Chapter 261: Second Key?

Johnathan had been an Earthly Lord.

That fact settled over the surviving Faraday operatives like cold water. Their leader, an Earthly Lord, had been decapitated in a single clean motion before he could finish a sentence. The gap between that and whatever Adam was didn't leave room for a rational response.

One of them broke and ran.

A wind blade took his head before he cleared his first step. The rest didn't even get the chance to make that mistake. Wind blades swept through the group in rapid succession, precise and unhurried, and then it was over. The street outside the manor gate had gone from a covert infiltration to a graveyard in under ten seconds.

Adam stood alone among the bodies, hands back in his pockets.

He had felt their killing intent during cultivation and made the decision then, whoever was outside was leaving in pieces. Finding out mid-conversation that they were the very Faradays he had planned to hunt down with Abigail only made it cleaner. The job he had been about to set a trap for had walked directly to his front door instead.

He almost felt like laughing.

"But what was he even about to pull out?" Adam muttered, his eyes dropping to Johnathan's body.

The answer came immediately.

A brilliant white glow erupted from the corpse. The totem tore free from inside Johnathan's coat on its own, shooting upward into the air above the street. The moment it cleared the body, a pillar of white light detonated from it, wide, blinding, and tall enough to be visible from every direction across Tristan. There was no missing it. The entire sector would have seen that column the moment it went up.

Four presences appeared beside Adam in an instant.

Remedy. Ivy. Felecia. Scott. All of them looking upward at the pillar, then down at the bodies, then at Adam.

Ivy spoke first. "I thought you said you would handle it on your own."

Adam scratched the back of his head. "I did handle it on my own. I just didn't expect this part."

His gaze locked back onto the totem hovering inside the pillar. Something about it pulled at his instincts in a way he couldn't immediately place. It reminded him of the Angel of Death, not in affinity, not in shape, but in something underneath those things. A structural familiarity. Like recognising a lock before you've seen the key.

But it wasn't the same. He was certain of that much.

Before he could push the thought further, the Faraday corpses began to move. One by one, the bodies lifted off the ground and were dragged upward into the pillar, pulled in like debris caught in a current. The white light swallowed them whole.

Then it began to congeal.

The pillar compressed, folding inward on itself, the light thickening and reshaping around the mass it had absorbed. The shape that was forming inside it was not human.

The light finished compressing and the shape inside it became clear.

It was enormous. A towering frame wrapped in pristine white robes, the chest left bare and carved like something that had never known weakness. A single ornate golden clasp held the robes at the waist. The physique underneath was immaculate, not the build of something that trained, but something that had simply been made that way.

Twelve wings spread from its back.

Some were fully unfurled, stretching wide in a silent display that pushed the air outward in slow waves. Others were folded forward, layering over the entity's face in thick curtains of white feathers, covering its eyes completely. It stood blind by design, a sentinel that had sealed its own gaze from the world below it, as if what existed down here wasn't worth looking at directly.

Adam and Remedy both went still at the same moment.

"Holy light affinity," Remedy said quietly.

Adam felt it too the unmistakable signature pressing outward from the creature in slow, steady pulses. Holy light was a primary affinity. That alone separated it from most things they would encounter. But beyond the affinity, there was something else. Something structural. The same vague familiarity he had felt from the totem before the transformation.

He pulled his attention inward and reached for Bob.

Ever since the Dead Man's Valley incident, the entity had taken up permanent residence somewhere in the back of his mind. Adam had learned to tune it out the same way you tune out background noise, always present, easy to ignore until you needed it. He pushed a question through deliberately.

The totem that formed this, is it connected to the Angel of Death?

Silence. Then a response came through, carrying the particular texture of someone annoyed at being used as a reference tool but answering anyway.

It was formed using the power of one of the keys. Not a complete key, a fragment. But do not mistake that for weakness. This fragment appears to be more potent than the Angel of Death you fused with.

Adam almost rolled his eyes.

Of course it is.

The creature's head turned. Slowly. Precisely. Twelve wings and a sealed gaze, and somehow it found Adam without needing to see him at all. When it spoke, the voice came from everywhere at once, filling the space the way pressure fills a sealed room.

"Candidate of the Throne of Death."

The words landed like a verdict.

"Hand over the key. Or I take it by force."

Remedy turned to Adam with a look he didn't see on her face often, genuine confusion.

"Candidate of the Throne of Death," she repeated. "What is it talking about?"

The others glanced over, but not at Adam. They looked at Remedy. The reaction made sense. She was the one who always seemed to already know things, the one who asked the fewest questions because she rarely needed to. Hearing her ask one out loud felt genuinely strange. Adam noticed it too and filed it away. It was similar to what had happened in Dead Man's Valley, it seemed like Remedy hadn't experienced anything like this scenario in her previous cycles. That made it worth treating differently.

He exhaled. "Don't worry about it. I'll explain everything after I handle this."

Ivy looked at him steadily. "Are you certain you can handle it? The power I'm reading from it rivals Cornelia's."

Adam raised a brow. "Who's Cornelia?"

"A Monarch," Ivy answered, with the same calm tone she used to describe the weather. "We encountered her when we attempted to repair Remedy's soul."

The silence that followed was brief but loaded. Adam had questions now. Scott and Felecia had more along with matching expressions that made it clear they were only just realising how much had apparently happened without them.

Scott crossed his arms. "When did we start going on group adventures without the group?"

Felecia said nothing, but the look on her face agreed entirely.

Outside the estate perimeter, Abigail and Dickson had followed the noise to the street. They stood on the pavement now, staring up at the angel looming over the road, twelve wings, white robes, blind eyes sealed behind layers of feathers, radiating the kind of pressure that made the air feel wrong. Then they turned and looked at the Eden team.

The Eden team was mid-conversation. Completely unbothered by the divine entity standing twenty metres away from them.

Dickson stared for a long moment.

"I can see why he fits right in," he said with Abigail beside him. "They're all as insane as he is."

The angel ran out of patience.

Essence detonated outward from its frame in a single burst, and it closed the distance in an instant , crossing the gap between them so fast that the air cracked in its wake. Its hand came down in a straight drive aimed directly at Adam's chest, targeting the exact point where the Angel of Death was lodged. It knew exactly what it was swinging for.

The blow connected and the explosion that followed tore through the street like a shockwave, the sound hitting before the dust did.

BOOM.

The dust hadn't finished settling before the team had their eyes back on Adam.

Felecia, Scott, Ivy, and Remedy had cleared the blast radius the moment the angel moved, fast enough to avoid the shockwave, close enough to see the result. The street where Adam had been standing was carved up, a pair of deep trench marks gouged into the pavement trailing back from where his feet had skidded under the force of the impact.

Adam stood a few feet from the angel, arms crossed over his chest.

The blow hadn't crushed him, the angle had been off by just enough. Instead of driving straight through, the strike sliced across both forearms as he brought them up, the angel's fingers cutting deep on the way in. Bad enough on any normal martial artist but on Adam, it lasted about three seconds. He didn't reach for Cryogen. He didn't need to. The Undead talent handled it quietly and immediately, the wounds sealing themselves without ceremony while he was still processing the exchange.

He uncrossed his arms. Rolled one shoulder. Looked at the angel.

Then he activated the War Bloodline.

The markings spread across his skin in a fast crawl, dark lines branching outward from his chest and up his neck, down both arms. Lightning crackled to life around his body in short, sharp bursts, snapping at the air around him like it was already looking for something to hit.

Ivy's eyes went wide behind her mask.

"What in the soul—" She stopped herself. Stared. "When did Adam get a bloodline?"

Scott said nothing for a moment. He was a bloodline holder himself, which meant he understood exactly what he was looking at. The weight of that registered on his face before he had a chance to school his expression.

Adam didn't give anyone time to finish processing it.

He summoned Judgement, the blade appearing in his grip mid-motion, and launched forward at the same moment the angel pushed off the ground toward him. The gap between them closed in an instant.