Shortly after Damon arrived at the Crimson Mountains, everyone important to him appeared one after another, stepping out of the paired teleportation gates he had quietly set up. These portals weren’t open to the public yet, and they wouldn’t be for a while. Damon wanted the weeds to filter themselves out before he let the masses anywhere near the main territory.
But that wasn’t even remotely his concern right now.
His heart was still racing, his breath uneven, the ghost of danger clinging to him like cold fog. He had expected retaliation. Only an idiot would drown cities in poison and assume no one powerful would respond. With the abyss tearing half the continent apart and him poisoning chunks of the remaining half, the Light Faction’s priorities were obvious.
They would hesitate against the abyss, take their time to actually prepare and mount an adequate response to the threat. But they wouldn’t hesitate against him. There was no way they would show him the same respect as the abyssal corruption.
He knew that. He planned for that. He fully expected the super guilds to cut corners and throw every resource they had to fast-track a response.
He also expected a B-rank to eventually show up.
But expecting it and actually facing it were two entirely different things.
The moment that presence brushed against him, his instincts screamed. No amount of arrogance or confidence could drown out the primal warning that thundered through his blood. It was the warning of an instant crushing death with no way out.
He had been completely wrong to assume that he could trade blows and perhaps even manage to escape from the opponent. The reality couldn’t be harsher. A B-rank was a force of nature and he was nowhere close to it. He had come within a hair’s breadth of facing definite death and there was simply no sugar coating it.
Damon exhaled shakily and dragged a hand through his hair. "...That was too close," he muttered.
The truth was simple. He could crush D-ranks in his sleep. He could devastate C-ranks all day long but when it came to B ranks... A real one? He wouldn’t just lose. He would be erased.
Damon sighed, wondering what exactly made the gap between a B-rank and a C-rank so unimaginably vast. How could a single step in power feel like crossing an entire cosmos?
It wasn’t just strength. It wasn’t just mana. It was... authority. A B-rank warped the world simply by existing. The laws bent for them. Space softened. Elements obeyed. Their presence alone was a declaration, ’You do not belong on the same battlefield as me.’
That was the gap he had just glimpsed and barely outrun.
His pulse still hadn’t calmed. His body remembered the suffocating stillness that had pressed against him, the way the miasma had recoiled like a terrified animal, the sensation of standing before something that could rewrite him with a thought. He had underestimated what a B-rank truly meant.

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