Chapter 1303: Ice, Blood, Void and the Road to the Abyss

"Don’t take too long."

The dragon had not even drawn breath to answer him when—

BAAAAAAANNNNGGGGG!!!!!!

The sound hit the sky like a giant fist.

Her head snapped toward the distance just in time to see a red explosion blossom high above the battlefield.

Bodies fell first.

Chunks of them too.

A swarm of frost-born abominations—Shardswans, Ice-Rippers, long-necked cliff horrors and spear-clawed flyers—came apart so violently that for one stunned instant it looked as though the heavens themselves had burst open and decided to rain meat and half-bodies of thousands of abominations. Blood and served bodies scattered through the pale winter air in a vast crimson veil, streaming downward in glittering arcs against the white stormlight.

Then the blood stopped falling:

Every drop of it hung there.

The dragon’s eyes widened.

The blood trembled in the air for half a heartbeat, darkening, thickening, pulsing with a more sinister life than blood ought to possess. Black fissures crawled within that red, void-darkness moving through it like rot inside a jewel, and in the next instant every droplet stretched long and vicious into a blood-spear.

Hundreds—

—then thousands.

—some came together and turned into dark red lances, huge and savage, their surfaces crackling with black fractures, their tips shrieked as the dark Void gnawed at the space around them.

They dropped all at once.

Below, the army moving and coming across the frozen reaches barely had time to lift their heads before the spears and lances struck at once!

The first ranks vanished beneath the impact.

Ice beasts the size of towers were punched straight through and nailed to the ground by huge spears made from Void-Blood. Packs of low-running white maws were split open mid-leap. Flying creatures trying to rise and those coming to the aid of the fisrt he’d killed and used their blood were all dragged back down, pierced through wings and throats, their roars cut short as spear after spear hammered them into the snow until the battlefield looked less like a warfront and more like a forest of blood stakes grown from murder.

Tens of kilometers were filled with nothing but bodies!

And at the same time—because apparently slaughter from above alone had not satisfied him—the ice answered too.

The frozen earth beneath the horde split apart.

Ten immense storms rose screaming into existence, not from the heavens but from the ground itself, each one a towering pillar of white ruin. They twisted upward with a fury sharp enough to flay flesh from bone. Ice dust, broken crystal and bladed snow spun so fast that the air around them whined. Anything caught inside them was torn, skinned, crushed, frozen and scattered before it could even understand what had touched it.

The storms did not remain in one place either.

They moved, carved and travelled through the army like living disasters, ripping long white scars through the beasts above and below. Shardswans were shredded out of the sky, Rimefang crawlers were diced apart as they charged, thick-bodied Glacier Maulers tried to brace themselves, only to lose entire flanks of flesh in bursts of red and white.

The dragon stared.

’How...?’

How was this the same young man who had once struggled to stand against two of the region’s beasts at the same time? How was this the same maddening, bloodthirsty, sharp-mouthed Young Dragon who had entered this place nearly a year ago with stubbornness in his bones and far more arrogance than strength?

Now he was ripping through the Zone Lord’s army like a calamity that had grown bored of patience; and he couldnt transform into a dragon yet! How terrifying would he be if he ever got his transformation!

And worse, he was not merely killing.

He was advancing!

The line of ruin moving through the battlefield had direction. Phei was not wasting himself in blind slaughter. Every detonation of blood, every storm of ice, every corpse falling from the sky marked a path driving deeper and deeper toward the abyssal chasm cutting through the heart of the region—the black, immeasurable wound in the frozen world where the Zone Lord lurked.

The dragon knew that chasm well.

Every creature in the region knew it.

That was where the ruler of this endless white hell waited: the Zone Lord, a real God being and the commander of these swarms infesting the Primordial Frozen Zone. It ruled over hundreds of thousands of creatures and abominations, everything from the lowliest fang-worms and ice jackals to the Shardswans, Glacier Maulers and the gargantuan cave things that spent most of their lives sleeping beneath the lower ice.

Even at her full power, long before imprisonment, exhaustion and time had worn her down, she would not have charged at that monster casually.

Now?

Now, reduced so badly that the strength she could safely wield had sunk as low as Sky Sovereign—no higher than Phei’s present stage—she would not even dream of it.

And yet he was going.

He was going like a lunatic who had personally insulted death and enjoyed the answer.

The dragon’s slited eyes narrowed as she watched another section of the horde come apart.

No... not just a lunatic.

Something worse.

Every enemy he tore down seemed to feed him and the more he devoured their Blood Essence the stronger he seemed to become and more savaged he was getting; with all the Blood Essence he was close to the same power as a Half-Divine being or Demigod.

Every drop of spilled blood seemed to turn him fiercer, more vicious, more alive. The cold itself obeyed his every whim. The darkness answered him, that red power of his drank battle greedily and returned it sharpened. It was as though war itself had decided to crawl into his veins and make a home there.

Then she saw him again.

Far ahead, suspended in the middle of red ruin and white storms, Phei threw back his head and laughed.

It was not a sane sound.

It was the laughter of someone who had suffered here for close to a year, bled here, frozen here, been hunted, mauled, buried beneath snow and claw and hunger here—and had finally grown strong enough to return every lesson to the region in kind.

Blood moved.

Not his.

The blood of his enemies rose around him in sheets.

It peeled up from the snow, from broken necks and bodies from split torsos and shattered skulls, and rushed toward him in dark streaming ribbons. Blackness of True Darkness and Void threaded through it. The deeper power beneath the red. The strange, hungry dark that never seemed content simply to be shadow, always wanting to become something sharper.

The streaming blood wrapped around his body.

It hardened, thickened and grew.

The dragon felt her breath catch.

Phei disappeared inside the forming shape of what looked to be a gigantic armor and it swallowed him from head to foot, swelling with every heartbeat until only monstrous figure stood where the boy had been: a twelve-meter fiend wrought from blood, ice and darkness, hulking enough to make the charging beasts beneath it look suddenly small.