"I’m sorry, but I’ll have to decline taking part in the war for the time being," Micheal suddenly interjected, stepping forward. He offered a gentle, entirely unbothered smile. "I still have a personal trial to complete."

"Well, so do I, actually," Anton added, raising a hand and waving it lazily.

"Ahem, join the club," Yeon chimed in, crossing her arms.

Nox let out a slow, long-suffering sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Complete them within the year."

"Clearing three separate SSS-Ranked dungeons within a single year is a bit of a tall order," Anton muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

"Clearing a hundred dungeons above C-Rank is arguably harder," Yeon countered matter-of-factly.

Micheal let out a soft, amused laugh. "You all drastically underestimate the sheer difficulty of reaching the top five on the global merchant list."

Nox ignored them, turning a sharp, pointed glare toward Zeke. Deal with your people.

Zeke merely shrugged back, his eyes screaming: Not my problem.

"Two years," the Emperor’s commanding voice suddenly cut through their comedic farce, brook no argument. "You three have exactly two years to accomplish whatever tasks you wish to fulfill. As for the rest of you, you will begin your ascent immediately and make your way to the newly emerging battlefields."

The monarch’s gaze locked entirely onto Zeke, a faint, predatory smirk playing on his lips. "But in return for this concession... your leader will have to stay here with me until I choose to let him go."

Zeke blinked, pointing a stiff finger at his own chest. "Me?!"

Don’t tell me this Emperor has Roman tendencies? Zeke thought, an involuntary shudder running down his spine.

The Emperor stared back at him, utterly unimpressed by the display. "You have one week. In one week’s time, the military and every citizen of this empire will begin the war in earnest."

With that, the Emperor turned his head slightly toward Nox.

The Administrator offered a polite smile and casually waved his hand.

In that single, imperceptible instant, the entire group vanished from the throne room.

Left in the quiet grand hall, the Emperor stared at the empty space before speaking aloud. "The Immortal is amusing. I hate him."

"Well, I don’t completely hate him,"

He continued

"I just highly dislike the sheer audacity of that child."

"One could argue that he is technically millions of years old," Nox noted dryly.

"He is?"

"Well, his running argument is that he experienced millions of years of subjective time during his very first trial."

"That’s utterly stupid."

"So is claiming you made a grand, ancient pact millions of years ago when you actually struck the deal a mere century ago," Nox pointed out with a smirk.

"That is entirely different," the Emperor scoffed. "I experienced the agonizing toil of those years with both my physical and mental body."

"It is the exact same concept," Nox countered smoothly. "You claim it feels like millions of years because you are measuring it by the weight of your personal experience. He claims he is millions of years old because of the sheer volume of his subjective experience. It is the exact same psychological phenomenon observed in regressors."

The Emperor rolled his eyes, leaning back. "Get off his dick, you old fart."

Nox blinked, a look of profound confusion crossing his face. "There is that bizarre, foreign language again."

"Explore a few more outer worlds, old man, and you might actually learn something."

...

With a soft flash of light, the entire group materialized inside the familiar, spacious living room of the group’s residence.

"Well, you guys are going to have to share this space until the week passes," Zeke announced, being the first to break the silence as he addressed his students.

The Class of Weirdos merely stared back at him, their expressions utterly puzzled and emotionally drained.

"You currently have nowhere else to stay within the empire, you can’t exactly walk back into the academy, and in a single week, you’re marching off to war," Zeke explained with an aggressively lazy yawn. "Well, a kiddie war first, and then the real war once you’ve been properly vetted."

He stretched his arms over his head. "Anyway, I’m exhausted. I want to sleep."

"Fuck off," Anton grunted, stepping forward and clamping a heavy, vice-like hand onto Zeke’s shoulder. "We are having a mandatory meeting right now."

"You’re not the boss of me," Zeke fired back, sticking his tongue out like a petulant child as he twisted his torso, attempting to shake off the grip.

But Anton wasn’t in the mood for games.

Reminding Zeke of the harsh reality that he was a peak first-tier Saint, Anton flared his aura slightly, pressing down with immense, crushing force.

The lazy, aloof expression instantly vanished from Zeke’s face.

A brilliant, blinding golden light burst from his form.

In immediate response, Anton snorted, a localized ripple of sheer kinetic pressure spreading outward from his boots as he pressed down even harder, determined to anchor the Immortal to the floor.

Zeke tilted his head upward, a sharp, dangerous smirk carving its way onto his face. But before he could execute whatever chaotic retaliation he was planning, a sharp voice cut through the air like a localized thunderclap.

"EZEKIEL VAUGHN."

Yeon stood a few paces away, her face set in a terrifyingly stern expression.

The roaring golden aura instantly dissipated into nothingness. Zeke offered a deeply wry, defeated smile. "I never should have told you my government name."

Anton sneered triumphantly, finally releasing his grip and stepping back.

The brief clash had been a calculated display of hidden mechanics.

The moment Anton had applied pressure, Zeke had actively utilized his copied version of Kai’s newly evolved ability: [Divine].

[Divine] represented a vastly superior, consolidated expression of Kai’s previous skill set.

In the simplest terms, all of Kai’s past abilities had received a massive structural upgrade. For instance, the old [Divine Blessing] skill—which previously allowed Kai to grant a variety of minor buffs once an hour—had been replaced.

Now tied directly to the [Divine] trait, its potency scaled exponentially alongside Kai’s overall rank.

At its current level, the ability allowed the user to grant one highly specific, monumental blessing to a single target. To receive a different type of blessing, the recipient either had to explicitly forfeit the active one or wait a full twenty-four hours for the effect to naturally expire.

The specific buff Zeke had invoked was the Blessing of Might.

While it fundamentally followed its original parameters—boosting all primary stats by one full rank—it possessed a powerful new nuance. It could either focus on individual stats, raising them violently to the absolute numerical limit of the subsequent rank (for example, boosting an E-Rank stat of 51 directly to the D-Rank ceiling of 199), or it could focus on the user’s baseline tier, elevating their entire existence to the apex of the next rank.

For Zeke, who was currently sitting at SS-Rank, the blessing forcibly dragged his existence up to the peak of the First Tier of Sainthood. It instantly normalized his entire stat spread to a staggering 5,000 points across the board—the absolute maximum for a non-specialist entity.

However, this aspect of the blessing carried a strict caveat: if any individual stat had already naturally achieved or surpassed the limit of the raised rank, the blessing would yield zero effect on that specific parameter.

The moment Zeke had triggered the ability, his raw physical strength briefly eclipsed Anton’s baseline, allowing him to casually shrug off the Saint’s crushing grip. Sensing the sudden, anomalous spike in Zeke’s parameters, Anton had instantly countered by activating his own ability: [Absolute Territory].

As a unique spatial trait, [Absolute Territory] granted Anton a massive localized amplification, forcefully raising every single one of his primary statistics—excluding magic power—by one full rank.

In that precise microsecond, Anton’s physical stats had skyrocketed to the peak of the Second Tier of Sainthood.

Zeke had been in the middle of preparing to copy [Absolute Territory] to stack the absurd stat multipliers and overpower him completely, but Yeon’s timely intervention had cut the escalating madness short.

The childish farce had simply gone on for long enough.

A few minutes later, the group finally settled down, scattered across the expansive furniture of the living room.

"What do you guys even want to talk about right now?" Zeke grumbled, slumping lazily across a couch.

The members of the Class of Weirdos were, to put it mildly, completely shell-shocked. Today had violently torn away the veil, exposing them to a terrifyingly alien side of their quirky professor. For a moment in the throne room, it had felt as though some ancient, cataclysmic demon was wearing the skin of their beloved teacher.

But as they carefully reflected on his inherently unreasonable—yet weirdly pragmatic—actions, they realized something. He’s always been exactly like this.

"Don’t you possess a single shred of shame? Your students are sitting right there," Micheal pointed out, a highly amused smile plastered across his face.

"Them?" Zeke scoffed, waving a dismissive hand. "Nah, they’ve basically graduated."

Suddenly, a realization struck him. He had completely forgotten to formally assess the severed heads of the monsters he had explicitly ordered them to bring back.

Eh, I really just demanded those for the sake of theatrical flavor anyway, Zeke rationalized internally, shrugging the thought away.

The students clearly realized this as well, choosing not to utter a single word to remind him.