Chương 465: Edward - The Crafter’s Blindspot

Before the Integration shattered reality, my entire life was defined by the quiet, orderly laws of peer-reviewed science. I was an astrophysicist and evolutionary biologist. I spent my days analyzing spectral data from deep-space telescopes, mapping cellular mutations in extremophile bacteria, and writing grant proposals. I believed that every phenomenon in the universe could be broken down into neat, predictable mathematical models.

Then the Prime System descended, turning physics into a suggestion and handing teenagers the power to throw balls of fire. During the initial Kyorian tutorials and the brutal siege of our home world, I survived not by picking up a sword or charging into monster nests, but by keeping my head down and doing what I did best: studying the numbers. I locked myself in underground municipal shelters, focusing entirely on crafting, metallurgical alchemy, and resource efficiency.

When Eren Kai and the Void Star liberated Ferra, breaking the Kyorian fleet and converting our distraught, ruined planet into a thriving planetary capital, I committed my life and my loyalty to their cause. They were building a real civilization out of ash, and as a scholar, there was no greater endeavor to be part of.

Which brought me to the present moment, standing in a violet-leafed alien forest on Outpost World V-09, nervously clutching a diagnostic slate while fifteen-year-olds casually roasted wyrm meat over a campfire. Eliza was the only reason I was out here. I watched her from across the morning campsite as she packed her medicinal satchels.

Her white medical robes were dusted with dirt, but her sharp, focused eyes carried that boundless, brilliant curiosity that had drawn me to her research departments in the first place. She had practically dragged me out of my laboratory for this expedition, insisting that as the world grew more dangerous, I needed to understand field conditions firsthand so I could defend myself if our facilities ever fell. She was entirely right, of course.

But standing beside the super-powered titans of Bastion was an exercise in profound, daily humiliation. Technically speaking, I was a Tier 5 cultivator. My crafting profession had scaled my baseline attributes — my Body, Mana, and Spirit had grown steadily as I forged high-grade alloys and absorbed metadata through my soul ability, [Thirst for Knowledge]. Yet, in practice, a twelve-year-old Academy student could literally wipe the floor with me in three seconds. It was what I mentally termed the "Crafter Dilemma."

When a non-combatant cultivates through crafting or research, their raw numbers increase, but they never develop the instinctive muscle memory, combat reflexes, or micro-second mana manipulation required for actual combat. It was the metaphysical equivalent of being a massive, three-hundred-pound bodybuilder who had spent ten years lifting heavy iron in an air-conditioned gym, but had never thrown a single punch in his life. The first time an actual boxer hits him in the jaw, the giant crumples.

"Stop staring at your slate, Edward," Eliza's voice broke through my thoughts, carrying a warm, teasing chuckle. She walked over, handing me a freshly brewed cup of herbal tea.

"Drink your tea. You've been running diagnostic models since dawn."

"I'm an analyst, Eliza," I smiled faintly, taking the warm cup, feeling a subtle, pleasant warmth flare behind my ribs as she stood beside me.

"Running models is my natural defense mechanism against being eaten by sixty-foot reptiles."

"You did well yesterday," she said softly, her eyes carrying a quiet, genuine encouragement.

"Your structural mapping of the mineral veins should save our Vanguard two hours of manual excavation."

"Only because your shielding array kept a magma-wyrm from severing my spine," I pointed out, earning a soft, musical laugh from her that made the alien morning feel significantly brighter. Across the campsite, Eren walked out of his tent, adjusting his armor. Over the past two days, observing our Planetary Lord up close had completely shattered my preconceived notions of what a galactic leader was supposed to be.

Based on my experiences so far, powerful cultivators, politicians and military generals were pompous, self-important figures obsessed with optics and hierarchy. I had expected the 'prophesied' leader — a cultivator who carried the mass of a planet and fought cosmic gods — to be an unyielding, paranoid micromanager. Instead, Eren was astonishingly laid-back.

He walked with an easy, relaxed stride, joked with his sister, ate camp food without complaining, and let Lucas, Jeeves, Leoric, and others manage the city's affairs without interfering. He didn't bark orders or posture; he acted like an older brother who preferred to lean back against a tree and let his people run things. Yet, beneath that relaxed exterior, I could see that he carried a profound, quiet love for his people.

He watched over the teenagers with an eagle's gaze, his subtle healing magic catching their minor scrapes before the pain could even register. He wasn't distant; he was just an unyielding bedrock that let everyone else grow.

"Alright, team," Eren called out, walking over to the central fire pit.

"Pack your gear. My perception flagged an anomalous energy signature coming from a set of buried ruins five miles down the eastern canyon. We're heading in." I looked at the jagged, fog-shrouded canyon on my diagnostic map, frowning slightly.

"Lord Eren, our arrays indicate heavy spatial instability in that sector. Shouldn't we send a scout to probe the perimeter beforehand?" Eren looked at me, giving a casual, confident wave of his hand.

"It'll be fine, Edward. The signature is faint. A quick sweep, a little resource sampling, and we'll be back at the outpost for lunch." His confidence was infectious, and the students immediately shouldered their packs, falling into formation. We marched into the shadowy depths of the eastern canyon, reaching the entrance of a massive, half-collapsed ruin carved from ancient, pre-Shattering basalt. We crossed the threshold into the dark, vaulted entrance hall. And then, reality broke.

Without a single microsecond of warning, the stone floor beneath our boots vanished. A colossal spatial-shear array — an invisible trap hidden beneath the bedrock — detonated with a deafening, glass-shattering shriek. A violent spatial vortex erupted in the center of our formation. The spatial tear didn't launch a kinetic blast; it functioned like a surgical, dimensional guillotine, snapping shut directly around the core powerhouses of our team.

In a fraction of a millisecond, the vortex swallowed Eren, Anna, Lucas, Crysanthe, Nyx and Silas whole. The dimensional tear snapped shut with a violent pop, leaving behind only empty air and a lightless spatial vacuum. The five strongest cultivators in our civilization had just vanished into thin air. Panic hit the room like a physical hammer. Left standing on the shattered stone floor were only myself, Eliza, the Academy's teenagers and Rexxar, who had been guarding the rear flank. Enjoying this book?

Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. My heart seized in my chest, a cold, suffocating terror rushing through my blood. Eren fell for a trap? How…? I felt my breath catching in my throat, my hands shaking violently as my mind spiraled toward catastrophic disaster. My internal mental discipline forcibly kicked in and I activated [Still Mind]. I forced my breathing to slow, slapping both of my cheeks with a loud, stinging smack to shock my nervous system out of paralysis.

I looked at the others, expecting tears and hysterical screaming. Instead, what I saw utterly baffled me. Jared and Vesk hadn't panicked for a single second. The moment the spatial trap snapped shut, Jared drove his boot into the stone, his eyes blazing with sharp, tactical focus.

"Defensive perimeter! Box formation! Talise, take the high ledge! Toby, anchor the rear and stay with Rexxar at all times!" Vesk's daggers were already unsheathed, her tail flicking with lethal readiness as her body blurred into phase-slits.

"Spatial disturbance at twelve o'clock! Enemies incoming!" I stood there, feeling thoroughly embarrassed. These fifteen-year-old kids had responded to a catastrophic emergency ten times faster than me. Before we could even process the tactical layout, four terrifying figures emerged from the shadows of the ruin. They wore ragged, menacing black predator-armor, their faces concealed behind featureless masks.

They radiated an aura that made the hair on my arms stand up — cold, brutal, and utterly lethal, each of them carrying the unyielding weight of a combat veteran.

"You cowards dare use such underhanded tactics?!" Rexxar roared, his golden aura flaring as he unsheathed his massive claymore.

"You will pay for that!" The four ambushers attacked as a single, coordinated storm. Their combat mechanics were terrifyingly unfamiliar. They didn't cast standard System spells. One ambusher moved with an electric-blue movement technique that allowed him to cross the stone floor at three times the speed of sound, leaving a trail of violet sparks as his kinetic blades swept toward Jared's neck.

A second ambusher tapped the air with his knuckles to send invisible, high-frequency shockwaves through the stone that shattered Talise's wind-shields with dry, cracking sounds. A third ambusher wove heavy vector-strikes, while the fourth deployed a localized, crushing gravity-slope that pinned our boots to the floor.

"Hold the line!" Jared shouted, channeling his gravity-repulsion shield to catch the lightning ambusher's blade. The kinetic impact sent Jared skidding backward, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. Vesk phase-shifted behind the second ambusher, driving her daggers toward his neck, but the masked predator didn't even turn around — his body vibrated at a microscopic frequency, his armor deflecting her blades like a wooden stick against an anvil. The ambush was an absolute, overwhelming mismatch.

The four masked predators were systematically dismantling our defenses. They were fighting like master assassins who knew every single one of our combat habits, countering our techniques before we could even finish our wind-ups.

"Get into these chambers!" Rexxar bellowed, stepping directly into the path of three simultaneous vector-strikes, his golden plate mail shearing under the brutal kinetic pressure. Blood sprayed across his armor, but the lion-giant stood firm like a mountain, slamming his shoulder into the heavy stone blast-door of the inner chamber to hold it open.

"MOVE, NOW! I will hold the gate!" Toby and Talise dragged Jared through the doorway, while Eliza grabbed my arm, pulling me into the chamber as Rexxar used his raw, physical bulk to slam the massive stone door shut behind us. The heavy stone door locked in place, shaking violently as the four masked predators began hammering on the exterior with heavy kinetic strikes. We collapsed onto the dusty floor of the dark vault, gasping for breath.

Jared was clutching his cracked ribs, Toby's hands were trembling, and Rexxar was leaning against the stone door, bleeding heavily from three deep gouges across his chest. I sat on the floor, adjusting my glasses, my analytical mind racing through the metadata of the ambush. Something wasn't adding up. I looked at Eliza, who was rapidly applying healing salves to Jared's chest as he drank her elixirs.

"Eliza," I whispered, my voice trembling with sudden, sharp deduction.

"Something is completely wrong with this picture." Eliza looked up, her brow furrowing.

"What do you mean?"

"Eren possesses spatial perception that can count individual atoms across a star sector," I said, my hands gesturing frantically.

"He has a future-prediction loop that runs on hybrid soul-mana. He can delete spatial boundaries with a flick of his wrist. How does an Ascendant of his caliber walk straight into an obvious spatial hole like an amateur?" Eliza paused, her hands freezing over Jared's bandages. She looked at the reinforced stone door, then looked at the specific martial techniques the four ambushers had used — techniques that relied on physical density, micro-vibrations, and non-linear vectors.

A sudden, wide realization dawned on Eliza's face. She let out a long, exhausted sigh, rubbing her temples.

"Oh, by the Seven Hells…" Eliza groaned, shaking her head.

"That insufferable idiot." Before Jared or Toby could ask what she meant, a soft, dry chuckle echoed from the shadows behind our vault. A hidden doorway in the back wall slid open, illuminated by floating, starlight-blue light-orbs. Strolling casually into the vault was Eren. Flanking him were Anna, Lucas, Crysanthe, and Silas, all carrying cups of warm tea, looking completely unharmed and thoroughly entertained. Hovering in the doorway behind them were the four masked predators.

Except they weren't foreign assassins — their ragged black armor dissolved into shimmering silver sparks, revealing four identical, high-density [Echo of the Ashen] proxies that dissolved back into Eren's shadow. The room went dead silent. Jared's jaw dropped. Toby stared with dinner-plate eyes, while Vesk's tail froze mid-flick.

"Instructor?!" Jared gasped, coughing on his own breath.

"That was you?!"

"It was an ambush," Eren smiled calmly, stepping into the center of the vault and looking down at his four battered students. His friendly, laid-back persona vanished, replaced by the cold, unyielding authority of an absolute leader.

"Every single spatial distortion in that canyon was visible on your passive perception arrays," Eren stated, his voice echoing with a low, subterranean rumble that made the stone floor vibrate.

"The four ambushers set up their encirclement thirty minutes before you even entered the ruins. The tracks were in the dirt, the spatial fabric was frayed, and the thermal signatures were screaming." He looked at Jared, then at Vesk.

"Yet not a single one of you checked your flanks. You walked into that hall in a tight, careless cluster, chatting about what we were going to eat for lunch. Why?" The four teenagers looked down at the stone floor, their faces flushing with deep, burning shame.

"Because I was walking beside you," Eren answered his own question coldly.

"You thought: Eren is here. Nothing can touch us. You outsourced your vigilance to my presence. You became completely, fatally complacent." He pointed to Rexxar, whose armor were still dripping with blood against the blast door.

"If those four proxies had been real High Court assassins," Eren said, his tone razor-sharp, "Rexxar would be dead right now. Jared would have had his throat opened, and Vesk's core would be shattered in the dirt. You survived today not because of your tactics, but because this wasn't real." The four students sat in absolute, heavy silence, the harsh weight of his lesson carving itself permanently into their souls. I sat on the floor, adjusting my glasses, watching the scene play out.

Internally, my academic mind was reeling. I understood the pedagogical necessity of the lesson — complacency in a high-hazard sector was fatal — but the sheer, ruthless psychological terror he had just inflicted on these kids felt bordering on cruel. Eren's gaze shifted across the room, locking directly onto my face. He read my micro-expressions in a fraction of a millisecond, seeing the quiet shock and criticism in my eyes.

"You think this was cruel, Edward," Eren said softly, stepping closer to where Eliza and I were sitting.

"I think... it was remarkably intense, Lord Eren," I admitted carefully, refusing to lie to him. Eren looked down at me, his eyes burning with a starless black and radiant crimson fire, his expression filled with an ancient, weary truth.

"The cosmos is cruel without warning, Edward," Eren told me gently.

"In ninety days, the Crucible will drop these teenagers into a meat-grinder where ancient empires play for keeps. Then after that, we will eventually face the High Courts, who I assure you, will not be pulling their strikes. They will not pause to let our scholars bandage cracked ribs. If I have to play the monster today so they survive tomorrow, I will play that role every single time." He turned back toward the cavern entrance.

"From this moment on, the training gloves are off," Eren announced to the silent group.

"I will not warn you of upcoming traps. I will not notify you of ambushes. I left a clear trail of evidence in that canyon that could have saved you, and yet you failed to read it." He paused at the threshold, looking back over his shoulder with a sharp, dangerous grin.

"Next time... try to stay sharp."