In the depths of the fortified underground vault, located dozens of meters beneath the stone surface of Seiron, where sunlight dared not infiltrate and where the eyes and ears of the Shadow Organization's spies were blinded and deafened, the second act of the plan's preparation was unfolding.
Dex Williams was training.
But the word "training" was a colossal understatement for what was happening in that closed space. The underground vault looked more like a scene of a natural disaster that had struck a confined space. Three of the four reinforced stone pillars were cracked or half-destroyed.
The floor was covered in burn marks and impact craters, and a thin haze of blue smoke and rock dust hung permanently in the air, mixed with the sharp smell of ozone from the concentrated mana. The heat in the space had risen to suffocating levels.
Dex stood in a low offensive posture, his feet planted at an unstable angle that would appear to any Academy-trained military instructor as a "textbook mistake."
His clothes were torn, his arms covered in thick red burn scars, created by his own phoenix flames when they had escaped his control, and by impact bruises from a training sword heavier and harder than any real blade he had faced in Falus Forest.
His movements were "dirty," savage, and bare, completely devoid of any showmanship. They were the movements of a being forged in the Forest of Death, where combat holds no honor, only blind survival instinct.
He leaned his slender, flexible body to evade a phantom sword blow, then lunged forward to deliver a crushing strike with his elbow toward an imaginary column's throat, followed by a low kick aimed at shattering the knee, then a bloody headbutt to where the face would be. He fought as though he were a trapped predator cornered against a wall, ready to tear his enemy's throat with his teeth if need be.
"Stop!" Marcus shouted in a powerful and deep voice that echoed through the vault's walls like a thunderclap, forcing the accumulated dust on the ceiling to rain down.
Dex stopped immediately, freezing in a low offensive stance. His chest heaved violently, sweat pouring from his brow to mix with floor ash on his face. He turned toward his father, his blue eyes burning with the battle fire that had not yet died. "What is it, Father?" Dex asked, his voice panting. "Am I slow? Did I leave a gap in my defense?"
Marcus rose with extreme slowness, picked his wooden training sword, weighted with heavy lead, making it heavier than a real steel sword, from the ground with one hand as though it were a dry tree branch. He advanced toward his son with heavy steps that made the ground tremble slightly beneath his feet.
"No, you are not slow at all, Dex. You are very fast, fast as a sand viper striking from below the earth. But your style..." Marcus stopped and sighed, looking at the scars covering his son's arms. "It is a style of survival, not a style of dominance.
You fight as though you expect to die in any fraction of a second, desperately trying to drag your enemy with you to hell as fast and as hideously as possible. This style is very effective when wrestling wild beasts or highway bandits in dark alleyways..."
Marcus walked around his son in a slow circle, like a general inspecting his most important soldier, and continued with cutting gravity: "But we will face elite mages, Shadow Organization members, and professional killers who have spent decades honing their combat arts.
Before such enemies, animal instinct alone will not suffice. They will anticipate your desperate attacks and use your recklessness against you. You need more than mere survival instinct, you need the will to annihilate."
Marcus raised his free hand, and a ball of pure golden mana materialized above his palm. "Mana is not merely magical fuel we pump out to cast a spell, only foolish mages think that. Mana is a direct extension of your will, your soul, your anger, and your calm. You now possess the legendary Phoenix Flames, a purely destructive power with no equal on this entire continent.
But it is a raging, feral, untamed power. If you continue releasing it randomly, it will burn your enemies yes, but in the end it will consume its own vessel. It will consume your own body. You need a technique to direct it, a steel mold to pour this volcanic lava into one single devastating channel."
Marcus took the classic fighting stance of the Williams family, the Poised Lion's Stance. He widened his feet with steadiness, raised his sword slowly, and in that moment, Dex felt a terrifying change in the room. The solid earth beneath him began to shudder in a regular trembling rhythm, and the air became heavier to the point of impeding breathing.
"I will now teach you the [Thunder Roar] technique," Marcus said, his voice acquiring a metallic resonance. "It is the secret technique and the foundation that allowed your great-grandfather to unite the warring western tribes and establish the Seiron Province. Do not be deceived by the name, it does not rely on the magical lightning element. It relies on absolute mastery of the body and mana."
Marcus explained as he compressed mana into his arm, until his veins rose like steel ropes radiating gold. "The concept depends on cramming and compressing a colossal quantity of mana inside the delicate muscle fibers, trapping it there until it reaches the explosion point, then releasing that energy all at once, in a thousandth of a second, like a violent sonic detonation at the moment of physical collision with the enemy.
It transforms your body itself into a time bomb, and your strike into a devastating thunderbolt that no armor or magic can obstruct."
The grueling training began. Marcus was unbelievably harsh. He did not treat Dex as a pampered son, but as the last heir who must carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.
"Compress the mana! Don't let it leak out like cheap smoke!" Marcus roared as he directed a sweeping lateral blow of his training sword at Dex's chest. Dex deflected the blow with great difficulty using his mana-sheathed arms, but the collision's force threw him backward to roll several meters across the rough floor, leaving bloody friction marks on his skin.
"Your flames try to burn everything around them by their chaotic nature, even your own body is damaged by their heat!" Marcus explained, advancing toward his son who was trying to rise. "You must force them to submit to their master. You are the master, and the fire is the servant.
Do not let it blaze outside your body. Make the fire liquid inside your veins, draw it from your skin's pores and compress it to a single point. And at the moment of the strike, make it explode. Not as a flame, but as a projectile."
Dex tried again and again, for long hours. In the beginning, his attempts were catastrophic. The flames rebelled against him, escaping in random, intermittent bursts, burning the sleeves of his shirt, or melting sections of the stone floor beneath his feet without producing the required effect.
The pain was unbearable, trying to compress phoenix flames inside muscle fibers felt like attempting to swallow burning embers. His muscles tore internally, then the phoenix flames would immediately heal them through the Resurrection property, only for him to tear them again. He was living a cycle of continuous physical agony.
But Dex did not surrender. As the heavy hours passed, through Marcus's harsh and merciless guidance, and the sharp intelligence Dex had honed through pain and suffering, he began to grasp the concept. He began to find what Marcus had called "the Rhythm."
Dex stood before one of the colossal stone pillars, built from solid granite fused with iron. He closed his eyes completely, isolating himself from his external surroundings.
He focused his entire consciousness inward. He visualized the blazing Core at the center of his chest, not as a raging fire consuming everything green and dry, but as a second heart. A heart beating slowly and powerfully.
With each pulse of his real heart, he drew a current of pure fire from the core. And rather than releasing it, he compressed it. Trapped it inside his right arm, driving it toward the muscles of his shoulder, back, and finger joints.
He felt absolute pain, feeling as though his bones were on the verge of melting into liquid, and that his blood was literally boiling. But with his iron will, he contained that pain, swallowed it, and converted it into cold, concentrated, directed fury.
The blue aura that had surrounded his body contracted and receded inward until it disappeared entirely. He appeared as though he possessed no mana whatsoever. But his right arm began trembling with an unnatural violence, and started glowing from beneath the skin with a dark and frightening blue light, as though a dying star dwelled inside his flesh.
"Now!" Marcus roared, having sensed the danger of the accumulated energy.
Dex opened his eyes and launched like a bullet toward the granite pillar. He used no sword and adopted no complex stance. He swung his right fist, sheathed in a very dense, compressed blue aura so intense it appeared pure white at its center from the severity of the heat and pressure.
At the moment his knuckles touched the hard stone's surface, Dex released his will and opened the gates. He unleashed [Thunder Roar].
BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
It was not merely the sound of shattering. It was a catastrophic explosion. The granite pillar did not break into pieces as ordinary strikes would cause. The entire middle section of the pillar evaporated, transformed in a fraction of a second from solid state to fine dust, then to nothing.
And from the point of contact launched a circular blue shockwave, immense and violent, that swept through the entire vault. The great vault shuddered with tremendous force as though struck by a maximum-magnitude earthquake.
The distant walls that had stood for centuries cracked, and gravel and stone dust flew through the air like deadly shrapnel. Lord Marcus himself was forced to drive his sword into the ground and grip it to resist the force of the propulsive wave, which tore his shirt and nearly uprooted him from where he stood.
The terrifying ringing deafened ears for several seconds. When the thick dust began to clear slowly, the scene was frightening. The remaining top section of the pillar hung in the air for a moment before collapsing to the ground.
And Dex stood amid the hot wreckage. His right arm still glowed with terrifying heat, thick steam rising from it, and his eyes gleamed with an inhuman golden-blue brilliance: a brilliance merging the will of the lion with the immortality of the phoenix.
Lord Marcus stared at the scene in genuine stupefaction, his mouth falling open in shock. He knew the Thunder Roar technique well, he had used it hundreds of times. It was a technique that shatters bones, breaks the hardest steel armor, and smashes rock, but it most certainly did not erase physical matter in this terrifying manner.
Marcus grasped what had just occurred. Dex's brilliant fusion of the family's muscular compression technique with the legendary phoenix flames of infinite heat had created something entirely new. A terrifying hybrid that far surpassed the original technique.
Marcus approached his son slowly, ignoring the scorching heat emanating from him, and placed his large, roughened hand on Dex's shoulder which was literally boiling. He looked into his son's eyes and saw in them a man capable of governing the world.
"Your style is strange, my son, savage, and reckless. But it is terrifying and perfect," Marcus said in a low voice charged with an absolute paternal pride blending with genuine awe at the power he had just awakened.
"Dex, you are no longer imitating power or borrowing it from previous spells. Today you have become its source. Sylvester believes, in his stupidity, that tomorrow he will face a noble knight who can be cornered by the rules of a duel, but he does not know that he will face a natural disaster walking on two legs."
Dex smiled a tired yet confident smile and looked at his scorched fist. "Father, they will learn that storms do not apologize to the trees they uproot."