Free Web NovelChapter 5: Tornado!
Leon’s eyes lifted.
Ran was standing a few feet away, his expression having completed its journey from stunned to furious, the greed still burning underneath but now wrapped in the particular anger of someone who felt they were being denied something that was already theirs by right.
He looked at Leon the way he always looked at Leon. Like an inconvenience that had briefly gotten above itself and needed correcting.
"Or do you have a death wish?"
Leon looked at him for a moment.
Then he raised the sword and pointed it directly at Ran’s chest.
"No." His voice came out steadier than he expected, rough at the edges from everything his body had been through, but steady.
"I killed the monster. It’s mine." He held Ran’s gaze without blinking. "Back off."
The dungeon floor went quiet for exactly one second.
Then Ran laughed.
It started low and built quickly, and the rest of the party joined without hesitation, the sound of it filling the dungeon passage from wall to wall, sharp and mocking and completely unimpressed.
They laughed the way people laughed at something that hadn’t earned the right to be taken seriously.
"Ohh... really." Ran let the word stretch, tilting his head with exaggerated consideration, his grin pulling wide across his face.
"You finally did something a little notable in your trash life." He spread his arms slightly, gesturing at Leon like he was presenting him to an audience. "And now you think you deserve a sword like that?!"
More laughter from behind him.
Then the air changed.
Two swords appeared in Ran’s hands, materialising out of nothing with the casual ease of someone who had performed the same action thousands of times.
They were long and well made, and the moment they solidified in his grip they ignited, red-hot flames wrapping the length of both blades.
Ran’s talent allowed him to coat any weapon he held in flames that multiplied the damage of every strike by a factor of three at minimum.
It was the core of why people followed him, why guilds had recruited him, why his name carried weight in awakener circles despite the personality attached to it.
Those burning blades had ended dungeon monsters far more formidable than a wounded grey pig without breaking his stride.
Behind him, the other three party members moved.
Talents activated quietly but visibly, each of them shifting into readiness.
They fanned out slightly, their eyes fixed on Leon and the sword in his hand with expressions that had dropped any remaining ambiguity about where their loyalties and their interests sat.
The greed was plain on all of them.
Leon looked at the burning swords. Then at the party members spreading out behind Ran. Then back at Ran himself, standing at the centre of it all with fire running the full length of both blades and absolute certainty written across his face.
Leon scoffed.
The sound came out short and quiet and completely unbothered.
"I told you already." He kept the great sword level, the golden light pulsing once along the blade. "It’s mine, don’t think I’ll just hand it to you."
Ran scoffed, the sound short and dismissive.
"You got some fancy sword." He gestured at it with one of his burning blades, the flames trailing through the air in a lazy arc. "And now you think you can take down all of us?"
He said it the way someone stated an obvious absurdity. Like the idea was so far beneath serious consideration that engaging with it at all was already more than it deserved.
Leon looked at him.
Then he smiled. Slow and deliberate, the kind of smile that had nothing performative in it.
"Someone as ugly as you," he said clearly, "doesn’t deserve such a beautiful sword in the first place, Ran."
Ran’s expression immediately underwent a huge change, his eyes tightening and his jaws whitening.
Then he exploded in anger.
"Kill him!" The words tore out of him raw and ugly, stripped of everything except fury. "Kill that trash bastard!" ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
The party moved before the echo of his voice had finished bouncing off the walls.
All three of them launched forward simultaneously, talents flaring to life as they closed the distance, each one burning through whatever restraint had been keeping them at observation distance.
One crackled with blue static electricity running up both forearms.
Another’s body blurred at the edges as a speed enhancement took hold, his outline going slightly unstable as his agility multiplied.
They would have attacked regardless of Ran’s order.
Leon understood that clearly as he watched them charge toward him.
The golden sword in his hand had made the decision for all of them the moment it appeared.
That kind of light, that kind of obvious power sitting in the grip of someone who had been their porter ten minutes ago — there was no version of any of them that walked away from it voluntarily. The greed had been settled long before Ran opened his mouth.
Leon’s breath caught, but his body reacted before his thoughts finished forming, a cold spike of panic moving through his chest as his feet shifted beneath him.
The blue inscriptions along the black handle flared hot, every line of them illuminating at once.
Golden flames erupted from the blade, far stronger than those of Ran’s blades.
Even with how much his attributes had increased, Leon was forced to plant his feet firmly to the ground just to hold the sword steady.
Then, he swung with all the strength he had.
The motion was simple. One broad arc, the great sword moving in a wide horizontal sweep that his new strength made effortless despite the blade’s size.
What came off it was not simple.
The golden flames peeled away from the blade as it swung and didn’t dissipate.
They caught the air and kept moving, rotating, pulling more of themselves into a spiral that widened with every rotation.
A tornado. Golden fire twisting floor to ceiling in the centre of the dungeon corridor, alive and roaring and expanding outward in every direction with no particular interest in what was in its path.
Ran’s eyes went wide.
