Chapter 1300: Dragon of Carnage!

Phei was right now a Sky Sovereign, one great stage beneath every Half-Divine beast surrounding him, yet whenever one of those black blades landed cleanly, hardened flesh opened beneath it.

More Frost Reavers rushed him.

Phei swept his perception outward, and the moment it crossed the sky, his Void-Ice answered with it without him doing anything:

A vast tide of black-white frost burst from his body like the last breath of a world already dying. It did not leave him so much as tear free, rolling outward in every direction until the air itself seemed to freeze around him and hang there, wounded; it poured from him in great invisible waves, swallowing distance, whitening the sky, and dragging a hurricane of frozen mist behind it as though the heavens had inhaled through Phei and exhaled winter back into the world.

Wherever that frost passed, sound thinned, light sickened; the sky itself looked flayed, as if something ancient had dragged its nails across the firmament and left winter in the wounds.

The air froze.

Hundreds of creatures were caught inside pale crystal while wings, claws and open mouths stopped wherever the cold reached them.

Then Phei moved.

His swords became dark flashes among frozen bodies as he flashes forward faster than light!

He appeared beside one Frost Reaver and crossed both blades through its chest before True Void Steps carried him away. He emerged above another, sliced through its neck and disappeared before the head began to fall, a third lost both wings, a fourth split from shoulder to hip, while Phei kicked through the frozen chest of a fifth and used the recoil to launch himself toward another cluster.

His flying speed alone remained inferior to theirs.

’Flight mixed with True Void Steps is another matter.’

Phei had spent countless battles learning to weave the two together. He accelerated through the air, entered the Void at the height of that speed and emerged elsewhere with the same momentum still behind him. When he needed to turn, he discarded the momentum completely and left from another direction. When he wanted just his physical mighty and power to kick the frozen bodies into useless ice cubes, he preserved everything and returned behind his enemy already moving fast enough for the first swing to become devastating.

Soon he was little more than a white-haired flash and dark flashes of swords weaving through frozen monsters.

Dark swords rose and fell, bodies followed from his kicks while he cut through others, dozens upon dozen died before the first groups of imprisoned Frost Reavers finished cracking their way free.

The Ice Dragon joined him.

Its vast wings spread through the frozen sky of bodies while a roar burst from the dragon’s damaged jaws. Dragon Breath swept across another section of the swarm and buried hundreds beneath Void-Ice before the colossal Dragon folded its wings and rammed directly into them.

Frozen Frost Reavers and Glacial Skyrays exploded against its chest.

Wings shattered—

Claws broke—

The Dragon tore through the sculptures like a living frozen mountain, sending fragments spinning for kilometers through the storm.

All these creatures belonged to the Primordial Frozen Zone.

Rimeleeches had fed upon things that could survive its deepest cold. Glacial Skyrays had battered their bodies against frozen mountains until their skulls became harder than the ice they shattered while Frost Reavers had spent their lives hunting through storms that could freeze blood and soul, while Rime Colossi grew beneath ancient glaciers where ordinary creatures would have died before taking their first breath.

Close to a year earlier, those facts had meant everything.

When Phei first entered the Primordial Frozen Zone, even the cold itself had cut him open. His blood froze inside wounds before it could fall. His marrow suffered beneath the Primordial Frozen Essence, his lungs burned whenever he breathed, and Infinity Control had failed against ancient ice that simply refused to listen.

For close to a year, he had endured it.

Void-Ice swallowed tiny traces of Primordial Frozen Essence, suffered beneath it, changed beneath it and slowly learned from a cold older than the frost Phei had known before entering this place; soon he’d tempered his body to it and his Void-Ice too making it superior to the Primordial cold’s essence.

Now the natives still carried the winter of this zone within them but Phei carried something colder.

His Void-Ice froze them.

The surviving Half-Divine beasts finally broke free across the battlefield. Hundreds of frozen prisons cracked apart almost together as Frost Reavers and Glacial Skyrays tore themselves loose and filled the sky once more.

Phei looked upward.

Then raised one hand.

Ice began forming throughout the heavens!

Thousands of enormous shards appeared first, each already larger than a man. Tens of thousands followed before the number swelled into hundreds of thousands, and still Phei continued, dragging more and more Void-Ice into existence until the sky itself seemed to disappear beneath what he had created.

They became millions.

The frozen heavens darkened beneath an impossible mass of colossal shards, each one sharpened into a murderous point and suspended under Infinity Control with terrifying precision. Vast blizzards twisted between them, roaring through the narrow spaces while white frost and blood-soaked ice churned together overhead until the entire battlefield looked trapped beneath the ribcage of some enormous frozen beast.

The creatures below had little choice.

The shards did not merely hang above them. They surrounded them from every direction, descending between bodies, filling the gaps beside claws, wings and tails, jutting upward from the ice beneath their feet and floating sideways through every route of escape. Millions of points enclosed the swarm inside a colossal crystalline cocoon so densely woven that even the smallest movement threatened to drive flesh directly into waiting edges.

A Glacial Skyray opened one wing and immediately found dozens of enormous spears turning with it, their tips following the movement before the wing had even fully spread. Rimeleeches writhed among the packed swarm only to discover blades above their backs, beneath their bellies and waiting at either side.

Even the towering Rime Colossi blow which had come for aid stood unnaturally still, their enormous bodies surrounded so completely that a single careless step would impale them from several directions at once.

Infinity Control held everything there.

Millions of frozen weapons hung inside the storm, constantly shifting by tiny degrees, following every twitch and breath from the creatures beneath them. The cocoon seemed alive around the swarm, tightening whenever something moved and relaxing only when everything remained perfectly still.

Phei stared, his white hair whipping violently through the blizzard while the impossible frozen prison continued spreading across the battlefield.

His grin slowly widened.

A beast could smash one shard apart and find ten more waiting behind it. It could leap and discover the sky already closing. It could retreat and meet the ice rising behind its spine. The more violently the swarm struggled, the more the cocoon shifted around them, millions of enormous frozen edges rotating beneath Phei’s control until the creatures were trapped inside a continuously moving grave of white and blood-stained ice.

Phei turned from the Dragon Lady’s back in the distant sky, one hand still raised while the blizzard behind them continued screaming around the immense crystalline prison.

The Half-Divine beasts roared and rushed after them.

Only Phei knew what those bastards had done to him during his first months inside the Primordial Frozen Zone.

He remembered Rimeleeches biting into his flesh while Dragon Regeneration desperately closed wounds behind their teeth. He remembered Glacial Skyrays smashing him through cliffs, Frost Reavers hunting him across frozen ravines and Rime Colossi breaking bones he had only just finished healing. He remembered waking beneath collapsed glaciers with blood frozen against his skin, clawing his way back toward the surface and discovering that another swarm had already found him.

He remembered all of it.

Every wound.

Every hunt.

Every fucking one of them.

Phei disappeared with the Dragon Lady through the Void just as the strongest creatures finally began forcing their way through.

They emerged far beyond the battlefield.

Phei’s hand came down.

"And they shall call me the Dragon of Carnage!"

The heavens collapsed!

Millions of enormous Void-Ice shards descended together.

The first wave struck before the freed creatures could scatter. Frost Reavers were pierced through wings and skulls while Glacial Skyrays disappeared beneath successive impacts powerful enough to drive their armored bodies into the frozen earth. Rime Colossi vanished beneath falling mountains of sharpened ice as the blizzards above forced everything downward faster and harder.

One impact merged into another until the entire region became a continuous roar.

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Glaciers fractured beneath the bombardment.

Frozen mountains trembled.

The battlefield disappeared beneath exploding ice and white storms.

Phei hovered far beyond the destruction, his breathing heavy while the two long Void swords slowly dissolved from his hands and returned to darkness.

The Ice Dragon remained beside him, wounded, bloodied and still impossibly majestic beneath the frozen heavens.

Phei watched the devastation below without speaking.

Close to a year inside the Primordial Frozen Zone had taught him many things.

Most importantly, it had taught him how patient prey could become when given enough time to grow teeth.