Ethan's pupils tightened.
He honestly hadn't expected the chains to still be this solid.
He was just about to gather his strength again and keep smashing downward when the aura coming off the middle-aged man beside him suddenly changed.
It wasn't a small bump. It was like an ancient feral beast that had been trapped for far too long—finally catching the scent of a real way out.
The power that had been pinned down by the chains seed to snap awake. It surged up from the deepest part of his body, slamming to the surface like a dam had burst.
The very next second, the entire space shuddered.
"Move."
The voice was no longer the low, exhausted rasp of soone who'd just woken up. It sounded like a roar from the dawn of ti, carrying a tyrannical pressure that felt like it could crush everything around them.
"From here on out, leave it to !"
The mont the words fell, everyone present froze.
The two guards' expressions shattered first. The hostility and brutality they'd been forcing onto their faces scattered like dust, wiped clean in an instant.
They stared at the middle-aged man, their bodies trembling on their own. Even their feet betrayed them, stumbling backward.
It wasn't just caution.
It was the instinctive horror of seeing sothing that was never supposed to wake up again.
Ethan didn't say anything else.
He simply glanced at the man, then nodded. He stepped back on his own, drawing in the power he'd been releasing, bit by bit.
Elira and Feylora didn't ask questions either. Almost in sync with Ethan, they retreated to a corner, clearing the center and giving him the space.
In the next instant, the entire region's atmosphere changed.
The strength that had been suppressed deep inside the middle-aged man surged out like a flood finally finding a crack, erupting from him in a full release.
This wasn't the usual spreading intimidation of a powerful fighter.
It felt older than that—like so existence so ancient it was forcing its presence back into the world through sheer will.
Waves of power rolled outward from him, layer after layer, carrying a heavy, suffocating Death-Aligned Power that pressed into every direction.
Before long, dense fractures started spiderwebbing through the surrounding space.
At first they crept across the air above them in fine lines, then they raced along the ground, the walls, and the dod ceiling. Everything around them seed unable to bear the force of what had reawakened, and the chamber filled with an endless, low, rumbling tremor.
And the first thing to change was the set of specially made iron chains wrapped around him.
The chains that had been wound tight around his body began to fail link by link under the wash of that surging power.
Not tiny chips.
Real cracks—visible, ugly splits. The runes carved into the tal flared wildly, trying to force the power back down, only to collapse one after another under the more brutal backlash.
The next second—
They blew apart.
Whole sections of chain snapped at once. Shards and shattered runes detonated outward, slamming into the surrounding walls with a series of shrieking impacts.
Off to the side, Ethan watched without blinking, understanding hit him almost imdiately.
Whoever had imprisoned this man had calculated everything. The number of chains, how they were placed, the ratio of energy sealed into each one—every detail had to be perfect to lock down an existence like this.
But now it was different.
Ethan had already pried open and weakened the energy structure of one chain. That single change created a real breach in the entire sealing system.
Once the breach existed, the remaining chains—ones that could've barely maintained the balance before—were no longer enough to keep him down.
What happened next proved it.
It didn't take long before the rest of the chains shattered under the pressure of his continuously expanding power.
Large chunks of broken links and leftover energy were shaken straight into ash, and the man's true aura finally spread across the entire area, saturating the world itself.
"Zyraeth, that bastard…"
His voice was low and hoarse, but it made the air tremble.
"To seal in a place like this for so many years."
He slowly lifted his head. The fury in his eyes had grown so thick it was almost tangible.
"Now I'm going to make him understand the price of laying a hand on ."
As those words landed, the two guards across from him changed completely.
A mont ago, they'd still dared to raise those special chains and fight head-on. Now, even standing upright was turning into a struggle.
They shook so hard their retreat looked stiff and broken, like the pressure had nailed them in place.
In the next instant, the suppression truly descended.
A rapid series of popping cracks echoed from inside their bodies—bones snapping.
It wasn't one fracture here or there. It was like their entire fras were collapsing inward at the sa ti. Shoulders, ribcages, arms, legs—every structure being compressed relentlessly by an invisible force.
Before long, their bodies had been squeezed smaller by sheer pressure. The terror on their faces drained into sothing worse—complete despair.
If it kept going, they wouldn't just die.
They'd be kneaded into a lump.
The middle-aged man didn't show a trace of rcy.
His rage ran too deep for that—so deep he didn't need to lift a finger. The power he continued to release was enough to grind the two guards to nothing.
A mont later, their bodies finally gave out. With a dull, short blast, they were crushed into scattered pulp and fragnts—nothing you could even call a proper corpse.
Only after it was done did the middle-aged man slowly turn around and float toward Ethan.
The terrifying aftershock still clung to him, thick enough to make the air feel heavy, but his tone had steadied a lot compared to a mont ago.
"I don't care who you are." He lowered his gaze to Ethan, voice weighted like stone. "You freed . From now on, I'll stay at your side and make sure you live."
He paused, like he was stamping the promise into the world—sothing that couldn't be revised later.
"And I can do three things for you."
Ethan's heart jumped.
A second ago, he'd already had the system sweep the man's status panel.
This middle-aged man was nad Valtheron. And the real problem—the kind of information that made your blood run hot—was what the system listed under identity:
He was the previous generation's Overlord of Elysion.
And that wasn't even the most frightening part.
Valtheron could manipulate this world's Primordial Force with absurd ease.
That was the thing that made Ethan's scalp tighten.
Because the war between Erald Castle and Elysion had already escalated past "intense" and into all-out, no-holds-barred.
Outpost grabs. Control over energy veins. The speed at which each side's combat strength rose and fell—it had all hit the point where hesitation ant getting erased.
In a situation like this, bringing in soone on Valtheron's level—
It wasn't just gaining another powerhouse.
It was gaining a lever. A fulcrum that could actually pry the entire balance of the war off its axis.
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