Chapter 1304: The Blood Fiend’s Dreadful Majesty!

The Fiend’s body was plated in dense dark-red armor that looked half-forged metal and half living gore, every overlapping plate giving a faint obscene throb as though something enormous had been skinned alive and taught to wear itself as armor. Thin seams between the plates opened and closed with each pulse, leaking black fluid that refused to fall normally:

It crawled upward, drifted sideways and stretched through the air in long corrosive filaments, smoking wherever it brushed the frozen ground.

The helm buried Phei completely beneath a faceless visage, its eye-slits burning with a dim blood-red glow while horned ridges swept backward like a crown grown from the skull of some abyssal war-fiend.

Beneath them, the chest rose broad and grotesquely powerful, carrying the dreadful majesty of something that had crawled out of an old slaughter and never learned how to stop killing.

In one hand, the fiend carried a colossal double-headed war hammer. Both heads were immense blocks of condensed ruin, wrapped in black-red chainwork that crawled continuously across the weapon instead of remaining still, tightening and loosening around the haft like starving serpents. Dark blood sweated from the metal in thick beads before being reabsorbed, while each hammerhead carried enough brutish weight to make the air sag around it.

The weapon possessed none of the elegance of a sacred artifact:

It looked purpose-built for caving in armor, pulping bone and reducing whatever survived the first impact into something unrecognizable.

The great sword in its other hand was leaner and far more vicious. Its long edge carried a thin river of blood that never stopped moving, sliding from guard to tip before blackening into liquid darkness along the final stretch. That darkness writhed against the blade as though impatient for flesh, and the surrounding frost hissed whenever the sword passed too close.

Where the hammer promised obliteration, the sword carried something colder: the deliberate cruelty of a weapon made to open bodies and keep travelling.

The armored fiend lowered its enormous frame into a crouch, one clawed foot was grinding deeper into the frozen ice while both weapons angled outward. The Dragon Lady felt the air tighten around him. More blood hanging across the battlefield began trembling toward his position, frost cracked beneath invisible pressure and threads of darkness crawled through those fissures as though the ground itself had started festering beneath his feet.

More beasts were already charging despite the dead thousands.

Rimehorn Behemoths thundered forward on pillar-like legs, every impact making the frozen plain jump beneath their weight. Shardswans descended from above in shrieking formations, their crystalline wings carving pale scars through the storm, while Ice-Rippers bounded over broken corpses with all four bladed limbs churning.

Farther inside the whiteout, heavier silhouettes were beginning to emerge, immense things following the scent of blood and slaughter toward the growing carnage.

Phei launched himself.

The ground beneath the fiend detonated.

Blood, darkness and ice surged ahead of him in one rabid tide, outracing even his monstrous body.

Primordial Blood rolled across the snow in thick crimson waves that bulged and contracted like exposed muscle, while black corrosion threaded through it and spears of Void-Ice erupted wherever the tide passed. The advancing beasts entered that living vanguard tide and were immediately swallowed by violence. Frozen spikes burst through bellies and jaws from beneath. Black-red chains tore upward from the blood, wrapped around torsos and limbs and ripped creatures sideways into one another.

Others disappeared inside eruptions of dark frost where Void gnawed through armor and freezing power invaded whatever remained.

Then the fiend reached them; it hurled the hammer.

The double-headed weapon spun once through the storm, its chains whipping behind it with a metallic shriek, and struck the first Rimehorn Behemoth with enough violence to make the surrounding snow erupt in a circular wall.

The beast folded around the impact.

Its plated chest collapsed inward first, followed by bone, flesh and ancient ice as the hammer drove everything toward the creature’s spine in one hideous compression. The corpse was launched backward before its own body had finished breaking apart, smashing into the beasts behind it and carrying ten more through the charge in a tumbling avalanche of shattered limbs, ruptured armor and frozen gore.

The hammer continued through them.

The chains along the hammer came alive;

—they lashed outward, so fast they were little more than black lines crossing the whiteness, and wrapped around five different beasts at once—one through the throat, one through the forelimbs, another around its entire middle, the last two catching them by horn and jaw.

The fiend yanked once.

The chained creatures were dragged through the air toward him.

His great sword sang.

One clean slash took three charging Ice-Rippers at his left. The backswing caught the five dragged beasts just as they reached him and severed them all in one black-red crescent.

That was one instant.

Twenty were dead before the second second had properly arrived.

He kept going.

The armored fiend charged headlong into the next crush of bodies while the ten storms of ice raged around him like mad servants delighted to outdo their master. He swung the hammer again after recalling it with a jerk of chain and shattered a cluster of Glacier Maulers so hard their upper halves left their lower halves standing for a stunned heartbeat before the rest of them collapsed.

He spun, sword following, and a ring of bodies opened around him.

Blood answered every kill, swelling his armor, feeding the dark edge of his weapons, and beneath it all his ice kept blooming in murderously elegant patterns—spears, crescents, walls, storms, eruptions from the ground, sudden freezing bursts that trapped struggling monsters in crystal before his next strike reduced them to glittering ruin.

All as one.

Ice.

Blood.

Darkness.

The Void moving through all three like the hidden truth beneath them.

Above the battlefield the dragon lady watched in silence, enormous wings flexing once as if she had briefly forgotten how still she had become.

Had it truly been a year?

A year since this infuriating young man had entered this frozen world?

Watching him now, buried in battle with that immense blood-armored body chewing through swarms on the road to the abyss, she could almost believe centuries had passed instead, that some ancient butcher from a forgotten age had put on the face of a beautiful boy and wandered into the Primordial Zone to teach it terror.

And the truly unbelievable part was this:

He was still getting stronger.

The deeper Phei advanced toward the abyssal chasm, the more the creatures sent against him began to change.

The earlier swarms had been simple enough to understand. Rimeleeches wanted flesh, Frost Reavers attacked whatever the Zone Lord drove them toward, and Glacial Skyrays appeared convinced that sufficient speed and several tons of armored body could solve practically every problem existence placed before them. They possessed hunting instinct and enough awareness to cooperate, yet there was still something wonderfully uncomplicated about enemies whose finest battle plan generally ended with bite the Dragon harder.

Several hundred kilometers closer to the abyss, that stopped being true.

The creatures guarding these reaches were far more aware.

Phei had begun calling the strangest among them Rime Wardens, although the name described what they seemed to be rather than any single race. Some stood several meters tall upon two legs, their narrow bodies wrapped in natural frost armor while four long arms ended in hooked claws. Others possessed broader frames and pale faces disturbingly close to human, their eyes following Phei with actual calculation instead of blind hunger.

Several carried weapons shaped from the ancient ice surrounding them, while others commanded lesser beasts through shrill cries, gestures and pulses of frozen essence.

They understood battle well enough to plan around him. They baited him toward stronger groups, withdrew when a position became hopeless and occasionally sacrificed weaker creatures merely to force him toward an ambush already waiting beneath the ice.

Some even learned after seeing Phei fight once, changing their formations whenever he appeared again rather than repeatedly throwing themselves into the same slaughter.

Phei appreciated the effort.

It changed absolutely nothing about where they were all going.

Fighting them felt closer to fighting people than beasts, except their experience against someone like Phei remained painfully lacking. They could coordinate, predict ordinary movement and hide attacks beneath the surrounding winter, but Phei had spent roughly a year learning what happened when Void, Void-Ice and Primordial Blood stopped behaving like three separate powers patiently waiting their turn.

He could bury an entire battlefield beneath all three before most opponents finished deciding which one frightened them most.

Twelve Rime Wardens discovered that rather painfully.

They spread the instant Phei appeared above a frozen ravine, six rising into the storm while the others disappeared beneath the ice. Two unleashed thousands of silver needles toward him. Three more drove jagged walls upward from opposite directions, trying to close his escape while the hidden Wardens rushed beneath the frozen ground toward wherever they expected him to flee.

It was clever enough that the fiend smiled.

"Much better."

The Void answered.