Queen Elowen clearly had no intention of giving her a chance.
Power kept surging out of her with almost no pause. The cold drawn by her spear grew heavier and heavier, until it simply ca down like a sky-filling weight.
Gisladra was forced back under wave after wave of that horrifying chill, until—beneath a dull, heavy boom—she was smashed straight into the ground.
In that instant, the ice power between heaven and earth was pushed to its absolute limit.
The entire area was sealed in ice.
Ground, ruins, the remaining defensive structures around them—even the stray energy streams high in the air—everything took on a cold-white frost trace. The temperature was so terrifyingly low that even Ethan, watching from a distance, couldn't help shivering.
He looked at Queen Elowen in the sky, and a flicker of shock slid through his eyes.
The ice she was releasing now had already surpassed what she'd shown before.
And Ethan knew it—she'd absorbed Infernal Essence earlier. In this cold, there was a far more tyrannical suppressive pressure riding underneath.
Ethan exhaled a stream of white mist, then led the Erald Castle forces to pull back farther, staying out of the collision zone.
The mont they opened distance—
A crisp cracking sound rang out from the sky.
It wasn't loud, but in this frozen world, it was sharp enough to stab the ear.
Then Gisladra's body finally shattered completely.
Huge chunks of frozen flesh and congealed energy fragnts burst outward, like a statue blown apart from the inside by cold.
But in the instant her physical body broke, a soul-form tore free from the center and drifted up into the air.
She was trying to run.
Ethan, of course, wasn't going to let her soul escape.
The mont Gisladra's body collapsed, he raised his hand.
White lightning gathered wildly in his palm. Arcs lashed against each other with a harsh, piercing crackle. He shot forward, target brutally clear—before that soul could leave the battlefield, he would scatter it.
But just as he was about to close in, the ice aura changed.
It didn't spread.
It condensed—faster, sharper.
The cold that had blanketed the entire region abruptly drew in, like an invisible hand clenching tight, locking onto the soul that was trying to flee.
In the next instant, the ice power detonated.
That soul didn't even have room to struggle. It was frozen solid in midair, tightened—then, with an ear-splitting crack, it burst into fragnts.
Ethan stopped dead in the air.
He stared at the soul remnants being ground down, inch by inch, into tiny points of light, and for the first ti a blank, stunned look crossed his eyes.
Even he hadn't expected Queen Elowen's ice power to be able to do this much damage to a soul.
This wasn't just freezing anymore.
It was destruction—soul and all.
Ethan let out a slow breath, finally loosening the knot in his chest. But he'd barely released half of it before his brow tightened again.
He knew perfectly well—this couldn't keep going.
Elysion's people would co in wave after wave to provoke them. What they'd sent so far were still separate groups—powerhouses and armies arriving in pieces.
Why they weren't crushing down with everything at once, Ethan couldn't see through yet. But whatever the reason, this situation couldn't last.
Sooner or later, sothing bigger would co down on them.
So he had to use whatever ti they still had to lock this foothold in place—completely.
Once that decision fell into place, Ethan didn't waste even a mont. He imdiately ordered everyone to embed all the runes they'd dug out from underground into the energy barrier they'd already built around the camp.
The periter turned busy again at once.
One newly recovered rune after another was set into the barrier's structure. The defensive wall that was already thick began to grow even more solid.
Light spread along rune-lines, adding layer after layer, thickening the defense ring by ring. And the most obvious change was inside the barrier itself—large numbers of aggressive energy nodes began to form.
aning this shield was no longer just a wall.
It was growing teeth.
At the sa ti, Feylora led the Fairies to the spatial passage.
They laid the runes they'd collected layer by layer around the tunnel, then quickly activated the entire altar. As energy raced along the lines carved into the ground and walls, the whole ruin let out a low, heavy rumble.
This ti, once the altar was running, it didn't open any new spatial passages.
All of that power was pressed onto the original tunnel.
The tunnel began to swell.
First the vortex structure along the rim was pulled wider, then it was forced outward again and again. Before long, the passage—already expanded once—grew several tis larger again.
More importantly, the runes being fed into it quickly locked into the internal structure, forming countless overlapping dinsional walls.
Those walls weren't obvious, but they were brutally effective.
Like thick layers of lining, they clung to the inside of the tunnel, pressing down on the still-raging spatial turbulence bit by bit.
The chaotic fluctuations weakened first.
Then they were isolated, severed.
In the end, they were crushed so completely they could no longer pose any threat.
Only at this point could the spatial passage from Erald Castle to Elysion be considered truly, fully opened.
There was no longer an impassable barrier between the two worlds.
They could move back and forth at will.
But Ethan still wasn't satisfied.
He stood before the now-stable passage and still felt it wasn't enough.
So he continued mobilizing more runes and energy cores, pouring them into the tunnel without pause.
As more power flooded in, the structure of the passage stabilized further. The energy fluctuations along the edges visibly drew in tighter, and the overall strength was raised again.
Only after he confird there wouldn't be another collapse risk in the near term did Ethan finally pull his attention away from the passage.
Then he took his people and headed deeper into the dungeon again.
In truth, the first ti he ca down, he'd already quietly had the system scan the energy structure here.
Beyond the rune power saturating everything around them, there was another kind of energy hidden deeper underground—sothing extrely strange.
Its fluctuations weren't like normal runes. It wasn't space power, and it wasn't void energy either.
But the system's feedback was clear—
This force, in so way, could massively boost the strength of Erald Castle's people.
That alone was enough to make Ethan go deeper.
He didn't delay. He mobilized every last bit of power inside him, then slamd it down toward the underground.
White lightning and violent energy pressed down together. The ground split layer by layer under the roar. Before long, a straight, deep underground passage had been blasted open by brute force.
Right after that, Erald Castle's army poured down that newly opened route, entering the deeper subterranean region.
When they finally arrived at the depths, everyone was shaken by what they saw.
The energy here was denser by far—more than a whole tier above what lay above.
Every inch of air carried palpable power fluctuations. Even breathing felt like drawing in pure, refined energy.
The surrounding walls and ground held a crystalline sheen. Flickering streams of light drifted slowly everywhere. The entire space felt like a gigantic energy reservoir buried beneath the earth.
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