The white light that had swallowed them in the Northern Forest of Sylvania held no temperature, no sound, and no form.
It was an absolute void that stripped the mind of any sense of direction.
For a normal person, that sensory deprivation would have triggered an instant and paralyzing panic attack.
But Ed Rothtaylor’s mind, forged in the strict martial discipline of King Grey, remained in a state of icy and purely analytical calm.
He didn’t fight the anomaly; he simply prepared his body for whatever awaited on the other side.
The transition lasted barely a second, but when the light shattered like broken glass, gravity returned with a crushing violence.
The absolute silence was instantly replaced by the deafening roar of the wind battering his ears.
Ed opened his eyes, and his pupils contracted sharply.
They were not on the ground.
They were in free-fall hundreds of meters in the air, plummeting at a vertiginous speed toward a thick, unknown mountainous forest crowned by jagged stone peaks.
The freezing air sliced across his face.
Ed didn’t waste a fraction of a millisecond on surprise.
His right arm snapped shut like a steel vise around Lucy Mayrill’s waist.
The small archmage, incredibly, still had her eyes closed, frowning slightly at the annoyance of the wind, but without letting go of her enormous hat.
«Trajectory calculation.
Imminent terminal velocity.
Point of impact: dense forest canopy,» Ed’s brain processed at the speed of light.
He didn’t panic.
He called upon the strength of his core.
“Wind!” Ed commanded in his mind, unleashing his affinity.
A violent vortex of emerald air erupted beneath his boots.
The magical explosion acted as a massive retro-rocket, bringing their fall to a screeching halt just before they broke through the treetops.
The branches of the immense pines snapped in their wake as Ed maneuvered in mid-air, using secondary gusts to cushion their descent until his boots struck the dirt ground with a dull, controlled thud, kicking up a cloud of dust and dry leaves.
Ed bent his knees, absorbing the impact flawlessly.
Hanging from his arm, Lucy slowly opened one eye.
Her bright, deep purple iris scanned the forest for a second.
She unleashed a monumental, lazy yawn and rubbed her cheek against the boy’s coat.
“Ed…
the wind is so annoying…” the girl murmured, her voice raspy from sleep, before closing her eye again, completely indifferent to the fact that they had just been hurled through a rift in space-time.
Ed let her go carefully, setting her on her feet upon the grass.
His gray eyes immediately scanned their surroundings.
His tactical senses were operating at maximum capacity.
They were on rugged terrain, near the edge of an immense precipice.
Before he could summon his system interface to check their coordinates, a sound sliced through the peace of the forest.
The clash of steel against steel.
Muffled shouts.
And then, a heart-wrenching scream, heavy with pure human desperation, echoed through the trees.
“ALICE, WATCH OUT!!”
Ed’s combat instincts ignited like gunpowder.
The scent of fresh blood and scorched earth reached his nose.
He drew the tungsten alloy katana in a single, fluid, and silent motion.
The matte black blade cut the air.
“Stay here if you want to keep sleeping,” Ed told Lucy, not even glancing at her.
In the next second, Ed vanished from his position.
He slipped through the underbrush like an apex predator, using precise gusts of wind to completely silence his own footsteps.
Less than four hundred meters away, in a wide clearing on the edge of a dizzying, fog-shrouded precipice, death was about to claim its due.
The adventurer party known as the Twin Horns was on the brink of total annihilation.
The ground was littered with craters, broken arrows, and the bodies of several bandits and dark mages.
However, the ambush had been brutal, and the numerical superiority of the attackers was overwhelming.
Helen Shite, the party’s leader, was bleeding profusely from a gash on her forehead.
Her sharp yellow eyes burned with determination as she drew back her bowstring.
With her leather armor torn and her black hair undone from its usual bun, the half-elf was trying to maintain her composure, but they were cornered.
Beside her, Adam Krensh could barely hold his spear.
The bright red-haired young man, usually boisterous and energetic, was breathing heavily, and the distinctive scar crossing his nose was smeared with soot.
Durden, the six-foot-seven giant with a narrow build, had positioned himself at the front, attempting to raise a useless earth wall with his last ounces of strength to protect his comrades.
Angela Rose, her beautiful green eyes dulled by exhaustion and her eloquent green tunic in tatters, was completely out of energy, leaning heavily against a rock.
And Jasmine, with her cold, narrow red eyes and her daggers drawn, evaluated the situation with deadly stoicism, calculating exactly how many enemies she could take down with her before she fell.
But the true target of the massacre was further back, backed right up against the edge of the abyss.
Reynolds Leywin, the charismatic adventurer with ashen-brown hair and a square jaw, had his armor shattered.
An ugly gash crossed his shoulder, and blood stained his face.
Behind him, huddled on the ground in sheer terror, was his wife, Alice.
The woman with beautiful reddish-brown hair and a gentle maternal aura protected her swollen, pregnant belly with both hands, weeping in silence.
In front of Reynolds, five dark mages advanced slowly, cruel smiles stretching beneath their hoods.
The bandit leader raised an iron mace imbued with fire, ready to crush the skull of the expectant father.
“End of the line for you, adventurer,” the leader sneered, bringing the weapon down with all his might.
Reynolds closed his deep blue eyes, placing his body as a human shield, willing to give his last breath to afford his wife and unborn daughter one more second of life.
The impact of the mace never arrived.
What arrived instead was a sudden, unnatural drop in temperature, followed by a dull thud.
Reynolds opened his eyes, thoroughly confused.
The bandit leader was completely paralyzed in front of him.
Slowly, a perfect red line appeared across the bandit’s neck.
A second later, the man’s head slid off his shoulders and hit the ground with a wet smack.
His decapitated body collapsed an instant later.
Behind the falling corpse, the figure of an ashen-blonde young man was revealed.
His gray eyes, cold and devoid of any hint of emotion or mercy, scanned the battlefield.
In his right hand, he held a straight, black blade dripping with fresh blood.
There were no battle cries.
No declarations of justice.
Ed Rothtaylor simply moved.
King Grey’s Swordsmanship was not designed for honorable duels; it was designed for maximum lethal efficiency.
This was an exhibition of pure, unilateral slaughter.
The second dark mage barely had time to open his mouth to scream when Ed appeared in his blind spot.
The tungsten katana pierced his ribcage, obliterating the heart and lung in a single thrust.
Ed twisted his wrist, retracting the blade instantly, and used the dead man’s body as cover.
Channeling his new deviant affinity directly into the blade, the katana was coated in a brilliant, lethal blue frost.
Ed sidestepped a clumsy slash from a third bandit and cleaved the air in a horizontal arc.
A blast of absolute ice shot forth from the black blade.
The third and fourth bandits were hit head-on.
The moisture in the air and the blood in their veins froze in a fraction of a second.
Their legs crystallized and shattered to pieces when they tried to move, sending them crashing to the ground, dying from massive thermal shock before they could even articulate a scream.
The last of the five assassins, terrified beyond reason at seeing his squad annihilated in under three seconds by a single boy, dropped his weapon and turned to flee into the forest.
Ed didn’t blink.
He raised his left hand, aiming at the fleeing target.
An invisible blade of compressed wind fired like a cannon shot.
It sliced through the air with a high-pitched whistle and decapitated the bandit mid-sprint.
The inert body ran two more steps on sheer inertia before collapsing into the grass.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the sound of blood dripping from Ed’s tungsten katana.
Helen, Adam, Durden, and the rest of the Twin Horns stood frozen in their positions.
The ranked adventurers were stupefied, watching the clinical, terrifying efficiency with which this young man had just dispatched the enemy vanguard.
“K-Kill the boy!
Surround him!” screamed one of the surviving mercenaries lingering at the rear of the ambush, his voice cracking with panic.
“He’s just a brat!”
But before the remaining half-dozen mercenaries could reorganize to attack Ed, the crunch of dry leaves drew their attention to the edge of the forest.
Three bandits saw a small, white-haired girl emerge from the bushes.
She wore a massive robe that dragged on the ground and a ridiculously large pointed hat.
She was rubbing her eye, visibly sleepy.
The three men exchanged a look of cowardly desperation.
If they couldn’t beat the monster with the sword, they would take the little girl hostage.
“Grab the brat!” one of them roared, lunging toward Lucy with a drawn dagger.
Reynolds and Helen’s eyes widened in horror.
“LITTLE GIRL, RUN!!” Angela yelled, the kind-hearted illusionist trying to step forward to protect her, but sheer exhaustion made her stumble.
Ed, standing ten meters away, lowered his katana.
He made absolutely no move to protect her.
He simply stood there, watching the bandits with a pragmatic expression.
Lucy Mayrill stopped in her tracks.
The three armed men were sprinting toward her, weapons raised.
The girl lowered her hand from her face.
Her deep, glowing purple irises locked onto the attackers.
Her expression didn’t reflect fear, but rather an immense, boundless irritation at being disturbed.
“Ed…
there’s too much noise…” Lucy whispered.
She recited no incantation.
She adopted no combat stance.
She simply raised her index finger toward the three men.
A sphere of energy, the size of a marble but with an incalculable destructive density, formed at the tip of her finger.
The silence of the forest was torn apart by a deafening roar.
A beam of pure energy shot forward.
The attack struck the chest of the first bandit and, without slowing down in the slightest, pierced through the other two right behind him.
There were no screams of pain, no blood.
The heat and pressure of the attack were so absolute that the three mercenaries were vaporized instantly.
The beam continued its trajectory, devouring a straight fifty-meter line of the forest, disintegrating ancient oak trees and massive boulders, leaving behind a smoking trench of crystallized earth in its wake.
When the echo of the explosion faded, Lucy lowered her finger.
She let out a long yawn, adjusted her hat, and walked lazily until she stood behind Ed’s back.
The battlefield fell into a state of total stupor.
The remaining bandits dropped their weapons.
Their faces had lost all color, and the terror in their eyes was primal.
They turned around and fled into the forest, completely abandoning their mission.
Ed did not pursue them.
His tactical objective—neutralizing the threat—had been successfully completed. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
With a quick flick of his wrist, Ed shook the blood from the tungsten blade and sheathed it with a flawless metallic click.
He turned and began to walk at a calm pace toward the Twin Horns.
The professional adventurers instinctively took a step back.
They had just been saved, but the aura of this blond youth and the absurd display of power from the little girl had them paralyzed with respect and sheer terror.
Reynolds, despite his severe injuries, forced himself to stand.
He raised his notched sword, bravely placing himself between Ed and his pregnant wife.
It was the pure instinct of a man who loved his family above all else.
“W-Who are you people?” Reynolds asked, coughing, his voice raspy but firm.
Ed stopped three meters away.
His cold gaze swept over the ashen-brown-haired man and then rested on the redhead who was crying tears of relief.
“Put the weapon away.
If I wanted to kill you, you would already be dead,” Ed replied, his voice flat.
“Evaluate your injuries and step away from the edge of the precipice.
The terrain is unstable.”
Alice, radiating a maternal warmth despite the recent terror, placed a gentle hand on her husband’s arm, silently asking him to lower the sword.
Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“T-Thank you…
thank you for saving our lives.
My name is Alice…
he is my husband, Reynolds.
And they are our party…
the Twin Horns.”
Helen, the leader, stepped forward, leaning on her bow.
Her posture was deeply respectful.
“We owe you our lives.
I assume you are high-ranking adventurers to possess such skills.
We hope to see you in the capital soon so we can properly thank you and reward you for this immense debt.”
Adam, the energetic redhead, let out a nervous laugh, rubbing the scar on his nose.
“By all the gods, kid!
You almost gave me a heart attack too with that sword!
You guys are absolute monsters!” he exclaimed, though his tone was brimming with gratitude.
Durden nodded slowly, his massive frame relaxing, while Angela looked at Lucy with a mix of adoration and absolute terror, not daring to go over and hug her.
Jasmine, on the other hand, remained silent, but her sharp red eyes tracked Ed’s every movement, recognizing a true master of arms when she saw one.
Ed listened to the introductions in silence.
His analytical mind processed the information rapidly.
«Reynolds and Alice Leywin?
The Twin Horns?»
Ed kept his expression like a mask of ice, but internally, the pieces clicked into place.
He knew the name “Leywin.” It was the name associated with the skill template the system had granted him.
The template of “King Grey” reincarnated as “Arthur Leywin.” He didn’t know the history or politics of this world, didn’t even know what continent he was standing on, but the surname resonated in his memory.
«If the system had reincarnated me in this world instead of just giving me the knowledge of the magic and skills of that template…» Ed thought, glancing at Alice’s swollen belly.
«Perhaps these people would have been my relatives.
What a strange tactical coincidence.»
However, he had no time to ponder the whims of the multiverse.
In the center of his field of vision, the Multiversal System reactivated.
A massive golden screen unfolded before his gray eyes.
[SYSTEM ALERT]
[Main Quest Generated: The Dragon’s Legacy.]
[Sole Objective:] Descend to the bottom of the abyss and find the injured Asura.
Ed read the quest description without blinking.
Simultaneously, his heightened senses picked up on a dark, heavy, and ominous power fluctuation rising from the thick, impenetrable white fog at the bottom of the precipice behind him.
It was an energy crying out for help.
Ed closed the system screen and shifted his attention to the leader of the Twin Horns and Reynolds.
“Take your wounded and march toward the nearest city immediately,” Ed ordered suddenly, his voice assuming the absolute authority of a commander on a battlefield.
“This place is no longer safe.
If you stay here, you will die.”
Reynolds looked at him, confused and suddenly worried for the two youths.
“But…
what about you?
You can’t stay in this forest…
come with us to the capital…”
Ed didn’t bother replying.
His role as their incidental savior had concluded, and his primary objective lay in the depths of the fog.
He turned around, turning his back on the group of grateful adventurers, and walked directly toward the edge of the precipice.
The abyss before him was a vertical drop into a sea of gray fog and jagged rocks.
He reached out his right hand and firmly grabbed the collar of Lucy’s oversized robe.
“Hey…
Ed, what are you do-?” The purple-eyed girl’s sleepy complaint was cut short.
Without a single second of hesitation, and without looking back at the astonished Twin Horns, Ed Rothtaylor took a step into the void.
To the stifled, horrified screams of Alice and Reynolds, the mysterious young man with the black sword and the white-haired little girl plummeted in free-fall into the immense, devouring fog of the abyss, heading straight toward an encounter with an ancient existence.