Episode-847
Chapter : 1693
Rock and soil exploded from the rooftop garden. The stones of the building itself ripped loose, swirling around him like a protective hurricane. Layers of stone slammed onto his body, fusing with his skin. Then came the metal. The iron from the nearby structures, the steel from the reinforced beams—it all flew toward him, coating the stone in a gleaming, organic steel skin.
He grew. He expanded. He transformed.
Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet.
The roof collapsed under his new weight, but he didn't fall. He stood amidst the wreckage, a titan of steel and stone.
The Steel Titan.
It was a form he rarely used. It was slow. It was clumsy. But it was virtually indestructible.
The Titan roared. It wasn't a human sound. It was the sound of grinding metal, of tectonic plates shifting. It rivaled the sound of Rosa’s wind.
"ROAAAAAR!"
Rosa stopped screaming. She looked at the giant standing in the ruins of the building. She didn't look afraid. A twisted, ecstatic smile spread across her face.
"Finally," she whispered. "There you are."
This was what she wanted. No more tricks. No more speed. Just a monster to match her monster.
She raised both hands high above her head.
The black blizzard swirled around her, condensing. It stopped attacking the town. All the ice, all the snow, all the hate—it was sucked inward. It compressed into a single, massive sphere of dark ice above her head.
It grew larger and larger. It was the size of a carriage. Then the size of a house. It hovered there, a black sun of frozen death.
"Let's see if you break," she hissed. "Let's see if you are as hard as you pretend to be."
She hurled the sphere.
The massive projectile flew through the air with a low, thrumming sound. It tore up the air pressure, creating a vacuum in its wake.
Lloyd braced himself.
Inside the Titan armor, his human body was sweating, straining against the magic. He couldn't dodge this. If he dodged, the sphere would hit the workers' district behind him. He had to tank it.
He stepped forward, the ground shaking with his footfall. He raised a massive steel fist, pulling it back for a haymaker.
He was done running. He was done talking. He was going to punch through the storm and grab his wife, even if he had to break every bone in his hand to do it.
But as she flew at him, trailing darkness, he saw her eyes.
Behind the black void of the corruption, for just a fraction of a second, he saw the terrified girl who had lost her mother years ago. He saw the loneliness. He saw the desperation.
And he realized, with a sinking heart, that the madness fueling her speed wasn't just hate. It wasn't just jealousy.
It was heartbreak.
She was destroying the world because her world had already been destroyed.
The sphere was inches away. The cold was biting through his steel armor.
Lloyd punched.
BOOM.
The collision was blinding. White light swallowed the square. The sound of metal meeting absolute zero screamed across the north, a song of destruction that marked the end of their marriage and the beginning of the end of the battle.
The town of Serrum had ceased to be a center of industry; it was now an arena carved from the frozen hell of a Sovereign’s broken heart. The black blizzard Rosa had summoned wasn't just weather; it was a weaponized atmosphere, a swirling vortex of razor-sharp obsidian ice shards that sought to flay anything with a pulse.
The collision between the Titan’s steel fist and Rosa’s dark ice sphere resulted in a shockwave that leveled the surrounding block. The Titan form groaned under the strain, frost rapidly eating through the thirty feet of stone and magical steel. Lloyd realized instantly that being a giant target was a death sentence against concentrated Sovereign power; he was a mountain, but she was the weather eroding it.
'Dismiss,' he commanded internally.
The massive construct shattered into particles of light, leaving Lloyd in his human form, freefalling through the debris cloud.
Lloyd Ferrum stood amidst the chaos, his breath misting in the sudden, absolute zero temperature. The massive sphere of dark ice Rosa had hurled at him had been deflected, but the effort had cost him. He had shifted his stance at the last microsecond, using a kinetic pulse from his Void power to redirect the projectile into a row of empty warehouses. The resulting crash sounded like a mountain collapsing, followed by the groan of steel beams shearing under the weight of magical ice.
Chapter : 1694
He looked up at his wife. She was hovering ten feet off the ground, buoyed by a cyclone of corrupted mana. Her skin was cracked like porcelain, black veins pulsing beneath the surface. Her eyes were voids. This wasn't a duel; it was a containment breach.
"Lloyd," she hissed, the name carrying the weight of a curse. She raised a hand, and the ambient moisture in the air solidified instantly into a thousand jagged lances, all pointed at his heart. "Why do you not bleed? Why do you not break?"
Lloyd didn't waste breath on words. He activated [Void Steps].
The world fractured into blue-white glitches. He vanished from his position a split second before the lances struck, the ground where he had been standing erupting into a crater of frozen shrapnel. He reappeared twenty feet to the left, atop a sloped roof, his boots finding purchase on the slick tiles.
He wasn't trying to win. If he wanted to win, he would have summoned Iffrit and turned the town into a thermal bomb, vaporizing the ice and likely half the district. Or he would have merged with Fang Fairy and ended it with a decapitation strike before her synapses could fire. But he couldn't do that. Despite his hatred, despite the divorce, despite the absolute mess she had made of his life, she was still Rosa. Killing her would be a political catastrophe and, deeper down in a place he hated to acknowledge, a waste of a valuable asset.
He needed to incapacitate her. He needed to knock her out cold.
"Stop running!" Rosa screamed. She swept her arm horizontally. A wave of black ice rippled through the air, slicing the top floor off the building Lloyd was standing on.
Lloyd dropped through the collapsing roof, landing in a crouch on the floor below. He didn't pause. He sprinted toward the window, crashing through the shutters just as the entire structure groaned and imploded under the crushing pressure of her spiritual weight.
He landed in an alleyway, rolling to disperse the momentum. His tactical mind was running a mile a minute, analyzing the data.
Target: Rosa Siddik. Status: Mental Deviation/Mana Corruption. Threat Level: Sovereign-High. Defensive capabilities: Absolute Zero Aura. Offensive capabilities: Omnidirectional Construct Generation.
She was stronger than she had been on Mount Monu. Heartbreak, it seemed, was a more potent fuel than duty. The corruption of her mana had removed the safety limiters on her output. She was burning her own life force to sustain this level of violence. If he didn't stop her soon, she would burn herself out and die from spiritual exhaustion.
"You cannot hide from winter, Lloyd!" Her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, carried by the wind.
Lloyd flattened himself against a brick wall as a localized hailstorm shredded the cobblestones in the main street. He needed to close the distance. Her ranged attacks were overwhelming, but if he could get inside her guard, he could use a physical strike to disrupt her mana flow.
He took a breath, centering his core. He reached into the unified reservoir of his power. He didn't summon a spirit; the atmospheric interference from her chaotic mana made maintaining a summon difficult and draining. He would rely on his own bloodline.
Steel Blood: Chain Shackles.
He thrust his hands forward. From the empty air, four thick, gleaming chains of Ferrum steel erupted, shooting upward like striking cobras. They weren't aimed at her body; they were aimed at her limbs, designed to wrap and bind.
The chains soared through the blizzard, seeking their target with unerring precision. They closed in on the hovering figure of the Ice Queen.
Rosa didn't even dodge. She simply looked at the incoming metal.
"Fragile," she whispered.
She clenched her fist.
The air around the chains flashed white. The temperature dropped so low, so fast, that the physics of the metal changed instantly. The steel lost all ductility. It became as brittle as sugar glass. The momentum of the chains caused them to shatter under their own weight, disintegrating into a shower of frozen metal dust before they could even touch her.
Lloyd cursed silently. He had underestimated the density of her cold aura. Conventional steel wouldn't work. He needed something she couldn't freeze. Or he needed to be faster than the cold.
He moved again, abandoning the alley as ice spikes erupted from the walls, trying to skewer him. He was being herded. She wasn't just lashing out blindly; there was a terrifying, instinctive tactical mind beneath the madness. She was driving him toward the town center, toward the old Clock Tower.