Chapter 369: Trapped [1]

’So I was righ—!’

Soren activated Phantom Step and his body blurred to the side just as a blade sliced through the space where his neck had been. He reappeared a few meters away, his feet skidding against the ground.

Another strike came from behind. He twisted, dodged, and moved again. The darkness made it hard to track the attackers, but his high perception and Eyes of Truth gave him just enough clarity to see their outlines.

’...There are three of them.’

He tried to keep his gaze locked on the glowing text floating before him, but the relentless barrage forced him into a constant sequence of dodges and evasive steps. The sharp whistle of condensed spatial blades tore through the void around him, shaving off his margin for error.

While his body blurred across the pitch-black field, his mind raced through the tactical situation. Five hostiles had arrived at their location. If three were trapped in this domain with him, that left two unaccounted for outside.

The Emperor was likely engaging Malakor. The remaining member was almost certainly going after Ethea.

Though the bond signaled that she was safe for now, the mere possibility of her being targeted made his blood run cold. His eyes narrowed, burning with a sharp, murderous intensity. If the Emperor had trapped Malakor in a similar spatial isolation, Ethea would be completely defenseless against an enemy.

He couldn’t afford to waste a single second in here.

Without holding back, Soren unleashed Overlord’s Aura. A crushing wave of dominant, suffocating pressure exploded outward from his body, heavy enough to momentarily distort the dark space around him and halt the attackers. Simultaneously, he activated his amplification, boosting his strength, speed, and reaction time. He closed his left eye for a moment and opened it again, activating Nature’s Eyes on it.

’...One attacking, one hiding, and one in the sky.’ Although using two different abilities in two different eyes felt a bit weird, he managed to spot their positions easily and used the brief delay to skim the rest of the floating window before dismissing it.

’So I just have to kill the ability user to get out?’ he thought, his gaze sweeping across the three outlines as he traced their mana flows and life forces. The one floating in the air was feeding a continuous current into the surrounding void. ’Found him.’

Although he couldn’t exactly see them, he could tell they were staring back at him.

Swoo-!

Just as Soren was about to launch himself upward, the space around his legs violently warped, twisting his ankles in opposite directions. He braced his core, gritting his teeth against the shearing torque, and barely dodged sideways as a spatial rift snapped shut where his lower body had been.

[Stop.]

An alluring voice echoed directly inside his head, imposing a sudden weight on his body. He froze for a split second, the command sinking into his muscles before Indomitable Soul flared, shattering the control.

CLANG!

Two thick, dark iron chains shattered the pitch-black space right where he had stood a moment ago. Missing their mark by a fraction of an inch, they recoiled instantly and shot straight up into the void after him.

Soren didn’t react at all; instead, he just flicked his fingers.

A flash of rime erupted from his hand, tracing the air like pale blue lightning. The frost rapidly expanded upon contact, creeping down the links of the dark iron chains and snapping their momentum mid-flight. Heavy, brittle blocks of ice encased the metal, dragging them down into the floorless dark. Around him, even the thin atmospheric vapor froze into suspended, razor-sharp crystals, momentarily locking the air in place.

Perhaps recognizing that raw physical strikes were useless against him, the attackers soon changed their style.

Fluctuations in the void signaled the deployment of elemental energy. Yet, within the pocket dimension, these constructs remained completely invisible until they breached his immediate reaction radius.

So he kept moving, twisting his body through the featureless air.

Space kept warping around him with a sickening pop while spatial blades carved through his flank, severing his amplified frost armor as if it were parchment and leaving a bloody gash across his body. Before the wounds could even bleed properly, follow-up waves of acid washed over, sizzled against his skin, and cracked the remnants of his ice casing. Chains tore through his skin and bit off his flesh each time.

He ignored the burning agony completely, his expression cold, his eyes indifferent.

’...Now.’

With a mental command, he summoned his beloved Nightfrost, inverted his momentum mid-air, and drove himself straight down, slamming the butt of the weapon into the void.

An overwhelming shockwave of glacial energy exploded outward in every direction. Massive, jagged spires of blue-white ice erupted from empty air, expanding like a frozen forest to pin down the immediate terrain and forcing the two grounded attackers onto the defensive.

Without wasting a single breath, Soren planted his boots on the freshly forged ice pillars, executing a series of rapid treading steps to launch himself back into the sky toward the domain caster.

Mid-ascent, the ambient gravity suddenly inverted and multiplied tenfold. A suffocating pressure slammed into his chest and shoulders like a falling mountain, threatening to shatter his momentum and drag him into the abyss below.

Soren’s face never lost its stone-cold composure.

’...Frozen Moment.’

In an instant, the world shuddered into a complete standstill. The crushing gravitational pull froze, the drifting frost locked in place, and in the fraction of a millisecond stolen from time itself, Soren bridged the remaining distance.

He materialized directly before the spatialist, his spear already coiled to strike.

Whoosh-!

The weapon thrust forward, a streak of blue piercing through the dark space. The spear tip drove cleanly through the target’s sternum, exiting their back. In the very next heartbeat, frost exploded outward from the blade, turning the target into a motionless block of ice.

"Tch."

Soren clicked his tongue as he realized he had hit the wrong target. Because at the last second, he ’saw’ it. The spatial user had reached out through the void and swapped places with the one with the blade.

Swoosh-!

The gravity increased another tenfold, and another command echoed in his mind at the same time.

’Fall!’

’Damn it.’