Far away, Salva watched the scene with calm interest and smiled. Directly controlling the mind fragments of the Ice Spirit was beyond them, since at full strength none of them could defeat Icelis. But that was only if she were truly at full strength.
From earlier encounters, Salva had already gauged her condition. She was strong, but far weaker than expected, lacking Magic and only slowly recovering her Laws along with her memories. Her fragment body was fragile, like glass.
It was precisely because of this weakness that they had been able to hide her remaining fragments in the Northlands and use them for rituals. Salva believed this was the price the Ice Spirit had paid to force herself awake from her sealed slumber, making the current plan possible.
The original plan had been to remove the fragments of the Ice Spirit that served as the seal and, through Salva's shaping, create a body known as an Ice Wraith. Using the remaining ice Laws in the fragments, they would create a Blizzard that blanketed all of the Northlands.
This blessing would spread everywhere, twisting minds under the influence of the decaying fire. While it would not directly corrupt intelligent humans, it would agitate monsters, driving them into madness. With ritual nodes placed in cities, a massive monster disaster could be triggered, feeding flesh and souls into a grand sacrifice.
At the ritual core, with all of the Northlands as an offering, even the signs alone would allow the decaying fire to interfere with reality. By then, controlling the Ice Wraith would draw the remaining fragments together, removing the seal entirely. The body would then serve as a vessel for descent, achieving two goals at once.
Since the original plan had already failed early on, Salva proposed a bold idea. The mind fragments of the Ice Spirit had been sealed separately and could not be found by divination or prophecy. But if the fragment moved on its own, that was different.
Below the canyon, Dotleivy and the Wolfguard struggled to hold out against the ever-mutating Icelis. Her attacks no longer involved endless collapsing ice mountains, but instead smaller strikes closer to deathly cold, with terrifying power.
"Icelis… what on earth happened to you." Fei'er Li had already used the token to call Vann and was pacing anxiously. She opened the blank book she had carried since arriving in this world, where only she could see the text, and hesitated over a skill that required many points.
After a brief pause, she looked up at Icelis, now fully encased in ice and ribs, almost impossible to see clearly. For a moment, her vision sharpened unnaturally, and she saw the frown on the girl inside the ice coffin. That expression never appeared on that troublesome child.
She clenched her teeth. "Troublemaker, you have to listen to me this time!"
A loud boom echoed across the sky. Belial rubbed his eyes.
It looked like the large red dot he was chasing had vanished from the System Map for an instant, then reappeared nearby. He muttered about system bugs, but it did not really matter, since his target was still ahead.
He could feel changes in that direction. In a canyon ahead, there were noticeable Magic fluctuations and elemental reactions, not small by any measure. His surrounding Magic showed signs of breakdown, with the base Magic Array collapsing before being forcibly held together by the Energy Field.
The reason was clear. The Ice Element in the cycle was being pulled in one direction, even trying to escape his will and the Energy Field to break free of the Magic Circle. "Ice Element is acting up again. Yeah, I know this one."
When a troublesome kid does not listen, you teach them. A heavy punch landed, and things quieted down.
"So this is the trap they wanted to pull me into?" Belial scoffed. He was not someone who could only breathe ice, and they should have remembered that after eating the Spiral Heat Ray before.
He could already see the person lying on the ground ahead, like a wilted flower of hope. Beside them was an iron box giving off a faintly familiar scent. Forget it, he thought, and stepped forward to stomp the person flat first.
Kwenfield lay on the ground, coughing as if squeezing the last bit of air from his lungs. His body had already rotted from repeated use of Blessing, forcing out burst power beyond its limits. After taking an internal blast, he pushed himself even harder, dragging this body back from the edge of collapse. It was nothing more than drinking poison to quench thirst, but he did not care, since this mortal body would not be used for much longer anyway.
After sealing a large amount of Blessed Power into the nearby Iron Coffin, the thin thread keeping him alive finally snapped. What remained was only the final flicker while falling toward the abyss. Still, he had succeeded. The plan now had only the last step left.
"Ha ha ha…" Kwenfield lay facedown, one hand stretched forward as blood splattered around him. If a black luxury car happened to pass by at this moment, the driver would probably shake their head and back away. His body was so ruined that it could not even be used as a teaching specimen, and the few nerves left stubbornly sent pain to his brain, while his neck had snapped from the fall.
Kwenfield instead felt it was fine. This position let him see the dragon flying in, and he could no longer feel pain at all. He had already sensed it, the sacred whisper. With the roar of storm and thunder, a cold and massive shadow covered the sky, pushing everything else out of his vision.
Kwenfield burst into mad laughter, his unrecognizable face filled with fanatic excitement. "My the Lord has arrived!" "My the Lord has arrived!" "My the Lord has…"
"What are you babbling about, so annoying."
A meteor crashed down, and the enormous Great Dragon stepped straight on him. To make sure the target died cleanly and without any doubt, Belial not only put real force into that step and released his weight, he also used Space Claw. Killing someone he truly wanted dead for the first time deserved some sense of ceremony, and taking it seriously was a kind of respect.
Nearly millions of tons of force slammed down, mixed with the extreme heat from Space Claw. It ensured complete annihilation, cutting off any chance of getting back up, and sent him firmly onto the Road to the Underworld. The ground shook violently, and the body was smashed into a deep crater, crushed flat and then burned and melted, mixing evenly with soil and rock.
It was not over yet. Belial opened his mouth and released a highly compressed surge of Ice Element, which froze the ground solid in an instant. Then a massive fist smashed down, shattering the ice, scooping it up, and throwing it into the air, followed by another breath that scattered everything into drifting dust.
This completely cut off even the slightest chance of someone using ashes to pull him back out of a grave. Only then did Belial let out a small breath. "Huh… wait, I should have fired another heat beam earlier."
Now that it was already ash, there was no way to add anything else. Killing a former kind for the first time, did it feel like anything? "The answer is nothing at all."
Belial felt no strong reaction. Human-like beings had been everywhere during monster sieges, and he had seen plenty of them already. There was no weight of life, no shaking, no nausea, nothing like that, and he even felt refreshed, like the morning of the first day of the year.
Those thoughts were not important right now. "God of Destruction, my God of Destruction!" What mattered was that the experience from killing this guy should be enough to unlock God of Destruction.
Belial could almost see his endless revival armor right in front of him, that bright future, until the system progress bar jumped out and slapped him back to reality with a big blank space. "Where is my God of Destruction?"
His first thought was that maybe this guy, despite dying so cleanly, was secretly preparing for a revival round. Would he win? Do not win, seriously. Then he turned to look at the System Map, and the big red dot was still there, very close, practically at his feet.
Buried underground, and not completely dead? Belial looked down and finally saw it. The Iron Coffin, smaller than his finger, wrapped in chains, with a familiar hint of Magic leaking out. "Feels like I have sensed this before… whatever, I will take the experience first."
Before he could open it, a ring of Magic Array suddenly appeared around him, stretching across what seemed like the whole valley and activating at extreme speed. The Iron Coffin floated up, its chains shattering like ice, and cold air spilled out as more than a dozen Ice-Blue Shard with a strange mixed aura flew free.
They floated up and instantly surrounded Belial. Under the influence of the surrounding Magic Array, massive amounts of Magic and Ice Element surged out of them and began closing in on him. "…Is this auto pickup?"