CHAPTER 139: POWERFUL

The Blood Fang Lord didn’t move. She merely observed Damien with that same cold curiosity—a detached, clinical stillness reminiscent of a scientist watching a lab rat run in frantic circles, unaware it was already trapped.

There was no malice in her demeanor, no urgency—just an eerie indifference that made Damien’s skin crawl.

Then her gaze drifted toward the weapon in his hands.

The Epoch Breaker.

For the first time, the expression beneath that ominous, cross-shaped mask seemed to shift. Though her eyes were veiled in shadow, something unmistakable gleamed behind them—a flicker of recognition? Of amusement? Maybe something darker?

It was impossible to tell.

And Damien didn’t wait for her to make a move.

Thousands of mana-forged bullets erupted from around him, fanned out in a deadly bloom, each shot hurtling straight for the Blood Fang Lord’s head. The air cracked under their force, and the faint whistle of pressure being torn apart followed their path.

There were no words exchanged.

None were meant to be.

Yet even with death screaming toward her from every angle, the Blood Fang Lord didn’t budge.

Not even a twitch.

She stood still, serene, untouched by the chaos rushing toward her.

Even as the compressed mana bullets came dangerously close—close enough to scorch the air beside her cheek—she didn’t blink, didn’t flinch.

Damien’s brows furrowed, a sliver of confusion rising in his chest.

What... was this?

He had expected a counterattack. A flash of evasion. A barrier. Something.

Anything that showed this woman took the threat seriously.

But her stillness wasn’t just arrogance—it was absolute. Unshakeable.

As if she stood in the center of a different reality altogether.

And then, just as that thought passed through his mind, a voice colder than the heart of a glacier tore through the silence.

"Kingdom of Blood."

It was as if her words were a divine command.

Instantly, the world shifted.

The sky turned a deep, suffocating crimson, like the heavens themselves had begun to bleed. The ground below Damien’s feet warped and twisted, veins of black and red pulsing with a life of their own.

And the bullets?

They stopped mid-flight.

Thousands of glowing projectiles froze in the air—motionless—each one suspended like an ornament trapped in amber.

Time itself had screeched to a halt.

Damien’s heart sank.

This is her Domain.

The realization hit him like a hammer, but panic wouldn’t serve him here.

Guessing wouldn’t solve the problem.

Reacting would.

Without conscious thought, his body responded.

Accelerated Cognition flared to life, activating like a reflex etched into his very soul.

In that split second, Damien’s neurons fired at speeds incomprehensible to ordinary minds—billions of signals rushing through his nervous system within a tenth of a second.

And with it, the frozen world around him... began to move.

Or rather, his perception of it changed.

Every detail sharpened.

Each suspended bullet, each ripple of crimson light—he saw it all as if time had been reduced to an abstract illusion. The stagnant, suffocating pressure of the Blood Fang Lord’s domain didn’t disappear, but Damien’s consciousness pushed against it, carving out a pocket of clarity in the storm.

A thin window of opportunity.

The pause button had been pressed on the world.

But in this altered state...

Damien could still move.

Damien’s eyes widened as the world around him ticked in slow motion, every frame stretched by the sheer velocity of his cognition. In this sharpened state, he noticed something—something deeply wrong.

The thousands of blue bullets launched from Epoch Breaker were slowly, almost imperceptibly, turning crimson.

His heart skipped a beat. The shift was subtle, but in a fight like this, subtleties were fatal.

A chill ran down his spine. His throat went dry, and a bitter metallic taste rose in the back of his mouth.

No... she’s not just resisting. She’s taking control.

If this was what he suspected—if the Blood Fang Lord was somehow corrupting his bullets with her domain—then he was in more danger than he could’ve ever predicted.

All around her, the world had changed. The forest floor, once littered with broken roots and scorched bark, had become a grotesque canvas of crimson. Rivers of blood trickled unnaturally through the terrain, weaving around obstacles like serpents. The air was thick, oppressive, humming with low-frequency echoes of something ancient—something wrong.

It looked like hell had cracked open... and the Blood Fang Lord stood at its center.

Each stream of blood twisted and writhed, as if possessing a will of its own. And all of them were inching—no, racing—toward Damien.

"Here it comes..." he muttered, eyes narrowing, breath shallow.

Suddenly, like a hailstorm reversing course mid-air, the bullets turned fully red and pivoted.

Thousands of them.

Each one screamed through the air at Damien, now traveling at twice the original speed—a swarm of vengeance re-engineered from his own attack.

There were too many.

The air itself buzzed from the friction of their acceleration. The projectiles were so densely packed that even moving at light-speed wouldn’t save him.

He could try to dodge, but the inevitable was already written.

Some would hit.

Maybe enough to kill.

Across the battlefield, if Damien had possessed the gift of clairvoyance, he would have seen the faint curl of a grin beneath the Blood Fang Lord’s cross-shaped mask. It wasn’t wide or maniacal—it was subtle, self-assured, the kind of smile worn by a scientist observing a test subject finally reach the expected failure point.

A cold and clinical sort of amusement.

"So this is the so-called Norm Breaker?" she mused internally, disdain flickering in her eyes like the reflection of firelight in oil.

For days now, her ears had been filled with tales of Damien—how he had humiliated the Blue Hammer King, torn through legions like paper, and broken the rules of natural law with his absurd weapon and talents.

He was supposed to be different.

He was supposed to be a challenge.

He was supposed to make her feel something other than boredom.

And yet here he was—backed into a corner, overwhelmed by his own bullets, looking every bit the fool she’d hoped he wouldn’t be.

She had gone out of her way for this.

She had kidnapped the Valthorn Queen and humiliated the Crown Prince for one reason: to lure this so-called threat out into the open.

And now?

Now she was disappointed.

"Overhyped," she scoffed quietly, turning her back on Damien without a second glance. Her interest faded like the last warmth from a cooling corpse.

She didn’t even need to watch him die.

With a casual flick of her hand, the swarm of corrupted bullets surged forward again—faster, deadlier, perfectly synchronized.

And without hesitation, she began walking away.

From what she had heard, the girl named Niomi—the quiet one bound in chains—was rumored to possess an A-grade innate talent: the World Devouring Pheonix.

A rare, grotesquely powerful affinity.

It was the kind of talent that only awakened once in a generation. The kind of talent that could rival even her own.

The Blood Fang Lord’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully behind her mask.

"At least this trip isn’t entirely useless," she murmured, her voice low and amused. "I can take her under my wings... mold her properly."

With that, her pace quickened, boots brushing over the crimson ground, uncaring of the battlefield still thrumming behind her.

---

Meanwhile, Damien’s world had become a latticework of possibilities.

To him, everything moved in slow motion.

Every single bullet, every droplet of blood still suspended in the air, every twitch in the wind was analyzed, dissected, and mapped out within the labyrinth of his accelerated mind.

His pupils constricted, glowing faintly.

In less than a second, he had already calculated every trajectory, every angle of deflection, every space where the crimson bullets could intercept him.

His body hadn’t moved yet, but his mind was already dozens of steps ahead.

Then, an indifferent calm settled over his face.

Emotionless. Cold. In control.

Suddenly, his Epoch Breaker flared to life once more. A sharp hum resonated from the core of the artifact, and with a piercing pulse, thousands of bullets exploded outwards, a second wave launched in all directions.

But this time—it wasn’t just an attack.

This was intent forged into form.

Crimson and blue clashed across the battlefield. In an instant, the scenery around Damien lit up like a cosmic collision between two realms—one soaked in blood, the other cold and absolute.

Crimson represented annihilation. Madness. The all-consuming hunger of the Blood Fang Lord’s domain.

Blue represented resolve. Precision. The serene detachment of a killer with nothing to lose.

When the two forces collided, no sound followed.

It was not silence.

It was absence—as if the laws of sound itself had been deleted from that sliver of space.

The impact erased all matter between them.

No flame. No explosion. Just the birth and immediate death of a radiant spark that glowed for less than a nanosecond—a cosmic punctuation mark in the middle of war.

To an observer, it would have been beautiful.

But Damien wasn’t watching.

His eyes were not on the Blood Fang Lord’s retreating figure.

Not even on the carnage left behind.

He was staring at a very different point.

A single location—quiet and undisturbed—on the bloodstained battlefield.

The exact place where the Blood Fang Lord had stood a moment ago.

His intuition was screaming.

His gut twisted—not from fear, but from an instinct born out of hundreds of near-death encounters.

She wasn’t the type to walk away after winning.

She was testing him.

Suddenly, Epoch Breaker’s direction shifted.

Effortlessly.

Its rune-etched surface began to glow, the intricate carvings lighting up in perfect sequence—like an ancient mechanism unlocking hidden functions buried deep within.

Blue circuits ran along its barrel, converging into a swirling point of absolute stillness.

And in that moment, Damien no longer looked like prey trying to survive.

He looked like a reaper preparing to execute judgment.