Dex responded to Lumia's firm guidance and forced his turbulent flames to submit to his will. He drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with air saturated with the smell of ozone and death, then closed his eyes for a moment, summoning a state of absolute focus. When he opened them again, they were no longer merely human eyes. They blazed with a blue-gold light. He had activated the Phoenix Sight technique bound to his Solar Core, taken to its maximum degree. It was a technique that allowed him to see the world not through the reflection of light, but through the currents of vital and spiritual energies.
His enhanced vision passed through the pale, deteriorating layers of Lord Marcus's skin, penetrated the atrophied muscles and prominent ribs, and plunged deep into the spiritual and energetic architecture of his father's body. What he saw there was not merely illness or organic damage, it was an epic battlefield, a scene that made him gasp audibly, his amazement laced with profound pain and an indescribable pride.
At the center of Marcus's chest, behind the weary physical heart, where the spiritual heart of every magical warrior resides, there was a massive and magnificent mana core. It rotated with extreme slowness, like a dying planet, yet it was still there, resisting annihilation. It was no ordinary core. It was an SS-rank core, a legendary level of pure power reached only by the rarest few humans in the continent's entire history, a level that granted its bearer the capacity to destroy entire armies or level mountains.
In its natural state the core resembled a blazing blue sun bursting with life, yet now it appeared as a sun trapped in total, permanent eclipse. There was a thick, viscous, pulsing sheath of cursed black mana, the remnant of Beelzebub's Tear, encircling the core on every side, pressing against it like two enormous jaws, attempting to penetrate its defenses and dismantle its molecular structure. The poison was not merely an inert chemical spreading through the blood, it was alive, intelligent in a demonic way, moving with calculated malicious pulses, perpetually seeking any gap or temporal weakness in the Duke's defenses through which to infiltrate.
"My God..." Dex whispered, forgetting entirely that he was in a dark vault. "He has been fighting. He never surrendered. He has been fighting every second, every minute, of these six long months."
In that moment, Dex grasped a stunning truth that the novel had never explicitly stated, only left to be understood between the lines. The real reason his father had not yet died, despite ingesting a fatal and direct dose of a poison sufficient to kill an entire legion of magically armored soldiers, was not some supposed "mercy" from his treacherous brother Sylvester, and was not owed to the pale crystal life-support equipment surrounding the bed, which was draining his energy more than providing it.
The reason was Marcus Williams himself. The Duke, the Lion of the West, even submerged in the coma of death, was waging a fierce internal war of attrition against the forces of darkness. He was voluntarily, through a force of will that exceeded all imagination, burning his own massive and concentrated mana reserves, the SS-rank energy he had spent decades honing, and using it as a primal fuel to keep his heart beating and to repel the poison's advance toward his brain and his soul. He was sacrificing his power, his future as a warrior, and perhaps his remaining lifespan, just to survive one more day. Why? Perhaps from a mad hope for his son's return.
"Look, Lumia, look at this formation," Dex pointed with a trembling hand toward the black aura, speaking in the language of military experts. "The poison is not attacking randomly. It is intelligently attempting to isolate the core from the rest of the body's pathway network. My father's extremities, upper and lower, have already died magically. Their mana channels are completely dry. The poison is concentrating all of its assault and mass on the last defensive line: the heart and the brain. My father, in counterpoint, is using an ancient defensive technique, I believe it is the Iron Fortress. He is not attacking the poison. He is fortifying his vital organs with an extremely thick and compressed layer of pure mana, sacrificing his extremities to protect the center."
"It is a remarkable and courageous tactic, but he is depleting himself at a suicidal rate," Lumia commented, standing beside him and analyzing the invisible energy flows with her unfailing silver eyes. "At this rate of energetic combustion, and with the curse's ferocity escalating, even an SS-rank core will run dry within a matter of days, perhaps less than a week. The moment his defensive fuel is exhausted and the Iron Fortress breaks, the poison will pounce to devour what remains of his heart and his soul in minutes, and nothing will be left of him but an empty vessel."
Dex leaned over his father, ignoring the suffocating smell, and placed his bare hand over Marcus's cold brow, damp with the sticky cold sweat of death. Through direct physical contact, Dex felt the very faint vibrations, the rapid frequencies running through the massive man's body, the echo of the silent internal battle, the booming of energetic cannons firing within his veins.
"Father..." Dex whispered, his voice carrying a complex mixture of a tenderness he had never known, and the lethal resolve he had sworn to fulfill. "I have returned. I crossed hell itself, survived schemes you cannot imagine, and I came back for you. I am the executioner who will sever Sylvester's hand and hang his head from the gates of Seiron, and I am the physician who will tear this cursed poison out of your veins."
He passed his hand slowly across his father's chest, as though wiping the dust of a long battle away, taking a silent oath that only death would hear. "You have fought alone long enough. You have held your ground like a mountain. Now rest. It is my turn to carry the shield and fight this war."