Chapter 124: The Banner of Frost and the Wall of the Void
The peace within the Morningstar Imperial Capital was never a state of absolute repose; it was a precarious balance forged upon the edge of an unsheathed blade. In the early hours of the fourth day since the eradication of the auction in Golden City, the sky over the Dragon Bone Desert decided to betray the perpetual warmth of its sands.
The clouds, usually sparse and tinged with a dusty crimson by the wasteland's minerals, turned a leaden and unnatural gray. They were dense, heavy like leaden gravestones, bringing not water, but the necrotic breath of the absolute north.
From the highest lookout of the Patriarch's Tower, an aberrant meteorological phenomenon could be observed. A black and bluish snow fell, crystalline and poisonous. However, it never reached the city floor. The snow evaporated in a violent hiss the moment it touched the burning aura of the immense obsidian walls, creating a perpetual mist that shrouded the capital like a ghostly shroud.
Inside the Throne Room of the main tower, the atmosphere was glacial, but the temperature had nothing to do with the external climate.
Samael Morningstar sat upon his throne, carved from a single block of stellar obsidian. He did not wear the casual dark silk robes he usually wore to play with his daughter Celeste or to walk the gardens with Seraphina. Today, the man had given way to the god of war.
He wore the Void Dragon Imperial Armor, a supreme Mythic Grade artifact. It was a masterpiece of impossible geometry, forged in void crystal that seemed to devour ambient light, leaving Samael wrapped in a constant gloom. The chest and abdomen plates were not static; they moved like liquid obsidian, adjusting to each of his muscles like a second skin. An intricate engraving of a primordial dragon ran across his entire torso, housing at the exact center of his chest a Dragon Heart gem that pulsed with a deep, intimidating red glow.
Instead of a helmet that hid his face, the armor ended in a high, sharp collar of black scales that framed the Crown of Eternal Dawn. The tricolor light of the floating needles—gold, violet, and crimson—contrasted violently with the absolute black of the void crystal, casting a terrifying divine halo over the Patriarch. Beyond its appearance, the relic emanated the Mantle of Nonexistence: a passive defense that rendered Samael's silhouette "blurry" to the laws of the physical world. Any conventional long-range attack would simply pass through the space he occupied as if he were a ghost; only an impact with the authority of a Peak Grand Saint could force reality to touch him. Every time Samael breathed, space itself seemed to curve in reverence.
In front of the throne, floating in the center of the hall, the System's continental holographic map projected three massive red dots moving from the north.
"They arrive with the exactitude of a funeral clock," Samael said. His voice was not cold or anxious; it was deep, polyphonic, and imbued with an imperial calm that served as a gravitational anchor for everyone present in the room.
Around him, the Supreme War Council was gathered in a perfect diamond formation.
To his right, Great Elder Lilith. The war deity was wrapped in passive smoky red flames that hissed and crackled, instinctively fighting against the intrusion of the spiritual cold from House Cryon that tried to seep through the tower walls.
To his left, the future empress, Seraphina. In a stellar white combat dress and wearing the majestic Ice Crown of the Blue Phoenix, her silver and icy eyes were fixed on the hologram. As someone who had ruled worlds, she analyzed the tactical formations of an enemy empire with mathematical coldness.
Behind them, the six pillars of the clan maintained their positions with military rigidity: Marcus, the First Elder and Master of the Forge, his crossed arms looking like solid copper logs; Torian, the Master of Arms, his lone eye glowing with homicidal anticipation; Sela, the Elder of Espionage, wrapped in perpetual shadows that blurred her features; Livia, the Elder of Medicine, whose emerald aura stabilized the room's pressure; Astarion, the Elder of Aerial Assault, whose platinum hair floated upward perpetually charged with blue plasma sparks; and Thalassa, the Elder of Aquatic Prisons, her hypnotic figure radiating a cold, suffocating pressure like the bottom of an abyssal pit.
And in the darkest corner, almost merged with the tower's architecture and denying his own physical existence, was Malak. The General of the Crimson Void floated in silence. His immense scythe, a curved blade of obsidian and sorrowful souls, rested on his immaterial shoulder. He did not breathe, he did not emit heat; he was the promise of death itself, waiting only for his Patriarch's permission to begin the harvest.
"The great family of the Stellar Ice Empire, House Cryon, knows no diplomacy," Seraphina declared, her voice cutting through the silence like an icicle. "They have mobilized three Glacier-class Super-Dreadnoughts. They do not come to negotiate a treaty for Lorian's broken jaw. For the Surgeon of the Abyss, the humiliation of his blood is a statistical aberration that is only corrected by freezing and dissecting every soul that breathes in this city."
Samael rose slowly. The heavy metal of his armor made not the slightest sound as he moved, but the atmospheric pressure in the room increased a full notch, forcing the Elders to tense their defensive Qi.
"Then we shall teach them that their arrogant cold is a minor annoyance compared to the absolute void," Samael said, walking toward the immense bronze doors of the hall. "Bring in the Sequences. It is time for the continent to see what kind of monsters hide behind our walls."
The ten-meter-high doors swung outward with a rhythmic thundering, activated by the tower's arrays.
The procession that entered was not a group of frightened disciples; it was the Golden Generation. The absolute elite.
Kael entered first. No trace remained of the impulsive youth from the Mist Valley. He was the Supreme Commander of the Morningstar Empire's Vanguard. His Magma Dragon aura was so dense, wild, and suffocating that the air in his path vibrated with a reddish distortion. On his back hung the colossal claymore, Magma Fang.
Behind him, Violeta and Eris walked in perfect and terrifying synchrony. Space and destruction. Absolute ice and ruin fire. Their steps were light, ethereal, but charged with a killing intent they had polished in recent purges and in the hellish Gravity Chambers.
Following them were Xylia, the empress of hidden thunder, Cedric, the architect of arrays, Lyra, Aylin, and the rest of the fourteen superior talents. They lined up before the throne's dais, kneeling on one knee in unison, a movement that made the obsidian floor tremble. In the citadel's corridors, Samael was an older brother or a strict leader; in this room, clad in night, he was the Sovereign of the Void who held their lives and deaths in the palm of his hand.
And at the end of the procession, the sound of heavy boots dragging broke the military symmetry.
Limping imperceptibly, but with his chin raised at an angle of pure defiance, entered Altair Ashborne.
He wore the heavy armor of black beast leather and metal scales that Marcus had forged for him. On his back, held by thick iron straps, rested the nine-hundred-pound monstrosity: Ash Lament. His skin had completely lost its human hue, acquiring a grayish, stony color, like the surface of a dormant volcano. The scars running across his neck and arms were no longer red; they were dark veins that seemed to contain latent fire.
His appearance was that of a demon just dragged from the depths of the underworld, alive only through pure thirst for revenge. Murmurs of curiosity among some of the lesser Sequences were inevitable at the former slave's grotesque transformation, but a single crimson glance from Samael silenced the room immediately.
"Silence," Samael ordered. The sound of his voice operated like a mallet striking the souls of those present directly.
The Patriarch descended the steps of the obsidian dais. His blood-red dragon cape billowed behind him. He stopped before Kael, resting his dark metal-gloved hand on the redhead's shoulder.
"Commander Kael. You will lead the ground interception vanguard. The enemy, confident in their numerical superiority, will land biological assault troops and Black Ice via drop pods before their main cannons open fire. I want you to turn the sand outside our walls into an ocean of glass and lava. Let them find not a single inch of firm, cold ground to plant their boots."
"It will be the privilege of my life, Patriarch," Kael responded, raising his face, his golden eyes shining with a promise of pure and absolute carnage. "They will drown in magma before they can even draw."
Samael nodded, released Kael, and walked heavily toward Altair.
The youth of the ash lineage did not lower his gaze. Even though the cold sweat of spiritual pressure ran down his back in the presence of the Stage 3 Saint Realm's overwhelming presence, Altair kept his gray eyes, now ringed by a perpetual orange fire, fixed on Samael's.
"Altair," Samael said, his tone neutral and calculating. "You have no official rank. You have no history or glory in this clan. For the vast majority of the soldiers who will defend these walls today, you are only a broken slave who was lucky enough to be bought by my gold."
"I don't need a number engraved on a medal to slaughter the imperial dogs, my Sovereign," Altair rasped, his voice sounding like granite blocks crushing each other. "My hatred requires no introduction. I only need you to give me steel and permission to kill."
Samael nodded minutely, a spark of dark respect crossing his runic pupils.
"Your position will be the West Wall. It is the flank of least density in our current suppression array. When the Cryon Mutant Horde tries to scale using ice claws, I want you to remind them why ash is the only thing left after flesh and fire have been consumed. If you survive this siege... if Ash Lament does not break in your hands and your will remains firm, the position of the Tenth Sequence will be yours officially before the eyes of the entire empire."
"If I die..." Altair said, unsheathing the colossal black sword with a single arm and driving the broad tip with a brutal thud into the hall's marble tiles, "...I ask that you use my steel bones to repair the cracks in the wall. Because even dead, I will not take a single step back from my position."
The System's internal alarms, synchronized with the citadel's core, suddenly began to howl in Samael's mind, sending tactical notifications in blinding blood red.
[Red Alert: Perimeter Incursion Confirmed.][Three massive energy signatures (Glacier-Class Dreadnoughts) have crossed the Dragon Bone Desert boundary. Time to visual contact: 5 minutes.]
Samael did not waste a single millisecond on motivational speeches. The beasts were already at the door.
He turned toward the large open balcony of the Throne Room. Without the need for hand seals, his Law of the Void responded to his sovereign will. The space beneath his armored boots bent grotesquely. In a blink, Samael's figure vanished from the tower and reappeared simultaneously at the top of the citadel's great North Wall, miles away.
There, the wind was a hurricane of ice blades. The black storm generated by the enemy fleet was trying to devour the city's protective dome.
Beside the main battlement was Cedric, the Fifth Seat and Master Array Architect. The youth was pale as a corpse, his hands moving like frantic lightning over a holographic runic control panel floating before him, trying to stabilize the defenses.
"Patriarch!" Cedric shouted, trying to be heard over the roar of the necrotic wind, without looking away from the spatial calculations. "The Void Dragon Array is operating at one hundred percent of its thermodynamic capacity! But this fleet's cold... it's anomalous. It's not natural ice. It's Putrid Black Ice. It's absorbing the energy from my fire ignition runes before they can even detonate outward! The barrier's temperature is falling at a critical rate; if the dome freezes, it will shatter like fragile glass!"
Samael walked to the edge of the wall, observing the immense, lethal, and frozen mist advancing like a solid tsunami toward his city.
"That is your error, Cedric," Samael said with a tranquility that contrasted absurdly with the imminent apocalypse. "You are thinking like an elemental mage. You are trying to fight extreme cold using extreme heat. Heat is nothing more than matter and particles in a state of excitement and motion. The Cryon technique is based on stopping that motion, on murdering entropy. If you throw fire at them, you are giving them energy to freeze."
Samael extended his gloved right hand and physically touched the golden light core of the central defensive array floating over Cedric's panel. His primordial Qi, black, absolute, and devouring, flowed from his meridians into the citadel's glowing runes, instantly dyeing the light barriers a deep, dark violet.
"The Void possesses no temperature, Cedric," Samael's voice adopted the resonance of an ancient master transmitting a divine secret. "One cannot cool what does not exist. Change the polarity of the entire array network. Stop emitting flames outward. Do not block their ice; devour it. Open the absorption circuits and use their own sub-zero pressure to feedback the gravitational density of our shields."
Cedric's eyes went wide, the enlightenment of tactical genius flashing in his mind. He understood his Patriarch's absurd but perfect logic.
"Thermodynamic polarity inversion! Opening spatial sinkhole conduits!" Cedric shouted, his fingers reprogramming the city-grade defense array in real-time.
The change was instantaneous and terrifying. The Morningstar Citadel's immense walls stopped emitting the warm, orange glow that repelled the snow. Instead, the immense energy dome turned a translucent black, a visual abyss. When the enemy fleet's necrotic Black Ice blasts impacted the barrier, they did not crash or explode. They simply slid into nothingness. The wall began to swallow the cold, using the kinetic energy of the enemy attack to thicken its own gravitational shielding. The city plunged into a lethal and dark silence, ready to absorb the impact.
Samael turned toward the shadow projected artificially behind him on the lightning-lit wall.
"Malak," Samael called.
The General of Silence emerged from the dark asphalt, his Soul Harvester scythe glowing with the repressed hunger of a thousand dead.
"At your command, Master."
"Those three Super-Dreadnoughts depend on immense Pure Stellar Ice Crystal cores and flight stabilizers anchored to gravity arrays," Samael decreed, looking toward the horizon where the ships' prows were beginning to tear the clouds. "Your hundred two-dimensional shadows cannot win a frontal war of attrition against fifteen thousand entrenched soldiers, but they can decapitate the hydra from within. Use the Eclipse Veil to camouflage yourselves in the storm. Infiltrate the lead ship, General Varkov's flagship. Kill the navigators in silence. Sabotage the stellar crystal turbines. I do not want those ships to gain altitude again. I want to see those monuments to biomechanical arrogance fall upon my desert."
"Their souls shall be the wheat of my harvest tonight, Sovereign," Malak whispered. In a blink, the colossus of black smoke dissolved into an incorporeal mist and shot toward the frozen north, moving through the astral plane, undetectable to enemy Qi radars.
Fifteen minutes later, the horizon finally broke.
Three cyclopean and monstrous silhouettes appeared through the blizzard. The Glacier-Class Super-Dreadnoughts of the Cryon Third Fleet were beautiful and abominable in equal measure. Their hulls were forged in white steel and crystallized eternal ice, pointed and aggressive. Around the ships, a perpetual snowstorm swirled like a planetary ring, generated by the ships' own engines.
They stopped a mere three kilometers from the citadel walls, hovering menacingly over the desert, eclipsing what little sunlight remained.
The voice of General Varkov Cryon, an expert at the peak of the Saint Realm Stage 7, was amplified by immense sonic alchemy megaphones, rumbling over the city like the thunder that precedes judgment day.
"RATS OF THE DESERT!" Varkov roared, his voice freezing the sand beneath his ships. "I AM GENERAL VARKOV OF HOUSE CRYON! YOU HAVE HUMILIATED THE BLOOD OF OUR EMPIRE IN THE SOUTH! HAND OVER THE IMPOSTOR WHO CALLS HIMSELF DORIAN VYLOS AND THE SLAVES YOU STOLE! DO IT, OPEN YOUR GATES, AND I SHALL GRANT YOUR WOMEN AND CHILDREN A SWIFT DEATH BY PAINLESS FREEZING! RESIST, AND THIS CITY SHALL BE TURNED INTO A MONUMENT OF NECROTIC ICE FOR ETERNITY!"
From atop the black battlement, Samael Morningstar did not use sound arrays to respond. It was not necessary to debate with a dead man. His mere presence as a Dragon King was the only valid response.
"Commander Kael. Eris," Samael said through the clan's mental link, his voice cold as absolute zero. "Begin the hunt."
The lower hatches of the immense Cryon dreadnoughts swung open. Like a swarm of lethal wasps, hundreds of assault pods coated in Stellar Ice began to freefall toward the desert plain, just a few hundred meters from the Citadel walls. Inside those pods were the shock troops and the biological Mutant Horde, ready to disembark and begin the ground siege.
But before the first pod touched the sand, the Morningstar Citadel's colossal obsidian gates burst outward.
Kael Morningstar shot out.
He did not run; the ground in front of the gates turned into a crater of molten glass as the youth used the explosion of his magma Qi to leap over four hundred meters into the air, intercepting the rain of enemy pods.
At the apex of his leap, suspended in the air before the immense enemy war machinery, Kael closed his eyes. His right hand firmly gripped the immense dragon-bone hilt of his claymore.
[Sword Intent: The Blade's Awakening (Level 1)]
At this level of supreme mastery, Kael's intent was still incipient; it did not cut the laws of causality or time, but it "cleansed" his connection with reality. Kael was no longer a warrior swinging a block of steel; he was the embodiment of the cut.
Combat Clarity: Instantly, the sensory chaos of the battlefield—the deafening roar of enemy engines, the blinding snow, the screams of soldiers in the pods—vanished from Kael's mind. He ignored visual distractions. His mind entered an absolute tunnel vision, focused solely and exclusively on the trajectories of the falling pods. Qi Alignment and Selective Silence: The colossal claymore became a weightless extension of his right arm. Magma Qi flowed without the slightest resistance through the steel channels. Kael stopped hearing the war; he only heard his own slow heartbeat and the deep, metallic hum of Magma Fang.
The air around his blade began to vibrate slightly, distorting the light like heat over the asphalt of hell. The red metal of the sword took on a blinding glow, and at the edge of the weapon, an extremely fine line of white light formed, sharpened to infinity, appearing to cut the light itself.
Combining this absolute understanding with his lethal art, Kael unsheathed.
[Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash - The Acoustic Void]
By gripping the hilt, Kael created a microscopic bubble of absolute void around the scabbard. When the immense broadsword left its sheath and drew a gigantic arc in the air, the metallic "click" and the hiss of a hundred kilos of steel cutting the wind were eliminated from existence.
The enemy army only saw a semi-circular flash of silver and incandescent magma expanding in the air.
There was no sound of impact.
The slash, driven by the Aspirant's Pressure (the echo of his Sword Intent's will), did not ignore the armor of the stellar ice pods; it was so unbearably heavy and dense that it instantly overloaded the materials' fatigue.
The first fifty assault pods that fell into the path of Kael's horizontal cut split cleanly in half. For a fraction of a second, the split pods seemed to float. Then, the artificial silence broke as the thermal shockwave of the volcanic clay detonated.
BOOOOOOM!
One hundred elite House Cryon soldiers and dozens of mutant beasts were incinerated at over a thousand degrees Celsius in mid-air before they could even draw their weapons or comprehend what had killed them. Their bodies evaporated, leaving only a rain of red ash and molten metal that fell upon the desert, transforming the icy sand into a bubbling ocean of glass and lava, just as Samael had ordered.
Kael landed in the center of the impact zone, one knee on the ground, the Magma Fang buried in the burning earth. He looked up at the remaining pods still falling, a wild and demonic smile crossing his face.
From atop the walls, Eris, the Destroyer, raised both hands toward the cloudy sky. Beside and behind her, three hundred Mission Pavilion disciples, armed to the teeth with spiritual bows and runic catalysts, channeled their Qi in perfect formation under Cedric's orders.
"Fire at will! Do not let those necrotic aberrations touch our wall!" Eris roared.
Her own Ruin Qi, chaotic and explosive black flames, enveloped the battalion's projectiles. Hundreds of dark fire arrows rose into the sky. Eris's fire, unlike Kael's magma, was designed to pierce and detonate. The arrows completely ignored the armor of the Cryon soldiers who managed to land, penetrating through to their internal organs and burning them from the inside out in small but lethal implosions of ash.
The ground assault instantly became a meat grinder for the invading empire.
However, General Varkov Cryon, observing from the flagship's secure command bridge, did not panic. His face, filled with cybernetic scars, twisted into a sneer of contemptuous disgust. Losing a hundred infantrymen or a hundred mutants was an irrelevant price; they were expendable biomass.
"Primitive skirmish tactics," Varkov buzzed over the fleet's intercom. "Let them enjoy burning scum. Align the main Necrotic Ice Cannon batteries of the three dreadnoughts! Aim directly at the citadel walls. Sustained fire! I want that barrier to freeze, rot, and shatter! Advance the ships!"
The immense stellar crystal engines of the three dreadnoughts roared, increasing their thrust. The three floating mountains of steel and ice began to advance slowly but inexorably toward the city, their main prows charging a foul and black energy that threatened to rot reality itself.
Samael Morningstar, observing the maneuver from his high position on the obsidian battlement, decided it was time to teach them the true disparity of power.
He did not draw a weapon. He did not order an artillery counterattack.
He took a single step into the void, walking through the air that separated the wall from the battlefield, as if there were invisible steps carved exclusively for his boots. With every step the Sovereign of the Void took, the space around him groaned and cracked finely, showing eerie glimpses of absolute nothingness, of the pure interstellar space behind the curtain of the physical world.
Samael slowly raised his right hand toward the three approaching dreadnoughts. His blood, the Blood of the Primordial Dragon, began to boil in his divine veins, granting him an authority over the dimensional plane that transcended the limits of mortal cultivation.
"You have very large ships, General Varkov," Samael whispered, but his voice slid through the cracks in space, resonating directly on the command bridges of all three ships simultaneously. "It is a pity you are blind to the threads of creation."
Samael slid the edge of his hand in a perfect and elegant horizontal movement, as if turning a page in a book.
[Law of Space: Forbidden Frontier]
Exactly one kilometer from the Citadel wall, between the invading dreadnoughts and Kael's vanguard, the air did not darken or explode. It simply split literally.
A perfectly straight and vertical line, three kilometers wide, tore across the horizon, resembling a flawless slash in an invisible mirror separating the sky from the ground. Behind that line, the desert landscape was suddenly distorted, pixelated, as if the reality's texture hadn't finished loading. A pulsating silver-white glow outlined the fracture's edges, revealing a stellar abyss through the rift.
General Varkov, on his command bridge, frowned.
"A flat dimensional shield? Idiots! Accelerate the engines! Our mass will cross any crystal shield they put up! Ram them!"
The three Super-Dreadnoughts increased their speed to the maximum, hundreds of thousands of tons of steel and ice ramming directly toward the glowing line Samael had drawn in the air.
But the Forbidden Frontier was not a solid wall. It was not a defensive shield designed to take hits. It was a Dimensional Discontinuity. Samael had taken the fabric of space-time within that zone and folded it upon itself in a perfect Möbius Loop.
When the immense prow of the Cryon flagship touched the glowing line, there was no explosion. No collision. A deafening and disturbing sound was heard, similar to a gigantic silk tarp being slowly torn in half, followed by an unnatural silence.
The enemy ship's prow crossed the line... and instantly reappeared, emerging from empty air five kilometers further back, at the rear of its own formation.
Visually, it was an aberrant paradox: the ship was being "eaten" by the invisible wall in the front and simultaneously "spat out" by empty space miles behind, traveling at full speed but without moving a single inch forward on the real axis.
The three immense ships were trapped in this state of instantaneous reverse transport. Their engines roared, burning obscene amounts of stellar crystal to advance, but every inch they crossed at the frontier threw them back in a frustrating, eternal, and static loop. Their main cannons fired immense beams of Black Ice, but the destructive energy was also swallowed by the loop and spat out harmlessly toward the arid desert in the rear.
the largest army of the north was paralyzed before a single man.
Samael lowered his hand, keeping the rift stable with a minimum of concentration thanks to his perfect affinity. He looked directly toward General Varkov's trapped command bridge, and their eyes connected through the distorted space.
In his mind, the Primordial Dragon System illuminated his consciousness with the golden light of conquest.
[System: Main Mission "The Baptism of the Empire" Activated.][Objective: Total annihilation of the House Cryon Invading Fleet.][Predicted Reward: Stellar Ice Law Fragment, Saint Grade Plunder, and Official Clan Rank Advancement in the Continental Hierarchy.]
Samael slowly brought his left hand to his waist and unsheathed his Odachi of the Ravenous Eclipse.
The immense and lethal curved black blade left its scabbard, and instantly, the edge hummed with a frequency so destructive that the snowy sky itself shuddered. Samael raised the blade, pointing directly at the trapped fleet.
"You have come to our desert looking for a cowardly impostor to avenge your wounded ego," Samael declared. His voice, driven by the power of a Stage 3 Saint and the Laws of the Void, crossed the ice storm, overcame the roar of the engines, and resonated like a funeral bell in the minds of each and every one of the fifteen thousand Cryon soldiers. "But you have found something much worse. You have found your executioner."
Samael lowered the Odachi's edge toward the battlefront.
"Welcome to the Morningstar Citadel, dogs of the north. This is where everyone comes to die. Legion! Slit their throats!"
The roar of thousands of dark cultivators erupted from the walls. Total war had begun. And for the first time in centuries, the invincible Great House Cryon was going to know the true and suffocating meaning of fear.