Free Web NovelChapter 7: You reek
The force that came with it arrived a half second later.
It hit Leon like a wall. He was airborne before he understood what was happening, the blast picking him up and carrying him, and then the ground came up hard against his back and all the air left his lungs at once. He lay there for a moment, completely still, staring upward.
The golden mushroom climbed the sky above him.
It was enormous. Bigger than anything he had a reference point for, the fire still expanding at the edges, still rolling outward at the crown in slow massive waves that caught the clouds and lit them from beneath.
He stared at it.
His back hurt. His mana was gone. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
Slowly, he dropped his gaze to the sword in his hands.
The golden light along the blade had settled into something quiet. Almost calm. The inscriptions on the handle had stopped glowing entirely, like it hadn’t just erased a dungeon from the inside out.
’Did I...’he thought.
He looked back up at the mushroom cloud, still climbing.
’Did I really do that...’
Even with his mana scraped down to almost nothing, and the exhaustion sitting heavy in every part of his body, Leon couldn’t stop staring at the golden mushroom cloud still rolling itself outward against the night sky.
The kind of power that had produced that — that had consumed an entire dungeon from the inside and sent the remains blasting through the roof in a column of golden fire — was sitting in his hand right now, quiet and patient, like it was waiting to see what he would do next.
He was still in awe of it.
He turned the thought over slowly, examining it from different angles, and it stayed true from every one of them.
One attack. One broad swing that his body had made more on instinct than intention, and six people had stopped existing.
He sat with that for a moment, testing it the way you tested ice before putting your weight on it, waiting for something to crack through.
Remorse. Guilt. Some version of the feeling he was supposed to have when people died because of something he did.
Nothing came.
If anything, the feeling that surfaced was closer to disappointment.
He’d had them. He’d had all of them standing in front of him, fear finally written across Ran’s face for the first time in the years Leon had known him, and he’d ended it in a single motion. One swing and it was over before it had properly begun.
He could have drawn it out. Could have let them understand, fully and completely, exactly what they had thrown away when they decided he wasn’t worth keeping alive.
He almost wished he had.
’Tornado Fury.’
That was the name of the skill he had used.
He had used it on pure instinct when all six of them launched toward him at once, and now the name of it sat in his memory like it had always been there.
He looked down at the sword in his hand. The light along the blade had dimmed slightly from what it had been in the dungeon, the intensity of it pulled back a notch, but the golden edge still caught the night air and threw it back brilliantly, the blade’s surface clean and flawless and genuinely one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen up close. frёeweɓηovel.coɱ
There was a craftsmanship to it that went beyond anything he could name, something in the proportions and the way the light moved across it that made it difficult to look away.
Leon ran his fingers slowly across the surface of the blade.
He had never seen a sword like this before. He was certain no one had.
’Excalibur,’ he thought, and something in him settled at the name, warm and certain. ’You’re the best!’
Then he heard footsteps.
They came from somewhere behind him, more than one set, moving at a pace that suggested purpose rather than wandering.
His chest tightened before he’d finished processing the sound, a quick involuntary spike of panic moving through him as his eyes swept the treeline.
’Inventory.’ he thought, and the holy sword immediately vanished from his hand, reappearing in a box in his inventory.
After a few minutes, a group of seven people came from behind him.
Their footsteps slowed, and their faces twisted in shock when they saw the giant mushroom cloud still churning itself against the sky.
"Holy shit!" A man among them spoke, his voice, rough at the edges. "Who the hell did that? They destroyed the whole dungeon?"
"That power." A different voice, quieter and more careful. "That’s clearly S-rank level. We should stay away from here — who knows what might still happen."
A beat of silence while they processed that.
Then their eyes came down to Leon, and they approached him.
Footsteps approached. One set, deliberate, separating itself from the group.
Leon turned his head.
The man who crouched down to look at him was short, with black hair and the kind of face that made quick assessments and didn’t bother hiding that it was doing so.
He looked Leon over once, top to bottom, and then his nose scrunched up with an expression that had nothing to do with the dungeon or the mushroom cloud or any of the more dramatic things in the immediate environment.
"Damn." He said it plainly, pulling his head back slightly. "You reek."
Leon smiled, and even the effort of that felt like it cost him something.
’Of course,’ he thought. ’That damn Ran.’
His injuries had healed themselves due to the golden light from Excalibur, but the smell had no reason to leave just because the wounds had closed.
Pig food. Feed and filth and whatever else Ran had made a point of covering him in back at the start of all this, still sitting in the fabric of his ruined clothes like a signature.
He was lying on the ground outside a destroyed dungeon, wearing rags, smelling like a pig pen.
