Legendary Awakening: Strongest Class In the Apocalypse-Chapter 66: New territory

Before Bloodmancer Thalia could fully absorb what was happening on the edges of the field, something even more absurd unfolded directly in front of her — something that didn’t just strain her understanding but came within a hair’s breadth of shattering it entirely.

The non-evolved human raised his sword.

He was pointing it at a First Sequence goblin knight.

No — what are you doing? The thought detonated through Thalia’s mind like a crack of lightning, immediate and involuntary. Don’t even think about attacking that thing. You will die. You will simply die.

She hadn’t even finished forming the expression that matched the thought.

Xavier swung.

The sound was clean and brief. Then a shower of blood caught the light, and a head left its shoulders and turned slowly through the air before hitting the ground with a dull, final weight.

The silence that followed lasted perhaps a single heartbeat.

How...

Bloodmancer Thalia’s eyes had gone wide — not the controlled widening of someone processing a surprise, but the involuntary, full-saucer expansion of someone whose framework for reality had just been presented with information it had no shelf for. She forgot to breathe. She forgot, for a moment, to do anything at all except stare.

Then the sword moved again.

It didn’t slow. It didn’t pause to acknowledge what it had just done. Xavier’s blade swept through the air in a motion that carried the quiet, practiced ease of someone completing a task they had done many times before — and the two other First Sequence goblin knights standing in his immediate vicinity ceased to be standing.

Three First Sequence creatures. Gone before Thalia had managed to close her mouth from the first one.

She stood completely dumbstruck, her blood chains hovering forgotten at her sides, every sophisticated calculation her mind was capable of running having temporarily ground to a halt against the sheer, uncooperative fact of what her eyes were reporting.

A First Sequence being carried a sense of danger that operated on a fundamentally different register from anything a non-evolved human could match — a pressure that wasn’t just physical but existential, something felt in the marrow before the conscious mind had time to interpret it. Thalia had detected Xavier’s arrival precisely because that gap between them should have been enormous and obvious, like a candle noticed against a dark sky.

What she was watching now did not match any version of that equation.

She was not the only one who noticed.

The disturbance in the air reached Jackie a fraction of a second before her eyes did. She turned her head sharply — an instinctive motion, precise and immediate — and her gaze found Xavier moving through the field with the unhurried momentum of someone who had already decided how this was going to go.

Something loosened in her chest.

The relief that passed through her eyes was quiet but genuine — not the dramatic exhale of someone who had been rescued at the final moment, but something more settled than that. More certain. It was the particular relief of someone who had not realized how much tension they were carrying until the reason for it walked back through the door.

She didn’t fully understand why. She only knew that the moment Xavier returned, the pressing urgency of the goblin threat seemed to recede — not because the goblins had diminished, but because something in the calculus of the situation had shifted. The hordes surrounding them no longer felt like an inevitable conclusion. They felt like a problem.

And problems, unlike inevitabilities, had solutions.

From her position nearby, Princess Evelyn’s eyes had narrowed into a sharp, measuring focus.

She watched a First Sequence goblin knight fall. Then another. Her gaze tracked Xavier’s figure with the quiet, unblinking attention of someone running a rapid and increasingly unsettled reassessment. The ease with which he moved through First Sequence opposition — the absence of strain in it, the almost offhand quality of the violence — pressed against every assumption she had formed about him since the moment he first arrived at her village.

She was a princess who had survived the extinction of her people through intelligence as much as strength. She knew what a person looked like when they were fighting at their limit, and she knew what a person looked like when they weren’t.

Xavier was not at his limit.

Not even close.

Multiple gazes were pressing against him from every direction — some carrying shock, some carrying awe, at least one carrying the particular quality of relief that comes when something terrible has been narrowly avoided. Xavier registered all of it and cared about none of it.

His eyes were already on the last goblin knight still standing between him and a clear field.

The system notifications drifted in front of his vision like afterthoughts, patient and unhurried.

[Ding! You have absorbed the soul record of three First Sequence goblins. +10 Strength, +20 Mana, +13 Health.]

[Ding! The evolutionary path has been updated.]

[Infinite Execution Record updated.]

[Goblin race spiritual record — 6.7%]

His gaze moved across the notifications in a single sweep — absorbing, cataloguing, moving on. A brief pause, nothing more. Then the sword was already moving again.

The numbers told a quiet story that the battlefield was in the process of illustrating in far more dramatic terms. The raw power he had accumulated through the bonuses alone had pushed him to a level that sat comfortably on par with a stronger Second Sequence creature — not enough to walk carelessly into a fight with one, but more than sufficient to make First Sequence goblin knights feel like a problem that had already been solved before it was fully presented.

He moved through the remaining ones the way a scythe moves through a field — not with fury, not with visible effort, just with a steady, inevitable rhythm that left no room for appeal. Where he passed, bodies fell. The comparison was almost peaceful in its consistency: like leaves losing their grip in autumn, one after another, not resisting so much as simply letting go.

Within minutes of his arrival, the First Sequence goblins had been reduced from an overwhelming, village-ending threat to a dwindling count, and then to nothing. In the spaces between, Xavier had taken the time to sweep through clusters of stronger non-evolved goblins as well — not out of generosity, but because eliminating them eased the pressure on the elven line, and a collapsing elven line would create complications he didn’t want to manage.

The result was singular. Almost unreasonable.

Single-handedly, without assistance, without strategy beyond the application of accumulated overwhelming force, Xavier had pulled Laplace Village back from the edge of annihilation. It was the kind of feat that was supposed to require coordination, numbers, planning — the kind of thing that didn’t happen because one person decided it would. And yet the field was clearing, and the one common variable in every part of it was the young man with a blood-marked sword who had arrived from the wrong direction and apparently not received the message about what was and wasn’t possible.

"Soldiers of my tribe — we have this!" Brutus’s voice tore across the field like a crack of thunder, hoarse and raw and burning with something that hadn’t been there minutes ago. "Don’t lose hope — not now! Drive these disgusting goblins into the ground!"

Something caught in the elven line when it heard him.

Whether it was Xavier’s impossible, visible dominance over opponents that had been destroying them moments before, or simply the desperate human need to believe when belief is offered — the elven soldiers responded. The exhaustion didn’t leave their faces, but something beneath it reignited. They came back into the fight with a ferocity that the blood and the losses and the fear hadn’t managed to extinguish entirely, only suppress.

The remaining goblins didn’t last long after that.

From a few meters away, Surnark stood completely still, staring.

His mind kept cycling back to the same memory — the version of this human he had first encountered, the one he had assessed and filed away with barely a second thought. The one he had looked down on with the comfortable ease of someone who assumes their measure of a thing is accurate because it has always been accurate before.

He turned that memory over now with the particular discomfort of a person holding something that no longer fits the shape they remembered it having.

Was I tired of living?

The question had no good answer, so he let it sit.

The last goblin fell.

The field went quiet in the way fields go quiet after a battle — not peaceful, not restful, but emptied. The noise that had filled every available space for the past however long simply stopped, and what replaced it was the sound of people breathing, and the distant crackle of things still burning, and the collective exhale of a village that had been a few minutes from not existing anymore.

Xavier lowered his sword.

He didn’t look around at the aftermath the way the others did. Didn’t scan the field, didn’t check faces, didn’t do anything that suggested he was waiting to be acknowledged for what had just happened. He simply stood for a moment, sword at his side, while the world finished settling around him.

Then his attention shifted.

It was finally time.

The evolutionary paths had been waiting long enough.