliant light, until it became a piece of the sun itself: a light that blinded the mercenaries' eyes and made them cover their faces in terror.

"Now..." Marcus added, his aura expanding to cover the entire square like a suffocating golden dome, "you will learn through direct experience why the West is called the Land of Lions. And why no Emperor, no king, and no demon has ever dared invade this city as long as I breathe its air. Prepare yourselves to receive the verdict, for none of you will leave my square alive today."