Chapter 1070: The Disease of Madness [part 1]
It didn’t take a genius to see that Northern had just created a battlefield that favored him alone. He’d given himself a powerful advantage while shielding the rest of the world from the destruction their battle would unleash.
Kryos watched him from afar, a soft smile playing on his lips. They were separated by several waves of ice plains now—frozen domes and jagged ridges that stretched between them.
The land looked like a dead ocean caught mid-tempest, every wave frozen into jagged permanence. The mountains—both shattered and whole—leaned into one another as though locked in an eternal struggle, their fractured ridges knitting together into twisted arches and serrated walls. Glittering spires jutted out at impossible angles, some sheared clean in half, others buried in the interlocking crush of their brethren.
Between them lay valleys of compressed snow and slick ice plains, their surfaces warped and uneven, reflecting the dim, frost-laden light like fractured mirrors from some ancient palace.
What had once been open desert was now a labyrinth of frozen corridors and domes, where even the wind seemed hesitant to pass, forced to whistle through narrow chasms carved by the collision of mountains.
Here and there, entire cliffs of ice had collapsed into sprawling terraces, their jagged debris fusing into the terrain as if it had been sculpted by centuries rather than seconds. The land no longer breathed warmth—its every contour was the handiwork of a power that had rewritten its nature, turning sand and heat into cold, unyielding dominion.
In this place, Northern stood like a warden before a prison of his own making.
Kryos chuckled low, the sound like a growling beast.
"And yet he claims to have no sense... indeed he is smart. But he greatly underestimates me."
Kryos pressed his palm against a wall of ice near him. Everything turned disastrous in a heartbeat. The landscape screamed.
Hairline fractures rippled out from his touch like veins, racing through the wall, then leaping into the next mountain, and the next. The ice didn’t shatter—instead, it twitched. Entire cliffs quivered as if something alive now pulsed within them.
The pale blues of the frozen world bled into a sickly crimson glow, like light refracted through blood. Jagged peaks began to warp, curling inward in unnatural spirals, their spires bending like claws. Valleys convulsed, rising and falling as if the earth itself were trying to breathe.
From the cracks, steam hissed—not of warmth, but of choking madness. The mist coiled into shapes: twisted silhouettes that darted just out of sight, whispering in voices that were both a thousand miles away and right at Northern’s ear.
The domes of ice began to laugh. A hollow, reverberating laughter, as though the mountains themselves had been driven insane. Shards tore free from the ridges, hanging in the air like fangs before spinning wildly, ricocheting between the walls of this frozen labyrinth.
In a heartbeat, Northern’s fortress had transformed into something alive and hostile—not his ally, but an extension of Kryos’s will. The battlefield that had been sculpted to shield the world was now a cage of madness closing in on its maker.
Northern tried to control the ice, to make it spread or thin. But it was useless. He had lost complete dominion over his own frozen creation.
’Is this the power of an Origin?’
He wouldn’t lie—it terrified him. Kryos had simply injected madness into the ice terrain he’d created, and the mountains, valleys, and walls of ice surrounding him had all gone mad instantly.
They shifted and collapsed, making sounds as though a titan was being driven by insanity.
His expression darkened the next moment.
’It isn’t so hard to fight... I have ice’s weakness too.’
Northern raised one hand to the sky, his eyes glowing with cold azure light. The sky darkened with a cantaloupe glow, as if something within the heavens was exploding.
"Come... Ignis Dominus, high output."
A rain of meteors descended upon the maddened plain.
The first meteor struck with the fury of a collapsing star.
Where fire met the maddened ice, the collision birthed something far worse than steam or water. The impact sent shockwaves through the living terrain, and the mountains screamed—not metaphorically, but with actual voices that clawed at the air with raw, primal agony. The crimson glow that had infected the ice flared brighter, feeding on the heat like a parasite gorging itself on fresh blood.
But the ice didn’t simply melt. Instead, it fought back.
As each blazing meteor crashed down, the maddened landscape convulsed and twisted, reshaping itself to catch and cradle the burning flames. Valleys suddenly yawned open like hungry mouths, swallowing fire balls whole before snapping shut with the grinding sound of continental plates colliding. The consumed fire didn’t die—it became trapped within the ice’s corrupted essence, creating pulsing veins of molten light that raced through the frozen labyrinth like infected arteries.
Where the meteors had struck and been absorbed, the ice began to weep with a dark, viscous fluid that steamed and hissed as it pooled in the fractured valleys. The substance moved with purpose, flowing uphill when gravity demanded otherwise, forming spirals and symbols that hurt to look at directly.
The collision of opposing forces—Northern’s purifying fire and Kryos’s corrupted ice—created something neither had expected. Hybrid formations erupted from the ground: towers of crystallized flame that burned cold, their surfaces crackling with frost while their cores blazed with trapped starfire. These impossible structures groaned and sang in harmonies that made reality itself seem to waver.
Northern watched in growing alarm as his meteoric assault, rather than cleansing the maddened terrain, only made it more volatile. The demented ice was learning from the fire, adapting, evolving.
Where once there had been simple frozen mountains, now there were architectural impossibilities—bridges of burning ice that defied physics, spires that twisted through dimensions that shouldn’t exist.
Through it all, Kryos’s laughter echoed, not weakened by the cosmic bombardment, but amplified by it. Each meteor that fell seemed to feed his power rather than challenge it.
His voice rumbled from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"Did you think that madness could be burned away so easily? Fire and ice, heat and cold—these are just temperatures, human. But madness... madness transcends the physical."
The maddened landscape pulsed with renewed vigor, and Northern realized with a chill deeper than any winter that his greatest strength—his mastery over the elemental talents—might have just become his greatest weakness.