I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1069: The Way Barbarians Fight

Northern chuckled.

“Sense? I’m sorry, you’re so mistaken. Sense is the one thing I don’t have.”

He paused for a moment, deliberately staring down the man.

“Which is why all the nonsense you’ve been spouting really is beginning to piss me off. Look, I don’t even care if you ate your wife and her mother—I just want you to get the hell away from my world. Now, you’ve got me thinking: is there a peaceful way this can be done? Or do we do this the hard way?”

Kryos smiled, but his eyes remained cold as winter stones.

For a moment, he said nothing and just kept that eerie smile fixed on Northern.

A few seconds crawled by, making the air between them grow thick and suffocating. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet enough to make the wind seem like a roar.

“What an interesting human you are.”

He paused and examined his hand, counting fingers. Then he looked up at Northern.

“Right. Seven thousand years. Seven thousand years have passed since I last laid eyes on a human from this mirror world. It’s fascinating to see that humanity has grown from that docile, controlled species into something cocky and arrogant. Though it’s rather tragic.”

He pointed one finger at Northern.

“Since you won’t give me the Mother willingly, I’ll have to eat you to claim it.”

Northern sighed and spread his hands.

“You guys from the underworld have such terrible appetites—not everything has to be eaten, you know? Have you ever had stomach problems before? Where you want to take a dump but it feels like the universe itself doesn’t want your crap in the world?”

Kryos paid no attention to what Northern said. His finger remained pointed forward and…

A sword made of pure crimson light materialized in the air and flew at Northern with deadly speed. But his reflexes were sharp enough—he raised his sword overhead with both hands, and the sand exploded outward in a shockwave. The ground cracked violently as Northern was driven into the earth by the weight of the blade.

He wasn’t dropping to his knees—his body held the strength to shatter ten mountains after all—but the ground couldn’t bear the weight of the crimson sword and was breaking apart beneath him.

The blade was impossibly heavy, pressing down against Northern’s sword. He gritted his teeth and held it back with everything he had. The strain was so intense that veins bulged from his hands and forehead.

He clenched his jaw so hard his teeth might crack, squeezing every ounce of power his muscles could provide.

The spiderweb cracks on the ground kept spreading and spreading, slowly birthing an earthquake.

It was agony to hold the sword at bay. He felt like a stone as vast as the entire sky and as heavy as the world itself was crushing down on him. The best his strength could do was hold it in place—trying to shove it away would require redirecting his power, which could be his downfall.

Northern knew he could heal quickly, knew he was nearly invincible, but he also knew one harsh truth: he could die.

And he had never felt so close to death as he did now, holding that blade with his own, matching its crushing power with everything in him.

Beside him, a clone flickered to life, lunged into the air, and grabbed the sword with both hands. He tore the blade away with colossal force and flung it skyward with a powerful spin that sent it twirling into the heavens.

Titan’s Reckoning hit the ground and rolled, then instantly vanished.

’What?’

Northern had never seen anything like this happen. Using his power had caused so much damage to Titan’s Reckoning that the clone couldn’t even continue to exist.

There was a silver lining, though. Northern had just discovered that the only ceiling for Colossal Force was his own body.

Kryos waved his hand across a small distance in front of him, and all around in the air, crimson light swords began to manifest. The first row spread across the sky, covering vast distance, and the second row followed—at least a thousand blades glaring at Northern, thirsting for his blood and flesh.

“I picked this up from Tishar just now. I heard this is how you all fight here. Such a barbaric way to battle, but since I’m weak myself, what choice do I have? Barbaric me.”

He casually moved his hand and swung it forward. The swords flew ahead with blurring speed.

Northern wasn’t so overwhelmed by confidence that he’d think he stood a chance at blocking them when he’d barely managed to stop one.

In that single moment, he shot away at peak speed, turning into a streak of light and flying a full kilometer in half a second. Following his retreat, a jagged peak of ice tore into the sky—as massive as a mountain.

The swords slammed into the ice mountain instantly, causing the world to roar and burst. Shockwaves of ice and white mist scattered across the landscape and shrouded the red desert. The scenery changed completely from that angry crimson to pristine white, with snowflakes drifting in every direction.

More ice mountains rose with stunning speed as the swords struck them down with even greater speed and power. The peaks exploded and shards of ice flew around the desert, even shooting into the sky.

It didn’t stop, and Northern had to fly farther from the swords while manifesting several mountains in an instant.

It was like the very nature of the terrain had suddenly shifted. These were mountains as large as naturally formed ones—not just one but several of them, erupting from the ground. And hundreds of swords, with power to easily shatter them, simply crashed into them.

The entire desert plain was in so much chaos that it no longer resembled a desert at all—it was becoming something else entirely.

The heat that had once baked the crimson sands bled away in moments, devoured by a spreading cold that seeped into the bones of the world. Every mountain that rose was not mere ice, but the crystallized marrow of the earth itself—white spires laced with veins of frostfire that hissed as they met the desert wind.

The air turned thin and biting. Clouds that had never touched this land before churned into existence above, heavy and bruised with snow. The sunlight dimmed under their weight, casting the battlefield into a pale half-night.

Kryos’s thousand blades hacked into peak after peak, shattering them into avalanches that swept across the dunes in roaring floods of ice and snow. But the destruction did nothing to stop the phenomenon—where one mountain fell, three more tore upward from beneath the sand, as though the desert itself had sworn loyalty to Northern’s will.

It was more than defense. It was an invasion. The red desert was being rewritten—its lifeblood heat driven back, its ancient identity erased under a siege of endless winter. The shifting terrain forced the crimson swords to lose their clean lines of attack, warping their paths, forcing them to detour, to clash into unexpected walls of frozen earth.

Every impact was a catastrophe. Shards of ice the size of warships screamed through the air, embedding themselves miles away. Whole ridges collapsed under the shockwaves, burying what little life clung to this wasteland beneath blankets of glacial ruin.

And yet… this was only the beginning. The mountains weren’t just rising—they were growing, stretching toward one another, weaving their roots of ice beneath the sand. The ground rumbled as if some slumbering giant was turning in its sleep, and a jagged crown of frozen peaks began to ring the battlefield, sealing it away from the rest of the world.

The red desert was dying here.

Kryos stopped smiling.