Chapter 845: Do you get it?

Whispers of panic spread through the ranks, the heavy iron shields trembling as the warriors looked from Rhys to the silent red-haired woman at his flank, whose fire wisps hissed steadily against the freezing air.

The heavy permafrost gates at the rear of the courtyard groaned open with the sound of grinding ice.

Stepping out into the center of the arena was the Clan Leader of the Frost Demons.

He was a colossal, four-meter-tall titan whose pale-blue skin was completely hidden beneath interlocking plates of crystallized ice armor that radiated intense, oppressive waves of raw ice mana.

Six massive horns of dark azure ice spiraled from his heavy skull, crowning a face etched with deep scars from ancient Spire wars.

In his right hand, he held a massive, double-bladed battleaxe forged from abyss iron, its edges weeping visible mists of flash-freezing frost.

The Clan Leader strode past his trembling sentinels, stopping five paces before Rhys.

He looked down at the young prince, his amber eyes narrowing as he evaluated the boy’s calm posture and the faint green contractual markings glowing along Rhys’s forearms.

"You invoke the name of the Warlord," the Clan Leader said, his voice shaking the frost from his ice armor. "You claim his heritage. But Pho does not grant his favor to weaklings or mortals who hide behind words. If you truly walk in his shadow, if you truly possess the right to demand the sacred tree and the head of this clan, then you will take it through the absolute law of strength."

The Clan Leader raised his massive battleaxe, pointing the frost-covered blade directly at Rhys’s throat.

"Face me, claimant. Prove you carry the blood of a master, or let your bones freeze into the permafrost alongside the fools who came before you."

Rhys did not answer with words.

He slowly reached behind his back, his fingers closing around the leather-wrapped hilts of his twin daggers.

He pulled the blades free with a clean, metallic hiss. The daggers did not crackle with lightning; they remained silent and cold.

As the Clan Leader lowered his center of gravity, his massive thighs flexing beneath his iron armor, Rhys closed his eyes for a single heartbeat.

His mind receded into the quiet depths of his memory, anchoring itself in the harsh lessons he had endured beneath the bastions of the lower floors.

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The memory was cold, smelling of crushed ice, blood, and sulfurous ash.

Rhys stood in the center of an open, windswept training ring, his chest heaving with ragged, agonizing gasps.

His practice tunic was torn to shreds across the ribs, his forearms bruised a deep, mottled purple, and his legs trembling under the sheer exhaustion of twelve consecutive hours of martial drills.

The taste of copper sat heavy on his tongue where a backhand strike had split the inside of his cheek.

Standing across from him, towering like a mountain of blue marble, was Pho.

The Deathfrost Sentinel had his massive arms crossed over his chest, his icy eyes looking down at Rhys with unyielding severity.

Pho carried no weapon; he did not need one. His entire body was a living conduit of primordial ice mana, radiating a cold so intense that the ground within ten paces of his boots was permanently glazed in thick frost.

"You are fighting like a mortal swordsman, boy," Pho’s voice rasped, deep, harsh, and cutting like an iron whip across the open courtyard.

"You swing your blades as if you are trying to cut through meat with brute force alone. You rely entirely on the speed of your wind mana to push you forward, and you treat your water mana like a shield to hide behind when an attack lands. That is the doctrine of elven weaklings who fear the sensation of broken bone."

Rhys had wiped a streak of blood from his chin with the back of his bruised wrist, his grip tightening around the wooden practice daggers until the pine grooved against his palms.

"My mana channels cannot produce fire or earth," Rhys had answered through gritted teeth. "Wind and water are the affinities of my mother’s bloodline. I must use what is within my core."

Pho let out a low scoff that sent a plume of frozen mist into the air, his heavy brow furrowing in disgust.

"Affinities are merely the raw clay, boy," Pho growled, stepping forward until his shadow fell across Rhys’s face.

"An amateur sees water and thinks only of rivers, waves, and fluid evasion. An amateur believes that water must yield to hard stone and sharp iron. A master understands that water is the mother of all physical states. When you strip water of its kinetic warmth, when you force its molecular substance to compress and lock into alignment, water becomes ice. And ice is not a shield, boy. Ice is a weapon that fractures from within."

Pho turned slightly, raising his right hand toward a three-ton boulder of solid granite resting at the perimeter of the training ring.

The stone had sat in the courtyard for decades, scarred by blade strikes and heavy bludgeons, its density capable of withstanding direct siege impacts.

"When I was young, before I united the clans of the frozen wastes, my brothers laughed at my small frame," Pho said, his eyes narrowing into cold, focused slits.

"They believed that raw muscular mass and massive weapons were the only things that mattered in the Spire. They swung axes that weighed as much as an ox, convinced that nothing could withstand their momentum. So, I developed a technique to teach them that the deadliest strike is the one they cannot see until their bones are already breaking."

Pho extended his massive clawed index finger and thumb toward the boulder.

"Every living thing, every piece of stone, every block of iron contains moisture within its porous gaps," Pho continued, his voice dropping into a low, rhythmic cadence that settled deep into Rhys’s memory.

"You do not need to generate a glacier to crush your enemy. You only need to touch the water that already resides inside them."

Pho snapped his fingers.

A sharp sound cracked through the training ring, like the breaking of dry kindling.

Fifty paces away, the massive granite boulder did not shatter from an external impact. Deep within the core of the stone, where microscopic traces of ambient moisture had seeped into the rock over centuries, a single, infinitesimal point of pure, super-compressed ice mana ignited.

A microscopic spark of ice.

Within a microsecond, that infinitesimal point of ice expanded outward with violent, catastrophic pressure. The moisture trapped inside the boulder flash-froze, expanding tenfold in volume and generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of internal hydraulic force.

The three-ton granite boulder detonated from the inside out, disintegrating into a cloud of fine, powdery gray dust that drifted away on the wind, leaving not a single pebble behind.

Rhys had stood frozen, his breath catching in his throat as the fine rock dust settled across his boots.

The sheer efficiency of the strike had bypassed every rule of kinetic defense he had ever studied in the academy.

Pho lowered his hand, turning his cold gaze back onto Rhys.

"Do you understand what you just witnessed?" Pho asked, his voice low and heavy with absolute certainty.