Reborn as a Hated Noble Family, We Start an Industrial Revolution

​The sound of the slash was incredibly faint amidst the howling of the freezing wind.

​It was just a minuscule graze, easily missed by the naked eye. Selene froze, her gaze slowly lowering to her left arm. A thin crimson line had bloomed across her porcelain skin.

​A split second later, fresh blood welled up, a single droplet falling to stain the black stone tiles of Magniora’s courtyard. Drip.

​Adul was no longer standing in front of her.

​Bzzzt! Bzzzt!

​Golden-yellow sparks crackled wildly in the empty air, leaving behind the pungent, stinging scent of static electricity that assaulted the nostrils.

​Before Selene could even fully turn her body, a silhouette blurred from her left flank. Swoosh! Eva’s steel dagger, clenched tightly in Adul’s grip, swung in a vicious horizontal arc aiming dead for her throat.

​Selene reflexively raised her left palm. Ssshhk! A dense, high-pressure wall of water materialized instantly, parrying the lethal slash exactly an inch from her throat.

​But... Adul had already vanished again.

​Sparks of yellow electricity abruptly erupted above Selene’s head. Then they flickered by her left hip. Then they detonated directly behind her back.

​Every time Selene summoned a firewall of water to parry, Adul had already displaced. His feet didn’t even touch the stone ground—he blurred from one point in the air to another like a wild bolt of lightning ricocheting off invisible walls.

​However, Selene didn’t hold the title of Arcanum Master by mere fluke. She refused to panic. She let her combat instincts take over, watching, analyzing.

​Her icy blue eyes successfully captured the basic rhythm of her opponent’s movements: instant acceleration, a dead stop, and another burst of insane speed. His trajectory was always linear. Always straight.

​Ssssshh!

​The currents of water surrounding Selene’s body violently churned. This time, they didn’t form a passive defensive shield. The water condensed, taking the form of a colossal predator from the deep abyss.

​A razor-sharp snout. Gaping jaws lined with high-pressure ice teeth ready to tear flesh to pieces. The massive water shark let out a silent roar, lunging with terrifying speed to swallow Adul, who had just landed and lacked air-footing to displace.

​Adul lost a fraction of a second to maneuver away.

​BAM!

​The massive water shark swallowed Adul whole, slamming him with brutal force against Magniora’s black stone pillar.

​Adul’s back collided with the hard stone with a sickening, wet crack. Micro-fractures spiderwebbed across the black stone of the courtyard. The torrents of water burst apart, flooding the tiles of Magniora.

​Selene slowly lowered her hand. ”Your movements are far too easy to read, boy.”

​But before the cold words could fully leave her lips, golden-yellow sparks of static violently ignited in the middle of the flooded tiles. Bzzzt! Adul dragged himself back up from the wet floor.

​Both his knees shook violently from the searing pain. His right shoulder was deeply gouged, weeping fresh blood. Yet... his eyes still burned bright with the flicker of yellow electricity. His resolve was nowhere near snuffed out.

​He lunged again.

​This time, his movements were completely non-linear. His body glided in a chaotic, erratic zig-zag—rapidly bouncing from the wet ground to a marble pillar, vaulting from the pillar to the tower wall, and then slicing through the air from the wall. Trails of dense yellow electricity were left at every point of contact, forming an electromagnetic net of energy that was impossible for the human eye to track.

​Selene narrowed her eyes sharply. ”He... changed his trajectory pattern?”

​Snikt!

​Adul suddenly materialized right on Selene’s left flank. His dagger swung. Selene scrambled to block using a makeshift water wall.

​But before the barrier could even stabilize, Adul was already directly above her head, launching a vertical thrust. Selene was forced to roll ungracefully across the stone floor to evade.

​Before she could even catch her breath, Adul was in front of her again, sweeping with a horizontal slash. Selene countered by summoning a row of jagged ice shards—but Adul had already displaced behind her back. A lethal stab lunged toward her blind spot at the base of her neck.

​Selene was forced to violently spin her entire body, forming a full-circle water dome to shield herself from all directions.

​The Water Arcanum Master was now genuinely besieged by the movements of a single, once-sniveling coward.

​Selene clicked her tongue in annoyance. ”Enough games.”

​She stomped her right foot heavily onto the wet tiles. Instantly, the temperature around Magniora’s courtyard plummeted radically.

​The moisture in the air froze in a thousandth of a second. The wet surface of the black stone tiles instantly glazed over into a sheet of absolute, dangerously slick ice. The radius of the frost expanded for dozens of meters.

​Adul, who had just landed, lost all traction. His boots slipped violently on the slick ice. His body pitched forward—and in that blind second, Selene unleashed her second massive water shark. This one was far more colossal, its movements infinitely more rabid.

​BAM!

​The shark’s snout struck Adul squarely in the chest. His body was launched, rolling helplessly across the frozen ground before crashing heavily against a black stone pillar. Thud. Fresh blood dripped from the corner of Adul’s split lip.

​Yet before Selene could even breathe a sigh of relief, Bzzzt! Adul surged back into a crazed zig-zag. Faster than before. More ferocious. The golden sparks enveloping his body erupted several times brighter.

​He manifested right beside Selene’s neck. Eva’s dagger was raised high, poised to sever her jugular from point-blank range.

​Selene had no luxury of tactical thought. Her combat instincts, honed through decades of life-and-death encounters, immediately hijacked her body.

​CRACK!

​A massive ice shield as thick as a tombstone abruptly materialized, barricading the side of her neck.

​The dagger in Adul’s hand struck the dense ice shield. The ice fractured violently, sending sharp crystal shrapnel raining into the air. However, the defense successfully thwarted Adul’s fatal slash.

​Adul staggered back a few paces. His breathing was ragged—thick plumes of white vapor constantly escaping his clenched teeth as he fought the biting cold.

​Selene was also panting, her chest heaving. The ice shield beside her beautiful face shattered into dust, leaving a thin cut on her cheek that slowly wept blood.

​The two of them locked eyes. Neither was willing to yield a single inch.

​”You...” Selene’s voice now carried a much heavier, authoritative weight. There was no longer any cold condescension in her tone. Instead, it was a rigid, forced respect. ”You are clearly no longer that pathetic brat who couldn’t even throw a stone.”

​Adul didn’t acknowledge the compliment. His numb fingers still gripped the hilt of Eva’s dagger. The residual static aura along his arms flickered weakly like a dying lightbulb.

​Adul didn’t even notice his body was covered in deep bruises. His focus was entirely singular: Protect Eva’s unmoving form behind him.

​Selene exhaled a cold breath, her eyes locking onto him. ”In that case... you are worthy of being taken down by my absolute best.”

​Selene slowly raised both hands high toward the heavens.

​Instantly, all the remaining water in the courtyard—the puddles on the tiles, the freezing moisture in the air, even the remnants of the shattered water sharks—moved as if possessed. Everything was sucked above Selene’s head, spinning violently into a colossal water tornado.

​The tornado’s form abruptly mutated.

​A long, draconic snout. Sharp scales forged from high-pressure water currents capable of shredding solid steel. A pair of hollow eyes radiating the raw, unbridled fury of the open ocean.

​ROAARRR!

​The massive water dragon, spanning dozens of meters, let out a deafening roar, its fluid body coiling through Magniora’s twilight sky like an apocalyptic serpent.

​Adul looked up, his grimy face illuminated by the monster. His heart hammered. Yet, he didn’t take a step back to run. He chose to abandon his evasion tactics.

​The water dragon dove ferociously. Its massive jaws opened wide—primed to crush and drown Adul into the pavement.

​BZZZTT!

​Adul launched himself straight forward, meeting the danger head-on. He charged directly into the dragon’s gaping maw.

​His golden-yellow Aura exploded, unleashing the most blinding flash of the entire battle. Adul swung his dagger in a single, flawless vertical slash from within the dragon’s body—slicing cleanly from its snout all the way through to its watery tail.

​SPLASH!

​The colossal water dragon was cleaved in two, detonating into a massive downpour that flooded the entire courtyard of the Magniora Tower like a torrential storm in monsoon season.

​Adul landed on his knees in the middle of the rushing water. He gasped desperately for air, completely drenched in a mix of floodwater, sweat, and his own blood.

​Selene stared blankly at the remnants of her water dragon, now reduced to ordinary puddles on the ground.

​Then, very slowly... a thin smile graced the lips of the Arcanum Master. It wasn’t a mocking sneer, nor was it a cold, emotionless smirk. It was the genuine smile of a veteran fighter who had finally found an opponent worthy of risking her life against.

​”Magnificent,” Selene praised sincerely.

​She slowly and elegantly raised her hand once more. The next second, the rainwater that had flooded the courtyard... abruptly froze mid-air. Every suspended droplet, every puddle on the asphalt, was locked rigid.

​Creak... Creak...

​It was no longer a simple water dragon manifesting. It was a colossal Ice Dragon.

​The scales lining its body were forged from pale blue ice crystals that beautifully refracted the evening sun. Its eyes were cut from frozen diamonds, radiating an absolute chill capable of freezing a man’s bloodstream with a single glance.

​Its breath... was a lethal blizzard, ready to turn anything into an ice sculpture.

​Adul shivered violently, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. The air surrounding him was instantly choked by a thick fog of white vapor. Yet, his feet remained firmly planted on the frozen ground.

​ROAARRR!

​The ice dragon roared, a terrifying sound like a collapsing polar glacier. A sweep of its massive tail struck the ground, sending a propagation of sharp ice fissures racing toward Adul. Adul nimbly leaped to evade, but a second sweep of the tail swung horizontally toward his flank.

​BAM!

​Adul was launched, rolling across the rough ice. A new tear formed on his left shoulder, fresh blood dripping to stain the frost beneath him.

​Yet, he forced his body to stand. He launched himself into the attack once more.

​Clang! His dagger slashed against the dragon’s icy scales, but it left only a meaningless scratch. The ice dragon countered, swinging a massive claw. Adul leaped to evade—but one of the razor-sharp ice talons sliced deeply into his left cheek.

​Stand up. Lunge again. Relentless. Fearless.

​And amidst the howling blizzard, Adul’s eyes captured an anomaly in the dragon’s defense. A tiny gap, sitting precisely in the joints between its ice scales. The density of the ice was impenetrable from the outside—but the joints were the weakness of its mechanical system.

​Adul focused the remnants of his speed. He blurred to the dragon’s right flank, driving his blade hard into the joint of its scales.

​CRACK! A massive plate of the dragon’s ice scale fractured.

​Without waiting for the dragon to counter, Adul had already displaced to its left flank. Another strike. Another fracture. He moved to its underbelly, striking again, before leaping to the back of its neck.

​The colossal ice dragon roared, thrashing wildly as it lost its target. Its massive body spun, slamming itself into Magniora’s black stone pillars to shake Adul off. But Adul moved far too fast—sprinting in a logic-defying zig-zag between the joints of the dragon’s scales, which were now riddle-ridden with severe fractures.

​Then came the final second of reckoning.

​Adul launched himself vertically into the twilight sky, leaping as high as the remaining yellow energy in his legs could propel him.

​The final, dying sparks of his golden electricity gathered entirely at the tip of Eva’s dagger, creating a single, blindingly brilliant point of light.

​He reached the apex of his leap—holding still in the air for a fraction of a second.

​Click.

​Adul plunged like a yellow meteor cleaving the darkness.

​A single, precise vertical stab landed dead-center on the ice dragon’s skull.

​BZZZZTTT! The detonation of electromagnetic energy surged wildly, rapidly coursing through the ice dragon’s entire system, forcibly tearing through every single scale joint fracture Adul had systematically prepared.

​SHATTER!

​The colossal ice dragon exploded into millions of pieces mid-air. Millions of crystalline shards rained down like glittering glass kissed by the evening sun, creating thousands of beautiful, miniature rainbows across Magniora’s courtyard.

​Adul crashed heavily onto his knees. The dagger slipped from his grasp, clattering onto the wet tiles.

​Every trace of golden electricity around his body was completely snuffed out. His breath was entirely gone—every drag of air felt as if a thousand invisible needles were stabbing his chest. His stamina reserves were completely pulverized past critical levels.

​On the other side of the frozen courtyard, Selene dropped to one knee.

​The Arcanum Master’s breathing was incredibly ragged, her mana reserves drained bone-dry to summon the ice dragon that served as her final trump card. She stared intently at Adul, her eyes filled with sheer disbelief.

​A boy who, just minutes ago, was sobbing in terror and clumsily throwing stones... had just shattered two of her ultimate magical masterpieces with his bare hands.

​”You...” Selene’s voice was hoarse, trembling violently. There was no trace of arrogance left on her face. ”You... are truly... not an ordinary human...”

​Adul didn’t answer. His jaw muscles were far too stiff to even form a single syllable. However, his eyes slowly drifted back—looking at Eva, who lay rigidly near the pillar. His guardian was still breathing softly. Safe.

​Adul offered a microscopic smile amidst his chest-stabbing winces. I... finally managed to protect you... Eva... he thought with profound relief.

​Just as Selene and Adul were forcing the absolute last of their energies to crawl forward and launch one final, life-ending strike... a shadow suddenly materialized, standing tall right between them.

​Whoosh...

​The faded brown cloak of the newcomer fluttered gently in Magniora’s twilight breeze.

​Lobrecht.

​The supreme leader of the Heretic Order stood tall, looking down at Adul, who lay helpless among the shattered ice. His gaze then shifted calmly toward Selene, who knelt devoid of mana on the opposite side. His serene, warm brown eyes scanned the ruins of the Magniora battlefield with deep, silent understanding.

​Lobrecht slowly carved a faint, dignified smile on his face.