Due to the unique nature of the spellcasting profession known as Wizards in this world, every wizard apprentice—not only had to study arcane knowledge—but also undergo rigorous knightly training.
It was said that every officially recognized wizard could crush even the strongest of Grand Knights with a single hand.
Moreover, the experiments wizards conducted were often extremely dangerous. A frail body simply couldn't withstand the rigors. Under such circumstances, physical fitness became a top priority, which meant that "physical frailty" was never considered a wizard's weakness.
At this moment, when Saya presented such a precious knight training method, Charles was deeply moved. He knew his path to becoming a true wizard had just been cleared a bit further.
This was no small favor.
He couldn't help but feel the kind of emotion that made a man want to die for someone who truly understood him.
---
Deep within the Forbidden Forest's sea of flowers…
Orsaga withdrew his attention from his avatar and returned it to his main body.
"We have a guest," he said.
Because he was tasked with guarding this place, all the bodies he used in the outside world were merely projected avatars. But since their senses were shared, he could still eat and drink as he pleased—living a very comfortable life. It didn't feel like a prison sentence at all.
As his gaze swept across the field, he spotted a creature lying low in the floral expanse not far away—a four-armed being over two meters tall, its body clad in metallic scales, with a lizard-like head and some sort of eyewear attached to its face.
At just a glance, Orsaga could tell: the creature's scales had both mimetic camouflage properties and the ability to block magical detection and barrier scans to a significant degree.
But none of that mattered to him.
The moment it brushed against one of the Deathblossom, even the faintest whiff of their scent stripped away any hope of hiding from Orsaga's perception.
Let alone the fact that his eyes weren't merely biological organs in the conventional sense. Empowered by his innate ability—Eye of Insight – Voidpiercer—he could, if he willed it, look several kilometers underground and count the worms in the bedrock. Conventional illusions and disguises meant absolutely nothing to him.
Faced with Orsaga's gaze, the creature seemed to realize its cover had been blown. It stood up from its prone position, shedding its camouflage, and glared at Orsaga with a murderous gleam in its eyes.
Anyone else might have been intimidated—but this was Orsaga. He'd clawed his way out of a newbie demonic village daycare soaked in blood. By now, the number of lives he'd claimed easily exceeded seven figures. That killing intent? It wasn't even worth mentioning.
Yawning lazily, he spoke in a relaxed tone, "I'm in a good mood today. If you want to leave, I'll let you."
That was already unusually kind of him. Normally, he wouldn't have bothered with words—he'd just strike first. After all, one more dead enemy was always better than one alive.
But the intruder didn't appreciate the gesture.
[Special lifeform detected. Abort infiltration protocol. Initiating probing assault.]
A hidden message was transmitted through a method so subtle that not even Orsaga noticed.
At the same time, an invisible, eerie ripple erupted from the creature's body and rushed toward Orsaga. The creature itself vanished, transforming into scattered particles, reappearing behind Orsaga an instant later, fully reformed.
Its razor-sharp claws—like honed blades—lunged forward with lethal precision, no hesitation or wasted motion. From start to finish, the attack was completely silent. Even air currents didn't shift around it. It was as if the strike came from a space with no air, no matter, no substance at all.
With such a deadly strike, even an alloyed wall would've been pierced. And just as expected, Orsaga didn't react in time and was hit.
But the damage was far below the creature's expectations.
Only a small trickle of blood seeped from Orsaga's chest.
Sensing something was wrong, the creature immediately retreated a few steps to prepare for the counterattack.
Yet Orsaga's reaction wasn't what it expected. No panic, no fury. Instead, he dipped a finger into his bleeding wound, licked the blood, and smiled faintly—unable to hide his excitement.
"I thought you were just a little mouse. Didn't expect you to be a wolf with bite. Judging by your body, you must have some kind of energy-suppression ability—otherwise, you shouldn't have been able to evade my detection. Still, I was careless. Even if I hadn't seen your methods before, I shouldn't have been injured so easily..."
At the moment he was struck, Orsaga had used a redirection technique to disperse the incoming force into surrounding objects, drastically reducing the impact on his own body.
By all rights, he shouldn't have been injured at all. But the creature's claws seemed to be infused with some special substance—unusually sharp and containing properties that suppressed regeneration—making even the tiny wound slow to heal.
The crimson light in his eyes grew more intense as he whispered, "You're starting to get me excited."
A wave of blood and sulfur stench burst from within him, followed by a surge of searing scarlet wind. In an instant, Orsaga shed his human form, transforming into his true body—towering over four meters tall.
As he transformed, the surrounding flower field responded like a living ocean. The flower stems and petals expanded in all directions, forming a sealed pocket of space that encompassed the entire area.
"Still not making your move?" he flicked his tail and grinned at the wary creature. "Then I'll go first."
Red flames—laden with venom and corrosive force—ignited around him. Temperatures soared past ten thousand degrees in a heartbeat, incinerating everything nearby except for the Deathblossom themselves. Even the air burned away.
Then he struck.
At many times the speed of sound, his claws were like molten scimitars, slicing through the air in a fiery blur.
The surrounding space, under his control, solidified like the hardest amber—freezing the lizard-man in place mid-dodge.
But even with a direct hit, Orsaga frowned.
His attack had passed clean through the creature's body—yet it caused barely any real damage.
Watching the lizard-man move awkwardly but remain otherwise unharmed, Orsaga instantly came to a conclusion:
"It's not spatial ability—otherwise, he wouldn't have been frozen by my spatial domain. And this entire space is my territory. I sensed no spatial fluctuations..."
An ineffective strike meant nothing.
So instead of preventing the creature from breaking free of his spatial bindings, Orsaga turned his focus to analyzing its physical form.
"No aura of the Wizarding World... but there's a trace of foreign world coordinates. Definitely a being from another dimension. Those scales and that glasses-like device... they have the feel of a tech-based civilization. Looks like I can't assess its abilities with supernatural logic alone..."
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