Chapter 125: The Ice Wall and the Toxic Rain (The Stellar Ice War - Part IV)
The advance of House Cryon's ground forces had been systematically and humiliatingly crushed. In the vanguard, the light infantry had been turned into molten glass; in the east, the infiltration squads had been devoured by illusions and botanical poison; and in the west, the colossal siege beasts lay like frozen monuments beneath a forest of petrified thorns.
However, the Cryons hadn't conquered states by surrendering at the first bloodletting. Supreme General Varkov Cryon, observing the massacre of his troops from the command bridge of his flagship—still trapped in the aberrant spatial loop of Samael's Forbidden Frontier—clenched his metallic fists until the knuckles of his exoskeleton creaked. His conventional tactics had failed. It was time to drown the Morningstar Citadel in its own arrogance.
Varkov activated the runic panel on his command throne.
"Initiate Operation Eternal Night. Let them drown in blindness."
The orders were transmitted through the fleet's biological communication network. The immense main cannons of the three floating mountains of steel and ice stopped firing their useless concentrated beams at the cold-devouring walls. Instead, the weapons' chambers reconfigured. With a dull, deep rumble that vibrated the air, the dreadnoughts began to release massive spheres of compressed gas directly into the atmosphere surrounding the citadel's South Flank.
The effect was immediate and apocalyptic.
Within minutes, a blizzard of Black Ice in a gaseous state descended upon the southern zone. It was not a simple snowstorm; it was a cloud of necrotic toxicity so thick and dense that it blocked the passage of any starlight or moonlight. The darkness that fell upon the South Flank was unnatural. It devoured the ambient fire Qi, withered any spark of heat, and reduced visibility to absolute zero. Even cultivators in the Origin Realm felt their Divine Senses repelled by the dense mass of freezing rot.
Under the perfect cover of this absolute, lethal blindness, the true stealth attack began.
Two thousand elite Cryon infiltration soldiers, clad in flexible dark ice polymer armor that made not the slightest sound when moving, advanced toward the base of the South Wall. They used no torches or light arrays. Each of these assassins was equipped with biological thermal visors implanted directly into their retinas—a horrendous surgery that allowed them to see body heat signatures through the necrotic storm.
Using grappling hooks forged from frost dragon bones, they began to scale the colossal obsidian walls of the Morningstar Citadel. Their objective was surgical and lethal: silence the defensive runic batteries on that flank, slit the throats of the array engineers in the dark, and open the secondary gates from the inside to allow passage for the heavy cavalry still waiting in the rear.
Silent as death itself, moving with the precision of spiders on a glass wall, the first hundred elite soldiers reached the upper edge and vaulted over the broad parapet of the South Wall. They landed without making a single sound, their poison-stained weapons ready to reap throats.
But they did not find a line of terrified, blind guards firing arrows randomly into the storm. They did not find the chaos their General had promised them.
They found four teenagers waiting for them in the suffocating gloom, standing with a tranquility that chilled the blood far more than the Black Ice itself.
Lys Morningstar, the Fourteenth Sequence.
Maren Morningstar, the Fifteenth Sequence.
Nylas Morningstar, the Sixteenth Sequence.
And Joren Morningstar, the Seventeenth Sequence, who was distractedly twirling twin daggers on his fingers—blades that did not reflect the little residual moonlight, as if they were forged from black holes.
The Cryon squad, seeing the four small heat signatures through their biological visors, did not hesitate. Imperial indoctrination did not allow underestimating the enemy, especially after the massacre on the other flanks. The hundred assassins simultaneously raised their Black Ice sniper rifles, aiming at the teenagers' skulls.
"Blind them all," Nylas said, his voice devoid of any human emotion. As he spoke, his right arm began to emit thick, malignant black smoke that reeked of sulfur and despair.
[Stun Offensive: Purifying Flash]
Lys Morningstar did not draw a physical weapon. He did not chant a long incantation or adopt an elaborate martial stance. He simply raised his right hand to face level and snapped his thumb and middle finger.
The sound of the snap was the detonator for a new dawn.
The world ceased to be dark. The necrotic blizzard that devoured the light was annihilated in a fraction of a millisecond. A sphere of pure, absolute, and relentless incandescent white light erupted from Lys's body. It wasn't an explosion of fire that burned with physical heat, but a deflagration of ultra-compressed photons that literally and conceptually erased all shadows in a perfect twenty-meter radius.
The effect on the Cryon soldiers was catastrophic. Their biological visors were designed and calibrated to catch the slightest trace of infrared radiation in extreme darkness. Upon receiving the direct impact of 50,000 lumens of sacred light straight into their maximally dilated optic nerves, the sensory overload was devastating.
Screams of agonizing pain tore through the sepulchral silence of the snow. The hundred invaders dropped their heavy weapons, bringing their gloved hands to their helmets in desperation, falling to their knees. Their surgically modified eyes literally boiled and burned from the inside out due to the light overload, frying their frontal neural connections.
But Lys's Purifying Flash didn't just punish the flesh. Tiny "threads" of sacred light, shining like golden filaments, could be seen actively chasing the Black Ice mist in the surrounding air, disintegrating the necrotic toxin and dark energies with a purifying hiss that smelled of clean rain and ozone.
With the first wave of the enemy writhing in pain on the obsidian floor, completely blind and disoriented, the true, swift hunt began.
[Self-Buff: Synaptic Overload]
Maren Morningstar closed his eyes, exhaling slowly. He didn't seek power externally; he found it in the core of his own nervous system. He injected micro-discharges of condensed lightning directly into his spinal cord and the base of his brain. The effect was instantaneous. It eliminated the natural biological "lag" of human synapses. His nerves ceased to be simple flesh conductors and became pure plasma fiber optic cables.
When he opened his eyes again, the young Maren had left his humanity behind. His pupils and irises had completely disappeared, replaced by two beacons of pure, blinding white light. Small electrical arcs, like branches of a light tree, sprouted from his temples and the nape of his neck, crackling in the cold air.
For Maren, time fractured. The world around him slowed to an almost complete stop. The blind Cryon soldiers, writhing at normal speed, appeared to him to move in ultra-slow motion, as if submerged in an ocean of thick molasses.
He moved. He didn't run, because running implies inertia and physical resistance. He shifted with a robotic, mathematical, and perfect fluidity. There was not a single millimeter of wasted movement in his biomechanics. As he advanced, he left behind a series of cyan light afterimages—echoes of his own silhouette slowly fading away, accompanied by the scratching sound of radio static.
[Cadence Offensive: Constant Lightning Strike]
Maren drew his preferred weapons: twin short knives, whose blades were not sharpened to cut bone, but designed to be perfect conductors. He coated the metal with a very high-frequency alternating current. The air around the blades hummed like a swarm of furious wasps.
He danced among the blind soldiers. It was a choreography of death where he was the only one who heard the music.
He struck the first Cryon soldier trying to stand up. One. The knife didn't penetrate the ice polymer armor; it didn't even try. It merely scraped the surface, leaving a visible static charge: sparks that stuck to the breastplate like electric fireflies.
The soldier barely felt the impact before Maren spun. Two. A second graze on the same enemy's shoulder, adding another layer of charge, the rhythmic flickering of blue and white light intensifying like a lamp about to explode.
Maren pivoted on his heel, appeared behind the invader, and delivered the final blow. Three.
Upon the third contact on the Cryon soldier's armor, the circuit closed.
The invader's body convulsed violently, arching backward at an impossible angle. A dry, deafening, and unnatural clap of thunder sounded not from the outside, but from inside his own ribcage. The accumulated static automatically detonated in an internal electrical micro-explosion. The discharge completely ignored the resistance of the external armor, traveling directly through bodily fluids to the opponent's heart and brain, frying them instantly. An eerie flash of cyan light escaped through the dead man's open mouth and burned eyes for a millisecond, illuminating his skull from within.
Maren didn't stop to watch the corpse fall. He was already on the next one. One, two, three. Internal thunder. Death. Next.
The Fifteenth Seat slaughtered twenty heavily armored elite soldiers in less than three seconds of real-time. He moved like a specter of light, leaving behind a trail of smoking corpses, the pungent smell of ozone, and the stench of charred flesh and blood.
But the Cryon assassins coming up in the rear, still scaling the wall and not having been directly exposed to Lys's light, heard the thunder and the screams. Realizing the lethal trap their comrades had fallen into, they did not hesitate. They anchored their boots to the obsidian wall and, from the outer edge of the wall, fired sustained blind volleys from their Black Ice rifles toward the residual glare of the massacre, seeking to annihilate the source of light and lightning.
[Area Defensive: Dome of Dawn]
Lys did not flinch at the rain of acidic, piercing ice projectiles. He planted his feet firmly on the stone and expanded his Sea of Consciousness, forcing his Light Qi to materialize on the physical plane.
A perfect hemisphere of solid, semi-transparent light sprouted from the ground, covering the four young Morningstars. The dome was the color of the purest honey gold, and its surface was composed of intricate geometric patterns—hexagons of light that pulsed rhythmically.
The fierce bursts of necrotic ice, designed to melt standard Qi shields, struck the dome. But Lys's barrier was not made of conventional energy; it was woven with super-compressed photons. The ice could not penetrate. The barrier repelled the impacts through overwhelming internal thermal force. Each zone of the dome hit by a projectile suddenly shone with the unbearable intensity of a miniature sun, evaporating and dissipating the cold acid and Black Ice into a harmless and beautiful shower of golden sparks falling on the snow.
"They're trying to fall back," Joren reported with disturbing calm. The young assassin twirled his daggers in a blur of air, watching the remaining soldiers who, terrified, were beginning to unhook their ropes to jump off the wall and flee into the storm. "They're afraid. Their heartbeats are erratic. They're going to jump."
"Let them stay where they are," Nylas replied. His voice sounded deep, distorted by the Abyss Qi beginning to saturate his vocal cords.
[Field Control Debuff: Mercury Heaviness]
Nylas took a step outside the golden protection of the Dome of Dawn. He didn't summon the immense Claw of the Abyss yet; that was a tool of destruction. Right now, he needed dominance. He extended his right arm, wreathed in black smoke, opening his palm toward the squad of a hundred enemy soldiers huddling on the outer edge of the parapet, desperately trying to descend.
He projected his overwhelming demonic will onto the exact coordinates occupied by the enemy battalion. He didn't launch an energy attack; he temporarily rewrote the gravitational constant in that specific sector of space.
Gravity suddenly multiplied by five.
The effect was hellish. The hundred Cryon soldiers, already wearing heavy armor of reinforced polymers, Stellar Steel, and Black Ice, felt as if the sky itself had fallen on their shoulders. They were crushed violently against the massive obsidian slabs of the parapet.
They were not instantly ground into meat paste, but the sudden impact and unbearable weight had an atrocious anatomical cost. The simultaneous crunch of kneecaps popping, femurs splintering under compression, and spinal columns giving way filled the cold air. They fell to the floor groaning, pinned down by their own military gear, completely unable to lift an arm, aim a weapon, or even get on their knees.
The pressure on their chests was so massive that the simple act of breathing became agonizing torture. They felt as if they were submerged up to their necks in an ocean of boiling lead. Nylas's left nostril bled slightly from the immense spatial and mental processing effort—a thin crimson line contrasting with his pale skin—but he did not falter. He gritted his teeth and kept the gravity zone relentlessly anchored.
"Get to work, Joren," Nylas ordered, wiping the blood with the back of his hand.
[Attack: Fangs of the Inverse Breeze + Dance of the Silent Wake]
Joren, the assassin of wind and void daggers, nodded slightly. His body blurred, almost translucent, like a heat mirage on asphalt. He walked right into the altered gravity zone. Because his own passive wind technique negated his body mass and kept him suspended on low-frequency air currents, Nylas's Mercury Heaviness barely affected him. He moved freely in an area where strong men died suffocating under their own weight.
Joren didn't walk; he skated on thin sheets of vacuum suspended millimeters from the ground. He moved in erratic zigzags at a speed unintelligible to the human eye, leaving behind thin threads of pale green wind that shone for an instant before snapping with a dull crack, similar to a distant whip.
Joren's daggers, unlike Maren's, were not made to electrocute, nor even to cut with the friction of steel against flesh. They cut with the absolute absence of friction. Around the black blades of his weapons vibrated a hyper-concentrated, low-pressure vortex—a hole in the reality of the air.
A Cryon soldier, on his knees beneath the crushing gravity, lungs burning and eyes watering, saw Joren's blurry silhouette approach. In an act of pure desperation, the soldier tried to raise his heavy ice spear to block the assassin's advance, his muscles tearing from the effort to move.
Joren didn't even look at the spear. He launched a horizontal thrust, apparently missing completely, the blade passing about five centimeters from the soldier's extended arm. A novice would have laughed at such a pathetic miss.
But the Void Attraction did its macabre work.
The white, translucent swirl spinning furiously around Joren's dagger generated a cataclysmic suction. The air, the fabric of the chainmail, and finally the enemy's flesh and bone were violently sucked toward the invisible edge of the blade. The soldier's arm wasn't cut; it was amputated and flayed as if pulled toward the steel blade by an industrial electromagnet of incalculable force.
Blood spurted out, not splashing downward, but being dragged into the dagger's vortex.
Before the soldier could even process the loss of his limb under the crushing weight of gravity, Joren finished his move. He spun on his heel and passed the dagger near the invader's neck. A clean, fluid motion. The wound on the soldier's neck didn't bleed initially; the skin and tissues were sucked outward, opening the main artery to the vacuum. The man collapsed, joining the sea of corpses.
Joren continued his silent dance. He was a reaping specter in an already mown wheat field. The carnage was absolute and terrifying in its cold clinical efficiency.
Divine light that blinds souls, gravity of the abyss that immobilizes and crushes bones, electricity that bursts vital organs from the inside, and absolute void that sucks away flesh and life in total silence.
The first Cryon boarding and sabotage attempt on the South Flank had been dissolved and massacred in less than five minutes. Frozen blood pooled on the obsidian.
However, the Cryons did not rely solely on numbers. They had hierarchy. And commanders did not stay behind while their men died.
Through the curtain of the black ice storm still swirling outside the walls, a super-heavy reinforcement squad scaled the wall and landed on the parapet with a crash that shook the stone. It was led by an Assault Commander who had reached the peak of the Origin Realm.
This leader was not a common modified soldier. He was a giant wearing immense, grotesque armor of solid, impenetrable Black Ice, so thick he looked like a dark crystal golem. In his left hand, he carried a rectangular shield the size of a bank vault door, specifically designed with hundreds of reflective facets to disperse and reflect light and direct energy-based attacks. In his right hand, he dragged a spiked mace inlaid with stellar steel.
The Commander looked at the shattered, burned, and sucked-dry bodies of his subordinates, and his eyes behind the ice helm burned with murderous hatred.
"Break that dome of light! Crush these children!" roared the Commander, his voice distorted by his armor's breathing filters. He lowered the center of gravity of his enormous body, raised the colossal faceted shield in front to protect against Lys's photon attacks, and charged forward like a runaway freight train. The ice crunched beneath his heavy boots.
Lys Morningstar, evaluating the situation in microseconds, understood that his Light Bolts would be refracted by the giant's crystal shield, dissipating the lethal damage. He took a serene step back, retreating tactically.
"Nylas," Lys said, his tone unwavering. "Flay him."
Nylas smiled. It was a smile that didn't radiate youthful arrogance, but an ancient, dark bloodlust. He dropped the gravitational domain of Mercury Heaviness and channeled the entirety of his Abyss Essence into his right arm. His limb suddenly erupted in pure black flames and dark, screeching static.
[Spiritual Weapon: Claw of the Devouring Abyss]
The unstable, smoking demonic energy materialized and solidified, superimposing itself over Nylas's arm. It transformed into a colossal claw of dense, heavy, and physical shadows, covered in the illusory scales of a nightmare monster. It was not a weapon designed to cut with spatial finesse like Violeta's or Zion's; it was an instrument of abyssal brute force, designed to tear, crush, and consume the very existence of what it touched.
The Cryon Commander, confident in his fifteen-hundred-kilo mass and the impenetrable resistance of his Black Ice shield, did not stop. He rammed shield-first, seeking to crush the fragile teenager against the ground.
Nylas didn't dodge. He planted his back foot and raised the gigantic dark limb.
[Defensive: Shield of Shadowy Jaws]
At Nylas's will, the immense demonic claw grew and widened in front of him, the "fingers" of the claw intertwining to act as a solid barrier of compact, infinite energy.
The Commander's immense Black Ice shield crashed with cataclysmic violence against Nylas's wall of shadows. The shockwave lifted the corpses of nearby soldiers and threw them off the wall.
But the Commander's shield didn't bounce off. There was none of the typical elastic recoil that occurs when two forces collide.
The Claw of the Abyss was not an inert shield; it had the disturbing property of "biting." At the instant of impact, the dense, sticky dark energy warped around the giant's ice shield, trapping it, enveloping its edges, and sticking to it like hardened resin or ultra-fast curing cement.
The Commander, confused by the lack of recoil, grunted and tried to pull his left arm back to retreat and ready his mace. He pulled with all his biomechanically enhanced might.
He couldn't move it a millimeter.
Despite his tonnage, he didn't have the pure physical strength or Qi density to tear his weapon from the insatiable gripping force of Nylas's Claw. He was completely locked into his own attack, with his shield arm anchored to Nylas's immovable shadow, his inertia stopped dead, and—most fatally of all—his right flank and the top of his helmet were completely and ridiculously exposed.
The Commander tried to raise his mace with his free arm in a desperate attack.
But Lys Morningstar, the strategist of light, did not waste such a monumental opening.
While Nylas held the monster in place, Lys reached his free hand straight up toward the sky clouded by the necrotic blizzard, his palm open and fingers extended. His eyes turned to liquid gold.
[High-Power Offensive: Sentence of the Sun]
The dense, suffocating ceiling of black clouds from Operation Eternal Night lit up above their heads for a single, terrifying fraction of a second, as if an angry god had struck a match in the stratosphere.
A pillar of ultra-concentrated light—a perfect vertical beam of white-gold energy and absolutely scorching, unbearable heat—fell from the heavens, tearing through the black clouds like a hot knife cutting silk.
The beam descended at the speed of light and struck directly upon the body of the trapped Cryon Commander.
There was not the slightest resistance from the supposedly impenetrable armor. The extreme thermonuclear heat of the photon beam completely ignored the defensive properties of the remaining Black Ice. The thick ice armor, which required magma to slowly melt, skipped the liquid state entirely; it sublimated, instantly turning into superheated steam.
The gigantic Commander was engulfed in blinding white flames that cast no shadows. The destruction was so instantaneous that there wasn't even biological time for pain signals to reach his brain. There were no agonizing screams, no boiling blood, not even charred ashes left. The man's biologically modified body, his weapons, his shield, and the immense stellar metal of his armor simply evaporated from existence in a burst of pure light.
When the pillar of light vanished a second later, all that remained of the assault leader was a trail of residual light floating in the air like dying fireflies, and a perfectly circular pit of molten, bubbling obsidian stone embedded in the wall's floor.
Nylas slowly dispelled the Claw of the Abyss, letting the black smoke and the smell of sulfur fade into the cold breeze. He flicked an imaginary speck of dust off the pauldron of his dark tunic.
"Clean," Nylas said, looking at the smoking hole where three seconds ago an armored colossus had stood.
The South Flank was secured. The stealth offensive had been annihilated to the last man, and House Cryon's attempt to suffocate the city in darkness had failed miserably before the light and gravity of the Morningstar Clan.
The four young Sequences, breathing calmly, leaned over the battlement and looked straight north, toward the epicenter of the necrotic storm in the sky. There, hovering menacingly, were the three Super-Dreadnoughts of the enemy fleet.
They knew the true and final tactical test was about to begin. Because on the frozen horizon, deep in the bowels of the command bridge of General Varkov's flagship, sealed doors were opening without any alarms sounding, and silent death, armed with a soul-harvesting scythe, was walking unhurriedly but relentlessly straight toward the enemy elite.
Malak, the shadow of Samael, had finally found his ship. And the harvest was about to claim its highest tithe.