Blizzard, arrows, and spear converged in flawless harmony, evidence that these Celestial soldiers had long since turned extermination into ritual. One of them barked a contemptuous curse, an insult flung like grit into the wind, daring their human prey to resist.
“You’re pushing your luck!” Jared’s patience finally splintered. A lance of molten gold flashed behind his eyes, and the calm he had worn like a cloak evaporated. He invoked no grand incantation. He merely lifted his right hand, two fingers aligned as a blade, and swiped upward against the falling spear.
A note rang out—clear, bright, and terrible—as though a sleeping dragon had sung. From his fingertips burst a thread of chaos-forged sword-energy so fine, so dense, it seemed able to sever the laws of the world themselves.
The captain’s spear, an artifact empowered by Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Three cultivation, shattered like brittle sugar under that stroke.
Terror widened the captain’s pupils. He twisted, meaning to retreat, but the sword energy whispered across his throat first. His head left his shoulders, expression frozen in disbelief, yet no blood spilled.
Blade and chaos erased flesh, spirit, and the very idea of him in a single, silent breath.
Jared’s left hand closed on empty air. A spectral dragon’s claw, woven from raw, primal energy, manifested above him and clenched.
Cracks raced across the three ice-arrows; they exploded into harmless motes. The blizzard of knife-edged snow slammed into an unseen barrier, collapsed, and fell as gentle flakes once more.
The surviving Celestials felt their arrogance congeal into dread.
How could this mild-mannered human, who looked scarcely older than a novice, wield such annihilating power?
Their captain had been a Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Three cultivator, the pinnacle of their squad, and Jared had ended him with a flick of two fingers.
“Run!”
Panic shredded discipline. The two warriors spun, desperate to dive into the sheltering white.
Jared’s voice followed them, cold as iron left overnight in the snow. “Now you wish to leave? Too late…”
With a flicker of intent, Jared released two threads of chaotic sword-light, fine as baby hair, swift as forked lightning.
The filaments slid in after the defenders’ own attack, pierced their protective radiance, punched through the ice-blue armor, speared the back, and burst from the breastbone.
Both divine soldiers froze mid-stride. The light in their eyes guttered. They stared down, aghast, at the tiny, fatal holes eating away their lifeforce and very souls. A heartbeat later, they toppled like felled statues, breath and divinity extinguished.
From the first spark to the last corpse, scarcely two breaths had passed.
Wind and snow still howled across the empty plain, yet a tomb-still hush now ruled the killing ground.
Clara Cloudridge drew a steadying breath, snow crusting her lashes. “Jared, we just killed warriors of the Northern Abyss Celestial Clan. They won’t… They can’t let such an affront slide.”
Jared answered with the faintest nod. “I know… I never sought trouble, yet trouble keeps seeking me. An enmity has been forged, so let it be. As long as they don’t bar my path to the medicine I need, I’ll ignore them. Should they come again, I’ll kill them, nothing more to discuss.”
The words were spoken quietly, yet each syllable rang with unassailable confidence and a chill edge that promised swift execution.
Jared turned to the wasteland once more. “Come… We keep moving. The Blood-Soul Frostpool won’t find itself.”
He spared not a glance for the three bodies. A swirl of his sleeve, and he, Clara, and Vermilion streaked deeper into the icebound expanse.
As Jared had predicted, the clan reacted with stunning speed. They had covered barely a distance before the thin air behind them split with a shrill, metallic screech.
It was no windborne cry but a crystal signal arrow, its ice-forged whistle able to carry for hundreds of kilometers across the barren flats.
“Quick indeed,” Jared murmured without looking back. His spiritual sense swept the rearward horizon and saw everything.
Five cobalt streaks knifed over the ice, each a Northern Abyss Celestial Clan warrior encased in full battle mail and cocooned in light.
They skimmed the frozen surface on crystal boards that kissed the ice with almost no friction, outpacing ordinary flight by a third.
Foremost raced a giant of a man, twin-bladed frost axe in hand, aura peaking at Level Five Heavenly Immortal. The other four, Level Four, fanned into a practiced hunting wedge.
The leader’s roar battered through the blizzard, imperious and cold. “Foreign trespassers, halt and submit! You have murdered our patrol! A crime worthy of death! Surrender now and your corpses may remain intact!”
Jared’s stride never faltered. He spoke to Clara and Vermilion alone, “Stay on course. Find the pool. I’ll tidy this up.”
“Be careful,” Clara said, worry flickering before she shot ahead, white cloak snapping like a banner.
Vermilion followed with a guttural laugh; he knew minor pests posed no threat to Jared.
Only then did Jared turn, planting himself amid the whirling snow, white robes and black hair whipping in the gale. His expression was calm, his gaze fixed on the five hurtling specks.
A hundred and fifty meters… Ninety… Then thirty…
Seeing their quarry waiting rather than fleeing, the leader’s surprise flashed, then boiled into rage; no outsider had ever dared taunt their clan on the plains.
“Form the Mystic Ice Dragon Binding Array!” he bellowed, driving the double axe into the frozen crust.
Crackling sigils spread like spiderwebs beneath their skates. The ice field erupted with a boom that rattled the sky. Splinters fanned outward like falling stars.
Five crystal columns, each as thick as an ancient oak, shot through the fractured surface, rocketing into low-hanging clouds. Countless runes, fine as snow-dust, shimmered across the glassy trunks.
The pillars did not stay still. They whirled, savage and fast, carving scythes of frozen wind that circled Jared and forged a spinning cage of blades.
An unseen magnetic tide fused with a crushing gravity well between those spires. Any ordinary Heavenly Immortal cultivator would have fought simply to remain standing.
At the perimeter, four warriors claimed the cardinal points. Fingers knotted into seals, they drove torrents of ice-born essence from their arms into the hungry array.
Blue light blazed. Heat fled. Moisture in the air crystallized at once, dusting Jared’s protective aura with glittering frost that gnawed, layer by layer, to entomb him alive.
Jared tilted his head, studying the whirling rune-stamped prison as though it were a curious painting rather than a weapon meant to kill. “Interesting… But still far too weak.”
The Dragonslayer Sword rested in silence against his hip; Jared had not even used the blade yet.
