Chapter 961

Chapter 961: 961

A triple trap, pinned, crushed, and cleaved in a single motion.

In that microsecond, the vibrant light in the avatar’s eyes extinguished, turning dull and lifeless.

The axe tore through her waist and his fist shattered her face, but the impact yielded only the hollow sound of splintering ice. The moment contact was made, she swapped positions with a decoy, leaving a frozen shell to absorb the catastrophic force. The clone shattered into a million glinting specks, scattering across the barren ground.

Instead of pressing the offensive or scanning for her new position, Björn simply stood down. He lowered the heavy axe, the crimson aura around him settling into a slow, heavy pulse. He shook his head, a look of profound disappointment washing over his features.

"You truly aren’t her," he said.

He paused, letting out a sharp, breathless laugh before shaking his head again.

"No... you are her. But it seems she never played a hand in shaping you. She merely manifested the image of the Silver Kingdom view of her, painted you in her own likeness, and threw you out here to deal with us."

The avatar’s brow furrowed, a flicker of cold irritation breaking through her composure.

Björn merely shook his head, his tone almost conversational despite the blood-soaked aura radiating off his frame. "You shouldn’t be offended," he said, adjusting his grip on the heavy axe. "I simply speak the truth. Even in my deepest madness, she never once attempted close combat with me."

He took a slow step forward, the ground beneath his boots cracking under his weight.

"Unlike you, she understood what I am. God of Warfare and Madness, it is not merely a title bestowed by mortal worship, but the absolute embodiment of my existence. And yet, here you are, stepping into my reach to trade blows."

He glanced at the glittering frost left behind by the shattered clone, a faint, mocking smile touching his lips.

"If not for your conceptual usage of Motherhood divinity to birth these avatars and decoys, you would have already met your end. The people of the Silver Kingdom picture you as a mother taking up arms to protect her children when pressed."

His eyes met hers, "And you indeed fight like one, desperate, fierce, instinctual, as proven by our brief exchange. But a mother’s desperation will never be enough to survive the God of War."

The massive, towering bulk of Björn’s figure began to condense, his muscles coiling and contracting as his frame thinned into a leaner, dense silhouette.

Then, he vanished.

A sonic boom ripped through the air a microsecond after his displacement. CRACK. The avatar’s form shattered into a shower of crystalline fragments, only for another to manifest fifty yards away and immediately disintegrate under a second unseen strike.

What followed was a terrifying storm of spatial fractures and thunderous sonic snaps. Across the entire expanse of the merged realm, the ambient noise sounded like breaking glass layered over continuous artillery fire. The two figures swapped positions across the battlefield at speeds that defied physical perception, a ghost of absolute zero constantly being hunted down by a red streak of violence.

Yet the balance was unmistakably tilting. Björn was not just chasing her, his accelerating velocity was beginning to match and exceed the exact rate at which her Motherhood divinity could manifest new clones.

With a final, sharp displacement of compressed air, Björn reappeared in the center of the clearing. He had shrunk even further, his frame now entirely stripped of excess mass, streamlined into a deadly, whip-cord precision built for pure speed.

Distance away, the avatar materialized. Her posture was taut, her chest heaving slightly, beads of cold perspiration glinting along her forehead. For the first time, her stance betrayed true strain.

Björn lifted his gaze, stepping toward her with a slow, measured stride that carried the weight of an inevitable tide.

"I feel stupid, honestly," he said, his voice quiet now, carrying effortlessly through the stillness. "Stupid for being so afraid. I panicked, dreading the threat you would pose, terrified simply because you bore her appearance and radiated her presence."

He paused, a dark, hollow laughter echoing from deep within his chest as he closed the distance.

"But standing before you now... I feel insulted. And I am certain she would be disappointed, too. But truly, what else should one expect from a entity crafted merely from the expectations of mortals?"

The Avatar, who had remained silent throughout the entire onslaught, finally lifted her head. "I am not her?"

The simplicity of the question hung in the air.

Björn’s forward stride ground to a halt, his boots carving small grooves into the dirt. "Of course you aren’t her," he sneered, his voice laced with absolute certainty. "She would never be this weak. This mindless."

Then, the Avatar’s posture shifted.

The rigid, defensive tension melted from her shoulders, replaced by an unsettling, effortless poise. Her hands dropped loosely to her sides as the ambient air around them stopped freezing and simply grew dead, heavy, and motionless.

Björn caught the subtle shift instantly. Instead of caution, a wide, sharp grin spread slowly across his lean face, his eyes gleaming with the thrill of a predator recognizing true danger.

"I am her, but she is not me, yet I am her," the Avatar said, her voice dropping its layered, ethereal echo, solidifying into with more life to it. "That alone is enough to ensure I am not merely what mortals imagined."

She took a single step forward, the ground beneath her yielding to frost, that spread around her.

"Mortals may have been the catalyst for my birth," she continued, her gaze locking onto Björn’s with clarity. "My purpose was forged to serve and protect them. But at my core, I am still her."

"I am her," she repeated softly, "and that alone is enough to shatter the mandate of my creation. I am no smiple puppet shaped by mortal minds."

Instinct took control before thought could form. Björn tore through the air, leaving a vacuum in his wake as a jagged, absolute-zero skeletal frame, an exact replica of his condensed silhouette crystallized in the precise space he had occupied a millisecond prior.

He didn’t stop. He couldn’t.

Even at top speed, a creeping, hollow chill began to gnaw at the marrow of his bones. Deep within his chest, something alien was trying to bloom. Something with the force of divinity behind it.

Glancing back with focused eyes, he watched the frozen skeletons shattering against the earth as fast as he left them behind. Each discarded ice frame was a shed skin, a physical manifestation of the cold that his divine body was desperately purging with every exertion of speed. He knew with sickening certainty what that inner frost meant, the moment his momentum faltered, the moment he stood still for even a fraction of a second, the incubation would complete.

His flesh would become the womb. His own skeleton would be converted, rewritten, and replaced from the inside out by those very same frozen, lifeless bones.

The divine authority of Motherhood was attempting to give birth to her weapon directly inside his godhood.

The realization hit him, but he wasn’t panicked. Excitment thrummed through him.

Björn’s divinity roared to life. His divinity was not static, it was an ever-shifting engine of biological and conceptual evolution. War was adaptation, to survive violence was to become the precise weapon required to end it.

As he moved, a red, incendiary shockwave erupted from his core. His blood boiled, turning into liquid furnace fuel that surged through his body. His divine physiology recognized the invasive frost for what it was, an parasitic birth. In response, his body restructured itself at a cellular level.

His bones hardened, dense marrow transforming into a hyper-compressed, volatile obsidian-like structure that actively repelled the cryogenic inception. The chilling phantom skeletons trying to form within his ribs were incinerated by his body’s forced adaptation before they could take root. His skin thickened, shedding its streamlined form for a thick, heat-radiating armor of fused muscle and calcified bone, engineered specifically to dissipate conceptual chill on contact.

BOOM.

He changed direction mid-air without losing an ounce of momentum, stepping through the air on exploding pockets of his own compressed aura. The realm cracked beneath the sheer heat radiating off his frame.

"An impressive trick!" Björn’s voice echoed, layered now with the guttural resonance of a body actively reshaping its vocal cords for maximum war-fright. He burst through the frost-laden atmosphere, leaving a scorched trench across the sky as he reappeared directly above the Avatar.

His battleaxe, now warped and fused with his own forearms into a twin pair of serrated, molten cleavers, came down in a cross-blade executioner’s strike.

"You cast aside mortal expectations to claim her true self," Björn roared, his glowing, crimson eyes locking onto hers through the blinding thermal haze. "Now let us see if she can survive a divinity that evolves purely to slaughter her!"

The Avatar didn’t dodge on time. Sensing the fundamental change in his concept, from pure speed to total environment-purging counter-adaptation, she raised both hands. The dead air around her compressed, drawing upon the weight of the moon to catch the falling god of war.