Chapter : 979
The black, volcanic rock did not just frost over. A massive, ten-foot-high, thirty-foot-wide wall of jagged, impossibly thick ice erupted from the earth, a miniature glacier brought into existence by a single, desperate act of will. It was a magnificent, beautiful, and utterly desperate defense.
It was not enough.
The Monolith Bear did not slow. It did not try to go around the wall. It simply… ran through it.
The sound was a cataclysmic explosion of shattering ice. The massive wall, which could have stopped a cavalry charge, was annihilated. It was not broken; it was vaporized into a cloud of glittering, frozen dust. The bear did not even seem to register the impact. It emerged from the cloud of ice-dust, its momentum completely unchecked, its malevolent gaze now fixed on the small, silver-haired woman who had dared to put a pebble in its path.
Lloyd saw the shift in its intent. He saw the beast lock onto her as the primary threat. “Rosa, move!” he screamed, his own body already surging forward, his bladed gauntlets flashing into existence.
But he was too slow. The bear was impossibly, terrifyingly fast.
It covered the remaining distance in a single, massive bound. Its colossal, obsidian-clawed paw swiped through the air, a black, blurring arc of death.
Rosa tried to dodge, her fencer’s reflexes screaming at her to retreat. But her power was spent. The creation of the ice wall had drained her to the very dregs. Her movements were sluggish, a fraction of a second too slow.
The claws, each one a razor-sharp shard of volcanic glass, tore through the reinforced leather of her leg armor as if it were paper. The sound was a sickening rip of leather and flesh.
Rosa cried out, a sharp, high-pitched sound of pure, unadulterated pain. She was thrown back, her body tumbling like a broken doll, to land in a crumpled heap twenty feet away, a deep, bleeding, and instantly crippling gash running from her thigh to her knee.
Her greatest defense had failed. Her speed had failed her. And now, she was down. She was wounded. She was bait.
The Monolith Bear, its first target neutralized, now turned its full, undivided, and utterly furious attention to the second, smaller, and now completely isolated annoyance in its path. It turned its gaze on Lloyd.
Lloyd stood his ground, a solitary figure against a tide of fury. He saw the beast’s massive chest heave as it prepared for another, final charge. He saw the crippled, bleeding form of his partner, his only ally, lying helpless on the rocks. He felt the cold, hard calculus of the soldier’s mind take over. Their current tactics, their beautiful, brutal synergy of hammer and scalpel, had been a catastrophic failure. Continuing on this path was not a strategy. It was a suicide pact.
He had to change the rules. He had to change the very nature of the fight. He had to do something that was not just unconventional, but was fundamentally, beautifully, and absolutely impossible. And he had to do it now.
The world seemed to slow down, the frantic, chaotic violence of the battle contracting into a single, focused moment of absolute, terrifying clarity. The Monolith Bear, a twenty-foot-tall god of pure, physical rage, was preparing to deliver the final, crushing blow. Rosa, his partner, his only ally, was a broken, bleeding figure on the cold, black rocks, her magnificent swordsmanship rendered useless by a single, brutal swipe. And he, Lloyd Ferrum, was standing directly in the path of an avalanche of muscle and fury, his own considerable strength a pathetic and utterly meaningless variable in the face of such overwhelming, absolute force.
He could feel the cold, hard logic of the strategist’s mind screaming at him. Retreat. Disengage. Find higher ground. The tactical manual was clear. But the tactical manual had been written for wars between men, for battles governed by the predictable laws of physics and strategy. It had not been written for this. For a fight against a primordial god on a mountain that ate magic for breakfast.
He realized, with a chilling and exhilarating certainty, that his own powers, his Steel Blood, his Black Ring Eyes, were not enough. Not here. Not against this. He could reinforce his body to the hardness of iron, but iron shatters against a moving mountain. He could manifest his chains, his blades, but they would be as effective as threads against the beast’s granite-laced hide. He needed a new weapon. A new paradigm. A new way to fight.
It was a good thing he had just gone shopping.
Chapter : 980
The memory of the ambush, of Jager’s cunning and Kael’s speed, had been a humiliating lesson. He had been outmaneuvered, his own movements, for all their preternatural grace, bound by the familiar, predictable laws of motion. He had identified the weakness in his own arsenal. And in the quiet, desperate hours after that battle, in the secret, star-filled space of his System interface, he had addressed it. He had spent the hard-won spoils of that victory, the coins earned from the capture of Kael, not on a bigger sword or a stronger shield, but on something far more fundamental. On a new way to move. On a way to break the very rules of the game.
He had purchased a B-Rank movement art from the deepest, most esoteric archives of the Shopping Tree. An art called [Void Steps]. A technique that was not about speed, but about a localized, instantaneous manipulation of space itself. A way to be here, and then, in the space between heartbeats, to be there. A shunpo of pure, unadulterated will.
He had not yet had time to practice it, to master it. He had only read the theory, the complex, mind-bending principles of its mechanics. To attempt it now, for the first time, in the heart of a life-or-death battle, was not just risky. It was an act of pure, unadulterated, and perhaps suicidal, insanity.
The bear roared, its voice a physical, concussive force that shook the very air, and it charged.
Lloyd did not dodge. He did not retreat. He did not brace for impact. He closed his eyes, and he took a step.
There was no grand surge of energy. There was no flash of light. There was only a quiet, internal command from his will to the Void. A single, focused thought: move.
The world did not blur. It simply… ceased to be. For a single, infinitesimal fraction of a second, he was nowhere. And then, with a sharp, almost inaudible hiss of displaced air, he was somewhere else.
He was at Rosa’s side.
The bear’s massive, obsidian claws, which should have pulped him into a red paste, tore through the empty space where he had been a microsecond before. They hit nothing but air, the force of their passage creating a small, localized sonic boom.
Before Rosa, her eyes wide with a mixture of pain and shocked disbelief, could even register his presence, a strong, unyielding arm scooped her up. Her world dissolved into a dizzying, nauseating blur of blue-white light, the color of a dying star. The crushing, thunderous pressure of the bear’s charge, the very sound of its rage, vanished, replaced by a strange, high-pitched hum.
A moment later, she was deposited with a jarring, almost clinical gentleness behind the solid, unmoving safety of a massive granite outcrop a hundred feet away. A faint, ethereal after-image of their path, a trail of fractured, blue-white light, flickered in the air for a single, impossible moment and then shattered like glass.
Lloyd was already gone.
He reappeared twenty feet to the bear’s left, his posture calm, his breathing steady. The first, desperate, and wildly successful test of his new power was complete. He had not just saved her. He had changed the fundamental reality of the battlefield.
Now, the true dance began.
The bear roared, a sound of pure, frustrated confusion. Its simple, predatory mind could not process what had just happened. Its prey had been there. Now it was not. And now it was over there. It was a violation of the natural order, and it was infuriating. It shook its massive head and changed direction, its charge now a clumsy, lumbering avalanche of pure fury aimed at the new location of its tormentor.
Again, Lloyd simply took a step. A shunpo of pure will. He vanished.
He reappeared atop a nearby boulder, fifty feet away, a silent, untouchable phantom. The bear skidded to a halt, its massive claws tearing deep gouges in the black rock, its small, intelligent eyes burning with a new and unfamiliar light. It was no longer just rage. It was the dawning, terrifying understanding that it was no longer the hunter.
Lloyd was no longer a man fighting a monster. He was a ghost, a disorienting, unpredictable phantom, and he was playing with a lumbering, powerful, and increasingly terrified beast. Each step was an instantaneous, jarring leap across space, a staccato rhythm of existence and non-existence.
Step. He was directly behind the bear, his presence a silent taunt, a blue-white trail of fractured light marking his impossible path.
Step. He was fifty feet to its right, his calm, analytical gaze drawing its attention, pulling its fury like a matador taunting a bull.