Chapter 151: No Feeling

His amber eyes burned with feral, unhinged battle-lust. The Fire Archduke loved a physical brawl. "Kaelus! You take the left flank! I’ll take the right! Aim for the joints! The armor plates must have seams!"

"Do not order me, Leonidas," Kaelus snapped, his dark aura flaring. "Vanguard! Fall back to a fifty-yard perimeter! Provide physical containment only! Do not cast any spell!"

Kaelus and Leonidas, the two most powerful, terrifying warlords in the Southern Hemisphere, did not hesitate.

They moved as a synchronized unit, a testament to the childhood they had spent sparring and bleeding together.

Leonidas charged first.

He didn’t summon fire as a projectile; rather, he summoned it as an enhancement. His body became wreathed in a thick, roaring aura of blazing, white-hot plasma.

Every step he took left a footprint of molten glass in the ash. He launched himself into the air, crossing the distance in a single, superhuman leap, aiming a devastating, meteor-strike punch directly at the beast’s massive, right knee joint.

CLAAANG!

Leonidas’s magma-enhanced fist struck the oily, metallic hide. The sound was deafening, like a blacksmith’s hammer striking an anvil the size of a mountain.

The raw force of the Archduke’s blow forced the colossal beast to stagger, its massive leg buckling slightly.

"Kaelus! Now!" Leonidas roared, hanging mid-air.

Kaelus was already there.

Moving with the smooth, blinding speed of a phantom, Kaelus slid under the beast’s staggering left flank.

He didn’t swing Requiem wildly, but utilized the absolute, pinpoint precision of the Northern Sword Arts. He channeled his freezing mana entirely into the razor-thin edge of his blade, ensuring no stray magic leaked to trigger the reflection.

He found a microscopic seam between two massive, overlapping plates of bismuth armor near the beast’s underbelly.

Kaelus thrust Requiem upward with all his might, burying the freezing blade three feet deep into the monster’s unarmored, fleshy interior.

The beast let out a shrill, deafening screech that shattered several of the remaining petrified trees.

Kaelus twisted the blade, unleashing an internal burst of mana directly into the beast’s bloodstream. He intended to flash-freeze its internal organs and shatter it from the inside out.

But the anomaly was ancient, and its biology defied logic.

The moment Kaelus injected his ice magic into the wound, the beast’s internal muscular structure violently contracted.

The blood pouring from the wound wasn’t liquid; it was a thick, viscous fluid that possessed the same reflective properties as its hide.

The internal frost was violently rejected.

An explosion of freezing energy erupted from the wound, directly into Kaelus’s face.

Kaelus was thrown backward, launched across the crater like a skipped stone. He hit the ash-covered ground hard, rolling several times before slamming his boots into the dirt to halt his momentum.

His dark canvas tunic was torn, and a jagged, bleeding cut marred his flawless pale cheek, courtesy of his own reflected ice magic.

"Kaelus!" Leonidas yelled, landing heavily on the ground nearby.

"Focus on your flank, you loudmouthed fool!" Kaelus hissed, standing up, wiping the blood from his cheek with the back of his gloved hand. His violet eyes narrowed, a cold, terrifyingly calm fury settling over him.

The beast was wounded, but it was far from dead. Kaelus’s strike had only managed to enrage it further.

The monster pulled itself entirely out of the crater, standing at its full, terrifying forty-foot height.

The ground trembled beneath its weight. The magenta eyes burned with a mindless, indiscriminate wrath.

It raised one of its massive, trunk-like front limbs, intending to crush the annoying, red-haired ant currently harassing its right leg.

"Come on, you oversized rock!" Leonidas bellowed, refusing to retreat. He summoned a thick broadsword forged entirely of solidified magma into his hands. He swung it upward in a desperate, two-handed parry, intending to block the descending claw.

The clash of magma-sword against bismuth claw was blinding.

But the physical weight of the beast was simply too massive. Leonidas was a Grandmaster, but he was attempting to block the footfall of a walking mountain.

The magma-sword held for a fraction of a second before shattering into a million pieces of cooling slag.

The beasts claw continued its downward trajectory, slamming directly into Leonidas’s raised guard.

The impact was catastrophic.

CRACK!

BANG!!!

The sickening sound of bone snapping echoed cleanly across the silent, tense perimeter of the battlefield.

"LEONIDAS!" Kaelus roared, his stoic composure fracturing.

Leonidas Valen, the Supreme Commander of the Southern Legions, was swatted away like a bothersome insect. The force of the blow lifted his heavily armored body off the ground, launching him horizontally through the air.

He flew backward over fifty yards, crashing violently through the remains of a petrified tree trunk before slamming back-first into an outcropping of solid volcanic rock.

The rock shattered behind him. Leonidas slumped forward, falling face-first into the ash, completely motionless. His red breastplate was heavily dented, caved inward over his left ribcage.

"ARCHDUKE!" Captain Pyros screamed, breaking formation, sprinting toward his fallen Liege Lord.

The beast, having swatted the primary annoyance, turned its head. The blinding magenta eyes locked directly onto the solitary, dark-clad figure standing near the edge of the crater.

Duke Kaelus von Nacht stood alone against the titan.

He looked at the unmoving form of Leonidas. He looked at the bruised, bloodied Vanguard knights holding the perimeter.

He looked at his pocket watch, though it was still hidden in his tunic.

’She will wake up soon,’ Kaelus’s mind whispered, a cold realization setting in. ’If I do not end this now, the beast will march on the Verdant Gate. She is sleeping in an unsafe territory.’

Kaelus did not retreat or call for a tactical withdrawal.

The Reaper of the North planted his boots firmly in the abrasive ash. He raised Requiem, holding the blade in a flawless, two-handed guard directly in front of his face.

He completely dropped the suppressive limiters on his Mana.

The air around Kaelus didn’t just freeze; it died. The ambient light in the Ashen Forest was actively sucked into his body, creating a terrifying sphere of void around him. His violet eyes ignited into blinding, radioactive flares of pure, homicidal intensity.

He was going to pour the totality of his life force into a single, physical strike. He was going to bypass the reflective carapace by utilizing such overwhelming kinetic force that the beast’s armor would shatter before the magic could reflect.

It was a suicidal maneuver.

The recoil alone would likely shatter every bone in his arms.

But Kaelus von Nacht was a father. And a father did not care about broken bones when his daughter was sleeping mere miles away.

The beast let out a final, deafening vibration, rearing up on its hind legs, casting a terrifying shadow that entirely swallowed Kaelus.

It raised both of its front limbs, interlocking its claws, preparing to bring them down in a devastating, double-handed hammer blow that would crush the Archduke into a fine, bloody paste against the bedrock.

Kaelus braced his legs, his muscles straining to the point of tearing, Requiem humming with a desperate song.

The limbs began their descent. The wind shrieked as the claws cut through the air, aimed directly at Kaelus’s head.

"Come," Kaelus whispered, welcoming the impact.

The claws were twenty feet away.

Ten feet away.

Five feet away.

Kaelus could see the intricate, oily patterns on the beast’s armor. He could smell the ancient, stagnant dust blowing off its joints. He tensed every single muscle fiber in his body, preparing to swing upward into the jaws of death.

And then.

The universe simply... stopped.

***

There was no explosion, no flash of blinding light, no heroic battle cry from the sidelines.

The forty-foot-tall Elemental Behemoth, whose descending, dual-handed hammer blow possessed enough energy to level a small fortress... froze completely, solid in mid-air.

It didn’t slow down or stagger. It went from maximum, lethal velocity to zero stasis in less than a second.

The massive claws hovered three feet above Kaelus’s head, perfectly suspended in the air.

The silence that crashed down upon the Ashen Forest was so intense that Kaelus could hear the blood rushing in his own ears.

Kaelus maintained his guard, staring up at the frozen, suspended limbs of the monster. His mind, trained for constant combat analysis, desperately searched for a reason.

’Did it die?’ Kaelus thought, confusion temporarily overriding his battle-lust. ’Did my previous strike finally reach its core?’

No. It wasn’t dead.