Chapter 139: Chase and sudden change in situation
"Damn it — how could I forget something this important—"
Lukas caught himself mid-stride, nearly hurling Kaiser’s severed head into the undergrowth. Tommy was still occupying his vision space. As long as that was true, extracting any skill from the head was impossible.
He tightened his grip.
He had already killed Kaiser. The Von Maximus family would come for him regardless of what he did with the remains — that door had been kicked off its hinges the moment the head left the body. He might as well use what he had. The Von Maximus bloodline ability had been eating at the back of his mind since the moment he understood what it was — a lineage that made the path of the sword feel natural, intuitive, inevitable. Something that might be exactly what he needed to push through to the advanced stage and touch grandmaster level.
He wasn’t going to throw that away over irritation.
The White Knight Settlement’s outer wall was close now. Behind him, Lukas could feel his star energy scraping the bottom — Phase Steps used repeatedly in rapid succession had burned through his reserves faster than he’d liked, and worse, the fusion between his two stars felt unstable, stressed at the seams in a way that made his chest tighten.
He almost wanted to cry.
But given the chance to do it again, he would make the same call. Kaiser wasn’t the kind of man who let things go. Given time, that arrogance and that grudge would have compounded into something considerably harder to deal with. Better to end it cleanly, on his own terms, while he still had the advantage of surprise.
Around him, White Knight Guild members and awakeners caught only a blur — Meteor Momentum pushing his body past what felt comfortable, past what felt safe, each stride eating up ground faster than the last.
Then the chill arrived at the base of his spine.
She was still behind him. Closer than before.
Lukas ground his teeth and fed more into Meteor Momentum, feeling it burn through what little he had left. For a half-second he thought about the skill he had passed up earlier and immediately buried the thought. Regret was a luxury. He kept running.
The settlement fell behind them. The forest swallowed them both — dense and dark, the trees thickening around the path, death energy hanging in the air like low fog. This was the mysterious forest, the kind of place necromancers called home precisely because the atmosphere fed them. Lukas felt his own strength tick upward slightly as he moved deeper in, the ambient energy brushing against something in him that recognized it.
He looked back.
She was still there. Relentless. Unhurried in the way that only someone completely confident in the outcome could be unhurried.
"Stop right there, you bastard!"
Her voice cut through the trees sharp as an arrow. But underneath the anger, Lukas caught something else — a faint, controlled surprise. She could read his cultivation. She knew he was Blood Infusion Stage. And yet here she was, a bloodline awakener, being made to work for it.
Good. Let her be surprised.
"Newcromancer!" Her voice again, slightly closer now. "Stop, and I will give you a painless death."
Lukas almost lost his footing.
A painless death. As opposed to what — the other kind she was planning to give him if he kept running? Was this supposed to be an incentive? Did this woman genuinely believe those words would cause someone to stop, turn around, and cooperate with their own execution?
He ran harder.
But the gap was closing. Kilometers had become hundreds of meters. Hundreds of meters were becoming less. He could feel the pressure of her aura on his back like a hand pressing between his shoulder blades.
He didn’t hesitate.
The gravity ring detonated outward with him at the center — a sudden, crushing multiplication of weight radiating in every direction, indiscriminate and immediate.
The forest floor cracked under the pressure. Branches snapped. The White Knight Guild Master lurched, her rhythm broken for just a moment, her next step heavier than it should have been.
But only for a moment.
The power of a bloodline awakener was not something a gravity field could simply hold. Her speed dipped, stuttered — and then climbed again, her body adapting with the quiet efficiency of someone who had trained past the point where most obstacles mattered.
She was nearly on him.
Then everything changed.
The malicious pressure he had been feeling — the suffocating weight of her killing intent pressing against him like a physical thing — vanished. Completely. Between one heartbeat and the next, it was simply gone, as though it had never existed.
Before Lukas could register what that meant—
Crack.
His neck bent sideways at an angle necks weren’t meant to reach. A grip like two iron bars closed around his throat, ice-cold and absolute, and his feet left the ground entirely. Two pale eyes looked into his from close range, carrying the particular emptiness of someone who has already made their decision.
"Didn’t I warn you?" Her voice was very quiet now. "A filthy necromancer could never outrun me."
For the first time since this entire disaster had begun, Lukas felt genuine fear. Not tactical concern. Not calculated risk assessment. Fear. The kind that arrives when you reach for your abilities and find nothing there — a hollow where power used to be, every technique sealed behind a wall he couldn’t locate or push against.
Neither of them had noticed how far they’d moved. The forest around them was different here — isolated, still, the air carrying a weight that had nothing to do with death energy. Time felt stretched, like cloth pulled too tight. Whatever this corner of the forest was, it sat slightly outside the normal world, and it had them both entirely to itself.
Lukas thrashed. His hands clawed at the grip around his throat. Nothing moved.
He opened his mouth.
"Lady — this is a misunderstanding! I am not a necromancer! Please — calm down and just listen to me—"
The frost in her eyes deepened.
Scumbag. The thought moved across her face like a shadow. Even now, you lie to my face. Every one of you deserves what’s coming.
The grip tightened.
Black was beginning to edge into Lukas’s vision. He had perhaps three seconds before this stopped being a problem he could solve.
"Stupid woman!" The words tore out of him raw and furious. "Just think for a moment..If I was a necromancer, wouldn’t I have summoned my undead army to kill you?"
Silence.
The pressure at his throat didn’t increase.
She hadn’t let go — but she hadn’t finished the motion either. Something behind her eyes had snagged on his words, turning them over despite herself, logic pulling against rage in a war she hadn’t expected to have to fight right now.
He was right. It made no sense. A necromancer’s undead were extensions of their will — you didn’t send them to attack yourself. You didn’t weaponize your own power against your own body. The logic was irritatingly clean.
Then the memory of that skeleton surfaced — the one that had shielded him — and her anger surged back up before the doubt could fully take root.
But the seed was there. He could see it. The slight loosening around her eyes, the half-second where certainty had flickered.
Lukas pressed into it with everything he had left.
"It was my summon," he said, forcing his voice steady despite the hand still wrapped around his throat. "My undead. Under my control. Not a necromancer’s."
"I didn’t raise it by extract human bones draining their blood and soaking them under the death energy pool,"
The silence that followed was different from the ones before it.
Then the grip released.
Lukas dropped. He hit the forest floor hard, hands and knees catching the impact, a cough tearing loose from his bruised throat as he dragged in the first real breath he’d had in thirty seconds.
However before he could let out a sigh of relief the white knight guild leader’s voice echoed once again.
If I caught you lying, believe me your fate would be worse than death.."
Lukas heard her threat and simply shrugged his shoulders, not bothering to explain further, the fact that she let him go alone speaks volumes. Any further attempt would do more harm than good.
He was sure of it.
Raising his hand to trace the slender finger mark on his throat, Lukas muttered with narrowed eyes.
"It appears she has nothing to do with it..."
Lukas very clearly remembered the moment when his skills suddenly stopped working, at first he thought it was her doing, but now that he thought about it, if she was capable of such a thing, why save it for last, why not use it when he was still in the settlement.
Maybe she had nothing to do with it at all.
The next thing he did was to make sure if the kaiser skull was still with him.
Indeed it was still hanging by his waist.
