Like a black star, the Guardian's carcass plummeted at high speed, tearing through the lower layers of the mountain as it spun, still crackling with the last traces of electricity. Twenty meters of pure gravitational distortion and spiraling shadows spun like a living drill until it struck the ground with a cataclysmic impact.
The ground shook. Rocks were launched like projectiles. A muffled roar echoed through the cavern's entire structure.
And then, the silence was broken... by screams of pain.
Dórian was no longer struggling. He was unconscious.
The mass of flesh and darkness fell directly on top of him and Seraphine.
Seraphine spun her spear, instinctively trying to open a channel of wind. A turquoise shield shimmered around her for an instant, activated by the core in her armor, but it wasn't enough. The weight, the energy of the impact, and the explosion of debris crushed everything around them.
Dórian was thrown to the side, violently hitting a rock that cracked under his weight. His sword, still in hand, was hurled back against his abdomen with brutal force, piercing between the armor plates. The dry sound of bones breaking filled the air.
He tried to rise... but his body no longer obeyed.
Only blood dripping from his lips and fading eyes.
Seraphine coughed, her right arm hung broken, her left knee bent at an unnatural angle. Protected by the artifact. A shimmering translucent shield had absorbed most of the impact, but at a severe cost in prana. Just like Glenn, her body collapsed to the ground, convulsing, eyes milk-white and foam dribbling from her mouth—also a victim of energy collapse.
The serpent, still alive but wounded, mutilated, and agonizing, twisted with erratic movements. The fall had hit it both physically and dimensionally.
Glenn's falling body was wrapped in a bluish trail. A carefully aimed blast of ice slowed his descent, preventing his head from smashing directly against the rocks.
Aeloria appeared just above, his expression a mix of frustration and awe.
'An early Awakened…' he murmured, almost in disbelief. 'With this level of power, it's madness. What kind of aberration are you, Glenn…?'
The mage spun his staff in his hands, his eyes already locked on the staggering creature.
The ground cracked with Aeloria's first step.
A pale blue magic circle covered the field.
"Absolute Ice Dome," Aeloria whispered.
Dozens of pillars burst forth with violent cracks. Ancient, dense, magical ice. The walls began to grow, accelerating until they formed a perfect dome around the Guardian.
The space trembled as the creature tried to escape. A portal opened… and was instantly sealed by a vertical ice lance that crushed it.
Inside the dome, everything seemed slower, sluggish, frozen. Literally.
The creature hissed, weakly. Glenn's attack had left a gaping hole in its torso, from which dark vapors and a sludge as thick as oil seeped. The shattered rib trembled with the effort of holding its shape.
'Looks like Glenn figured it out,' Aeloria thought. 'This thing wasn't made for direct combat. It's a living trap. Slippery. Cowardly. Deadly by tactics, numbers, and manipulation.'
He spun his staff. Ice stakes emerged from the top, sides, and floor of the dome.
"But without your portals... without your serpents... without your advantage... you're nothing."
The creature tried to compress itself, to escape.
A smaller portal opened beneath it.
Aeloria slammed his staff into the ground.
Dozens of ice lances pierced the portal instantly, shattering it like glass. The serpent screamed, a high-pitched frequency that sliced the eardrum. But the mage didn't flinch.
The Absolute Ice Dome sealed the creature like a final tombstone. Thick, translucent, filled with lances and stalactites, it adapted to even the smallest movement within it. Every attempt the Guardian made to open a portal was intercepted—ice spears sprouting from the walls, ceiling, and floor like sacred daggers, tearing through the dimensional vortices before they could fully form.
Cornered, wounded, with no way out, the Guardian finally charged in for a direct attack.
Its deformed jaw opened sideways, the facial bones cracking with dry pops. Inside, three tongues twisted—though they weren't muscles, but three black serpents, symbionts now revealing their true purpose.
Aeloria's eyes widened.
"Symbionts... even it's a victim of itself."
The tongue-serpents reared back. Their black eyes glowed for a second, and then the violet beams began firing, like homing lasers, ricocheting off the dome's walls at unpredictable angles. One mistake, one moment of hesitation, and he'd be impaled.
Aeloria dodged masterfully at high speed. But he wasn't the one moving.
It was the ice.
Thin crystalline blades formed beneath his feet, advancing and retreating with mathematical precision. Every time the lasers approached, the ice mass pulled him to a new safe spot, while other lances emerged to deflect or block the attacks.
He was the center of the dome. The conductor of a glacial symphony.
The serpent fired more intensely. Now the three beams came together, crossing like a web of death. Aeloria counterattacked.
"Iron Maiden..." he whispered, raising his left hand.
The dome walls trembled.
Thousands of ice lances emerged from every direction. Some as thin as needles, others as thick as columns. The space between them was narrow, claustrophobic—a living torture machine.
The beams slashed, destroying dozens of lances per second, but others took their place. Aeloria kept his eyes focused, staff in hand, channeling mana and prana in perfect synchrony with the rhythm of battle.
Deep down, a realization struck him.
'That's why… that's why no creature ever tried to conquer this mountain.'
'It's not just the Guardian… it's the symbiont serpents. If any of them escaped, they'd take control of another creature.'
'In the end, this mountain was sealed from both sides. No one came in and no one got out.'
The Guardian roared. The serpents snapped their fangs. One of the lances pierced one of the mouths, driving into the creature's skull base. It shrieked. And Aeloria didn't hesitate.
"Die, YOU BASTARD!"
He struck the staff against the ground.
The entire base of the dome trembled.
Spiraling columns of ice surged upward around the Guardian, sealing its body in multiple layers of crystal. The pressure increased by the second, like a divine press.
Aeloria gritted his teeth. The ice columns narrowed, crushing the monstrous body inch by inch. But the creature, even cornered, hadn't given up.
And then... it broke.
A grotesque crack reverberated through the dome's walls. Like a lizard amputating its own tail, the Guardian severed part of itself.
Nearly fifteen meters of its serpentine body were discarded—a useless carcass that collided with the frozen spears and collapsed to the ground.
The creature, now reduced to just over five meters, pulsed with uncontrollable energy.
Its speed quadrupled.
A blur of black and violet streaked through the dome, weaving past Aeloria's projectiles—crystal arrows and spikes conjured in quick succession, all attempting to intercept its path.
A dance of life and death.
A game of cat and mouse—except both were predators.
Aeloria slid across the ice, propelled by thin, frozen plates that extended beneath his feet.
The creature skimmed the ground, slithering with lethal precision, aiming for a fatal strike.
Ice arrows tore through the air, but they weren't enough. The creature drew closer with each passing second, targeting the mage's greatest weakness—his physical fragility.
Until—
It succeeded.
With one of the three remaining tongues in its mouth, the serpent lunged. The small tongue hissed—but this time, no laser emerged. Instead, the entire creature pulsed with darkness and spatial distortions.
The Guardian's head expanded and twisted—its shadowed skull stretching beyond the bounds of reality.
Black flames exploded around its body.
And from five meters... it grew to fifty. A deformed silhouette of flesh and shadow, flickering between solid and illusion.
The entire mountain trembled when the creature's mouth found its target. It closed around Aeloria, and all that remained was a dry, muffled scream.
Sharp.
Desperate.
And then gone.
Two severed legs lay on the ground, bitten off by the beast.
The ice dome shook and collapsed.
The spears melted, the walls crumbled, the ceiling shattered into crystalline shards.
Even Dália's protective globe—resilient since the start of the battle—finally gave way, cracked and broken.
Time passed, and all that remained was the silence of a devastated battlefield.
The serpent raised its head.
Colossal. Victorious.
Surveying its nest in ruins.
But then...
something changed.
Its body trembled.
A bluish glow began to spread across its scales. The deep black and violet sheen of its body slowly shifted into a feverish, piercing, unnatural blue.
The creature writhed. Its massive form rolled across the cave floor as if something tormented it.
It opened its mouth and released a disfigured roar.
But there was nothing it could do.
The cold was coming from within.
From its core, an absolute ice nucleus began to expand.
The Guardian, now nearly fifty meters tall in its monstrous form, began to freeze from the inside out. Inch by inch.
First the neck. Then the chest.
Each scale cracked, releasing white vapor.
Its eyes widened in pure terror—the creature finally understood what had happened.
A sacrifice. A trap. A checkmate.
With a final scream that echoed like thunder buried in ice,
The Guardian of the sixth mountain became a statue of ice.
A fifty-meter sculpture of pure, translucent frost, with traces of agony frozen at the exact moment of its ruin.
All around, the symbiotic serpents convulsed, their bodies twisting, severed from the hive mind. One by one, they perished—some melting, others petrified by the residual cold.
For long seconds, only the sound of ice cracking remained.
Then, something moved.
A figure slipped out of the Guardian's mouth.
Dragging itself forward with nothing but its arms.
Aeloria emerged.
His body was drenched in blood.
Skin melted as if he'd fallen into acid.
His torso still breathed—still alive. But his legs were gone.
Severed by the creature's bite.
He crawled inch by inch, fingers digging into the ice like hooks, until he made it out completely.
His face was pale. But his eyes burned with savage fire.
"Die, you wretched bitch," he whispered, spitting blood.