The corner of his mouth twitched into something almost like respect. “No wonder you’re Venerable Glacier. Your eyesight really is vicious.”
His voice stayed level, as though discussing the weather. “Since you’ve seen through me, there’s no point in keeping up the show.”
Seeing this change, icy light blazed in Venerable Glacier’s eyes. “Bold wretch! Impersonating a celestial envoy and trespassing in the Divine Punishment Hall! You will have your very soul ripped out, refined into a soul crystal, and tortured forever!”
He hadn’t even finished the last syllable before Venerable Glacier lunged. The movement was blinding, cold wind snapping across the hall. No weapon glimmered in his grip; he simply flattened his hand and drove it forward as if swatting a fly. In an instant the chamber plunged toward absolute zero, Jared’s breath crystallized mid-air, shards of frost crackling around his boots.
A colossal palm, pure Frost Law made solid, condensed above him. It carried the promise of freezing worlds and shattering souls as it descended. The very air splintered; hair-thin cracks laced the frozen space like a shattered mirror. Any ordinary Upper Immortal sixth-grade would have been erased without a trace.
Clearly, Venerable Glacier meant to end the struggle in a single blow and drag answers out of whatever was left. Yet heat flashed in Jared’s eyes—a spark of pure battle joy.
“Perfect!” Jared barked. He surged forward instead of back, both hands carving rapid, intricate sigils before his chest. Chaotic force roared out, not to meet the ice head-on, but to whirl before him, condensing into a spinning vortex.
He growled, “Chaos Return to Origin! Spatial Genesis!”
At the vortex’s core, a pinprick of absolute darkness blinked into being. It ballooned outward, ripping open an unsteady gash that led to raw, unknown void. The giant ice palm crashed straight into the tear, its power shredded, scattered, then devoured by swirling chaos.
Jared’s figure flickered; he dove after it and vanished beyond the fracture. While sliding through the rift, he poured everything into holding the torn space steady, forcing it outward until a rough sphere, maybe three hundred feet across, formed around him—a newborn Chaotic Microcosm.
Behind him came a frosty snarl. “Think you can flee? Dream on!”
The precision of the spatial art made Venerable Glacier hesitate for half a breath, then his killing intent doubled. He blurred into an ice-blue streak, slicing through the narrowing rupture and plunging after Jared. A muffled boom rolled through Frigid Silence Hall. The gash snapped shut, leaving only brittle cold and ragged waves of warped space. The two combatants were gone.
***
In the Chaotic Microcosm, gray, murky currents of chaos churned everywhere, the border of this pocket world twisting and quaking. Jared had carved the place as a private arena: no outside senses, no witnesses, and the ground itself eager to obey him.
The moment Venerable Glacier stepped in, his link to the Frost Law thinned, while biting streams of chaos gnawed at his protective aura.
“Parlor tricks!” Venerable Glacier sneered. “A flimsy bubble won’t hold me!”
He unleashed everything. Upper Immortal seventh-grade might thundered out of him, cracking invisible whips through the haze. Ice-blue law chains spiraled, shoving the chaos back. Between his hands, an Ice Crystal Longsword coalesced, clear as glass and colder than death.
“Impostor, die! Extreme Ice Annihilation Slash!” He swept the blade. A wedge of ice-blue sword aura, sharp enough to carve heaven from earth, tore toward Jared.
Jared read the swing coming and felt the air bite with cold. Venerable Glacier’s sword carved a blue arc so heavy the floor groaned, power dwarfing the casual palm from the hall. He set his jaw. Heat never reached his eyes, only a steady spark of purpose. Fear tried the door, found no latch, and backed away.
Jared raised empty hands. Chaotic force, rolling in grey mist, bled from his pores, curling into his palms and fusing into a long, austere blade that looked carved from the universe’s first dawn.
“Chaos Genesis!” His shout rolled like thunder inside the cramped sky of the microcosm. He stepped through the cold and broke it, sending his own sword downward in a clean, merciless cut.
No colored halos answered him. Only one strip of dense grey light leapt from the blade, straight as fate, to meet the roaring Ice-Blue Sword Aura. The first contact hissed like steel plunged into acid. Grey and blue slammed together, twin storms locked at the neck. Instead of thunder, a long grinding whine rose, like teeth scraping stone while the edges ate each other grain by grain.
The Ice-Blue Sword Aura shattered first. The strands unraveled, each thread stripped of shape then swallowed by the advancing Chaos Sword Light, mute and devouring. The Chaos Sword Light drilled onward, its tip now inches from Venerable Glacier’s chest.
“What?!” The shout cracked from Venerable Glacier, more shock than sound.
Jared saw the man’s pupils shrink, saw the confident chill on that angular face melt into raw alarm. The Ice Lord staggered back a pace, gawking at the fragments of blue still drifting away like dust. He threw his sword across his body, and ice-blue law chains burst outward, stacking shields between himself and the incoming light.
Boom!
Grey power hammered the new barriers, a blunt bell strike that echoed through the warped sky. Shockwaves punched across the floor. Venerable Glacier’s arm shook, fingers numbing around the Ice Crystal Longsword. The blast forced him three full steps backward.
“You… What kind of power is that?!” His voice rattled between anger and raw disbelief. A halo of frost flared around him, yet the man’s shoulders twitched, the stance no longer sure.
Jared tasted the advantage on his tongue. The grey within his blade hummed, craving another bite of ordered law. He leaned into the microcosm, riding its currents. Space folded, and he slid past sight to the venerable’s flank, his Chaotic Longsword sketching lethal arcs toward throat, heart, and spine. Ice blurred around him.
Venerable Glacier whipped the longsword, birthing a blizzard of mirrored blue blades that clashed against Jared’s grey line after line. Here, Jared moved like a fish in home water. Every swing carried the microcosm’s hunger, dissolving each frozen copy before it could bloom.
The venerable’s strength bled away, stifled to a whisper. Even the strikes that reached Jared struck fog; chaotic currents drank half their bite before they kissed his guard. Across the churned air, Jared glimpsed tiny hesitations, timings broken by fear. He guided each into a widening crack, swordplay so fluid it felt remembered, not improvised.
