The twenty Frost Giants blocked the massive archway.
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, forming a solid, thirty-foot-high wall of pale blue muscle and glacial armor. They did not roar or beat their chests.
They simply raised their massive bedrock warhamrs.
[System: Elite Guardians Engaged.]
[Enemy: Frost Giant Sentinels (Level 45 - Elite)]
[Warning: Environntal Curse - Absolute Zero (Active). Target possesses 100% resistance to physical stagger.]
Lucifer spurred his Nightmare Steed. The black beast galloped across the smooth, glass-like ice of the avenue, leaving a trail of rapidly cooling embers.
He rode alone.
Elara gripped her silver spear, her golden wings flaring, but she did not follow. The Warlord had ordered the column to hold. S
eraphina watched nervously from the rear, the starlight orb on her scepter pulsing rapidly.
The Frost Giants stared down at the lone rider. Their blank, white eyes tracked his approach.
When Lucifer was fifty yards away, the three centermost giants swung their warhamrs down simultaneously.
CRACK.
The massive stone hamrs hit the ice with the force of falling teors. A shockwave of pure cold exploded outward.
The smooth ice of the avenue erupted into a jagged wave of razor-sharp spikes, racing directly toward Lucifer’s mount.
Lucifer did not flinch. He did not pull the reins.
"Void Step," Lucifer commanded.
The Nightmare Steed and the Warlord vanished.
The wave of jagged ice spikes tore through the empty air where Lucifer had been a second before, shattering harmlessly against the cavern walls.
Lucifer reappeared flawlessly directly above the center Frost Giant. He was fifty feet in the air, falling rapidly toward the guardian’s massive, bald head.
The giant looked up, raising its warhamr to swat Lucifer out of the sky.
Lucifer did not swing his sword. He sheathed the blade.
He raised his left hand, extending his armored fingers toward the center of the giant formation.
In his past life, Lucifer had seen Void Arcanists use this spell. It was highly unstable, requiring massive amounts of mana to cast and absolute precision to control. It was considered a desperate, last-resort nuke.
But Lucifer was Level 50. He had the mana capacity of an Archmage.
"Void Singularity," Lucifer whispered.
He snapped his fingers closed into a tight fist.
[Skill Activated: Void Singularity (Tier 3 - Epic)]
[Effect: Creates a collapsing black hole. Pulls all matter within a 50-ter radius into an ultra-dense singularity.]
[Mana Cost: Extre.]
Directly in the center of the twenty Frost Giants, a sphere of absolute nothingness materialized. It was no larger than a marble.
For a microsecond, the cavern went entirely silent.
Then, the physical laws of the room snapped.
The singularity exerted an unimaginable gravitational pull. The air itself shrieked as it was sucked into the black hole. The massive, thirty-foot Frost Giants, weighing dozens of tons each, did not even have ti to swing their hamrs.
They were ripped off their feet.
The giants roared in terror. Their massive bodies were yanked sideways through the air, violently pulled toward the tiny black hole.
They collided with each other in the center of the archway with a sickening, wet CRUNCH.
Bones as thick as tree trunks snapped like twigs. Heavy stone warhamrs broke against the icy armor of the other giants.
The sheer gravitational force compressed the twenty massive guardians into a tangled, horrific ball of pale blue flesh, crushed stone, and frozen blood.
It did not stop pulling.
It squeezed tighter. The massive ball of giants shrank rapidly. The imnse pressure forced the frozen air and blood out of their bodies, condensing them further.
Lucifer landed lightly on top of the massive ice archway, safe from the gravitational pull of his own spell. He stood on the edge, looking down at the hole.
The twenty Level 45 Elite Frost Giants were crushed into a sphere no bigger than a carriage. The sound was loud and heavy, echoing through the frozen canyon.
Lucifer opened his fist.
The Void Singularity vanished.
Without the imnse gravity holding the compressed matter together, the ball of crushed giants violently expanded. The intense pressure released all at once.
BOOM.
The sphere exploded. A shockwave of pure frost and crushed bedrock ripped through the archway, blowing the heavy iron gates off their hinges and sending shards of ice flying hundreds of feet down the avenue.
A thick cloud of blue mist and snow filled the air beneath the archway.
[System: Elite Guardians Eliminated.]
[Experience Gain Suspended: Mortal Level Cap Reached.]
Lucifer stood on the archway, looking down into the settling mist.
He didn’t check for survivors. A Level 45 Elite could survive a lot of things, but they could not survive being crushed into a singularity and then violently decompressed.
A single, glowing blue item dropped onto the cracked ice floor below.
Lucifer jumped off the archway, his heavy boots absorbing the impact as he landed gracefully in the center of the destruction.
He walked over to the glowing item.
It was a chunk of pure, translucent blue crystal. It was freezing to the touch, radiating a cold so intense it burned the air around it. It pulsed with a deep, ancient energy.
[Loot Acquired: Essence of Primordial Frost]
[Tier: Mythic Material]
[Description: A core elent of the deep freeze. Radiates absolute cold. Can be used to significantly empower ice-aligned entities or artifacts.]
Lucifer picked up the essence. He did not imdiately store it in his Dinsional Vault.
He looked back down the avenue.
The Grand Army was marching forward. The Aether-Steel Dragoons hovered over the cracked ice, completely unfazed by the explosion.
Elara and Sarah rode at the front, their eyes wide as they took in the absolute devastation of the archway.
"You didn’t even draw your sword," Elara said, halting her Nightmare Steed next to him. She looked at the pulverized remains of the Frost Giants. "That spell... it is catastrophic."
"It is crowd control," Lucifer said. He held up the glowing blue crystal. "And it dropped exactly what we need."
Sarah leaned forward in her saddle, staring at the essence. Her breath fogged heavily. "That is not a weapon component, Lucifer. That is a catalyst. It feels like the frozen heart of the mountain itself."
"It is," Lucifer said. "The Royal Dragons did not just go to sleep. They put themselves in stasis. They used the ambient magic of this glacier to freeze their own cores, lowering their heart rates to one beat per year to survive the low-mana era. To wake one up, you don’t just yell at it."
Lucifer stored the Essence of Primordial Frost into his Dinsional Vault.
"You need to jump-start their core," Lucifer explained. He looked through the shattered gates of the archway.
Beyond the ruins lay a massive, completely dark cavern that housed the central palace.
Elara readied her silver spear. "The sentinels were only the outer guard. The inner palace will be heavily defended by the Sovereign’s personal retinue."
"Let them try to stop us," Lucifer said.
He summoned his Nightmare Steed. The dark beast materialized, shaking its mane of black smoke. Lucifer swung smoothly into the saddle.
"Dragoons, tighten formation," Lucifer commanded. "Arch-Seraphs, increase heat output. We are entering the deep freeze."
The army moved through the shattered archway.
The temperature dropped instantly. The air inside the inner cavern was no longer just cold; it was painfully, magically lethal.
The Absolute Zero curse intensified to Level 3. Thick frost imdiately ford on the black armor of the Dragoons.
The Star-Kissed Elves shivered violently, pressing closer to the radiating warmth of the Arch-Seraphs.
Lucifer rode forward. The darkness was total, broken only by the faint glow of the frozen ruins around them.
They had breached the outer defenses. The Sleeping Sovereign was waiting, and Lucifer was fully prepared to break her centuries-long slumber.
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