Undead Evolution: From Trash To Divine-Chapter 48: Confrontation

"Lady, watch your words. You have no right speaking ill of me."

The words that left Lukas’s mouth were cold and utterly emotionless — not the kind of cold that came from anger, but the kind that came from somewhere much quieter. He didn’t like it when others insulted him for no reason. Forget the fact that he had been fighting day and night without pause — even if he had sat in a corner doing absolutely nothing, she still had no right to open her mouth at him like that. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

"..."

The silence that followed was suffocating.

Lukas’s voice continued to echo faintly in the room, as if the air itself was reluctant to let it fade. Ambrose’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly, a flicker of disbelief crossing her face behind the cat mask. For a moment, she genuinely wondered whether she had misheard.

Someone had actually talked back to her.

She opened her mouth once, then closed it again. For a rare, stunned moment, she simply didn’t know how to respond.

But Lukas wasn’t done.

He looked at her directly, his gaze unhurried and steady, as though he were reading the final lines of a Chapter he had already grown bored of.

"Before questioning my ability and character, why don’t you take a look at yourself?" His voice carried no heat, no venom — just a flat, unimpressed calm that somehow cut deeper than shouting would have. "Just look at the poor sword. From its state, it looks like it’s been used for hammering nails. Instead of poking your nose into other people’s business, if you had focused on refining your skill, the poor thing shouldn’t have had to suffer such a terrible fate."

As he said it, he gave a slow, dismissive wave of his hand and shook his head the way someone might when confronted with an especially hopeless sight.

Of course, the old Lukas would have never wasted his breath on something like this. He would have heard those words, let them pass through him like wind through an open window, and moved on without a second thought.

But that was before. Things had changed.

In his previous life, silence had felt like the safer choice. But somewhere along the way, he had come to understand what that kind of silence actually cost.

Although staying low-key had its merits, that didn’t mean anyone could take a piss on him for no valid reason at all. Letting it slide once didn’t just affect one’s own mental state — it gave others the quiet permission to keep doing the same. One had to put such people in their place at the very first instance, or simply ignore them forever.

Whether that approach was right or wrong, Lukas neither knew nor particularly cared. He only knew one thing with absolute certainty — no one was allowed to insult him for no reason.

And frankly, even when there was a reason, the situation shouldn’t change much.

He had noticed her sloppy, graceless sword technique long before this conversation, but he had never gone out of his way to bring it up. So why in the world should he quietly swallow her nonsense?

On the other side of the room, Ambrose had gone very still.

Hidden behind the cat mask, her eyes had turned cold — a thin, dangerous chill that settled into her gaze like frost forming on still water. A subtle, oppressive aura bled from her figure, pressing outward in quiet waves.

"You dare to insult my sword skill?" Her voice was low, each word measured and deliberate. "Do you even know how hard I practice, day and night, just to improve? Why don’t you show me your skills then? If they’re better than mine, I’ll forgive you. Otherwise... hmm."

The trailing silence at the end was far more threatening than any explicit words could have been.

Lukas felt a flash of irritation, sharp and brief. He couldn’t quite stop himself.

"Why should I show my sword skills for no reason?" he said flatly. "My moves aren’t meant to be performed for others’ entertainment or approval. They’re meant to kill."

A beat of silence passed between them.

Then, slowly, something shifted in Ambrose’s expression.

"Oh, is that so?" Her voice came out quieter this time, and the faintest trace of something that wasn’t quite amusement but wasn’t quite anger either crept into her tone. "You might not have any sword skill — but you certainly have a way with your tongue."

As the words left her mouth, she felt the heat of her own anger beginning to drain away, and what replaced it was something more uncomfortable — a quiet dissatisfaction with herself for having gotten stirred up at all. She had let a trivial exchange get under her skin, and that wasn’t like her. All the accumulated stress was clearly starting to cloud her head.

She hated to admit it, but the young man’s words hadn’t been entirely wrong either. Her sword skill wasn’t going to sharpen itself just by swinging at monsters.

Still. His words had genuinely angered her, and she hadn’t quite worked out why.

When she first heard him speak, she had almost blurted out the first thing that came to mind — You little— followed by something along the lines of: Walking out of this room alive isn’t nearly enough reason for you to see my skill.

She was glad, for once, that she had kept her mouth shut.

But at the very last moment, she stopped herself.

The words dissolved before they could reach her lips. She held them there for a breath, then let them go entirely.

Thinking of something, Ambrose reached into her backpack and produced a small pouch. Without a word, she tossed it into the air toward him.

Moving purely on instinct, Lukas caught it cleanly. He glanced down at the pouch, then back up at her, one brow arching upward. The faint but unmistakable aura seeping from the fabric told him everything he needed to know before he even opened it.

Star crystals.

He turned the pouch over once in his palm, weighing it with a casual shake — up, then down. The contents shifted with a dense, satisfying weight.

At least a hundred pieces.

That was a couple days’ worth of hard labor, condensed into one small, unassuming bag.

Ambrose watched his reaction in silence, her beautiful eyes studying him from behind the cat mask with an expression that was difficult to read. A moment passed. Then she took a quiet breath, as though steadying herself for something that didn’t come easily.

"I apologize..."

"Huh?"

Lukas’s brow climbed even higher.

He caught it — the faint crack running through her voice, almost imperceptible, buried beneath the careful composure she wore like armor. As if those two words had cost her something.

"I have gone overboard..."

He stared at her for a moment longer than necessary.

He genuinely hadn’t expected her attitude to take such a sharp turn. One moment she had been radiating the kind of cold, suffocating pressure that made lesser people shrink into walls, and the next she was standing there, stiff-backed and quietly sincere. The whiplash of it was almost amusing.

Not that he disliked it. The less headache for him, the better.

Maybe it was the change in her attire. Maybe it was something else entirely. He couldn’t quite pin it down. But somewhere in the back of his mind, his impression of her shifted — just slightly, like a door that had been nudged open rather than thrown wide.

He shook his head once, casually, dismissing the matter entirely.

Then he turned and reached for the copper blood-infused sword.

"Watch."

He said nothing else for a moment. He simply held the sword in one hand and let the silence settle.

"A sword is not a hammer." His voice was calm and unhurried, carrying none of the earlier coldness — just the flat, straightforward tone of someone explaining something that should have been obvious. "So before you even begin to wield it, you must first understand its nature. It is light. It is sharp."

As the words left his mouth, he shifted his grip and slashed at the air — a single, clean motion, effortless and unhurried.

A faint whine rang out as the blade cut through the empty space before him, the sound thin and precise, like a whisper that carried farther than it had any right to. Despite the sword being broken clean in two, in his hands it looked as though it had never been touched by damage at all. It moved the way it was meant to move.

"Therefore, to make the best use of it, you must let the blade work for you." He performed two more slow, deliberate slashes, each one a quiet demonstration. "Use its sharpness to kill your enemy — not your brute force. The moment you start treating it like a bludgeon, you’ve already lost the point of carrying it."

He came to a stop and turned to look at her.

"Understood?"

He was no master swordsman — not even close. It hadn’t even been a full week since he had first picked up a sword in this life. But that didn’t mean he lacked understanding. His grasp of the weapon had already reached an initiation level — not nearly enough to stand before anyone as a teacher, but more than enough to speak plainly about the essence of it, drawn from his own hard-won instinct and the quiet observations he had made along the way.

Sometimes that was all a lesson needed to be.