Novel Full Chapter 300: The Dominion Over The Endless!
Chapter 300: The Dominion Over The Endless!
The antlers of the beasts branched outward like trees made of frozen lightning.
And the air around them slowed.
Not metaphorically. Actually slowed. Each breath exhaled from their nostrils condensed instantly into heavy frost clouds. The ground beneath their hooves crackled with freezing aura that radiated outward in concentric rings, and Bruce could feel it pressing against his movement, a subtle drag on every step, as though the air itself had thickened into syrup.
They weren’t attacking. At least not yet. They were startled.
One elk lifted its head. Its hollow eyes, pale and luminous and utterly empty, locked onto the approaching trio.
Then it screamed.
A deep, resonant call that rolled across the plain like a shockwave, vibrating through the frost and into the marrow. The herd responded instantly, dozens, then hundreds, snow erupting beneath their hooves as they surged into coordinated motion. Not chaotic. Not panicked.
A stampede. Organized and devastating.
Bruce felt the pressure immediately. The freezing aura emanating from their antlers created overlapping zones of deceleration, and even his steps felt heavier as the fields stacked. Hundreds of elk meant hundreds of overlapping aura zones, a compounding effect that would have frozen most S-Rank hunters in their tracks.
Duke angled upward to avoid the brunt. Isolde raised one hand, and frost spiraled from her palm in elegant arcs, forming barriers that diverted the front ranks like river water splitting around stone.
Bruce didn’t wait.
Vitality Sovereign surged outward.
The leading elk faltered mid-charge. Their massive muscles seized as vitality drained from the extremities inward, legs first, then shoulders, then the glow within their skeletal frames dimming like lanterns running out of oil. One by one, they dropped. Not violently. Just collapsing into the snow like ancient trees felled in silence.
The herd behind them stumbled into the fallen bodies, momentum dying in a cascade of tangled limbs and dulled antlers. The plain that had moments ago thundered with hooves became littered with enormous skeletal shapes lying motionless in the frost.
Alive. But powerless.
Bruce’s breathing remained steady. His mind calculated. Thirty thousand monkeys. Several thousand beetles. Hundreds of elk. The mental strain was rising, but manageable.
For now. The snow ahead rippled.
Subtle at first. Then violently. The surface of the frozen plain began to shift in long, racing lines, like something massive swimming beneath it.
Duke’s voice came sharp. “Below!”
The snow exploded upward in towering spirals.
Glacial Leeches.
At first glance they might have resembled ordinary pale worms, but these were enormous. Ten meters long, thick as tree trunks, translucent bodies with visible pulsing organs glowing faintly blue beneath the skin. They moved not by slithering but by burrowing through packed snow at terrifying speed, leaving spiraled tunnels behind them like twisted veins beneath the earth.
Their mouths were circular maws lined with rotating rings of ice-fanged hooks.
And they didn’t leap. They tunneled upward, exploding from beneath their targets with zero warning.
One burst beneath Bruce’s left side.
He twisted mid-air, snow blasting around him as the leech’s maw snapped shut where his torso had been a half-second prior. Another erupted directly under Duke, who vanished in a flicker of spatial distortion and reappeared several meters away, expression unchanged. Isolde froze the ground beneath her momentarily, locking one leech mid-emergence in a column of instant ice.
Bruce extended Vitality Sovereign downward, pressing his awareness into the earth itself.
The leeches within range convulsed. Unlike the monkeys or elk, they resisted, their massive bodies thrashing through the snow for a full half-second before the Authority took hold. Dense vitality. Stubborn biology. They fought the drain the way a drowning man fights the current.
Then their vitality collapsed inward.
They shrank grotesquely, translucent bodies sagging and deflating into pale, lifeless husks half their former size. The glow of their organs faded to nothing.
But more were coming. Dozens. Hundreds. The snowfield became a battlefield of bursting white and pale-blue spirals, leeches erupting from every direction, turning the terrain itself into an ambush.
Bruce expanded his Authority further. The five-kilometer radius pulsed outward, and every leech entering the field faltered instantly. They erupted from the snow with killing intent and dropped before their maws could open.
One by one. Wave after wave. Erupt. Drop. Erupt. Drop.
The snowfield settled. Silence returned. Only the wind remained, whistling through the empty tunnels the leeches had carved.
Bruce hovered briefly, scanning outward with Life Glance.
Millions of life signatures. Deeper. Denser. The scale of this Labyrinth was genuinely absurd, not a dungeon but a world, teeming with layered ecosystems compressed into a space that had been feeding and growing and evolving unchecked for years.
Duke looked back at him, eyebrow slightly raised. “You sure you’re not enjoying this?”
Bruce gave a faint, controlled smirk. “Ask me again after the SS-Ranks.”
Isolde’s gaze shifted toward the distant horizon. The temperature, already brutal, dropped further. Not gradually. Sharply. A deeper cold. A territorial cold, the kind that didn’t belong to weather or climate but to something alive, something that had claimed this region and saturated it with intent.
“We’re entering their zone,” she said quietly.
Far in the distance, something howled.
Not like a beast. Like a warning, long, low, and deliberate, carrying across the frozen expanse with the clarity of a voice that wanted to be heard. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t aggression.
The Everwhite Abyss had tested them with numbers, endless tides of A-Ranked fodder, S-Ranked swarms, environmental ambushes designed to overwhelm through sheer density and attrition.
The sky darkened again, but this time it wasn’t the glittering density of black crystal-shelled beetles that blotted out the pale light. It was something thinner. Paler. More unnatural.
The first shapes peeled themselves from ice-cliff ridges high above, detaching from cavern mouths like strips of living frost. Then more followed. And more. Thousands upon thousands of pale forms unfurling into the air, their descent eerily silent for a heartbeat before the wind began to tremble beneath the rhythm of their bat wings.
They came like a living storm.
’Pale Screechers.’
Eyeless. Skin stretched thin and translucent over gaunt, elongated frames, faint veins visible beneath pallid flesh like cracks beneath ice. Their wings were long and narrow, more blade than membrane, slicing the air in eerie synchronization. Where eyes should have been, there was only smooth, curved bone that gave their faces a blank, unfinished horror.
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