Chapter 617: Things are About to Get Thrilling

After every fragment of thought finally slid into place, Liam wasted no time. He burst into motion, darting through the breadth of Percy’s pseudo-domain with sharp, deliberate movements, boots skidding across frost-slick ground as the air screamed around him. Almost immediately, the domain reacted. More ice clones emerged from the fog, their forms carving themselves out of frozen mist, and this time they were accompanied by violence from every angle—jagged ice spikes and spears tearing through the air, descending from above, erupting from below, and launching from blind spots Liam couldn’t afford to ignore.

Yet paradoxically, the escalation played directly into Liam’s hands.

To keep his Myst absorption hidden—subtle, unnoticeable, and beneath Percy’s perception—Liam needed to appear overwhelmed. He needed the illusion of desperation. A knight on the back foot. A fighter too busy surviving to scheme. The relentless barrage of ice made that deception effortless.

With clones pressing him from the front and razor-edged projectiles screaming in from all directions, Liam let himself look fully occupied. His movements were sharp but defensive, blades carving arcs of heat and shadow as he fenced off attacks in rapid succession. Every parry, every evasive step, every narrowly avoided impalement sold the lie. Outwardly, he looked locked in a losing struggle. Inwardly, his focus had turned elsewhere entirely.

Deep within his core, Liam began to draw.

’Hopefully he doesn’t notice in time,’ Liam thought as he deflected a spear that shattered inches from his face. ’He’s perceptive—too perceptive. But if I can keep this up for three… four good minutes… even five, without tipping him off, this should work. At least enough to matter.’ A grim note followed the thought. ’Assuming I don’t pass out first.’

There were two clear objectives behind what Liam was doing, each layered atop the other with ruthless precision.

The first was straightforward in concept, if dangerous in execution: weaken Percy’s pseudo-domain. By absorbing the Myst Percy was using to saturate the environment, Liam would thin the illusion of omnipresence. The domain wouldn’t collapse outright—not even close—but its most dangerous effect would erode. Percy’s presence would no longer be perfectly masked. Liam would be able to sense him clearly enough to react, to predict, and most importantly, to avoid being blindsided again as he had been moments earlier.

The domain would still exist.

But it would no longer be absolute.

The second objective, however, dwarfed the first in both risk and reward.

Liam was aiming for an Ascension.

An Ascension was not something that simply happened through time or talent. It required three critical components to align perfectly: capacity, pressure, and integration. Capacity meant the Myst core had to be nearly saturated, pressed against its limits, teetering at a bottleneck. Pressure meant something had to force that core beyond its established ceiling—something extreme, something absurd. Near-death situations, overwhelming external strain, or sheer, merciless willpower. And then there was integration. Any Myst introduced had to harmonize with the core, accepted rather than rejected, flowing naturally instead of becoming toxic or destabilizing.

For most knights or mages, one of these factors—pressure—was the wall they could never breach. Forcing a Myst core past its limit through will alone was borderline impossible, something spoken of more as theory than reality.

But dark mages were different.

They were anomalies.

Dark mages operated inherently above their nominal limits, able to push their cores beyond what should be possible, tapping into layers of output others could never safely reach. It was never easy, never safe—but it was possible. And as the very last of his kind, Liam intended to exploit that natural advantage to its absolute limit in this moment.

As for the other two requirements, Liam already had them.

His core had reached saturation. Not recently—but decisively. He had hit a bottleneck, a hard ceiling where growth stalled and pressure accumulated. Training had contributed, certainly, but it wasn’t the true reason he’d reached this point so quickly.

The real cause lay nine months in the past.

During the Gaia War, when Aesmirius had taken control of Liam’s body.

Liam had undergone an Ascension only weeks before the war began. Under normal circumstances, even relentless combat and training wouldn’t have been enough to push his core back to saturation so soon. Add to that his six-month slumber afterward, and the idea of reaching another bottleneck within two or three months of waking from a coma bordered on impossible—even for a dark mage.

Yet Aesmirius’s possession had changed everything.

Every time Aesmirius cast a spell while inhabiting Liam’s body, he drew upon nearly the entirety of Liam’s Myst reserves. And to prevent depletion mid-battle, Aesmirius was forced to constantly replenish those reserves—again and again, sometimes even adding more than Liam had possessed before. That relentless cycle of expenditure and renewal forced Liam’s core to adapt at a brutal pace, expanding faster than it ever should have, evolving under pressure far beyond what normal training could provide.

By the time the war ended, the foundation had already been laid.

All Liam had needed to do after waking was push himself the rest of the way.

And as for the final requirement—integration—that was where Liam truly found himself walking a razor’s edge, every step threatening to send him plunging into something irreversible.

The Myst he was drawing in was not simple, ambient energy. It was Percy’s Myst—refined, densely compressed, and actively structured, saturated with a sharp, biting ice alignment. That distinction mattered more than most would realize. Raw Myst was malleable, easily bent and reshaped once absorbed, but refined Myst carried intent, pattern, and rigidity. It had been tempered, disciplined, and honed through another’s core.

Absorbing something like that was never passive.

The moment Percy’s Myst crossed into Liam’s system, his core was placed under immediate internal strain. Pressure mounted not just from quantity, but from incompatibility. For an Ascension to truly take place, the ice-aligned Myst had to be dismantled at a fundamental level—its structure broken apart, its alignment rewritten, then filtered through Liam’s fire and dark Myst affinities until it became something his core could accept as its own.

That kind of process was supposed to happen in stillness, in deep meditation or complete rest, where the body and mind could focus entirely on harmonization.

Not in the middle of a vicious duel between two cold-blooded assassins.

And yet, that was exactly what Liam intended to do.

He was fully aware of the consequences if he miscalculated even slightly. Loss of control. Violent backlash. Agonizing pain that could leave him crippled. Or worse—elemental rejection, where his core outright refused to break down Percy’s Myst, causing internal collapse that might unmake him entirely. No one truly knew what happened when a core rejected refined foreign Myst mid-absorption.

But Liam was ready to gamble.

Not only would success accelerate his plans far beyond what careful progression ever could, but there was something else stirring within him—something raw and intoxicating. A thrill, like a buried ember suddenly fanned into a roaring flame, flooding his veins with heat and urgency, making him feel vividly, dangerously alive.

As an ice clone lunged toward him, Liam twisted and drove a brutal kick into its side. The construct shattered mid-air, crashing into several others and exploding into shards that skidded across the frost-covered floor. A wild grin tugged at his lips, hunger and excitement burning brightly in his eyes as his heart thundered in his chest.

’Things are about to get thrilling,’ he thought, exhilaration crackling through him.

Deep within the dense fog of the pseudo-domain, Percy remained crouched atop an elevated ice pillar, silently overseeing everything unfolding within his control. Blood continued to trail down from his temples and arms, the lingering aftermath of Liam’s earlier Shadow Rend, dark crimson streaking starkly against pale ice.

From his vantage point, Percy watched Liam fend off waves of ice clones and incoming attacks, and he found himself drawn into a strange fascination. It was like looking at a younger version of himself—only twisted into something sharper, more dangerous. Liam wasn’t just skilled; he was terrifyingly perceptive, combat-intelligent to an abnormal degree, and lethally adaptive.

Every instinct Percy possessed screamed at him to end this fight now. To abandon his original goal of observing Liam’s dark magic and eliminate the threat before it grew any further.

Yet Percy didn’t retreat.

Part of the problem was that Liam was making it difficult. After Shadow Rend and the initial dagger technique, he hadn’t relied on his dark magic again. And frustratingly, Percy understood why.

The authoritative figures of the academy were seated just beyond the domain, still within the grand hall, watching. Because this wasn’t a complete domain, Percy knew the duel was being displayed clearly to everyone present. There was no true isolation here, no guaranteed privacy.

And Liam wasn’t about to bare everything he possessed—not yet.

“Tch.” Percy clicked his tongue, irritation flaring—not at Liam, but at the situation itself. ’If only I’d managed to persuade the Headmaster properly… or found a better way to approach this,’ he thought bitterly. ’Then he wouldn’t be so cautious about revealing his dark magic. He’d still hide things, sure—but not to this extent.’

’Curse those damn geezers.’

As Percy’s focus sharpened entirely on Liam, something finally registered—something that made his blood run cold.

’Is he… smiling?’

Percy stared, disbelief flickering across his expression as he caught sight of the wild grin stretched across Liam’s face. For a split second, he struggled to understand what about being surrounded, ambushed, and relentlessly attacked could possibly be enjoyable.

Then realization struck.

’Wait, has he already… ?’

Before the thought could fully form, Percy launched himself forward. The ice pillar beneath him shattered from the force as he surged through the fog, body blurring with speed as he went straight for Liam.

Closing the distance in an instant, Percy aimed directly for Liam’s neck—not to kill him, but to end the fight decisively.

’He’s far more dangerous than I thought,’ Percy admitted inwardly, his ice dagger coming within inches of its mark. ’To identify that this was an incomplete domain, uncover the trick behind it, and find a way to lessen its effects…’ A genuine smirk crossed his face. ’You were incredible, Liam Hunter. Even without showing me much of your dark magic. I hope we get to do this again—’

The thought never finished.

Liam vanished in a sudden streak of flames, the burst of heat and motion catching Percy completely off guard. Before he could even process what had happened, Liam reappeared at his flank, body already coiled into motion.

His left leg was raised, poised to strike.

Flames wrapped tightly around it, roaring with intensity, and Liam’s eyes burned a deeper, more feral red.

“Guess I was right,” Liam said, his voice brimming with exhilarated satisfaction.

He drove his leg forward.

The kick slammed into Percy’s chest with devastating force. Fire erupted outward, forming a tight, blazing ring around them as a thunderous boom echoed through the hall. Percy was sent flying backward, his body tearing through the fog as the impact shattered the space between them.

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