Chapter 1350: One Soul in Each Hand

Seraphina assumed she’d knocked him senseless.

She swung what she considered a "fast" claw through the water and smacked the defenseless Vaelor straight out of the sea. Then she kicked off the surface and leaped into the sky, beating her wings repeatedly to fling the water from her scales.

The others thought Seraphina had gotten even stronger.

With a body that massive, she had somehow managed to hit Vaelor underwater.

Only Elowen watched the dragon’s body fly out of the sea with pity in her eyes.

"His soul is gone."

She studied Vaelor’s empty eyes and reached her conclusion.

"Vaelor has been dead for a while."

Seraphina stopped shaking off the water.

He’d been dead for a while?

Then had she spent all this time fighting a corpse?

Everyone caught their breath. No matter how strange the battle had been, if Vaelor was truly dead, then it was over.

Before they could relax, the ice beneath them began shaking violently.

Random cracks appeared around their feet. A rapid series of snaps came from below as their entire foothold broke apart into chunks of varying sizes.

Everyone bobbed up and down with the floating ice. When they looked into the water, they finally found the culprit.

A shark had sunk its teeth into the ice.

Crunch!

Its jaws closed, crushing the ice in its mouth. The fragments drifted away on either side, but the shark wasn’t finished. It turned its head and searched for a larger piece nearby.

Find a chunk. Bite it apart.

It was completely absorbed in using the ice to sharpen its teeth.

Namyanna stared silently at the shark.

It looked strangely familiar.

But where was the creature that had been riding on its head?

Noticing everyone’s attention, the shark turned and flashed them a neat row of white teeth. Then it lowered its head and went right back to sharpening them.

At that moment, the mantis shrimp was hiding in a dark cave far away.

It braced its left arm against a reef to steady its aim. Its right arm drew back slightly as the forearm joint compressed lower and lower. The moment its target entered range, it would fire.

Everyone on the ice continued watching the shark.

Honestly, it was pretty cute.

Too bad it had picked the wrong people to mess with.

Namyanna raised a hand and recalled her trident. Locking onto the shark as it continued chewing the ice, she hurled the weapon forward.

The trident skimmed over the water. Its blades sliced through every piece of ice in its path as it flew straight for the shark’s head.

The mantis shrimp was already prepared.

Time to punch.

Its right arm slammed into its left, launching a mass of compressed air from the front. The projectile shot through the water, burst above the surface, and raced toward the shark.

The trident was directly in its path.

Still not entirely confident, Namyanna opened her other hand.

The scattered ice around the shark began glowing icy blue. Drawn together from every direction, the fragments gradually sealed off its escape routes.

The trident was only a few feet from the shark.

The compressed air struck it first.

The forces of the projectile and the trident canceled each other out, forming a transparent ring at the point of impact. The ring expanded through the air, shoving aside all the floating ice nearby.

The trident vanished from where it had been struck. It flew across a vast stretch of sea before finally embedding itself in a distant beach.

The shark had avoided the trident’s point, but it failed to escape the surrounding ice. The fragments were already pressing against its body, and intense cold spread rapidly across its skin.

Its tail froze first.

Then its body, fins, and head.

Within seconds, the shark hung rigid in the water.

Elowen glanced at Namyanna, then looked down at the shark. Apparently, she wanted to try it herself.

She casually formed an even colder sphere of energy and tossed it down.

The frozen shark had no way to dodge. The sphere released its energy directly into the shark upon contact, and ice spread inward from its skin.

The shark died instantly.

Its body slowly rolled over until its white belly faced the sky, floating among the broken ice.

As everyone took in the pitiful sight, the same thought occurred to them.

Vaelor’s father was probably about to have a very bad day.

The mantis shrimp in the underwater cave didn’t fire again. It lowered its arms, pushed away from the reef, and swam alone into the depths of the sea.

Back in the palace, Thalvyr held Vaelor’s soul in one hand.

His fingers gradually tightened, squeezing the soul in his palm until it warped out of shape. For a moment, Thalvyr truly considered crushing the child then and there.

The palace doors slowly opened.

The mantis shrimp paddled its tiny legs and followed the current into the great hall, stopping before the throne.

Thalvyr gave it a puzzled look.

The mantis shrimp raised its two large claws and waved them from side to side, babbling out a long string of incomprehensible sounds. Thalvyr listened in silence, then nodded slightly and dismissed it.

"How tragic."

He lowered his gaze and idly toyed with Vaelor’s soul, though there was little grief in his voice.

"How did that child manage to die just like that?"

Thalvyr looked up again at the mantis shrimp, which had yet to make it through the doors.

"You should start over too. Your little friend is dead, so it hardly seems right for you not to die once and liven things up."

The mantis shrimp went rigid.

Blood-red energy seeped from its body and rapidly spread through the seams in its shell. A round soul drifted out of the body and stopped before Thalvyr.

Only after the soul had fully separated did Thalvyr release the lifeless mantis shrimp.

He tapped the armrest of his throne in a steady rhythm.

Before long, several blank "templates" appeared in the center of the hall.

Thalvyr held Vaelor’s soul in one hand and the mantis shrimp’s in the other, then extended both hands. Each soul entered one of the empty bodies.

The surfaces of the templates began to writhe.

Their fingers and limbs reacted one after another. They seemed to have regained the ability to move, but their rigid condition hardly looked any different from death.

The two souls, however, were eager to get started.