Chapter 480. He Looks Like He’s Dancing, But the Music Sounds Like Breaking Bones

Chapter 480: 480. He Looks Like He’s Dancing, But the Music Sounds Like Breaking Bones

Along the marble colonnade, the witnesses watched with a paralyzed mixture of horror and visceral disbelief a collective trauma that none of them possessed the vocabulary to process.

The courtyard below was no longer a place of military training; it had become a slaughterhouse of broken wills and shattered bodies.

Theron stood with his mouth slightly agape, the fury that had burned in his chest moments ago extinguished by a dawning, terrifying realization. The man below was not the quiet, sharp-tongued instructor who had spent weeks patiently correcting his daughter’s stance in the walled yard behind the barracks.

That man was a ghost, a carefully constructed mask that had just been torn away to reveal something ancient and devastating.

’That isn’t a swordsman,’ Theron thought, his throat working convulsively as he watched William send another man sprawling. ’That’s a force of nature wearing human skin.’

Beside him, Albert’s knuckles had gone bone white against the leather folder of diplomatic documents clutched in his hands.

His mind, always the pragmatist, always the strategist, was already spiraling through a thousand catastrophic scenarios. He wasn’t seeing a fight; he was seeing the collapse of every political calculus he had ever made.

He knew, with a sinking dread in his gut, that every diplomatic conversation Celestial would ever have from this moment forward would be shadowed by the knowledge of what William was capable of. The power dynamic of the entire kingdom had just shifted on its axis.

Kaela stood frozen beside Catherine, her hand still trapped in Catherine’s vice-like grip, though she had long since stopped struggling against it. Her wide, glassy eyes tracked every impossible arc of Aetherion, every unnatural gust of wind that turned men into debris.

Her expression was a haunting cocktail of emotions: terror for the man she knew, layered beneath an unmistakable, reverent awe that made her breath catch in her chest.

’He looks like he’s dancing,’ she thought, her heart hammering against her ribs. ’But the music sounds like breaking bones.’

Down in the ring, the atmosphere had shifted from disciplined confrontation to something approaching religious terror.

Near the outer edge of the circle, one of the few Delmore soldiers still standing—a man who had survived three campaigns and a dozen sieges—backed away a full step.

His sword lowered involuntarily, the tip scraping against the wet stone with a pathetic, metallic skritch. His breathing had come undone; it was no longer the controlled rhythm of a soldier but the ragged, shallow gasps of prey cornered by something it couldn’t comprehend.

The soldier’s eyes were fixed on William, who stood in the center of the carnage, the wind swirling around him like a living shroud.

The man’s lips trembled as he leaned toward his comrade, his voice nothing more than a broken whisper that barely carried over the wet sounds of the dying and the distant roll of thunder.

"What is that?" he breathed, the words carrying a primal, childlike fear. "Gods above... what is he actually?"

His companion never answered. There was no time for words, no space for a shared prayer.

A sudden, violent gust of wind—not a breeze, but a concentrated fist of pressurized air—slammed into the soldier’s chest with a wet THWACK. The impact sounded like a sledgehammer hitting a sack of grain.

He was lifted off his feet as if weightless, his armor rattling uselessly as he was hurled ten full paces across the slick marble. He hit the ground with a bone-deep CRUNCH, skidding through the puddles until he came to a stop, motionless and broken.

In that moment, the first soldier understood. The realization didn’t come as fear; it came as a cold, nauseating clarity that turned his stomach to ice.

He was no longer a hunter. He was not a soldier of Delmore standing his ground against an intruder.

He was prey, cornered in an open field, watching the predator circle. And there was nowhere left in that courtyard to run.

’Gods help us,’ he thought, his fingers shaking so violently that his sword tip danced against the stone. ’There is no winning this.’

’There is only surviving it.’

That realization was spreading like a contagion. Along the rear of the formation, the remaining soldiers, those who had not yet tasted the wind’s fury, began to edge backward.

Their weapons were still raised in a pathetic parody of readiness, but their boots were already betraying them, shuffling toward the safety of the courtyard wall.

The ironclad, disciplined line Bracken had spent years drilling into their bones, which was dissolving into something primal and cowardly: a loose knot of terrified men, each silently praying to whatever gods would listen that the storm would pass them by.

Bracken himself stood frozen. He watched his elite unit men he had trained to face death without blinking come apart in real time.

For the first time in fifteen years of warfare, a cold, sinking certainty settled in his gut. It was the feeling of a man watching his own execution.

He saw the broken bodies, the blood mixing with the rain, and the unnatural grace of the man at the center. He knew, with the grim certainty of a veteran, that the outcome of this fight had already been decided. No order he gave would change the inevitable.

But Bracken was not a man who accepted defeat without a final, desperate gambit.

With a snarl of frustration that masked his terror, he realized his conventional soldiers were useless; they were merely meat for the grinder. He raised his sword, not to attack William, but to signal the hidden reserves.

"Now!" he bellowed, his voice cracking. "Bring forth the Arcane! Break him now!"

From behind the retreating line of ordinary soldiers, a second wave emerged. These were not men of steel and leather, but figures of shadow and ritual.

They moved with a disturbing, synchronized stillness that stood in stark contrast to the chaos around them. They wore dark, hooded robes that seemed to absorb the dim light, clutching wands of carved bone and thick, leather-bound grimoires that hummed with restrained power.

As they fanned out in a semicircle around William, they began to chant. The voices were low, overlapping, a guttural incantation that sounded less like language and more like the grinding of stones.

Immediately, the temperature in the courtyard plummeted. The rain began to crystallize in midair, each drop turning into a tiny diamond of ice.

FWOOSH!

The first volley erupted. Fireballs bloomed to life in rapid succession, orange flames roaring bright against the oppressive gray drizzle, casting dancing, hellish shadows across the marble.

Alongside them, spears of jagged ice materialized out of thin air with sharp CRACKLE sounds, each one longer than a man’s arm and honed to a point that promised to pierce through flesh and bone alike.

Then came the lightning.

Two mages raised their wands in unison, their faces contorted in concentration. Crackling threads of azure energy arced between their staves, hissing like angry serpents.

The air grew heavy with the sharp, metallic tang of ozone. The energy gathered, condensing into a single, blinding lance of white-hot electricity that roared with the sound of a thousand breaking bones.

All eyes—the terrified soldiers, the horrified witnesses on the colonnade, and even William himself—were fixed on that lance as it screamed through the air, aimed directly at his chest.