Legendary Awakening: Strongest Class In the Apocalypse-Chapter 63: Return

When Xavier had first jumped into that portal, he hadn’t known what was waiting on the other side. No map, no guarantee, no safety net — just the decision and the drop.

Coming back was a different matter entirely. He stepped through at his own pace, unhurried, with the quiet and settled weight of someone who had already paid the price for what came next and was simply collecting what he was owed.

The bloodstained plain greeted him like an old, unpleasant acquaintance.

Goblins still roamed the open ground, their guttural roars cutting through the cold air, their movements restless and disorganized. But the numbers had thinned noticeably compared to when he had left. The field that had once been a wall of green-skinned bodies now had gaps in it — spaces where there had once been mass and noise, now only stained earth and scattered remnants.

Xavier took a measured look at his immediate surroundings, cataloguing exits and threats out of habit. Then his gaze dropped to his right hand.

The Lich King Seal was gone.

Not faded, not weakened — gone, as cleanly as if it had never been there. Which made sense. He hadn’t broken a branch or burned a leaf. He had destroyed the root entirely.

He flexed his fingers once, then looked behind him.

The portal shimmered at his back, its edges pulsing with a low, rhythmic light. Then, one by one, the women began stepping through — emerging from the rippling surface like figures surfacing from deep water, their expressions carrying the particular dazed quality of people whose minds hadn’t fully caught up to the fact that they were still alive. Disbelief had taken up permanent residence on most of their faces.

Xavier watched the procession in silence.

The process took a full five minutes. Bodies filtered through steadily, one after another, until finally — last, as he had somehow expected — Aria stepped out.

Her expression was exactly what it always was. Cold. Indifferent. Contained behind walls thick enough to qualify as fortifications. There was no visible relief in her face, no softening at the edges, no exhale of breath that said I made it back. She simply walked out and stood on solid ground as if she had done nothing more significant than step through a doorway.

Xavier watched her for a moment, then let his gaze drift.

Hmm.

Something was absent. He scanned the surroundings again, slower this time, checking the treeline, the open ground, the spaces between.

No Jack. No Rufus.

Not a trace of either of them anywhere.

His mind wandered back almost without his permission — back to the elves’ village, to the last time he had accounted for both of them. He turned the question over quietly. Maybe they had found their way there. Maybe they hadn’t. There was no way to know from here, and standing in the middle of a goblin-infested plain wasn’t exactly the ideal moment for extended reflection.

He filed the thought away and shifted his attention.

Zerin stood beside the pulsating portal, and the moment his eyes landed on her, it was immediately obvious that something was wrong. The composure she usually wore like a second skin was still in place — barely — but beneath it, the cracks were visible. Her face had drained to the color of old paper, pallid and drawn, the shadows beneath her eyes deeper than they had been an hour ago. Whether it was the sheer scale of what she had just done or something else pulling at her, the exhaustion was written plainly across every line of her expression.

Xavier reached into his inventory without breaking stride.

He pulled out a mana recovery potion — goblin blood, not the cleanest option available, but functional — and turned it over in his fingers once before flicking it through the air toward her in a clean, casual arc.

He wasn’t doing it out of any particular concern. He was doing it because a drained Zerin was a liability, and liabilities had a way of becoming problems at the worst possible moments. That was all.

Zerin’s hand shot out and snagged the bottle without fumbling. She pulled the cork, tipped it back, and drank the entire thing down without a second of hesitation — no grimace, no comment, no acknowledgment beyond the act itself.

Fair enough.

Her mana reserves were considerable on a good day. But throwing open a portal of that scale, large enough to funnel that many people across in sequence, was not a casual expenditure. Without the shadowblood she had prepared and stored beforehand, the whole thing would have collapsed before it had even started.

Once the last person had cleared the threshold, Zerin raised one hand with a quiet, practiced motion and flicked her wrist.

The portal folded shut behind them without a sound, its edges collapsing inward like a curtain being drawn, until the shimmering light narrowed to a point and disappeared entirely.

The plain returned to what it was — open, cold, and stained with the evidence of everything that had already happened.

The tight line of Xavier’s expression eased slightly as he watched Zerin recover. The color hadn’t fully returned to her face yet, but the worst of it had passed — the potion was doing its job, and that was enough.

He had briefly considered saying something about the evolutionary path. Offering some kind of acknowledgment, maybe even a word of reassurance. But he stopped himself before the thought could go any further.

The plain around them was quiet. Too quiet.

No goblins. Not a single one left moving within his line of sight.

And that realization, instead of bringing relief, settled in his chest like a stone dropped into still water. If the goblins had pulled away from here, there was only one direction they were likely moving.

The elves’ village.

He didn’t need to think it through any further than that. Finding his sister required the elves, and he could not allow anything to happen to that village — not through inaction, not while he was standing here doing nothing.

He turned without a word and started moving.

He had taken exactly one step when a voice cut across the open ground behind him.

"Wait—"

He stopped.

The young woman who had spoken stepped forward from the gathered crowd. She was difficult to miss now that she was close — several burn marks scattered across her skin, still raw and angry against the surface beneath them. Her golden hair had been cut unevenly, as if by her own hand at some desperate point, the ends jagged and uneven. And her eyes — sharp, searching, caught somewhere between confusion and a hope she clearly hadn’t decided whether to trust yet — were fixed entirely on Xavier’s back.

"Where are you going?" Her voice cracked slightly at the edges, held together more by desperation than composure. "Don’t abandon us. Where are we supposed to go?"

A brief pause.

"We have nowhere left."

Xavier turned to look at her.

He recognized her. This was the woman who had been crying the loudest when Lich King Rokos had made his intentions about their fates perfectly clear — voice breaking, body trembling, as though the weight of it had collapsed something inside her. He remembered.

His eyes cooled by a degree or two.

"Is it written on my face somewhere?" he said, his voice carrying no particular heat — just a flat, unimpressed calm that somehow made it land harder than anger would have. "Instead of thanking me for saving your life, you want to drag me down with you?"

He let that sit for exactly one breath.

"Where will you go?" He glanced out at the open expanse surrounding them, unhurried, then back at her. "Look around. The world is vast. You’ll find a place for yourselves."

He didn’t wait for a response.

He had already said more than he had intended to, and every second he spent here was a second the elves’ village didn’t have. He had wasted enough time already — more than enough.

What the women behind him didn’t know, and what Xavier was quietly, keenly aware of, was that the Infinite Execution Record’s DeathWill aura was still active. Lich King Rokos had gone down in a single hit — which meant the aura hadn’t burned itself out yet. His agility was still running at double its normal output, energy pouring through his legs like current through a wire pulled tight.

He took one step.

The ground cracked softly where his foot had been.

His figure blurred and vanished, shooting across the plain toward the direction of the elves’ village like something loosed from a bowstring — there and then not there, leaving nothing behind but a faint disturbance in the cold air.

Behind him, a crowd of women stood in silence.

Most of them were still staring at the spot where he had been standing.