CHAPTER 443: ICE, BLOOD, DEATH (2)

The frozen plains cracked wider as the three monsters hurled themselves at each other, carving wounds in the world with every impact. The very air seemed to break under the pressure. Icebergs shattered into powder. Runes flickered like dying stars. The domain became a storm of blood, death, frost, and rage that no mortal could hope to survive.

Tyrant slammed its colossal paw downward. The claws scraped through the intertwined domains like they were fabric. Reality shrieked as bloodlight and necrotic fire were ripped apart in one brutal movement. Trevor darted aside just in time, his body dissolving into crimson mist before reforming atop a floating shard of ice. Lamair, slower but impossibly durable, braced himself behind crossed axes and took the hit. The force sent him sliding backward, carving a long trench in the earth.

Trevor looked down at him with a wicked grin. "Still standing, old corpse?"

Lamair spat out a piece of frozen blood. "I’ve died eight times before my evolution. A beast is nothing."

Tyrant heard that. The corrupted wolf’s fur bristled, each strand sharp like icy wires. Frost crawled beneath its paws as the creature lowered itself, muscles coiling. Its eyes flared a deeper red, then a ghostly pale blue. Its domain trembled.

Trevor’s smirk vanished. Lamair’s grip tightened.

The beast had reached its threshold.

The air thickened as the temperature plunged far below freezing, each breath crystallizing instantly. The wind died. The frost domain darkened. Tyrant’s body expanded, bones cracking and rearranging beneath the metal plates grafted into its flesh. Its legs elongated. Its spine lengthened. Its jaw split slightly at the edges, revealing rows of crystalline fangs. Its breath fogged the ground in spirals of white fire.

Chunks of corrupted Saint energy rained from its body in unstable pulses that warped the air around them.

"Trevor," Lamair said, voice low and solemn for once. "He’s ascending."

"Don’t joke." Trevor flickered into smoke, reappearing beside him. "Corrupted beasts don’t ascend."

"This one... does."

Tyrant took a step.

The world broke.

Cracks of glowing frost ripped through the battlefield in spiderweb patterns, splitting glaciers, slicing through the domains, freezing undead mid-motion. Skeletons shattered as they were caught in the expanding pulse. Shadows froze solid. Even Trevor’s blood rivers stiffened like crimson glass.

Trevor hissed. "This is bad."

Lamair didn’t answer. His eyes were focused entirely on the wolf that now towered above the ruins, an abomination crowned in ice and cybernetic light.

Tyrant’s new form loomed like a myth carved from nightmares. Six frozen horns jutted from its skull, glowing with pale sigils. Its wings, two massive constructs of ice and metal, spread open for the first time, shaking off dustings of black snow. Each wingbeat released a gale that tore craters into the ice plains.

And then... the beast spoke.

Its voice was distorted, layered with static and echo, like a dying machine trying to mimic a god.

"Master... commands... annihilation."

Trevor’s breath hitched. "He can talk? Leon turned him into this?"

Lamair clenched his axes. "He will suffer for it."

Tyrant’s wings snapped closed, and in the next instant, it vanished.

A shockwave exploded behind Trevor before he even realized what had happened. Something slammed into him, something cold and heavier than a mountain. Trevor’s body shot backward at terrifying speed, smashing through glaciers like they were panes of brittle glass. Blood sprayed from his mouth in misty arcs as he coughed violently in midair.

"Trevor!" Lamair roared, his voice cracking the frost.

Before he could reach the vampire, Tyrant appeared in front of him. Not teleportation. Just speed that broke the sound barrier so violently it shattered the ice plateau beneath them.

The wolf’s massive jaws opened.

Lamair felt death, not the kind he ruled, but the kind that ended even kings.

He crossed his axes just as Tyrant bit down.

The world flashed white.

The impact hurled Lamair across the plains, his body carving a trench of pulverized ice. His arms trembled violently. His axes were shaking. Cracks crawled up the hafts. His bones vibrated with each heartbeat.

He could barely stand.

Trevor appeared beside him, coughing blood, one arm limp. "Alright. That’s... new."

Tyrant stood in front of them, wings spreading wider, ice forming halos around its horns.

The beast lowered its head, breath pouring out like a miniature blizzard.

Trevor flicked his smoke away from his eyes. "He’s trying to kill us."

Lamair growled. "Then we must push him to his breaking point."

Trevor wiped his mouth and smirked again, blood dripping from his teeth. "Or die trying."

The corrupted wolf charged.

Trevor dissolved into blood-mist, reforming beside the charging beast, his scythe carving a crimson crescent across Tyrant’s flank. Lamair swung his axes in a crossing arc, releasing a shockwave of deathly force that temporarily staggered the beast.

Tyrant roared and erupted with absolute zero frost. The air froze mid-flight. Blood turned to crystal. Shadows shattered.

Trevor flickered behind it, slicing through the frozen air with a snarl. "Come on, mutt! Let’s dance!"

Lamair leapt high, roaring, his undead puppets dragging themselves free from the frozen abyss to join him.

The three forces collided again.

Claws met steel. Frost met death. Blood met corruption.

And at last, finally...

Tyrant began to crack.

The corruption in its veins twisted violently. Its horns flickered. Its wings stuttered like failing machines. Its movements grew unstable, savage, erratic, desperate.

Trevor’s eyes gleamed. "He’s reaching it."

Lamair tightened his grip. "The breaking point."

The battlefield trembled.

The beast howled.

And something inside Tyrant shattered.

But it wasn’t what they were expecting. It was the least of what they were expecting.

When beasts reached the Platinum rank, they could gain humanoid forms. That was true for all of Ethan’s spirit beasts. Trevor’s spirit beast, Apole, also had a humanoid form. Lamair’s spirit beast, Qirantha, also had a humanoid form.

But Tyrant didn’t have one. This was strange since his master was at the Saint Realm. Spirit beasts and their masters weren’t that far from each other in power levels.

"Shit! He’s now going through an evolution!" Trevor practically screamed as he backed away from the colossal beast.

"No wonder. It seems we would have to go all out, but even that wouldn’t do much. Apole and Qirantha too are..." Lamair said, though his expression turned comical at the end.

"Where are... don’t tell me..."

"..."

"What the fuck! Is that even possible?" Trevor exclaimed when he realized what Lamair was hinting at. Apole and Qirantha, a death skull and a spider queen, were in an intimate relationship.

"Focus, idiot!" Lamair shouted at Trevor.

"Ugh! Why did you have to bring it up!"

Trevor retorted, but the words barely left his mouth before the change overtook him like a rising tide of ancient instinct. His hair lifted as if gravity had suddenly forgotten him. Every strand quivered with power, shifting from white into a shimmering gradient of crimson at the tips. The air shuddered around him. His wounds didn’t just close; they stitched themselves together with threads of liquid blood that sizzled and evaporated once they finished their work.

His pupils thinned to razor slits. The red in his eyes deepened until it looked less like color and more like an abyss lit from within. That eerie glow swallowed the whites of his eyes, leaving only crimson emptiness that pulsed with hunger.

His skin paled further, losing all semblance of mortality. It became the color of moonlit bone, smooth and cold, almost reflective. Then the armor across his torso dissolved into drifting flakes, as though rejecting the thing he was becoming. Every inch of exposed flesh lit up with crimson markings, tribal sigils shaped like twisting arteries, moving subtly beneath the surface as if alive. Each line pulsed with light, beating in sync with the thunderous rhythm of his heart.

His fangs lengthened into elegant, vicious scythes. His hands, once merely clawed, sharpened into weapons of lacquered blood-red keratin. When he flexed, they hummed with a metallic resonance, hungry for violence.

Then the world convulsed.

"True Blood Arts... Ancestral Form!"

His roar was no longer a voice. It was a pressure wave. Snow vaporized off the ground. Rocks cracked. Lamair had to brace himself with both axes to remain standing.

Trevor’s aura erupted outward in a dome of crimson light that clawed at the sky. The air thickened until it felt like they were underwater in a sea of blood. Tyrant’s evolution stalled mid-surge, frozen for a precious heartbeat under the oppressive weight of ancient vampiric lineage.

Trevor’s hair finished its transformation, bleeding into a deep, luxurious crimson that mirrored fresh-spilled blood under torchlight. A mark surfaced on his forehead, a delicate, swirling insignia shaped like a blooming rose made of thorns, gleaming with quiet radiance.

Behind him, the aura condensed.

At first, it was a silhouette. Then it breathed.

A titanic avatar loomed, humanoid, but only in the way a nightmare is vaguely familiar.

Its ears extended like elegant spears, tapering into lethal points. Its fangs jutted past its jawline, dripping with spectral blood. The claws were long enough to rake the clouds if they reached upward.

And the tails... six in total, each one the size of a tree trunk, trailing behind it like living scythes. They moved independently, carving trenches through earth and stone with every casual flick. The air hissed where they passed, leaving red afterimages that hung like ghostly scars.

The beast opened its mouth and let out a soundless scream, one that seemed to vibrate directly in the bones, an echo of some primordial predator from before the dawn of civilization.

Trevor stood within its shadow, transformed into something regal, terrifying, and impossibly ancient. The ground withered beneath his feet. The air quivered. Even Tyrant’s frozen form trembled.