Legendary Awakening: Strongest Class In the Apocalypse-Chapter 61: Unexpected

Killing the women was never going to be an option. Not for him. Not even now, cornered and bleeding and running out of time, with the DeathWill bonus dangling in front of him like a lifeline he refused to grab. He couldn’t do it — and somewhere beneath the cold arithmetic of survival, he was quietly glad that he couldn’t.

Running was equally off the table. There was nowhere to go, and even if there had been, his legs already knew what his pride hadn’t yet fully admitted.

All that remained was a single fraying thread of possibility, thin enough to snap at the slightest tension — a five percent chance of instant execution from the Infinite Execution Record. Five percent. A number so small it bordered on insult.

And yet.

Hell, even if it had been one percent, Xavier would have flung himself at it without a second thought. He had gambled on worse. He had staked everything on odds that had no right to be called odds at all, more than once, and somehow crawled out the other side. This was nothing new. This was just Tuesday.

Besides, it wasn’t as if the alternative was appealing.

Kill or die trying. And Xavier had absolutely no intention of dying just yet.

His fist began to move.

Not powered by confidence — he had none left to spare. Not by any calculated strategy — there was no strategy here, only the stripped-down, bone-deep refusal to stop. What drove the punch forward was something older and quieter than either of those things. Hope. The raw, ugly, grip-your-teeth-and-swing kind. The kind that didn’t ask for logic, didn’t wait for good odds, didn’t need the world to make sense before it kept moving.

It was the only fuel he had left, and he burned all of it.

Across from him, something shifted in Lich King Rokos’s expression.

A smile — thin and slow and laced with something that could only be called mockery — curled at the edges of his gaunt, skeletal face. It was the smile of a man watching a child throw a stone at a castle wall and somehow believing it would fall.

This same move again, huh?

His hollow eyes tracked the incoming fist with the idle, half-lidded attention of someone watching a candle gutter in daylight. The memory of the last attempt was still fresh — that same punch, that same desperate commitment, that same result. It hadn’t even registered as a threat. It had barely registered at all.

There was nothing waiting for him at the end of this swing except more of the same.

He didn’t lift a hand... simply stood there, robes hanging limp and tattered around his skeletal frame, and waited for it to be over.

All around the edges of the space, tens of women stood frozen. Eyes wide. Hands pressed to mouths. Some had stopped breathing entirely without realizing it. Aria stood among them, her gaze locked on Xavier’s figure, her breath snagged somewhere between her ribs, unable to move in either direction.

Then Xavier blurred.

He crossed the space between them the way a ghost crosses a room — silent, instant, already there before the eye could follow. Like a photon burning a straight line through the dark, he appeared directly before Lich King Rokos’s gaunt, ugly frame, arm already extended, the punch already committed, the decision already made and past the point of taking back.

Die—!

The word didn’t leave his mouth. It erupted through his mind instead, raw and wordless and violent, a war cry born entirely in the space between his skull and his clenched jaw, as his fist drove forward and made contact.

The result arrived in absolute silence.

Nearly two hundred points of raw strength. Everything he had. Every last ounce of force his body could summon, compressed into a single knuckle, a single moment, a single desperate and unreasonable act of will.

It achieved nothing.

Not a flinch. Not a tremor. Not even the subtle shift of weightthat came when something registered as a threat. Lich King Rokos’s face didn’t move. His posture remained perfectly undisturbed. Not one tattered fold of his ancient robes stirred from the impact. Xavier’s two-hundred-point punch had been, to the Lich King, roughly equivalent to a moth brushing against a mountain — acknowledged only in the loosest, most dismissive sense of the word.

The silence that followed pressed down on the space like something physical.

Then, slowly, Lich King Rokos tilted his head.

"Hehehehe..."

The sound that came out of him wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It crawled out of the hollow cavity of his chest low and dry, like the sound of dead leaves dragged across cracked earth in the cold — thin, rhythmless, deeply wrong in a way that was difficult to name but impossible to ignore.

His hollow eyes drifted to Xavier’s face.

What lived in them was not cruelty. Cruelty would almost have been preferable. What was there instead was something quieter, and somehow far worse.

Disappointment.

"So this is it." His voice came out flat and unhurried, each word placed with the patience of a man who had already read the last page and was simply waiting for the rest of the book to catch up. "It appears I was expecting too much from you. To be incapable of something as simple — as fundamental — as killing, just to ensure your own survival."

He let that sit for a moment, settling into the silence like sediment into still water.

"It seems I thought too highly of you."

His gaze lingered on Xavier’s face — not with malice, not with rage, but with the particular, dissecting stillness of someone examining a cracked vessel that had just finished confirming it was beyond repair.

Then his lips parted again.

"Now then... how do I..."

Then, without warning, it happened.

Lich King Rokos’s face froze.

Not gradually — not the way surprise builds and settles — but instantly, as though something had reached through his skull and seized the very mechanism of thought. The mockery drained from his expression in a single, arrested moment, replaced first by shock so total it almost looked comical, then by something colder and far more primal.

Horror.

And then — nothing.

His eyes went empty. Whatever had lived behind them, whatever ancient and terrible will had animated that gaunt, skeletal frame across however many centuries, simply ceased.

Thud.

Like a puppet whose strings had been cut all at once, the Lich King’s body crumpled. The cold, hollow corpse of Lich King Rokos hit the floor with a dull, heavy finality — the sound of something vast and terrible reduced, at the very end, to nothing more than dead weight on cold stone.

Silence swallowed the room whole.

Xavier stood exactly where he had been standing. He hadn’t moved. He wasn’t sure he could. His eyes dropped to the Lich King’s collapsed form, then drifted slowly back to his own outstretched fist, knuckles barely marked, hand trembling slightly from exertion rather than power.

The look on his face was one of pure, unfiltered disbelief.

To think that rare perk would actually activate...

In all honesty, by the time he had thrown that punch, he had already begun drawing up a quiet contingency in the back of his mind. There might not have been enough goblins in here to grind his way through, but there was a whole world of them just outside. There was still hope — there was always still hope, as long as he was breathing. He had decided to try his luck one final time before retreating.

And it had actually worked.

He was still processing that when the space in front of his retina lit up.

The system messages came one after another, each one appearing with a clean chime that echoed softly in the silence.

[Ding! You have absorbed the plural record of Second Sequence Lich King Rokos. +30 Strength, +40 Health, +24 Stamina, +54 Mana.]

[Ding! You have leveled up.]

[...You have leveled up.]

.

.

[You have reached Level 25.]

[Evolution path has been unlocked! Suggested evolutionary paths based on user’s current potential.]

[Would you like to take a look at the evolution path now, or wait until you are more confident?]

[Warning: You have ten days to make a choice. After that, an evolutionary path will be randomly assigned.]

Xavier went very still.

If there had been any lingering shadow of doubt about whether he had truly killed Lich King Rokos — any quiet, disbelieving corner of his mind still insisting this couldn’t be real — the system had just swept it away entirely.

He hadn’t just killed the Lich King. He had leveled up four times in a single stroke, jumping directly to Level Twenty-Five. The Evolution path — the threshold he had been grinding toward, the gateway to First Sequence — had finally cracked open in front of him.

And yet he felt no particular rush to look at it.

A thought had already settled in the back of his mind, quiet and deliberate. His health could still climb. The higher he could push it before making his choice, the better his odds of unlocking something rare — something that wouldn’t show itself to just anyone who reached this threshold. He could wait. He had ten days, and patience had never been something he lacked when the reward was worth it.

While that thought turned slowly in his mind, his gaze drifted across the still-scrolling list of notifications.

[Ding! You have achieved an unprecedented feat! Being the first non-evolved human earthling to kill someone two sequences higher than your own.]

[You have unlocked and received the title: Godlike Warrior! Your attacks now have a chance of inflicting twice the damage to higher sequence beings.]

Xavier read it once. Then again. He turned the effect over in his head, picking it apart from a few different angles.

Then he shook his head slowly, a short exhale leaving him that was almost — almost — a laugh.

Simple enough. My attacks would just make them bleed more.

Not the most elegant description of it, maybe. But accurate.

And then, at the very bottom of the pile, one last notification sat waiting.

[Ding! Lich King class module has been deposited in your inventory.]

Xavier stared at it for a moment longer than the rest.

His expression didn’t change. But somewhere behind his eyes, something quietly sharpened with interest.