Chapter 248 Torrential Rain

"Ding!"

A perfectly straight, slender, razor-sharp blade clashed violently against a heavy broadsword completely wrapped in silver.

There were no dazzling sparks that should have accompanied the impact. Instead, an incredibly crisp—and even somewhat piercing—screech echoed through the air.

The type of weapon a person wielded could perhaps represent their personality and combat style. But in a moment like this, when their sharpness and quality were perfectly matched as the blades ground against each other, the only thing left to tip the scales of victory was the purest factor of all: the wielders' physical strength.

Hum—it was somewhat unexpected.

The seemingly powerful broadsword, with a blade thicker than an adult's arm, actually seemed to be falling at a disadvantage against the slender sword—a weapon thick at the base and thin at the tip, looking as fragile as an insect's stinger that might snap at the slightest touch.

The silver liquid steadily flowing over the surface of the heavy sword began to churn with unnatural ripples under the pressure of the clash. Even the hands holding it, similarly wrapped in flowing silver, trembled violently.

"Damn it!"

His medium-length golden hair was drenched in sweat, clinging messily to his cheeks. On Trevelyan's handsome face, nothing remained but the strained grimace of sheer exertion.

"I can't let this continue!"

The combat training he had received from his family since childhood ensured that, while he might be vastly inferior to his opponent in actual combat experience, he could still keep a clear head at critical moments.

Under the Morton Family's training system, the special class known as [Silver-Plated Knight] consumed massive amounts of special metals and silver during its progression. However, upon job-occupation, it provided defensive capabilities far exceeding those of ordinary Warriors. It even granted elemental damage traits, allowing him to strike effectively against certain intangible undead creatures.

But it was ultimately just a niche Basic Class.

While he gained outstanding defense, he sacrificed his own physical Strength and movement speed. Even though his Class Level had already reached Level 5—giving him the confidence to easily handle the vast majority of unstructured, equally leveled Adventurers—he could only fall to a disadvantage against Lawson. His opponent's comprehensive Class Level had reached Level 6, using the [Blood-Seeking Veteran] class to compensate for the flaws of the [Warrior] class, and he possessed rich combat experience from years of working as an Adventurer and a guard.

Their brief clash back in Molten Scale Town had even given Trevelyan the illusion that his opponent was nothing special. It was only when he was lured step by step into the open space outside the town, and Lawson's evasive, retreating combat style suddenly turned aggressive, that he truly realized the gap in strength between them.

The cramped environment among the dense buildings in the town, along with the interference and siege from his subordinate knights, might have bridged the gap between them to some extent. But right now, when he truly had to fight this gloomy middle-aged man one-on-one, the significance of being one level higher—possessing an additional Mastery-level combat technique and its accompanying physical enhancements—was thoroughly laid bare in their battle.

"Ahhh!"

He gritted his teeth until they nearly shattered, his muscles bulging as they pushed against the metal armor on his arms. His will connected with the blade, and in that moment, the liquid metal seemed to take on a life of its own.

Amidst the dense, violent ripples, the liquid silver formed tiny protrusions. Sensing the danger hidden within them, the slender blade that had been pressing toward Trevelyan's neck suddenly paused and was forcefully retracted!

The next second, the tiny protrusions gathered on the surface of the broadsword morphed into sharp silver spikes, shooting outward like a storm of rain. But they only pierced the empty air, leaving countless tiny, deep holes in the ground.

Lawson lightly gripped his strangely shaped, stinger-like rapier, standing ten meters away in the clearing. A few holes coated in residual silver liquid could faintly be seen at the hem of his clothes, but his body bore only a few lightly bleeding scratches.

His condition was practically perfect.

On the other side of the battlefield, Trevelyan, who had just forced him back with that rain of silver spikes, was already panting heavily, clearly having exhausted a significant amount of stamina.

"From what those little runts were saying earlier, you're the family's Knight Commander?" Lawson slowly said in a mocking tone, secretly recovering his stamina as his gaze swept carefully over the flowing silver on his opponent's blade and the bulging pouch at his waist.

"That old thing from the Morton Family really has no standards; you only got that position because of your birth."

"I busted my ass in his castle for five whole years and he didn't even make me a squad leader, yet trash like you managed to become a Knight Commander."

"Hey," he said, using an unusually deliberate gaze to study the young man's facial features and medium-length golden hair, his face full of teasing amusement. "You're not that old bastard's illegitimate son, are you?"

Trevelyan just panted, offering no reply.

This naturally wasn't because he was indifferent to Lawson's mockery. At less than thirty years old, his temperament was nowhere near stable enough to remain unaffected by outside provocations. He had simply seen through the man's attempt to enrage him and was deliberately holding back, though the surging emotions erupting in his heart over the insult to his family's honor and his direct bloodline had already turned his eyes bloodshot.

The silver-white liquid beneath his arms and neck spread rapidly, almost connecting across his chest.

"Lawson, do you know why the Duke was unwilling to put you in a position of importance?" Trevelyan asked, his voice trembling slightly, though a subtle sneer crept onto his face.

He stared intently at the middle-aged man's face, wanting to burn every impending shift in his expression firmly into his mind.

"A little over a year ago, when I received the mission to come to Cloudclimb Province and keep an eye on you, the Duke happened to mention it in passing."

"Oh, he was feeding the hounds at the time. You remember 'Old Gray-Hair'—that old dog whose tail had practically lost all its fur and who could barely walk anymore."

"The Duke told me that you were exactly like that mutt. No matter how many bone scraps you were fed, your heart would never warm to us; it would only feed your appetite and your audacity, making them grow bigger and bigger."

"A backbiting wild dog like you, who seems somewhat capable but is actually entirely untrustworthy, only deserves to spend the rest of his life outside the castle, picking up bones for the Morton Family."

Lawson's composure shattered.

The doubts he had harbored for years were finally answered, rendering the loyalty he had once offered to the family utterly laughable. As if poked right in the deepest, most painful wound in his heart, his face—already pooling with gloom and anger—twisted into unparalleled ferocity.

"You deserve to die!" a hoarse, freezing voice filled with killing intent squeezed out of his throat.

The gloomy figure standing in place vanished in an instant.

Taking his place was the harsh screech of a sharp object tearing through the air.

At the exact same time, however, a bizarre smile of a successful scheme abruptly surfaced on Trevelyan's face.

In secret, using the blind spots behind his back during their clash, he had already let the flowing silver seep into the ground and lay in wait—and now, it suddenly activated.

The companion combat technique of the [Silver-Plated Knight] at Level 5, "Silver-Lock Prison," triggered in a flash. Viscous silver liquid burst forth from deep within the soil, erupting like a geyser to form dense, flexible chains that tangled together. Like a birdcage rising from the earth, it anticipated the high-speed figure's trajectory and enveloped him within.

With his vast combat experience, Lawson knew he had fallen into a trap the very instant an inexplicable tremor came from beneath his feet. He immediately forced himself back to calmness from his blinding rage.

His rapier quivered twice, and a blood-red gleam surfaced along the edge of the blade. Facing the silver prison before him, he delivered a diagonal slash, cleaving the incredibly sturdy liquid chains right down the middle.

Trevelyan naturally knew that this combat technique couldn't trap his opponent for long. At the very second the "birdcage" took effect, his left hand had already left his sword hilt and reached for his waist. With just a light brush over his pouch, a small scroll about the length of a palm was already grasped in his hand.

He didn't need to inflict much lethal damage on the man. As long as he could bind Lawson in place—even for less than a second—it was enough time for Trevelyan to play his trump card.

As the youngest Knight Commander of the Morton Family, Trevelyan had been pumped full of massive resources since childhood due to his outstanding talent. A full set of Fine equipment, loyal and reliable subordinates, the resources required for a [Silver-Plated Knight] to grow... he had received practically the most of anyone in his age group.

Right now, even though he was dispatched on a mission heavily steeped in surveillance—one with almost zero danger unless he initiated an attack, and where even the Duke himself doubted Lawson's team could successfully steal the secret treasure from the Dragon Lair—he hadn't come unprepared. Aside from being granted a token engraved with the Morton family crest that allowed him to freely mobilize the guards of Molten Scale Town, and bringing along over a dozen elite family knights, the Duke had given him special authorization before departure. He had retrieved a precious, single-use magic scroll from the family treasury, one that even a non-spellcasting Class Holder could use:

—Necromancy School, Fourth-Circle Upgraded Edition, Scroll Optimization Type II: [Bestow Curse].

This spell, forcefully upcast to the Fourth Circle from its original lower-tier Third Circle and specially modified into a scroll item, not only drastically lowered the requirements for the user, but also forced the target to possess a much higher Perception attribute to resist it, all while enhancing the spell's effects and duration.

As for the detailed effects of [Bestow Curse] itself, it was said there were four options in total to choose from, making it look incredibly complex. But in summary, they boiled down to just two types:

Debuff and Control.

And the resistance required to gain immunity against these effects decreased in that same order.

Trevelyan naturally could have chosen the latter option. If the spell took effect, Lawson would be directly controlled and rooted in place, completely immobilized, leaving Trevelyan to simply step forward, swing his broadsword, and effortlessly sever the man's head.

But the probability of the Control effect being resisted was far higher than the Debuff. This meant that if he chose the Control-type effect of [Bestow Curse], given Lawson's physical resistance, there was a very high chance it would be negated.

For Trevelyan, who had already played his trump card, that was simply unacceptable.

Therefore, he chose the first of the effects: "Debuff."

It would cause Lawson's physical attributes to suffer an all-around decline for the next several dozen minutes. The impact was naturally not as absolute as "Control," but correspondingly, the resistance needed to fend off the curse was much higher. Unless the Goddess of Luck cast her gaze upon him, there was absolutely no way a Class Holder of Lawson's level had the attributes to resist it.

"Riiip."

The small scroll was flicked open with one hand, his will hooking into it.

Just as Lawson, inside the silver prison, raised his rapier and before he even had time to swing it down, an obscure, grayish-white beam of foul light silently shot from the scroll. Guided by Trevelyan's absolute concentration, it passed right through the gaps in the silver liquid chains and landed on Lawson's body.

His expression changed drastically!

Bound by the "birdcage" that had risen from the ground, there was simply no time to dodge. And his own Perception attribute was only barely able to detect this upcast spell when it was practically right on top of him.

Naturally, immunity or resistance was out of the question.

By the time the momentum of Lawson's physical strike shattered the prison with his rapier and he bolted backward into a safe zone, his lean, powerful body was already covered in a discordant grayish-white mist. An unspeakable weakness that made an uncontrollable wave of nausea rise in his chest washed over him, feeling just like the utter exhaustion that follows extreme physical drain.

Let alone swinging a sword, even the basic strength required to move his legs and walk had dropped by at least thirty percent.

Against ordinary Adventurers, or a newly advanced Class Holder, Lawson might have still been able to maintain a crushing advantage right now. But against Trevelyan, whose Class Level was already at Level 5, this thirty percent across-the-board debuff robbed him of any possibility of continuing the fight.

The scales of victory had, in an instant, tilted infinitely in the young knight's direction.

His temples were graying, the fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes melting into the shadows on his face. Lawson's fingers gripped his sword hilt—tightening, then loosening, then tightening again.

In his murky, vicious eyes, the figure radiating a brilliant silver-white glow ahead was reflected.

At this moment, he no longer had the mind to analyze whether it was his own negligence brought on by being enraged, or if the knight's movements had simply been too covert for him to detect. The plan he had spent two years agonizing over day and night, his hands stained with his teammates' blood, the missing treasure of the Dragon Lair, the Duke of Morton's evaluation of him spat from the knight's mouth... with all these factors stacking together, the weakness radiating from every part of his body under the curse became the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

"Heh."

An extremely twisted, bizarre smile that practically deformed his facial features surfaced on the man's face.

Right in front of Trevelyan, Lawson chuckled weirdly and pulled a small, red crystal from his chest pocket, its interior flashing with a bright luster.

His fingers clenched hard.

Crushing it.

Crack—

It held no destructive power and completely lacked the ability to affect a human body. It was just a pure, bright beam of light that suddenly shot up from the wasteland.

Fleeting as it was, it vanished into the vault of the heavens in the blink of an eye.

Suddenly recalling the intelligence his subordinates had reported to him a few days ago, Trevelyan's entire body jerked to a halt. The expression on his face became indescribably colorful.

"You—"

In the distant sky, deep within the churning, low-hanging leaden clouds...

...a massive, ferocious silhouette loomed faintly within the grayish-black mist. Only the occasional flash of firelight momentarily illuminated a stray scale or piece of armor on this colossal beast.

As the red light dissipated into the clouds, it was accompanied by a primal roar that sounded like thunder, yet was far heavier—a roar filled with a Rage capable of incinerating entire mountain ranges.

Boom—the torrential rain poured down.