Chapter : 1323

He pushed his advantage. The sky, which had been a dark purple, now turned a churning, angry black. The full, wild power of Magog was released. A hurricane, a real, continent-sized hurricane, began to form around them. Its eye was the calm, deadly center where the two powerful beings stood.

Simultaneously, Gog became a living volcano. The rock of his skin glowed with a white-hot fire from within. He was no longer just a mountain; he was the anger of the earth itself.

Roy Ferrum was no longer just defending. He was attacking. He was using the full, wild, and world-ending anger of his world against the silent, beautiful, and terrible void that tried to swallow it.

The wedding below continued, a fragile, beautiful lie. The guests laughed and drank, not knowing that the sky above them was being torn apart. They didn't know that a war of gods was being fought for their very existence, that the fate of their world was being decided in a battle of storm and mountain against a beautiful, terrible, and total silence. The storm was getting stronger, and the story was far from over.

Tab 8

The change was not a trip; it was like he stopped existing for a moment. One moment, Lloyd was in the large ceremony room. It was a place full of sensations—the loud music, the smell of a thousand flowers, the heat of a hundred people. The next moment, he was in a place of complete and perfect nothingness. The teleport, using his special [Spatial Power], was a rough and confusing act of being taken apart and put back together. It was a process of turning the atoms of his body into pure information and reassembling them somewhere else. He stumbled, feeling very sick as his physical body struggled to feel whole again in this new, strange place.

He was in his own private space. His personal, 5-square-kilometer prison. It was a world with no features, a sheet of pure, clean white that went on forever to a horizon you couldn't see. The sky was the same blank, shadowless white light. There was no up or down, no east or west. There was only here and now, a perfect, clean, and total emptiness. It was a lab, a safe place, and today, it was going to be a tomb.

A few yards away, Jager appeared with a similar, sick feeling. The master assassin, even with his strong self-control, handled it worse. He fell to his knees, his handsome face pale. A small stream of blood ran from his nose. His body was not used to the strange violence of teleporting through space and had fought against the change. The effort had been huge. He looked around, his light grey eyes wide with a mix of raw, basic terror and a growing disbelief.

“Where… where are we?” he stammered. His voice was rough and broken. The smooth, arrogant tone was completely gone. He was a hunter who had just been suddenly moved from his normal jungle into a clean, strange cage. His sharp instincts were screaming at him that everything about this place was deeply and fundamentally wrong.

Lloyd took a moment to steady himself. He took a deep, calming breath of the plain, non-existent air. The sickness went away, replaced by a cold, quiet, and total focus. The masks were gone. The simple decorator, the clumsy professor, the charming lord—they had all been burned away in the heat of the moment. The person who stood in this white emptiness now was something else entirely. Something colder, older, and much more absolute.

He watched as Jager's terror was slowly replaced by his old arrogance. The assassin’s training was very strong. He got to his feet, brushed the non-existent dust from his perfect dark blue clothes, and a slow, superior smile returned to his lips. He was forcing his own view of reality, his own feeling of being better, over the impossible things he was seeing.

“A clever trick, Lord Ferrum,” he admitted, his voice getting some of its smooth sound back. “A pocket dimension. Impressive. A rare and valuable skill. You have successfully separated us from the battle.” He paused, looking at the endless white. His smile grew into one of real, hunting amusement. He thought he understood the rules of this new game. “But a cage, my dear lord, works both ways. You have not trapped me. You have trapped yourself. Here, with me.”

He was not wrong. His thinking was correct. Lloyd had taken them from a battlefield where he had a thousand friends to a place where they were totally, completely alone. It was a foolish, risky, and strategically bad move.

Chapter : 1324

To prove his point, Jager called his spirit. There was no big explosion of power. There was only a quiet, creepy tearing of the clean white fabric of the dimension. A swirl of oily, greasy shadow, the color of a bruise on a dead body, spun into existence beside him. It was a wound in reality, and from it, a creature of pure, greedy evil came out.

It was Kroth, his King-Rank parasitic spirit. The twenty-foot-long iron alligator was a masterpiece of twisted nature, a thing of terrible, raw beauty. Its scales were not the color of living metal, but of cold, dead, and blood-stained iron. Its eyes were not the eyes of an animal. They were two burning coals of pure, greedy hunger. It was a hunger not for flesh, but for life force, for spiritual energy. It let out a low, deep hiss. The sound was not a physical vibration, but a mental one. It was a wave of pure decay that seemed to drain the life from the clean, featureless air. The spiritual pressure it gave off was huge, a choking, heavy wave of decay and despair.

“A King-Rank spirit,” Jager continued, his voice now a smooth purr of total, unshakeable confidence. He rested a hand on his spirit’s iron-plated snout. The gesture was almost loving, a master petting his favorite dog. “A master of soul-draining and spiritual corruption. Its jaws can crush S-class defensive spells. Its aura can wither a lesser spirit to dust. And you, Lord Ferrum,” he said, his eyes settling on Lloyd with a look of deep, almost pitying scorn, “are a Commander-Rank user with an amusing but ultimately limited fire demon. I have read the reports. I have done the calculations. The math of this fight is brutally simple. You are outmatched. You have, in your bold and admittedly spectacular cleverness, succeeded only in arranging your own, very private, and very foolish, death.”

Lloyd just watched. He looked quietly, almost scientifically, amused. He let Jager finish his speech, like a patient teacher letting a slow student work through a wrong math problem. He was giving his opponent the most powerful and deadly poison a fighter can have: the gift of complete, unshakeable overconfidence.

When Jager was done, a perfect, deep silence fell over the white emptiness. The only sound was the low, hungry hiss of the iron alligator. Lloyd’s lips curved into a slow, cold smile. It was a perfect, chilling copy of Jager’s own, but it had a different, and much more terrifying, quality. It was not the smile of a hunter confident in his own strength. It was the smile of a god, looking down on a somewhat interesting but ultimately unimportant mortal who had just made a basic, and deadly, mistake in how he understood the universe.

“You assume,” Lloyd said, his voice a quiet, normal tone that cut through the heavy silence with the clean, sharp finality of a surgeon’s knife, “that I am the one who is trapped.”

And then, with a quiet, internal command, he released his true power.

It was not an explosion. It was not a roar. It was a change in the state of being. The clean, neutral white of the dimension did not get darker; it grew brighter. It became a blinding, cold, and total white that was not the presence of light, but the complete, conceptual absence of everything else. A silent, expanding ball of pure, unfiltered cold erupted from him, a storm of absolute zero. The very air, which didn't really exist in this place, seemed to turn to crystal. A billion tiny, perfect snowflakes formed and then broke in the space of a single, silent heartbeat.

From the center of this instant, self-contained blizzard, she emerged.

She was a being from myths and legends, a creature of impossible, heart-breaking beauty and terrible, absolute power. Bingyu, the magnificent, Sovereign-Level Ice Dragon. Her crystal scales, each one a perfect, many-sided diamond, shimmered with the captured light of a thousand far-off, frozen stars. Her huge, elegant body was a living mountain of starlight and frost. Her movements were like a slow, smooth, and unstoppable glacier. Her eyes were not the eyes of an animal; they were two ancient, frozen stars, holding a wisdom and a power that was absolute, eternal, and unforgiving.

But she did not stay a dragon. The moment she appeared, her huge, physical form dissolved into a swirling, chaotic vortex of shimmering, crystal light, a blizzard of pure, conceptual energy. And this blizzard did not expand. It collapsed, folding inwards, and came together around the quiet, smiling form of Lloyd Ferrum.

The merge was instant, a perfect, silent, and terrifying combination of man and god.

The world of white was torn apart by the birth of a new king.