Chapter 170: Chapter 170 - One Week
As silence completely returned to the room, Logan couldn’t stand anymore.
He collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily as he raised a hand to his chest.
’It feels weird,’ he thought, staring at his heart before looking at the mana circle in front of him.
Seeing Logan on the floor, Silas shook his head with a large frown on his face.
"Are you one hundred percent certain that you are alright?" he asked.
Logan’s mind churned, he knew he needed to convince Silas that everything was alright to avoid making him worried.
Even while he wasn’t sure how the future would look himself, he understood that this creature and technique fell far outside what Silas could help him with.
Having made up his mind, he nodded slowly, staring up at Silas with a smile.
"What kind of crazy teacher would give a teenager such a dangerous technique," Silas muttered, sitting down on the ground beside Logan.
Logan shrugged.
"You’ve experienced its power yourself," he said, a grin forming on his face. "I’d say it’s totally worth it."
"Worth it my ass," Silas said. "I know damn well it was using mana from the resources around it."
Logan scoffed. "As if that matters."
His grin widened slightly, despite a pit forming in his stomach.
"Even if you hand a baby a gun, it doesn’t mean the baby knows how to pull the trigger." His eyes narrowed as he stared at the extinguished circle. "But this thing? It was just created... and it still managed to block your attack."
Silas fell silent, his frown deepening as he recalled the clash.
For the first time, Logan noticed that Silas didn’t have a quick retort. No more warnings, no worried questions, no lectures, just silence as he watched him calculating in his head.
Logan pressed a hand to his chest, feeling that faint, unnatural cold still pulsing from the chamber within.
His grin faded, replaced by a neutral expression.
"...If that was a newborn," Silas finally muttered, his voice low, "I don’t ever want to see it grown."
Logan didn’t answer. He already knew he couldn’t let it grow if it wasn’t completely under his control.
"Silas," he said after a pause, his tone firm. "No one else hears about this. Not even Edric... absolutely no one."
Silas turned his head, giving him a hard look. "Keeping this a secret might be more dangerous than revealing it."
"Maybe," Logan admitted. His fingers tightened over his chest. "But right now, it’s the only option we have."
Silas didn’t argue further, but his frown deepened as he looked at Logan’s trembling hand.
Logan exhaled slowly, silence falling in the room again.
’If people figured out such a creature lived inside me,’ he shivered. ’They’d want to kill me to research it or even to just get rid of this potential danger.’
He knew very well that this was nowhere near an ordinary creature. The lands he’d seen inside his dream and even the creatures there, none of it had ever been seen before in his world.
Silas let out a long breath, dragging a hand through his hair. "Fine. If that’s the choice you’ve made... I’ll respect it."
He stood up, brushing the dust from his trousers before giving Logan one last hard look. "But listen well, Logan. Whatever you brought into yourself today... it isn’t normal. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re fully in control."
Logan didn’t answer. He kept his gaze fixed on the extinguished mana circle, his hand still pressed to his chest.
Silas lingered for a moment longer, as if debating whether to say more, but in the end he turned away. His footsteps echoed softly across the training room floor.
At the door, he paused. "I’ll give you some space... but don’t push yourself any further tonight."
With that, he opened the door and stepped out, the sound of it closing behind him leaving Logan in silence once more.
Logan exhaled, the grin he’d forced earlier fading completely. Alone, he allowed his expression to sink into something closer to unease.
"Spawn of the Abyss..." Logan whispered under his breath. "I’ll need to figure out what exactly this creature is... and fast."
His feelings were very mixed at the moment. On one hand, he had gained an incredibly powerful knight with potential that he couldn’t even understand.
But on the other hand, he didn’t know anything. Not if he could control it, not what it knew and could do, absolutely nothing... and that scared him.
"How do I even summon it back?" he muttered, closing his eyes for a moment.
He pushed himself off the ground and walked over to the lounge area, leaving the mess in his training room behind for now.
After plopping himself down on the couch, Logan let his body sink into the cushions. He was exhausted, both physically and mentally.
After staring at the ceiling for a few minutes, he pulled out the manual from his space ring, in an attempt to find more answers on how he could summon the creature back.
’There’s only one way I can figure out what it knows,’ he thought. ’And that’s by summoning it here.’
He knew the book wouldn’t hold any answers regarding the skeleton king himself. He’d skimmed through the final pages before, and while the author had noted thousands of different undeads, none of them even remotely matched what he’d seen.
After a dozen pages, his eyes narrowed as he came to a stop.
Above the page he’d stopped was a line written in deep black ink.
"Resummoning of the Dark Knight."
Logan leaned in, eyes scanning each line. The passage had been written in great detail and precision, even explaining what would happen right after contracting the first Dark Knight.
"Summoning a Dark Knight right after forming a bond with it is unadvisable. The host needs to let the First Dark Knight acclimate to the heart chamber for seven days to avoid risking the bond becoming unstable."
Logan’s eyes lingered on the line for a long moment, a frown forming on his face.
"Unadvisable..." he muttered. "Doesn’t mean it’s impossible."
He lowered his gaze to the next paragraph.
"To resummon the Dark Knight, the host must channel mana into the engravings of the chamber. Allow the flow to circulate naturally. Do not force it."
Logan’s breathing quickened slightly as he shut the manual close.
’That isn’t complicated at all,’ he thought, staring at the wall in front of him. ’If I want to, I could summon it right now and here to get the answers I need.’
The thought alone made his chest tighten.
Logan shook his head, the rational side of his mind telling him it wasn’t worth it at all.
’I’ll get the answers after it’s acclimated to my undead space,’ he thought, storing the manual into his space ring. ’A week earlier wouldn’t change much outside of answering some worries.’
The last thing he needed was to lose control of something like that... if he even had any at that.
Leaning back into the couch, Logan closed his eyes for a moment, the image of the skeleton king wiping out Silas’s attack with ease.
’It really has infinite potential... as long as I keep it in control it’s hard to say how much stronger we’d be able to grow.’
His thoughts started blurring, his chest slowly heaving up and down as his body sunk deeper into the cushions.
Logan let out a slow breath, before the exhaustion finally made him fall asleep.
The room around him remained silent as hours flew by.
His sleep didn’t bring him comfort though. Fragments of the skeleton king’s dream kept appearing, playing on repeat in his mind. Each time, he felt a cold feeling spread through his chest.
The outlines of the broken land filled with undead, the raven, the skeleton king himself—by the time Logan woke up again, he’d seen them a hundred times.
"That was some of the worst sleep I’ve had," he muttered, rubbing his eyes.
With a soft groan, he sat up and stretched, his muscles stiff from having slept awkwardly on the couch.
For a moment, he simply sat there, staring blankly at the ceiling while the fragments of his dream slowly slipped away.
The silence was broken by the sharp buzz of his communicator. Logan blinked, dragging a hand over his face before reaching for it.
"Morning," Edric’s voice came through, steady but carrying a hint of concern. "You awake yet?"
"Barely," Logan muttered, leaning back into the couch. "What’s going on?"
"Nothing urgent," Edric replied. "Just checking in. Silas mentioned you were... pushing yourself yesterday."
Logan gave a faint smile, even if Edric couldn’t see it. "I’ll manage. What’s on today’s agenda?"
"Nothing much for the morning," Edric said after a pause. "Rest while you can. Later today, though... we’ll be sitting down to discuss the Alvarez family. It’s time we decide how to finish them off for good."
Logan gave a nod. "About time."