Chapter 1014: Northern vs Rughsbourgh [part 1]
The lightning danced frivolously in Northern’s hands, looking barely contained.
Annette, Vida, and even Aster were all frozen, watching with awe in their eyes.
Northern exhaled and then moved. He flashed forward, the lightning almost vanishing, blurring ahead as he blazed across the distance with devastating speed.
Rughsbourgh was standing above Helena—she was struggling to get up, but the entire space was crushing her back to the ground. And she had not the might to resist the power of space.
He turned his head sideways, microseconds before Northern collided into him with the titanic whip of lightning, causing an intense impact that exploded outward and sent both of them reeling across the destroyed land.
The forest had been razed to the ground by the Leviathan, and there were several patches of fractured lands. Northern and Rughsbourgh flew through all of them, their forces disintegrating the stones and residual trees at an alarming speed.
Rughsbourgh buried his feet into the ground but was still reeling away, carving the earth as he did. He finally came to a stop and fixed his eyes forward with an even, emotionless look.
Northern landed and controlled the whip of lightning. The titanic lightning danced with destruction, spraying around the environment as it lashed through the air and headed for the man standing indifferently.
Rughsbourgh watched it with still, calm, and unreadable eyes.
He moved his hand and tore a section of space—gently, like unzipping a coat. The lightning bent midair, curved unnaturally, then vanished into the split.
The whip reappeared—behind Northern.
Northern didn’t flinch. He twisted his fingers, coiling the lash midair like a serpent obeying its master. It wrapped around his arm again and crackled against his skin, eager, sentient, biting him with sparks as if asking "Again?"
Northern obliged.
He lunged.
This time, he didn’t strike with lightning.
He struck with fists.
He moved like lightning incarnate—pure momentum, no hesitation. Each step bent the ground. Each punch carved trenches in the air.
Rughsbourgh blocked with warped zones—distorting the space between them into slabs of compressed vacuum, barriers so dense that matter couldn’t survive in them. But Northern’s fists didn’t rely on matter.
One hit cracked a barrier.
The next shattered it.
The third broke through.
Rughsbourgh caught the fourth punch with one hand. Their collision created a pressure wave that peeled away the surrounding storm. Thunder fled. Trees splintered.
Northern gritted his teeth. Then a wide grin split his face.
"It would really have been a letdown if it so happens that you were a wimp!"
The lightning erupted again—this time internal, from within his own skin. His hair lifted, every strand glowing. His eyes blazed with electric white, and suddenly his entire body exploded forward with a flash so blinding, even Rughsbourgh narrowed his eyes.
Northern didn’t stop. He blurred around Rughsbourgh in wide arcs, fists weaving an orbit of force around him.
But Rughsbourgh didn’t counter.
He stood at the center, his eyes calm and unmoving. It looked like he didn’t even care.
When Northern struck again, he reached forward—and the space between them elongated. Northern’s punch landed a foot away from where it should’ve.
Space itself had cheated.
Rughsbourgh rotated his fingers.
"Collapse."
Northern’s body crushed inward. Not his bones—his existence. The space around him condensed violently, attempting to trap him like a singularity snapping shut. For a second, his lightning flickered and his body trembled, pinned midair like a statue.
But then—
A massive shockwave of ice blasted outward, and everything in the atmosphere seized movement. Including Rughsbourgh.
Northern’s body began to freeze, and the frost began to break and remake his body, from the minute cell to the tissues, to his muscles and his bone.
Using Absolute Zero was to create a vast and endless resource of ice that his body could relate to, and using Chaos’ inherent regeneration, he used the spreading properties of ice to regenerate his body and recreate what needed to be recreated.
It was more of what his body could do with its relationship with ice property than using Chaos, but he wouldn’t deny the fact that it was possible because Chaos existed in the first place.
He felt a little disappointed that he still had to use Chaos in the end, but at the same time, knowing that he was doing so against a Luminary made him feel excusable.
Northern dropped from the crushing space, his limbs trailing frost, steam curling off his shoulders.
The storm Helena summoned had not calmed—but it had stilled. The air had lost temperature so rapidly that thunder itself paused in the skies, confused. Even lightning had begun to move slower, as if it, too, had been snared in an unseen web of ice.
Rughsbourgh’s brows twitched faintly.
The earth crackled beneath Northern’s feet, frost overtaking the battle-scarred landscape in a matter of seconds. The torn forest froze mid-death. Trees petrified into white statues. Craters filled with jagged glacial ridges. Even the wind—the damn wind—came to a halt, caught in suspended motion.
Northern’s voice echoed faintly, resonating through the frigid stillness like a hymn to inevitability.
"Let’s even the playing field, shall we?"
The air turned translucent. Then solid.
Rughsbourgh moved—
Or tried to.
His arm lifted half an inch. The motion resisted. Not because of power. Not because of magic.
Because the concept of motion itself was being pulled down into a glacial grave.
Northern moved.
Or rather, vanished.
A streak of white passed Rughsbourgh’s left—followed by a hundred ice spears forming in midair and launching simultaneously. No formation. No warning. They came from everywhere—angles that didn’t make sense. From behind, above, even beneath space itself.
They weren’t just fast. They were faster than fast—born of frozen air, moving through the cracks of halted space, threading their way past physics.
Rughsbourgh reacted by shifting his body.
It took effort.
He snapped his fingers—and the space in front of him compressed into a dense cube, swallowing a dozen spears. Another twenty disintegrated upon touching the distorted shell of space he threw around his back.
But the rest?
They pierced clean through his barriers.
Rughsbourgh twisted to avoid a fatal hit, and an ice spear scraped his ribs, drawing blood. Another struck his shoulder, burying itself partially before cracking and bursting into splinters of cursed frost.
His eyes sharpened.
Northern grinned as he saw that he managed to impale Rughsbourgh.
"I am so lucky! Thanks to you, I am growing exponentially. Now I have a counter against spatial abilities."
Rughsbourgh raised his arms, his eyes cold and void.
"You fool. You forgot the other part."
Northern frowned. Something was wrong. Before he could pick it out though—
The lightning danced frivolously in Northern’s hands, looking barely contained.
Annette, Vida, and even Aster were all frozen, watching with awe in their eyes.
Northern exhaled and then moved.