Arthur walked away from the main clearing and went deeper into the ruins of Amon Sûl, looking for a isolated place to test his new abilities.
He stopped in a small courtyard surrounded by crumbled stone walls and broken pillars.
Taking a deep breath, he rested his left hand on the hilt of *Ester*.
The moment his fingers brushed the scabbard, a surge of arctic cold trickled up his arm, not to harm him, but to acknowledge its new master.
*Clash!*
Arthur drew the sword in one swift motion.
The air around him immediately dropped in temperature, his breath instantly condensing into white mist.
Ester’s blade gleamed with a translucent, crystalline blue light, frosting over the grass at his feet in seconds.
He took a basic stance and instinctively, his body adjusted.
His footing shifted slightly, his shoulders dropped, and his grip relaxed into a stance honed by what felt like a lifetime of war.
Peak Swordsmanship wasn’t just knowledge in his head; it was embedded in every muscle, tendon, and breath.
*Swoosh—!*
Arthur swung the blade in a clean, horizontal arc.
He didn’t just slash the air; he commanded it.
An arc of dense frost and pressure burst from Ester’s tip, tearing through the glade.
*CRASH!*
The vacuum wave sliced cleanly through three massive stone pillars fifty feet away, freezing the exposed rock into brittle ice before the pillars collapsed into frozen shards upon hitting the ground.
Arthur looked at his hands, genuinely startled by his own power.
There was no hesitation, no awkwardness in his wrist, just absolute, lethal precision.
Suddenly, low, guttural growls echoed from the shadows of the ruins.
Attracted by the noise and the scent of human blood, a group of massive Wargs—easily the size of a small carriage—stepped into the light, their crimson eyes locked on Arthur.
They bared their fangs, drool freezing before it hit the dirt.
They were creatures that would terrify any ordinary human.
But Arthur felt no panic.
‘Let’s try the active effect,’ he thought.
Arthur focused his mind and activated *King’s Radiance Aura*.
An invisible wave of absolute dominance erupted from his core.
The faint blue light around Ester flickered with an authoritative, golden hue.
The air grew heavy, carrying an aura that demanded submission.
The Wargs’ aggressive posture shattered instantly.
The predators’ eyes widened in sheer terror as a crushing mental pressure bore down on their minds.
Their legs buckled, and they collapsed onto their stomachs, letting out pitiful, whimpering whines, completely paralyzed by the sheer presence of a true sovereign.
Arthur walked toward the beasts with calm, deliberate steps.
As he approached, he released the oppressive pressure of the Aura, letting its passive state wash over the creatures instead.
Instantly, the Wargs’ shaking subsided, replaced by a strange, profound sense of tranquility.
They bowed their heads low to the earth, entirely docile.
“Impressive,” Arthur whispered, sheathing Ester.
The freezing aura dissipated, returning the ambient temperature to normal.
“A passive tranquility to unite allies, an active pressure to break enemies, and the steel to back it all up.”
A satisfied smile crossed his face as he turned back toward his camp.
He was no longer just a lost soul in an unfamiliar land; he was a king in the making.
Arthur stood perfectly still, Ester held loosely at his side, the Sword crystalline blue light contrasting sharply with the deep shadows of the ancient courtyard.
The low whimpers of the paralyzed Wargs filled the air, a testament to the power of the King’s Radiance Aura.
But his satisfaction was short-lived.
*Krr-chk.*
The sound, soft and distinct, came not from the docile beasts before him, but from *above*.
Arthur looked up.
Perched precariously on the fractured rim of a fallen stone archway, forty feet high, was another Warg.
This one was larger than the others, its fur mangy and dark, its back scarred, and one eye clouded with a milky cataract.
More importantly, it was *not* cowed.
The passive effect of his Aura wasn’t enough; this one had felt the mental assault and was now driven by a potent mixture of pain and primal rage.
The scarred Warg didn’t whine.
It gave a short, high-pitched yelp—a different signal.
In response, the paralyzed Wargs *didn’t* calm down.
Their docility vanished, replaced by an even greater frenzy.
The mental tranquility Arthur had established was obliterated.
The scars of the alpha, its survival of the mental blast, had forged a harder, darker will, and its call had communicated that rage to its pack.
They pushed past the lingering pressure, their muscles bunching, their whimpers turning back into aggressive, drooling snarls.
‘One percent,’ Arthur thought calmly.
‘My aura broke at one percent concentration.
Good to know.’ The instinctive knowledge provided by his Peak Swordsmanship didn’t make him smarter, but it made him strategically colder.
He needed a harder target.
The alpha Warg on the archway leaped.
It didn’t fall; it floated for a split second, a dark silhouette against the fractured stonework, before accelerating downward with terrifying velocity, its remaining crimson eye fixed on Arthur’s throat.
Arthur adjusted his stance, Ester shifting seamlessly in his grip.
The memories of thousands of fights rose up, but his focus was single: speed and cold.
As the Warg plummeted, Arthur waited.
*Swoosh-CRACK!*
Arthur didn’t strike the beast itself.
Instead, he channeled a focused, concentrated pulse of arctic pressure through Ester’s tip.
It hit the large boulder that was directly in the alpha’s downward trajectory, just ten feet above the ground.
The boulder exploded outward.
But not randomly.
The force of the arctic vacuum burst from the *side*, blasting chunks of frozen rock and a massive, localized wave of sub-zero pressure horizontally into the path of the descending beast.
The Warg, expecting resistance or dodging, was caught entirely off guard by the kinetic, horizontal blast.
The impact didn’t just smash it aside; the freezing wave enveloped it mid-air, its body instantly hardening into a statue of ice-sheathed fur and muscle.
The velocity of its own descent, coupled with the frozen momentum of the blast, sent it crashing into the stone ground forty feet away, shattering on impact into thousands of glistening, red-tinted shards of frozen flesh and bone.
The courtyard plunged into a absolute silence.
The remaining Wargs, seeing their alpha obliterated not in a glorious struggle, but as a byproduct of a tactical strike they couldn’t comprehend, froze in place.
Arthur stepped away from the frozen, shattered remnants of the alpha, sheathing Ester once more.
The temporary cold aura lifted.
He looked at the surviving Wargs, who were now truly, utterly submissive, their eyes no longer locked onto him with rage, but gazing at the space the alpha used to occupy in abject, primal terror.
He turned toward his encampment, his stride smooth.
*The King’s Aura breaks,* he mused, ‘but the King’s Steel holds true.
This world isn’t just brutal, it requires precision.’ His new skills had met their first test, and he was no longer just a king in the making, he was a king who could execute his will.