Chapter 134: Monologue

Chapter 134: Chapter 134: Monologue

"..."

Jeremy captured their expressions and reactions entirely in his eyes.

His mood was somewhat complex.

On the peak of the snowy mountain, the wind swept across in waves, carrying along fragments of ice that battered crackling against the vine barrier Evelyn had just erected. The light reflecting off the snow was blindingly white, clearly illuminating every tear on the cloaks of all five of them.

Leon was wiping his lunar blade with a piece of cloth torn from his hem, his movements slow and steady, but every time the blade rotated in his hand, the corner of his mouth twitched.

Phoenix lay on his side at the other end of the vine bed, his hat pulled down covering his face, motionless.

As for Lucius, he sat straight-backed in the corner, his posture unusually proper for someone who had just dragged himself back from death’s door.

Jeremy leaned his back against the edge of the bed, his left sleeve torn open from the shoulder down to the wrist, the fabric still stuck tight to the wound that hadn’t had time to dry.

There was still a metallic taste in his mouth. He swallowed it down.

Back then, right when he had calculated the final number and knew he couldn’t escape, Lucius abruptly appeared.

He didn’t say a single word. He merely charged through the layer of wind blades, turned his back, and used that exact back to shield Jeremy.

The blood that splattered on Jeremy’s face at that time wasn’t his own blood.

But Lucius’s instant teleportation skill, after activation, also required a buffer period to pinpoint coordinates.

Thus, the two were trapped together inside for a while.

Lucius deployed a defensive magic tool, blocking the majority of the storm as well as the backlash from the magic tools he detonated to break the skill.

The first shield shattered after ten seconds. The second layer couldn’t even hold for seven seconds.

The fragments dissolved into light dust and were entirely swallowed by the wind, leaving not even a sound behind.

By the fourth layer, Lucius only slightly furrowed his brows, casually summoning the fifth layer, as if merely turning to the next page of a boring book.

But Jeremy saw clearly: during that fourth time, his knees had buckled half an inch before he managed to brace himself.

And within that timeframe, he traced the loophole of the cyclone.

Normally, when the caster left, the skill left behind would dissipate within a few minutes.

But that black-cloaked figure had additionally cast a heretical forbidden art onto it, significantly prolonging its existence time. The sole purpose was to cut off his path of survival.

As for the reason he didn’t just kill him outright, with the nature of heretical cults, it was obviously because they wanted the victim to fully taste the malicious pleasure named prolonged fear of death.

But as time passed, coupled with the continuous assault of the magic tools, the slimy dark green monsters were cleared out.

The cyclone, inherently lacking a single gap, finally cracked open.

A thin line, angled towards the northeast, only about half a hand’s span wide.

Every twelve seconds it closed and opened once, in sync with the rhythm of the outermost wind layer’s vortex.

Jeremy counted a full three rotations to ensure he hadn’t misseen, then gave the signal.

Lucius understood instantly. Without asking a single question, without confirming even once. He merely shifted the shield’s direction, concentrating the entirety of the remainder towards the northeast side, leaving the other three directions exposed for the wind to tear at.

Under that support, coupled with magic potions, Jeremy forcibly pushed his magic power to the absolute limit, pouring his strongest strike precisely into the crack.

Then came the scene that had just occurred.

This time, he couldn’t help but admit: if not for Lucius and the other three, he truly couldn’t have broken that deadlock.

The fact that Lucius, disregarding the consequences, chose to charge straight into the storm to pull him out, surprised Jeremy greatly.

His perception of the remaining three teammates was also completely overturned after this incident.

When trapped in the cyclone, for the majority of the time he couldn’t hear the commotion outside. The sound of the wind grinding against itself formed a dense wall of sound, swallowing everything clean.

But occasionally, a few fragments still slipped through.

The sound of Leon’s lunar blade grinding gratingly against the wind layer, repeating, then being repelled back.

A string of curses torn to shreds midway, leaving only the final two syllables.

The sound of Evelyn’s vines whipping against the ice surface, steady, unceasing — that rhythm Jeremy was so familiar with that just by counting he knew which arrow she was firing.

And that dark purple light from Phoenix’s magic disk.

It logically only needed to flare once and then extinguish. But it flared three times.

That detail alone was enough to guess what had happened out there.

Truth be told, in that life-and-death circumstance, the fact that they didn’t immediately choose an escape route far exceeded his predictions.

Let alone choosing to stay behind to gamble for a sliver of survival.

Since the day of enrollment, aside from Lucius who was always clinging to him, the emotions of the others were frequently in the cold or empty state of an outsider.

Leon talked a lot, but never said anything true. That mouth was only used to stab people, absolutely never used to open up.

Evelyn was the exact opposite — she almost never spoke. Over half a semester, the number of sentences she proactively initiated with the whole group could be counted on two hands, and the majority were tactical reports.

Phoenix was even more extreme. He sat in the back row, wore a hat, and could remain silent throughout an entire training session without anyone realizing his existence.

And Lucius’s enthusiasm was only a superficial layer floating on top. The feeling of play-acting within it was so clear it was hard to ignore.

No matter how passionately he performed, people always felt they couldn’t truly reach him.

If dissected deeper, a person who appeared as easily moved as him was probably the most heartless existence in the entire group.

Also because of that reason, he — the one who had the captain’s seat casually shoved onto him — also inherently drew an uncrossable boundary between himself and them.

Over the past half-semester, he had never asked where anyone came from.

Nor had anyone asked him.

The five ate together, were thrown into the Wasteland together by Griffin, dragged themselves back to the dorms together, then each returned to their own rooms, doors closed and that was the end of it.

Even the name "Eclipse Team" was assigned by the academic affairs office; no one bothered to object, and no one found any meaning in it either.

He further assumed that after graduation there would be no more ties, so there was no need to form deep connections, nor any need to understand each other.

But in reality, perhaps all that he saw, all that he defined, was merely the one-sided perspective of individualism.

That boundary, it turned out, was drawn by him alone and adhered to by him alone.

As for those four, in the second the glacier river collapsed, they had stepped across it without even realizing there was a boundary.

Jeremy raised his hand, quietly wiping the bloodstain at the corner of his mouth.

His fingertips trembled slightly. He clenched them, waiting for the tremor to pass before releasing them.

Countless thoughts tangled like a tide, along with an emotion no words could adequately express, being pushed to the peak right at this moment.

In his past life, aside from his master, he had no relatives or friends to converse with normally.

At school, he played the role of an upper-average student. At home, he played the role of the heir. At night, he took a blade out the door, unsure if he would return.

Those three roles had no intersecting points, and he also never let them intersect.

The cousins in the family called that being clear-headed.

His master called it differently. That old man once tapped his pipe and said he wasn’t clear-headed; he was just afraid of losing, so he chose the path of having nothing to lose from the very beginning.

At that time, he thought the old man was talking nonsense.

Naturally, regarding things like friends and companions, he always felt that having them or not didn’t matter.

He was accustomed to drawing clear boundaries with everyone who touched the trajectory of his life. Right from before it began, he cleanly isolated every existence that had the potential to affect him.

That approach had never backfired. It helped him live to sixteen years old in a family where half the people wanted him dead.

And it also meant that on the day his master passed away, in a mourning hall packed with people, there was not a single person he could turn to and talk with.

The wind on the mountain peak swept across another wave. The vine barrier trembled, then stabilized.

At the other end, Leon finished wiping his lunar blade, tossed the piece of cloth aside, and leaned back onto the snow, hands pillowed behind his head, muttering something about this secret realm owing him compensation.

Evelyn didn’t reply, but casually slid a bottle of magic potion towards him.

The bottle slid across the ice, stopping exactly beside Leon’s elbow.

He didn’t say thanks either, just reached for it and popped the cork.

Jeremy looked at those two, then looked at the fox tail still wrapped around his waist.

But now, whether he wanted to or not, he was forced to admit: he needed teammates.

Regardless of whether it was the present, or the future.