He merely lifted his right index finger and tapped the air toward the nearest pillar. A mote of swirling, chaotic light bloomed at his fingertip, no larger than a grain of rice yet carrying the hush of galaxies being born and dying.
The mote blossomed without thunder, without glare. From Jared Chance’s finger, a silent ripple rolled outward, invisible but absolute, sweeping through every shard of ice and every line of rune.
Crack… The sound of shattering glass flooded the night, sharp enough to make people wince. Spider-web fissures raced across the rune-laden columns. In the space of a blink, they riddled each pillar from base to crown.
With one cavernous roar, all five collapsed at once, exploding into glittering powder that drifted like cruel snow.
The five warriors anchoring the array spat arcs of blood, their complexions draining to parchment white. The backlash of the broken formation tore through their cores and left fear naked in their eyes.
“Impossible! The Mystic Ice Dragon Binding Array can detain a Level Six Heavenly Immortal for minutes…” the ax-wielding captain screamed, his voice cracking mid-protest.
Jared answered only with an indifferent look. Two fingers slid together in the air, sketching five strokes too swift for mortal sight.
Invisible sword intent flashed. The warriors felt a sudden chill at their throats, then the world spun.
They watched their own headless bodies sway, blood freezing into scarlet icicles before it could spray. Consciousness fled into a darkness deeper than winter.
Jared never paused. He turned, stepped once, and reappeared three thousand meters ahead. Two more strides carried him to the Vermilion Demon Lord and Clara Cloudridge.
From halting his stride to erasing five lives to vanishing again, the entire exchange lasted no more than three breaths.
“Keep moving.” Jared’s tone did not ripple. To him, the blood he had just shed mattered no more than the smears a man wipes away after swatting flies.
***
As the three pressed deeper, the world around them deteriorated: air thinned, light waned, and the cold dug in like iron claws against naked bone.
A ragged ice fissure suddenly yawned ahead. Its chasm ran so deep that the bottom lay beyond imagination. Knife-sheared walls rose on either side, the corridor scarcely thirty feet wide—a single, merciless throat leading to the heart of the frozen plains.
“Sir, the landscape is dangerous. Perfect for an ambush,” Clara murmured, unease coiling behind her measured voice.
Sword hand steady, she combed the glittering walls with her spirit-sense, inch by frigid inch, unwilling to let even a snowflake hide a threat.
Jared nodded. His eyes flashed golden, and he swept the canyon with that draconic sight.
In that vision, pulses of hidden power blazed like fireflies in pitch darkness: twelve distinct flares buried inside the walls.
Each spark masked a celestial warrior; the weakest hovered at Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Four, the strongest—two of them—burned at Level Six.
Those killers had merged with the ice itself, their heartbeats, breaths, even their auras thinned to threads—proof of assassins born to silence. Beneath the ice at both mouth and exit of the gorge slept three chained arrays, linked to detonate in hungry succession.
One wrong step would unleash a storm fierce enough to cripple even a sixth-tier Heavenly Immortal.
“Twelve hidden fighters, three Ice Explosion Arrays,” Jared reported, voice still calm.
“Two at Level Six, four at Level Five, six at Level Four… stronger than the last squad we met,” he added, almost conversational.
Beside him, the Vermilion Demon Lord inhaled sharply, the sound frosting in the air.
A formation like this, paired with such terrain, could bury even a Heavenly Immortal Realm Level Eight master who slipped once.
Clara tightened her grip on the hilt, silently bracing for the battle certain to erupt.
“Stay within ten feet of me,” Jared instructed, then strode into the gorge without hesitation.
His boot kissed ice, and the sleepers awoke. No warning, no war-cry, just raw murderous intent ripping open the hush. The air itself screamed as weapons tore free.
Twelve glacial silhouettes burst from the walls, moving so fast that their after-images hung behind like ghostly banners. Each brandished a different ice-forged weapon—swords, spears, wheels, spikes—all radiating deathly chill, converging from every direction to seal off escape.
Simultaneously, the three dormant arrays clicked awake beneath the travelers‘ feet.
Boom!
Columns of compressed frost, each a hundred feet wide, roared skyward, swallowing Jared and his companions in searing blue light.
Shockwaves rattled the gorge. Ice daggers broke loose, clattering down the cliffs like glass rain while the canyon shuddered.
Cold smiles crept across the ambushers’ faces.
With coordination like this, even their clan’s elders would retreat. These three reckless outsiders were already corpses in their minds.
Then, in the span of a heartbeat, every grin froze.
Within the blue inferno, a single point of gold bloomed, bright as dawn against midnight ice.
At first, the golden light was faint, but in the blink of an eye, it swelled and spread like the rising sun, unstoppable in its ascent. A faint dragon’s cry seemed to echo through the canyon. Wherever the golden light passed, the raging ice-explosion energy dissipated as if spring snow had met the blazing sun, vanishing without a trace.
A huge golden orb hovered steadily in midair. Inside, Jared stood with hands behind his back, shielding Vermilion and Clara behind him, both unharmed.
On the orb’s surface, chaotic celestial energy intertwined with a trace of draconic energy, forming an impenetrable barrier.
“What?!”
Twelve ambushers froze in shock.
The ice-explosion array they had fully activated couldn’t even break through the defense.
Jared lifted his eyes, scanning the surrounding divine ambushers, his voice calm and detached. “Nice ambush… But your strength falls short.”
Before they could react, he moved. This time, he did not use sword energy. Instead, his hands formed an ancient, mysterious hand seal.
“Chaotic Hellseal!”
Boom!
From Jared’s center, an indescribable, crushing pressure descended. It wasn’t physical weight; it was suppression on the level of cosmic law. It was as if the weight of the entire world had concentrated here, bearing down on the twelve divine ambushers.
Thud! Thud! Thud!
The twelve fell like trash from midair, slamming heavily onto the ice. Horrified, they realized their ice-based celestial energy had completely stalled. Their bloodline powers were fully suppressed. Not even a finger could move. They could only watch as the white-clad figure advanced toward them.
“You… Who are you?” The leader of the ambushers, a Level Five Heavenly Immortal, struggled to lift his head, eyes wide with fear and disbelief. He had only ever felt such absolute law-based suppression from a few top elders in his clan.
Jared gave no answer. He simply extended his hand and clenched it lightly in midair toward the twelve enemies.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Twelve muffled explosions rang out like crushing twelve icy grapes. The bodies of the twelve ambushers erupted simultaneously, forming twelve clouds of blood mist.
Within moments, the extreme cold froze them into twelve chillingly beautiful ice-blood sculptures, scattered across the white ice.
Jared released the hand seal. The golden orb vanished with it.
