The battlefield was a frozen graveyard of shattered armor, torn fur, and blood-soaked mud.
The freezing rain continued to lash down upon the battlefield, but in the center of the crater, the storm seemed to hesitate, suppressed by the sheer, suffocating aura radiating from the king of the ants and the wolf king.
King Antares stood in the blood stained snow.
He didn't immediately look at the monstrous Lycan he had just swatted away.
Instead, his gaze swept over the Vanguard in the distance. The Ashfang infantry and the remaining Arcanis mages plus the camp warriors were still fighting a desperate battle against the surviving horde of Terror Wolves.
The metallic clack of spears against bone and the desperate shouts of his dying men echoed through the freezing wind.
Antares's jaw tightened. He needed to end this battle quickly and get back to the main line. His army was bleeding out and his men needed him.
But first order of business, his commanders.
Antares stepped past the shattered remains of Kael's iron shield. The Blacksmith was unconscious, his heavy obsidian armor cracked and leaking blood into the slush, but his chest was rising and falling in a steady, stubborn rhythm. Kael's injuries were horrific, shattered ribs, torn muscles, a mangled shoulder and many broken bones but they were entirely physical. Kael was built like a mountain.
This physical trauma wouldn't be enough to put the Titan in the ground.
Velas, however, was a different story.
In a flash, Antares crouched beside the fallen Mage.
Velas was terrifyingly pale, his lips tinted with blood that stained his chin and the collar of his robes.
His breathing was dangerously shallow, rattling in his chest like dry leaves.
Antares didn't hesitate. He retracted the Helios gauntlet back to it's bracelet form, exposing his bare hand to the biting cold, and placed his palm flat against the center of Velas's back.
The King closed his eyes, extending his own senses into the mage's body.
What he felt made his stomach drop. Velas's internal mana heart, the vital, ethereal chamber that allowed a mage to draw power from ambient mana in the world was completely damaged by the sheer, reckless volume of magic he had forced through it.
The heart was collapsing inward. Velas wasn't just dying; his very life force was unraveling due to severe mana exhaustion.
"You always were a stubborn, reckless fool, Velas," Antares murmured softly.
Taking a slow, deep breath, Antares tapped into his own vast, oceanic reserves of power. A brilliant, warm, golden aura ignited around the King's hand. He didn't just pour raw mana into Velas; he carefully, surgically threaded his own energy into the mage's damaged mana heart.
Velas would be out of commission for weeks or days at best, but thanks to Antares's direct intervention, he was going to survive.
BOOM.
A heavy, earth-shaking tremor vibrated through the mud.
Antares slowly withdrew his hand from Velas's back, He didn't look over his shoulder, but he could feel the malicious, boiling heat reigniting behind him.
The Lycan King had come back for revenge.
The massive, two-and-a-half-meter beast dragged itself out of the splintered remains of an ancient pine tree.
The monster was a horrifying sight. The right side of its jaw was completely caved in from Antares's punch, a grotesque tangle of shattered bone, steel needles, and missing teeth. Thick, white foam mixed with purple blood bubbled violently from its ruined mouth.
But the physical damage had not broken the beast's spirit; it had only shattered its sanity.
The Lycan King's three eyes were completely bloodshot, the whites flooded with crimson, the irises burning with a maddened, rabid yellow light. It let out a gurgling, metallic roar of pure, unfiltered hatred. It didn't care about the pack anymore. It didn't care about survival. It only wanted to tear the man in the travel hood to bloody ribbons.
The massive bipedal monster dropped to all fours, its scythe-like claws digging deep into the frozen ground, and charged directly at Antares with incredeble speed.
Antares slowly stood up, turning his back on his fallen commanders to face the charging nightmare. He didn't adopt a defensive stance. He didn't brace himself for impact.
He just chuckled. It was a low, dark, and utterly confident sound.
"You really don't know when to stay down, do you?" Antares whispered to the wind.
The King reached to his waist and wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his weapon,Eos.
As he drew the blade from its scabbard, the air pressure in the clearing plummeted.
Eos was a masterpiece of lethal artistry, a long, gracefully golden blade forged from an unknown, metal that seemed to absorb the ambient light around it. The edge hummed with a subtle, devastating vibration.
Antares didn't wait for the beast to reach him. In a sudden, explosive burst of speed that completely tore the ground beneath his boots to shreds, the King charged to meet his foe.
The clash was not a brawl of attrition like Kael's desperate struggle. It was a brutal, one-sided slaughter.
The Lycan King swung its massive right arm, aiming to cleanly decapitate Antares with its foot-long, steel-cleaving claws.
Antares didn't dodge. He simply vanished.
Using speed and agility, Antares slipped completely beneath the Lycan's guard.
The beast's massive claws cleaved nothing but empty air and freezing rain. Before the Lycan could even realize it had missed, Antares pivoted tightly on his heel, bringing Eos around in a blinding, upward crescent strike.
The hum of the blade pitched into a shriek.
Eos didn't just cut through the Lycan's impenetrable steel fur, it glided through the beast's thick hide, muscle, and reinforced bones as if they were made of warm butter.
A geyser of boiling purple blood erupted into the sky as the Lycan King's entire right arm was severed clean off at the shoulder.
The massive limb hit the ground with a heavy, sickening thud. The beast shrieked in sudden, unfathomable agony, staggering sideways. It tried to retaliate, violently kicking out with its massive, left leg, hoping to crush Antares's ribs.
But Antares was already two steps ahead.
He ducked under the wild, desperate kick. Spinning the hilt of Eos in his hand, he reversed his grip and drove the humming blade downward in a brutal, two-handed chopping motion.
The blade sheared cleanly through the Lycan's knee joint.
The beast's massive left leg was completely amputated from the thigh down.
Deprived of its balance and half its limbs, the monstrous bipedal nightmare collapsed violently into the freezing mud, thrashing and screaming, a fountain of purple gore turning the snow into a horrific swamp.
Antares stood over the writhing creature. His chest heaved slightly, and he looked down.
During the chaotic flurry of the beast's desperate, thrashing fall, a single, stray claw had managed to graze the King. A neat, diagonal cut had been torn through his travel cloak and the armor beneath, leaving a shallow, bleeding gash across Antares's chest.
Antares touched the blood on his chest, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger. It didn't slow him down. It didn't reduce his fierceness. If anything, the sting of the minor wound only made him to want to kill the Lycan even more.
Suddenly, the atmosphere in the clearing changed.
Antares unleashed his full, unsuppressed killing intent.
It was a physical, crushing weight. It didn't just radiate outward; it descended upon the Lycan King like a torrential rain of invisible, freezing needles. The sheer pressure of the King's malice pinned the beast to the ground, paralyzing its entire body.
The Lycan King, a monster born for pure violence and slaughter, finally felt something it had never experienced before: FEAR.
Its rabid madness evaporated, replaced by a desperate, whimpering need to survive. Bleeding profusely, missing an arm and a leg, the creature dug its remaining, trembling claws into the mud and actually tried to crawl away.
It dragged its massive, heavy body backward through the slush, its three eyes wide with undeniable fear, trying to put distance between itself and the sovereign.
But its fate was already written in stone.
Antares walked forward, his boots completely silent against the bloody snow. He stepped on the Lycan's remaining wrist, pinning the creature to the earth.
"You've caused enough trouble for my people." Antares stated, his voice devoid of all emotion.
He raised Eos high above his head with both hands. The blade drank in the dim light of the storm, humming with the promise of absolute finality.
In a single, perfectly executed, overwhelmingly powerful slash, Antares brought the blade down.
The Lycan King was instantly beheaded.
The massive, three-eyed skull rolled cleanly off the creature's shoulders, coming to a rest in the frozen mud, its glowing yellow eyes finally turning into dull, lifeless grey.
With a quick, sharp flick of his wrist, Antares threw the purple blood from the blade of Eos and smoothly sheathed the weapon.
He didn't spare the corpse a second glance. The King immediately turned his attention back to the distant Vanguard camp. He could still hear the clash of steel. His men needed him. He bent his knees, preparing to launch himself across the valley to reinforce the main line.
But before his boots could leave the ground, the temperature dropped.
It wasn't a natural chill.
It was an absolute, sub-zero freeze that instantly turned the falling rain into solid, suspended hail.
The puddles of blood at Antares's feet crystallized into purple glass within a fraction of a second.
Suddenly, from high up in the bruised, churning storm clouds above the valley, a blindingly bright anomaly appeared.
It looked exactly like a white comet, tearing through the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity, trailing a long, shimmering tail of absolute zero mist.
It didn't crash into the earth; it landed with pinpoint, silent precision directly in the center of the battlefield, right between Antares and the distant, ongoing war zone.
A shockwave of pure coldness exploded outward from the impact zone.
The freezing aura was so intensely profound that even the simplest, weakest soldiers fighting a mile away gasped as their breath instantly turned to thick, white vapor.
As the icy mist and displaced snow slowly settled, Antares smiled. He knew exactly who had just arrived.
Standing in the center of the frosted crater was a man radiating an aura of absolute zero.
Yanrid had arrived.
The general's usually raven-black, curly hair had undergone a magical transformation, it was now as white as freshly fallen snow, whipping wildly in the frigid wind. His eyes, normally blue, were now glowing with a piercing, ethereal, and violently bright blue light.
Yanrid slowly turned his head, his glowing blue eyes sweeping over the battlefield.
He looked at the broken barricades, the mountain of dead Terror Wolves, the unconscious bodies of Kael and Velas, and finally, the bleeding, beheaded corpse of the Lycan King at Antares's feet.
Yanrid's expression was completely, terrifyingly unreadable.
Then, he growled softly.
It was a quiet sound, but the thick, suffocating killing intent that spread out from him was completely overwhelming.
It hit the distant front lines like a physical tidal wave. The pressure was so incredibly dense, so inherently hostile, that dozens of the surviving Terror Wolves on the front line whimpered, their eyes rolling back into their heads as they literally fainted from the sheer, paralyzing terror of Yanrid's aura.
Yanrid didn't draw a weapon. He didn't have to.
He simply lifted his right boot and stomped his heel down into the ground.
KRRAAACK!
The ground completely shattered. In an instant, thousands of massive, jagged, razor-sharp ice spikes violently violently protruded from the earth, erupting upward across the entire valley in a massive, battlefield-wide area of effect.
The ice was devastatingly precise.
It bypassed every single surviving Antman, but it instantly, brutally impaled every last remaining Terror Wolf on the field.
The massive beasts were hoisted into the air, skewered cleanly through their chests and throats by pillars of solid ice. The entire horde was completely, utterly annihilated in a single, silent second.
Yanrid's fury was so strong that he didn't even spare the dead.
A half-dozen massive ice spikes erupted directly beneath the Lycan King's beheaded corpse right beside Antares, violently piercing through the steel fur and lifting the massive carcass into the air, pinning it like a grotesque, bloody trophy against the sky.
From his violently cold aura alone, one could easily tell that Yanrid was absolutely furious.
Before Antares could even open his mouth to greet his commander that had grown as a friend in the past few weeks, Yanrid turned around.
The glowing blue light in his eyes narrowed into a terrifying, icy glare aimed squarely at his king.
"Now," Yanrid said, his voice dropping the temperature in the air by another ten degrees. "Where exactly do you think you're going without alerting your guards, Your Majesty?"
Antares froze.
The man who had just effortlessly dismantled a boss-level monster suddenly looked incredibly awkward.
Rather than explaining himself, Antares simply looked up at the grey sky, pursed his lips, and began to whistle a jaunty, terribly out-of-tune melody, pretending he couldn't hear his general over the howling wind.
Shit, Antares thought, a bead of sweat forming on his brow despite the sub-zero temperature.
I completely forgot about him.
Yanrid has effectively ended the battle with a single stomp!
And now it was time for Antares to explain his little stunt he had pulled on his men at the Godwall mountain.