Legendary Awakening: Strongest Class In the Apocalypse-Chapter 65: Saving the village

"No..."

The word tore out of Princess Evelyn before she could contain it — raw and ragged, stripped of every layer of composure she had spent years building. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

"I didn’t make all those sacrifices just to end like this."

The roar that followed shook her chest from the inside, fury crashing through her like a wave that had nowhere left to break. If the force of her rage alone could have killed, every goblin knight currently tearing through her people would have dropped where it stood. The ground would have been littered with black armor and silence.

But fury changed nothing. The goblins continued their advance, unhurried and relentless, and the battlefield continued its grim arithmetic regardless of what burned in her heart.

Despair had taken root.

Not just in Evelyn — she could feel it spreading outward, moving through the ranks of her people the way cold moves through water. She could see it in the way shoulders dropped between blows, in the way eyes started scanning for exits that didn’t exist, in the way voices stopped calling out to one another because the effort of hope had become too costly. The fight was still happening, but something essential had already begun to leave it.

And the numbers told a story that no amount of will could rewrite.

Every minute that passed, the elven village lost another ten percent of its fighting strength. Not wounded. Not retreating. Gone. Permanently subtracted from the count that was already too small to begin with.

Each loss hit Princess Evelyn like a blade finding a gap in armor. There were no words adequate to the shape of the pain — not grief exactly, not shock exactly, but something that lived in the space between them, something that hollowed out the chest and left an echo where a person used to be.

Then Bloodmancer Thalia’s voice cut across the chaos.

"Everyone — gather around me!"

She punctuated the order by slamming her blood chain sideways into the nearest goblin knight, the impact sending it skidding several meters before it caught itself. Even as she issued the command she was already retreating, pulling back with measured, tactical steps, her expression tight with the focused strain of someone running more calculations than they had the resources to solve.

There were simply too many of them. Even if Thalia somehow found a way to burn through every goblin knight on this field herself, it would be a victory measured in ashes — by the time the last one fell, there would be nothing of the elven village worth saving. She understood that. She hated that she understood that.

Thalia was many things, and humble was rarely one of them. But she did not want this. Not this.

The order landed, and anyone still capable of rational thought obeyed it immediately.

Jackie and Millie moved first. There was no deliberation behind it — staying scattered against a force like this was a death wish neither of them had signed up for, and a tactical retreat toward their strongest point was simply the only move that made sense.

They fell back quickly, reaching Thalia’s position as the blood chains rose higher around them, weaving a shifting, living barrier that caught and redirected the press of armored bodies.

Behind them came Surnark, then Brutus — limping badly, one hand pressed against the wound still seeping through his armor, his jaw set with the particular stubbornness of a man who refused to acknowledge that he was close to his limit.

And finally, descending from the watchtower with her weapon drawn and her eyes still burning with everything she hadn’t been able to convert into action, came Princess Evelyn.

They formed a circle.

Bloodmancer Thalia stood at the center of it, her blood chains spinning outward in overlapping arcs, each thread responding to her will as the group tightened around her. The barrier wasn’t impenetrable — nothing here was — but it held. For now, it held.

The goblin knights tested the edges of it with heavy, probing strikes, looking for the weakness they knew had to be there.

Inside the circle, nobody spoke.

There was nothing left to say that the situation hadn’t already said louder.

Xavier stood over the two young men lying on the ground and closed their eyes.

Then he let out a long, quiet sigh.

His guess had been right. Both Rufus and Jack had made for the elven village — that much was clear from the direction they had fallen and the state in which he had found them. They had almost made it. Almost. But the gap between almost and there was, as it so often turned out to be, the gap between living and not.

The deaths had been gruesome. He didn’t let himself look at them any longer than necessary.

He exhaled once more — slower this time, carrying something heavier in it — then dropped to one knee and began digging. His hands moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had learned long ago that grief and momentum couldn’t always share the same space, and that honoring the dead sometimes meant not stopping. With his superhuman strength, the earth gave way quickly. The pit was prepared in far less time than it should have taken.

He laid them down carefully. Then straightened. Then moved.

He just hoped it wouldn’t be too late.

His pace was quick and deliberate, threading through the treeline with the focused momentum of someone who had already closed one Chapter and was now fully committed to the next. But after only a few strides, his steps faltered — just slightly, just for a moment.

Something at the edge of his awareness pressed gently but unmistakably against his senses.

Auras. A couple of them. Trailing behind him at a distance that suggested awareness rather than coincidence.

His frown arrived quietly.

He already knew who they were. He turned it over in his mind for exactly one moment, weighed the options, and then shook his head and kept walking. He had bigger problems waiting ahead of him, and they would either keep up or they wouldn’t.

By the time the elven village came into view, the sky above it had already changed.

Thick trails of smoke climbed upward from behind the walls in dark, twisting columns, curling at the tops like something reaching for height before losing the will to continue. They rose like dancing dragons against the pale sky, each one marking something that had been burning long enough to produce that kind of yield. From the distance came sounds that he recognized without needing to identify the source — anguished, raw, the sounds a place makes when it is in the process of being unmade.

His eyes moved fast across the scene ahead.

A group of First Sequence goblins had formed a perimeter around a tight cluster of people — what remained of the village’s fighters pressing together in a circle, their combined effort holding the line by increasingly thin margins. From where Xavier stood, the math was obvious. They were failing. Slowly, stubbornly, and with everything they had — but failing.

His gaze sharpened. He made the calculation in under a second.

"Zerin." His voice came out flat and even. "Open a path."

He had no intention of spending the DeathWill execution streak on goblins that didn’t warrant it. The buffer mattered. Every sequence counted, and burning it on targets below First Sequence would push the bonus into territory he wasn’t ready to cash in yet. Zerin could handle the preliminary clearing — and at her current strength, it wouldn’t even be a question.

The contract had loosened as Xavier grew. That was simply how it worked. Zerin was a Seventh Sequence being at her full measure, and as the ceiling of Xavier’s strength rose, the constraints binding her rose with it. She was not what she had been when they first crossed paths, not by a significant margin.

A cold snort was the only acknowledgment he received before her figure materialized ahead — stepping out of the shadows between one moment and the next as though she had simply always been there and the world had only just remembered to show her. Her long black hair lifted and fell in the wind with unhurried grace. Her snow-pale skin caught the light filtering through the smoke overhead, faintly luminous in the way things are when they don’t entirely belong to the world they’re standing in. Her smoky grey eyes swept the field ahead with the cool, assessing detachment of someone reading a situation they have no emotional investment in.

Then she raised one hand.

The shadows responded like they had been waiting for permission.

They peeled away from the ground, from the bases of trees, from the spaces between bodies — rising and stretching and flowing with a liquid, purposeful ease that had nothing natural in it. They moved toward the goblins the way dark water moves toward lower ground, and where they touched, they consumed. No sound. No struggle. One moment the goblins were there, and the next they were simply on the ground — dozens of them, tens of them, dropping in swift, silent succession as the shadows swallowed whatever kept them moving and gave nothing back.

In the space of a breath, a clear path had been carved through the press of bodies. Straight through, all the way to the cluster of people at the center.

Inside the circle, Bloodmancer Thalia felt the shift before she understood it.

The pressure against the blood chains eased fractionally — then eased again, in a pattern that didn’t match anything she had done. She glanced outward and saw goblins going down in the periphery without explanation, falling in clusters that her own power hadn’t touched.

What happened?

She scanned the field, trying to locate the source, her mind running through the limited list of things that could produce that kind of result that quickly.

Then she saw him.

A young man moving through the newly opened corridor at speed, heading directly toward their position, his expression carrying the particular brand of focused calm that belonged to people who had stopped being surprised by bad situations some time ago.

Her eyes went wide before she could stop them.

Him—!

The recognition landed hard, chased immediately by the question that had no clean answer.

How is he still alive?