CHAPTER 264: THE REMATCH

After their long, intimate session, the couple rested for two hours. It was Sunday.

"I’m bored, Ner!" Khione suddenly declared as they woke, still nestled comfortably in his arms.

"What do you suggest?" Having no particular activity in mind, he decided to let her choose.

"Let’s go have a rematch!" Her ice-blue eyes shone with determination; she wanted a rematch and, if possible, to win this time.

Nero chuckled. "You really hate to lose, don’t you? Let’s go then. I’ll use the Law of Lightning. If you win, I’ll do anything you say."

"Don’t go back on your word!" Khione was fired up.

•••

The tranquil pocket world, a realm of ancient trees and dappled sunlight, was about to become a warzone. Nero and Khione stood facing each other in a wide clearing, the air already crackling with the promise of their clash. The memory of their last match, where his lightning had ultimately trapped her, was a fresh wound for Khione and a point of confidence for him.

"Remember your promise, Ner," she said, her voice cool but her eyes blazing with competitive fire.

"I never break my word," he replied, a confident smirk on his face. Golden lightning immediately began to arc around his body, his feet lifting slightly off the ground as the Law of Lightning thrummed through his veins. "Let’s see how your ice handles a real storm."

He didn’t wait. With a thunderous CRACK, he vanished, employing Flash Step to appear not directly in front of her, but in the canopy above. He rained down a volley of Lightning Javelins, spears of pure electricity that screamed toward her position, intending to pin her down from the start.

Khione was not the same fighter he had faced before. She had analyzed his speed. Instead of a broad shield, she created a rotating, intricate Ice Mirror Array above her head. The javelins struck the mirrors, and to Nero’s shock, they didn’t shatter them. Instead, the mirrors refracted the bolts, sending them careening wildly into the surrounding forest, exploding tree trunks and setting the foliage ablaze.

The fight was on.

Nero became a tempest, a blur of golden light zipping through the trees. He used Flash Step relentlessly, appearing, striking, and vanishing. He carved trenches in the earth with Lightning Slashes and tried to close in with his Current Cage.

But Khione had evolved her strategy. She was no longer a stationary fortress. She became a glacier in motion. With every step, the ground flash-froze beneath her feet. She didn’t try to match his speed; she denied him the space to use it. She cast Frostbind Fields in wide arcs, forcing him to teleport higher or risk being rooted. She fired Arctic Lances not at where he was, but at where he was going to be, her predictive skills honed from their last battle.

The forest around them was being systematically demolished. A stand of pines was reduced to splinters by a misdirected lightning blast. A small creek was instantly frozen solid, then shattered into a million glittering shards by a concussive shockwave. The air was a chaotic mix of steaming mist from melted ice and the sharp, clean scent of ozone.

Nero was sure he had the upper hand. His power was more aggressive, more directly destructive. He gathered his energy for a decisive blow. Soaring above the clearing, he molded the lightning into a colossal, crackling dragon’s head.

"Divine Wrath: Lightning’s Descent!" he roared, hurling the concentrated storm downward.

Khione looked up, her expression not of fear, but of intense focus. She had been waiting for this. She crossed her arms over her chest, and all the cold she had been spreading through the forest coalesced around her.

"Absolute Zero: Cocytus Embrace."

She didn’t create a dome this time. She created a void. A sphere of absolute, soul-deep cold expanded from her, a pocket of anti-energy that didn’t just defend, but consumed. Nero’s magnificent lightning dragon plunged into her sphere and simply... died. The light was extinguished, the sound was swallowed, the energy was negated into nothingness. The silence that followed was more deafening than any thunder.

The effort left her visibly drained, her chest heaving.

This was his chance. Her ultimate defense had a cooldown. With a final, triumphant Flash Step, he materialized right before her, the last vestiges of his lightning forming a Lightning Lash in his hand. He was mere feet away. Victory was his.

But he had forgotten one of her most fundamental elements: the air itself.

As he lunged forward, Khione, with the last whisper of her prana, did not summon ice. She exhaled.

It was not a normal breath. It was the Breath of the North Wind, a technique that required almost no prana, just an innate, perfect command over frozen air. A cone of unimaginable cold, invisible and silent, shot from her lips.

It wasn’t meant to kill or even injure him seriously. But it was a shock far greater than any lightning bolt.

The hyper-cold air hit him square in the chest. It was like being punched by winter itself. His muscles seized, his lungs froze mid-inhalation, and for a critical half-second, his entire nervous system went into paralyzing shock. The Lightning Lash sputtered and died in his hand. He stood frozen, utterly vulnerable.

In that single, suspended moment, a delicate, razor-sharp icicle formed at the tip of Khione’s finger. She pressed it gently against his throat. The touch was as cold as death.

"Checkmate," she whispered, her voice breathless but victorious.

The cold shock faded, and Nero shuddered back to awareness, feeling the pinpoint of cold at his neck. He looked from the icicle to her triumphant, exhausted face, and a slow, incredulous smile spread across his lips. He had been so focused on her grand, icy constructs that he had forgotten the simplest, most fundamental weapon in her arsenal.

He raised his hands in surrender, his laughter a puff of steam in the frigid air. "I yield. You win... fair and square."

He had lost. Not to a cataclysmic iceberg or a monumental blizzard, but by a single, perfectly timed, breathtakingly cold breath. It was a humbling and brilliant reminder that in a battle between masters, victory can come on the air itself. And as he looked at her, proud and victorious, he knew he would gladly listen to anything she said.