“Clara, sir, step back and protect yourselves. I’ll break this array,” he said calmly, drawing the Dragonslayer Sword.
The blade was plain, lacking brilliance. Yet the moment it was drawn, a fierce aura that could cut through cause and annihilate all law surged upward, diluting the murderous aura emanating from the Northern Abyss Immortal-Slaying Ice Array.
The general’s pupils contracted slightly. He sensed the sword’s extraordinary nature. “Attack!” he commanded, though confident in his array.
“Black Tortoise World Suppression! Total Frost!” The spectral Black Tortoise roared, spewing a wide ice-blue pillar of light. Where it passed, space froze into solid ice, carrying the power to crush everything, aimed straight at Jared. This strike alone reached the power of a Level Eight Heavenly Immortal.
Jared didn’t dodge. He gripped his sword with both hands in front of him, eyes closed, mind and blade completely fused.
Chaotic celestial energy surged within him. The Chaotic Fire Lotus in his elixir field and the draconic energy ignited simultaneously, channeling immense force into the sword.
The Dragonslayer Sword hummed with anticipation. Fine dragon-scale patterns appeared along the blade, and an ancient, vast, all-destroying sword intent began to coalesce.
Jared’s eyes snapped open, golden light burst forth like tangible flames!
“Dragonslayer Sword Technique Third Form! Heavenrend!”
He slashed diagonally from bottom to top. No dazzling sword light, no deafening sound—just a thin, almost transparent gray thread of energy extending from the tip.
It looked fragile, as if it could snap at any moment. Yet the instant it met the ice-blue pillar, like a hot knife through butter, the pillar, containing the force of a Level Eight Heavenly Immortal, was effortlessly split in two.
The halves grazed past Jared’s sides, slamming into the ice behind him, creating two bottomless craters, but leaving him completely unharmed.
The filament of gray sword-light did not falter. It drifted onward with deceptive ease, gliding toward the vast, translucent battle array that shimmered above the ice like an illusion made of starlight.
“Brace for impact! Maximum defense!” the commander standing at the center of the Celestials’ phalanx bellowed, his voice cracking under sudden fear.
One hundred fifty armored warriors answered at once. Their immortal energy flared, flooding the glyphs beneath their feet. The sigils blazed white-blue, and the phantasmal Black Tortoise above their ranks thickened until it looked hewn from glacial jade.
The sword-thread alighted upon the Black Tortoise’s shell, a single gray hair brushing ancient armor. Time seemed to freeze, holding its breath in the brittle air.
The next heartbeat snapped.
Crack!
A faint, unmistakable fracture rippled through the silence.
From the point of contact, spider-fine fissures raced across the tortoise illusion, webbing outward until they filled its colossal body. The cracks leapt to the soldiers below. Ice-blue breastplates, crystal pikes, even flesh and bone—all split along the same fatal lines.
“No!” the commander roared, his protest swallowed by despair as the sound tore at his throat.
Boom!
The Black Tortoise, and the warriors who sustained it, collapsed like toppled statues, exploding into shards of armor, splinters of weapons, and a mist of frozen blood.
Azure motes and crimson vapor drifted down upon the white plain—a snowfall of ruin. One stroke, an entire battle array lay broken.
Jared stood with his sword lowered, chest rising and falling. That single cut had siphoned nearly a third of his celestial energy, yet the result was nothing short of awe-inspiring.
With the array’s keepers dead, the flight-locking field wavered. The pale dome flickered, then burst like a soap bubble, and the crushing hundredfold gravity vanished.
Vermilion and Clara stared at the ravaged field, and at Jared, sword in hand, poised between god and demon, unable to summon words.
“Come! The pool can’t be far,” Jared said as he slid the blade home. His face was calm again, as though the world-shattering strike had been no more than casual practice.
They stepped across ice that was red, then instantly glass-hard, pressing deeper into the frozen land.
Behind them remained only shattered armor, broken pikes, and blood-red crystals, mute testimony to the celestial warriors’ defeat.
Less than an hour later, a pressure unlike any before surged from the icebound depths—ancient, predatory, unstoppable.
Vermilion and Clara gasped, lungs seized, spirits quaking under an invisible mountain. Even the screaming blizzard hushed, its snow hanging motionless in the air.
Jared halted, turned, and fixed his gaze on the approaching storm of power.
For the first time, true gravity darkened his eyes.
Whoever comes is stronger than every guardian we have faced… Stronger even than that Level Seven Heavenly Immortal we slew before…
Jared’s mind sharpened in a heartbeat.
The stranger’s strength sat at the very summit of the Heavenly Immortal Realm, Level Eight, razor-steady, dense as winter stone. No trace of pill-swollen bluster clung to that aura. Every dram of power felt earned, hammered into shape by years of honest battle.
An icy blue comet tore through the cloud-bank and speared into the plain, exploding in a shower of frozen light a hundred yards ahead.
When the brilliance faded, only a lone figure remained, motionless amid the drifting snow. He looked to be forty, his features chiseled and severe, eyes as bottomless as a glacier’s crevasse.
A jagged cobalt sigil burned between his brows, more intricate, more luminous, than any Jared had yet encountered in these lands.
A simple robe the color of glacier ice hung from his shoulders, yet the cold it exuded warped the very air.
He held an ancient sword of flawless crystal. Though its edge appeared dull, the chill it breathed pricked at Jared’s soul like needles of black frost.
“I am Celadin Frostbane, Third General of the Northern Abyss Palace… Are you the interloper who smashed our lines and slaughtered hundreds of my kin?”
“Hmm… Curious… You register as Level One Heavenly Immortal, yet your aura is a storm of formless chaos, draconic pressure flickering within… Whatever art you practice, I have never seen its like…”
“Step aside,” Jared said, his voice calm and level. “I came only for the medicine that will save a life. I’ve no wish to cut anyone else down.”
