Ascension of the Dark Seraph - Chapter 244

Chapter 244: Back to Square One
Leandra felt her throat tighten.

She saw a familiar figure lying on the ground amidst corpses, his skin as pale as a ghost.

No sign of blood could be seen coursing through his veins.

Instinctively, she rushed to his side and froze, staring down at him, unwilling to believe her eyes.

“No…” Leandra ushered as she dropped to her knees. “He’s not that easy to kill…”

Both her hands trembled over Lucivar’s dead body, not daring to touch him out of fear—that her touch would seal his fate forever. Unbidden, tears welled in her eyes, blurring the lifeless form of Lucivar in front of her.

Hesitantly, she flipped Lucivar over and gasped as it was really him.

Against all odds, someone was able to kill him.

Despite that, she inhaled deeply and found no traces of fatal wounds across his cold body.

It was almost as if Lucivar dropped dead out of nowhere.

“Don’t… Don’t die on me,” Leandra wiped her tears, grasping his body as if holding him tight enough would be able to bring him back from the dead. “I haven’t understood you yet—I haven’t changed you into a better person yet, I haven’t done anything!”

Leandra pounded his chest hard out of sheer frustration.

“You can’t die, not yet!” She screamed.

Gazing into Lucivar’s peaceful face, unresponsive, Leandra could feel hope slipping from her fingers.

For the next two minutes, she cried and sobbed, burying her face on Lucivar’s chest.

Then, a flicker of determination crossed her face.

Stubbornly, Leandra wiped her tears and snots again as her eyes began to gleam with purple ether.

“I can still help him,” She muttered. “Yes, I can still help him.”

Swish!

Leandra did something, the cold air of the night turned colder, and the celestial stars decorating the sky and the moon above glowed brighter in response. Then, one star shot starlight toward her—basking her entire form in its radiance.

A surge of ether climbed from the deepest part of her Inner Chamber.

Her purple hair floated like in water, ether coated her like a thin blanket, and her eyes turned into stars.

Fueled by her emotions, Leandra’s Star Witch bloodline was stimulated.

She used a costly ability, one that even made her entire body translucent—from the amount of ether she needed to use in order to activate this—Wish of Shooting Star. Once her transformation was complete, turning her into a celestial being-like, she bit her lower lip hard.

It was hard to control, her body felt like it was going to burst any second.

However, she persevered and pressed on.

Placing her hand on Lucivar’s chest, she channeled her wish into him.

“Revive.”

As soon as that word left her lips, her energy shot into Lucivar.

A subtle yet forceful shockwave exploded, tearing down the stalls around them.

Lucivar’s entire body was overwhelmed with the essence of her power, but it didn’t last long.

Another power, more forceful and overbearing, deflected the Wish of Shooting Star ability and dispersed Leandra’s ether almost instantly. She gasped in a cold breath as everything returned to normal, her power retreated, and that restored the tranquility of the night.

“It… failed…?” Leandra muttered in shock.

Just then, a figure arrived on the scene and saw the situation—It was Ravenna.

Like Leandra, Ravenna was shocked when she saw Lucivar’s corpse.

Her body froze as this should be impossible.

It’s not that easy to kill Lucivar, and since even the Feradith Family and the Crimson Wolf Clan failed.

Sensing her arrival, Leandra turned towards her before more tears streamed down her face.

“Ravenna…” She sobbed, devastated by her failure to revive Lucivar.

“What happened?” Ravenna approached—her voice steady and composed, yet her eyes betrayed a depth of distress she hadn’t known she was capable of showing. The weight in her chest was suffocating and crippling, the sensation almost surreal.

Seeing Lucivar’s lifeless body left her weak, as intense as back when she failed to save Delilah.

She was surprised since Lucivar had only been with her for a couple of months.

Even though their relationship was transactional, or at least that was what she thought of it, the taste of loss she was feeling right now—showed otherwise. Staring into Leandra intensely, she repeated, “What happened?”

“I tried…” Leandra said between sobs. “I tried reviving him, but I couldn’t. I really tried…”

Blood could be seen drizzling down her nose, but she didn’t seem to care.

“How did this even happen…?” Ravenna muttered, still in shock.

Scanning Lucivar’s dead body closer, she realized that there were no visible, fatal wounds.

It made her frown—whatever killed Lucivar must be something from within.

Just then, Ravenna noticed faint, yellow cracks along Lucivar’s body.

She reached her hand to feel the cracks and realized that it was some sort of energy, a powerful one.

‘Caldaros…?’ Ravenna questioned grimly.

…

Meanwhile, within the red desert dominion.

Lucivar couldn’t count the number of days he was stuck in this hellish training due to the endless sun.

So instead, he counted the number of deaths.

Right now, Lucivar was on death number 68.

He thought that out of the three sections of the training, the last one would be the easiest, but it turned out to be the hardest. Lucivar only needed to walk across the desert while being chased by slow mummies, but he never seemed to reach his destination.

An endless desert with no end in sight.

However, worse of all was that whenever he died from exhaustion or was killed, he was sent back to the start.

Every time he did, he could only scream and shout in frustration.

It was true that his stamina had drastically improved over time—now he was able to at least walk for two hundred miles across the unforgiving red desert, enduring blistering heat and occasional relentless sandstorms.

He now has four times the stamina of his initial attempts, yet still, it wasn’t fast enough.

Not fast enough to his liking.

As opposed to working on his stamina, this was more like testing his mental resilience.

Sutekh increased his individual prowess a lot, more than Loki, but He really makes Lucivar work for it.

‘I can do this, I can do this…’

Lucivar crawled through the sand, his palms peeling and bloodied.

He kept dragging his body forward despite it screaming for him to stop.

Graah!

Behind him, a few mummies were slowly closing the distance, reaching out their lethal hands that could tear or even cause Lucivar’s body to explode with a single touch. Despite tasting death countless times already, the sensation never settled on him.

Lucivar still hated it, and he would never get used to it, or at least, he didn’t want to get used to it.

Pain is still something he loathed.

Soon, the world suddenly became heavenly when she heard a voice in the distance.

“Oh, would you look at that, you’re finally here.”

Despite the bratty, insufferable tone, which undeniably pointed at none other than Sha—Lucivar felt an overwhelming sense of relief wash over him. His weary body, burned and strained, responded with the heavenly sensation of basking in divine elevation.

Sha’s voice was surreal—it was celestial, the one sound he had desperately longed to hear.

Raising his gaze weakly, Lucivar peered ahead through a blurry vision and saw Sha waiting ahead.

A few mummies stood in rigid silence, their ancient bandages fluttering as they fanned Sha with massive ceremonial fans. Seated on an ornate carpet woven with shifting golden hieroglyphs, Sha lounged with relative ease, basking in the eerie, rhythmic breeze of the undead’s service.

Unlike him, who was suffering, Sha was being pampered and having the time of her life.

Frankly speaking, Lucivar didn’t care.

He laughed to himself, finally reaching the end.

However, his laughter ceased instantly when a sudden purple beam shot from the sky.

Boom!

Lucivar’s eyes widened, his vision that was mainly dominated by the hues of the red sun and desert was suddenly dyed by an unnatural violet. Then, a surge of invigorating energy seeped into his skin, lifting him from the crimson sands and pulling him toward the sky.

For a fleeting moment, confusion gripped him.

‘What’s happening?’

Once his mind was cleared, he noticed the familiar pulse of the purple energy.

He has sensed this purple energy before.

‘Leandra…?’

Blinking his eyes in shock, realizing that this was Leandra’s doing, Lucivar immediately retaliated—he desperately tried to break free from the violet energy’s grasp, “No, no, no! I was so fucking close! It is right there! Sha is right fucking there!!”

Clearly, Leandra has found his body and did something.

No matter how much Lucivar tried, however, he couldn’t break free in his current condition.

“Release me!” Lucivar shouted. “Leandra, you dumb girl! I’m not dead!”

Upon seeing him being pulled away, Sha stood up and frowned.

“For her to breach and touch the red desert’s dominion… her Star Witch bloodline is far from ordinary,” Sha murmured. But then, her divine energy surged around her, setting the crimson sands into motion. They spiraled in her orbit before, with a mere flick of her will, shot toward Lucivar.

Like a storm of scarlet blades, the crimson sands quickly reached Lucivar and struck the purple energy.

Splash!

A massive impact force exploded as the crimson sands devoured Leandra’s purple energy.

Lucivar was stunned for a second before he realized that he was falling.

Once the purple energy was gone, there was nothing holding him afloat again.

His body was spinning, and the height from which he was falling was greatly concerning.

Not even a Chrysalis-rank Hybrid would be able to survive this fall.

Recalling that he was an Angel Hybrid, he tried to unfurl them, but he couldn’t.

No matter how hard he tried, his wings refused to emerge—his exhaustion from crossing the red desert ran too deep to summon them properly. As the wind howled past him, rushing against his skin as he fell from the clouds, his gaze darted to Sha.

She was his only hope.

‘She’s going to catch me… right?’ He thought dubiously. ‘She can control those crimson sands so she will catch me, right?!’

Despite his attempt to convince himself that Sha was going to help, reality proved otherwise.

Instead of catching him, Sha turned around to sit down once again.

Then, she even dared to shoot a playful grin towards him—knowing exactly what Lucivar was thinking.

“Fuck…”

CRASH!

Lucivar slammed to the ground hard, and the world instantly turned black.

Once he regained consciousness, he instantly opened his eyes and sucked in deep breaths like a fish on land. He reached for his body with his hands and found that it was intact, but the wounds and exhaustion were gone.

He was back to full vigor.

It was supposed to be a good thing, but Lucivar’s face was drained of all color.

Slowly, he turned to look over his shoulders and saw the familiar structure behind him.

At that moment, his breath was caught in his throat.

Despite not feeling any pain at all, he clearly died from the fall.

And now, he was back to square one again.