Four jagged ice spears shimmered into existence before the old man, their edges catching what little light existed and distilling it into a hard, wintry gleam. His lips moved in a rapid chant, syllables layered on syllables, a cadence that sounded like frost forming on glass. With a flick of his hand, the spears shot forward at terrifying speed, lines of frozen intent loosed from a bowstring of will.
The monster swung its massive log in a sweeping arc—clean, lethal, contemptuous. Three spears shattered mid-air, bursting into sleet that hissed against its bark-like hide. The fourth struck true, burying itself up to the fletching in the creature's leg. It sneered at the old man, unfazed, as if pain were only an old acquaintance, as if blood and black poison meant less than rain to a mountain.
With a savage roar, the beast heaved the log again. The sheer force cracked the air itself, strange pressure shearing forward in a howling wind that lifted dust and shards, that pressed suit fabric to ribs and made the eardrums ache. The old man raised an ice shield just in time, his chant tightening; a crystalline wall flowered out of emptiness, splintering but holding against the gale. Fractures spidered through the translucent barrier. It groaned, sang, then steadied.
The monster's grin widened, teeth slick with heat, almost inviting him closer—as if daring him to make the next move, as if the battlefield were an arena built for two.
They clashed again and again. The old man moved in a wide circle, never letting the Hasura pin him to a line. He walked air as if it were stone that remembered how to be steady under his feet, robe whispering with a light that didn't throw shadows. His chant never ceased; it braided with breath, with heartbeat, with a discipline so old it had smoothed itself to inevitability. He hurled ice spears in a rain so fast the human eye could not follow, a white storm that wrote its own grammar across the monster's body.
Spears pierced relentlessly. Shoulders, flank, thigh, the hinge where bark bent; they drove in, lodged, and sang cold. The creature became a grotesque porcupine of frozen blades, a walking field of winter grown from violence. Thick black liquid spilled in sheets, hit the ground, and sizzled like tar set alight. The smell of it bit the tongue, acrid and metallic, like blood turned to smoke.
And yet impossibly, the flesh healed. It healed almost as quickly as it was pierced. Ice cracked and fell. Bark knit. Wounds sealed like mouths closing on a secret. Where the spears bit deepest, the skin buckled around them, then grew over, swallowing half the shaft with obscene patience.
Sluggish now, its movements dulled by the weight of countless wounds, the monster staggered—but it still smiled. Its eyes burned brighter, yellow churn caught in a furnace. It was a storm that did not know the word end.
The old man raised both arms. Cold condensed above them, the air itself answering to a command older than weather. Three massive slabs of ice materialized high overhead, each the size of a house wall, edges keen as knives, faces flecked with runic frost. They crashed downward, boxing the beast in with a thunder of frozen stone. For a heartbeat, it looked trapped; for a heartbeat, hope dared a breath.
The monster slammed the log into the walls—once, twice, three times—and the ice shattered like fragile glass under a hammer. Shards sang and skittered across the ground, a deadly sleet that the orb's cocoon curved away from Tian's people in soft, invisible arcs.
Undeterred, the old man reforming the slabs—faster this time, sharper, like inverted cones poised to impale rather than contain. The chant shifted, dove, rose; his hands carved sigils in the air that pulled the cold into points.
The monster bellowed in fury, sound cracking the dust into a shape of fear. It slammed the log into the earth, and in an instant the slabs shattered again, not from impact, but from the shock that rippled out of the ground. Stone bucked. The world itself flinched under the blow.
Now its face twisted in rage. The grin broke. Heat licked the corners of its mouth. And for the first time—it spoke. The words were crude, broken—warped language forced through a throat built for roaring—but unmistakable. Meaning crawled under the sound like something with too many legs. Even without comprehension, everyone understood the intent: denial, dominion, hate.
The old man descended from the air, every motion measured, each breath a chosen thing. He summoned a weapon unlike any before: an Ice Jade Spear, flawless, crystalline, alive with layered light. It seemed carved from starlight that had frozen while falling, its core pulsing with a patient, inner glow. He leveled it and lunged.
The monster met him head-on.
Log and spear clashed. The impact thundered, a sound that struck bone and skipped thought. Wind exploded outward. Shards of ice flew in glittering arcs, skimming armor, pinging off rock. The old man's robe snapped once, then lay flat again as if gravity had begged forgiveness.
Cut. Stab. Slam. Counter. The sequence accelerated beyond ordinary seeing, memory itself struggling to hold the steps. Neither yielded. In mere minutes the battlefield became a storm of destruction—walls sloughed into rubble, the street torn into seams, the air striated by heat and cold colliding. To watch it was to feel very small.
Amara, frozen in awe just behind Tian's line, whispered to herself, the words scratching raw out of her throat. "What kind of beings are these… monster and man both—each like natural disasters made flesh."
The three survivors on the ground—the spear-bearer, the swordsman, the woman—scrambled back toward Tian's group, fighting for breath under the crushing pressure of the duel. Even their prowess bent under the weight of it. The woman's palm hovered inches from stone as if itching to guide, to help, and yet holding back—this was not her field to paint. Not now.
The beast roared, throat flaring incandescent. It spewed molten magma from its mouth in a torrent that turned air to glass. The old man's chant cut a new shape; dozens of smaller ice spears blossomed in a weaving net, intersecting, crossing, knotting into a mesh. Fire met ice mid-air and exploded into steam that screamed away in silver sheets. The net burned through even as it held, and the torrent lost force, drooping to orange drips that hissed out on the shattered ground.
Then the old man struck.
The jade spear flashed, a line too straight to be luck. It pierced the monster's chest, biting deep past bark and muscle into whatever furnace beat within. The Hasura howled but did not fall; it grabbed at the shaft, bark plates trying to lever it free, blood boiling black around a wound that refused to be convinced of its own existence.
Chanting furiously, the old man summoned more spears—endless, relentless—flicks of the hand birthing bolts that drove in from angles a mind would never guess twice. Shoulders. Hips. Thigh. Neck. The creature staggered, tearing many free with hands big enough to crush stone, yet each movement slowed further, each rip costing more than the one before. Its balance faltered. Its timing bled.
Then it happened.
The first spear—lodged in its chest—began to pulse. Not bright, not loud. A heartbeat in ice. From its shaft, threads of frost stretched outward like a spider's web spun in winter, delicate and unpitying. One by one, the scattered spears answered, thin filaments leaping to touch, freezing together into a lattice of crystalline chains. It was beautiful in a way that hurt.
Its shoulders froze. Its arms froze. Its legs froze.
The beast struggled, shrieking, muscles bulging against restraints that creaked, that cracked, then thickened and held. It broke some—ice shattered like glass, shards skittering—and more ice spread, faster than it could resist, the lattice thickening under each failure. It fought the way an avalanche fights a valley: with massive inevitability. But the valley was older.
In moments, its entire body was encased in a prison of glacial steel—transparent and implacable. It hung in its own violence, a hateful thing arrested mid-roar, eyes blazing behind a skin of winter.
The old man panted, shoulders bowing. Sweat froze at his temples, a fine crown of frost. He almost collapsed, then caught himself with a tremor of will alone, and continued his chant—quieter now, more intricate, as if telling the ice a secret only it could keep.
Around the frozen monster, towering slabs formed, rising from ground and air both, enclosing it like a coffin built by a careful god. Their surfaces were pristine, the color of deep glacier, not the pale of fresh frost. They closed in with the slow, cruel patience of ceremony. Then, above, another slab appeared—triangular, its face etched with glowing carvings that hummed in Amara's sight like remembered songs. Slowly, it descended, sealing the prison shut.
When the final glyph locked into place—a soft, resonant click that felt as if the earth itself had agreed—the old man drew a trembling breath and pressed his fingers downward.
The sealed prison sank into the ground like a fading hologram, swallowed by the earth until nothing remained but silence and the memory of cold. The soil smoothed as if hands had patted it flat. The air exhaled steam that did not know where to go and so vanished.
Silence.
No echo. No triumphant roar. Only the kettledrum pound of hearts remembering how to slow, the soft whine of cooling metal, the distant clatter of a loosened stone finding rest.
The battle was finished. All of it—overwhelming, apocalyptic—had lasted barely six minutes.
Tian realized he had not moved since the battle begun. The orb in his harness warmed his sternum with a steady pulse, as if reminding his body of the shape of breath. Elena's fingers were still pressed to Amara's wrist; she looked down to find her own hand shaking and had to laugh once, quietly, at the betrayal.
The woman survivor straightened in slow stages, like a bow unstrung. The spear-bearer's chest heaved; the swordsman flexed his powder-stiffened palm and met the old man's back with a look that was part reverence, part relief, part sorrow at what the cost must have been.