Episode-593
Chapter : 1165
"Oh, I'm not the one you should be worried about fighting," Lloyd said, his smile widening into something that was no longer human, but something ancient, cold, and predatory. He took a step back, a gesture of a man clearing the stage for the true star.
"After all," he whispered, his voice a promise of a beautiful, terrible winter. "It is time you met the queen."
The world froze.
It was not a gradual drop in temperature. It was an instantaneous, conceptual shift. The very concept of warmth was violently and systematically erased from a hundred-yard radius around Lloyd. A storm of absolute zero erupted from him, a silent, beautiful, and terrifying blizzard of diamond dust and crystalline energy.
From the heart of this freezing, silent cataclysm, a new form materialized. Not a demon of fire or a phantom of lightning, but a magnificent, sixty-foot-long Ice Dragon, its scales of flawless, interlocking crystal shimmering like a captured constellation. Its eyes, two perfect sapphires the size of shields, held the cold, ancient, and utterly indifferent wisdom of a frozen star.
This was Bingyu. And her arrival was a statement.
But she did not remain in her draconic form. The magnificent beast dissolved, not into a chaotic burst of energy, but with a precise, breathtaking grace, its crystalline scales unraveling into a flowing river of frozen starlight. The river of light flowed not away, but into Lloyd himself.
The transformation was instantaneous and terrifying.
Two massive, crystalline blue wings, each one a twenty-foot-long masterpiece of translucent, shimmering ice that seemed to be woven from the heart of a glacier, erupted from Lloyd’s back. They were not clumsy appendages; they were a part of him, their every movement a silent testament to a new, alien grace.
Two jagged, spiraling horns of dark, glacial ice, the color of the deep, sunless parts of the ocean, sprouted from his temples, framing his face in a new, savage, and regal geometry.
And his eyes. His familiar, intelligent eyes were gone. In their place, two orbs of cold, ancient, and unblinking blue-white light burned, the light of a winter star that has seen the birth and death of galaxies.
He was no longer Lord Lloyd Ferrum, the clever, sarcastic boy. He was a king born of winter's heart, a paradox of cold, hard steel and even colder, harder ice. A being of sublime, terrible, and absolute power.
He looked at his uncle, at the demon-king who had thought himself the apex of power, and a slow, cold smile touched his transfigured lips.
Rubel’s furious, arrogant expression had been replaced by a new one. A look of profound, dawning, and absolute horror.
He was trapped. Ben, his power a promise of an unbreakable, physical cage, was his shield. And Lloyd, now a god of winter, was his inescapable, beautiful, and final blizzard. His escape route had just become a frozen graveyard.
Viscount Rubel, now a cornered, desperate animal, reacted with the only instinct he had left: overwhelming, chaotic violence. The demonic power within him, a gift from a god of despair, roared to life. He threw his hands forward, and a torrent of pure, unholy energy—a fusion of black, soul-eating shadow and crimson, abyssal flame—erupted from him, a river of damnation aimed directly at Lloyd.
It was an attack that could have melted a fortress wall, a blast of conceptual hatred that should have unmade anything in its path.
Lloyd, in his new, winter-king form, did not even flinch. He did not raise a shield of ice. He did not counter with a blast of his own. He simply… opened a door.
A silent, shimmering, almost invisible tear in the fabric of reality, no larger than his own body, opened in the air directly in front of him. It was a perfect, circular void, its edges a soft, hazy distortion of light. It was the entrance to his private, 5-square-kilometer spatial dimension. His storeroom. His Nexus Point.
The torrent of demonic shadow-flame, a cataclysm of unholy power, hit the tear in reality. And vanished.
It did not explode. It did not dissipate. It was simply… gone. Swallowed whole by the silent, hungry void, as if it had never existed. The entire, spectacular, world-breaking attack had been neatly and contemptuously filed away in another dimension.
Lloyd had become an absolute void, a living shield that did not block attacks, but simply erased them from the equation.
Rubel stared, his mind, which had already been teetering on the edge of sanity, now taking a final, decisive plunge into the abyss of pure, gibbering madness. The laws of physics, of magic, of reality itself, were being systematically, casually, and gleefully violated before his very eyes. This was not a battle. This was a nightmare.
Chapter : 1166
"My turn," Lloyd said, his voice now a layered, resonant thing, a fusion of his own and the crystalline chime of Bingyu's.
He raised a hand, and the very air in front of Rubel began to crystallize. A thousand tiny, impossibly sharp icicles, each one a needle of Absolute Zero, materialized from the moisture in the air. But before he could unleash his own attack, a new, and even more terrifying, phenomenon occurred.
Ben, who had been standing as a silent, immovable anchor, finally made his move. He took a single, slow, deliberate step forward.
And reality warped around him.
There was no physical change to his form. He did not grow larger or sprout wings. But the very concept of motion in a ten-meter bubble around him simply… ceased to exist. It was a field of absolute stasis, a zone where time and causality had been put on pause for all but him.
This was the true, terrifying power of his own spirit, a conceptual entity he had never revealed, not even to Lloyd. A spirit whose name was Sloth. It did not grant him speed; it granted him a monopoly on it, by simply revoking it from everyone else.
Rubel, who had been about to recoil from Lloyd’s icicle storm, found himself frozen. Not by ice, but by a law of physics that had been personally and pointedly rewritten just for him. He was a statue, his face a perfect, frozen mask of horror, his demonic power a useless, contained storm within his paralyzed body.
And inside this cage of frozen time, Ben moved.
He was not fast. He was instantaneous. He was a phantom, a glitch in the world, a being who existed outside the normal flow of cause and effect. One moment he was standing beside Lloyd; the next, he was directly in front of the paralyzed Rubel, his perfectly crafted steel fist drawn back.
The fist was no longer just steel. It was glowing with the condensed, white-hot fury of a son avenging his murdered father.
"This," Ben whispered, the sound a silent, private judgment in the frozen world, "is for my father."
He struck. The blow was not aimed at Rubel's head or his chest. It was a single, brutal, and perfectly executed strike to the solar plexus, a blow infused with a lifetime of rage and a King-Level master’s absolute control.
The world lurched back into motion.
Rubel was not thrown back. The force of the blow was so immense, so perfectly focused, that it had nowhere to go. It simply imploded within him. He doubled over, a strangled, inhuman sound of pure agony tearing from his lungs. The demonic fire in his eyes flickered and died, and a spiderweb of cracks spread across his unholy armor.
He was trapped in a perfect, inescapable hell. Any attack he launched was erased by the living void that was Lloyd. And any attempt to move, to even exist, brought him within the cage of absolute stasis that was Ben, where he was a helpless statue before a god of speed.
He was a rat. A rat in a cage forged from the broken laws of physics. And the two cousins, who had become living violations of natural law, were just beginning to play.
Rubel was a king trapped in a cage forged from impossible physics. He was a being of immense, demonic power, yet that power was rendered utterly, comically impotent. Every offensive move he contemplated was a suicidal act of feeding his own strength into the silent, hungry void that was Lloyd. Every defensive maneuver was a fool's errand, as Ben could simply pause the very concept of motion and strike him at will. He was a god in a universe where the fundamental laws had been rewritten specifically to negate his divinity.
The pain from Ben's blow was a white-hot, singular reality in the chaos of his shattering mind. It was not just a physical wound; it was a conceptual one. The strike had not just broken his armor and his ribs; it had disrupted the very flow of the demonic energy that sustained him. He felt the unholy pact he had made begin to fray at the edges, the borrowed power flickering like a faulty lantern.
Enraged, terrified, and utterly desperate, he focused his will, gathering all of his remaining strength into a single, final, and suicidally potent blast. He would not aim it at the untouchable void-god, Lloyd. He would aim it at Ben. He would obliterate the master of the stasis cage, and in the ensuing chaos, he would find his escape.