Chapter 1071: An Origin’s Punch
Kryos’s hand lingered on the ice as if tasting it. A pulse spread outward, faint at first, then stronger, deeper.
Northern shifted his stance—only to find the wall before him was suddenly much farther away. No, closer. The distance kept... breathing.
A jagged ridge to his right split down the middle, and what should have been a narrow crack opened into a yawning gorge.
The wind rushing from it carried whispers—familiar voices, too familiar—calling his name. He spun sharply, but the sound came from behind him now, then from above.
Snowflakes spiraled down, but instead of falling, they rose, then curved sideways, forming a slow cyclone that twisted into the shape of a hand before dissolving.
He leaped to a nearby ledge, only for the ledge to stretch beneath his feet like melting glass, forcing him to skid for yards before it reformed solid.
The frozen domes no longer sat still—they leaned, shifted, slid against one another with groans like the breaking of ancient ships, opening and closing paths without warning. Northern caught sight of a mountain in the distance... and then it loomed directly in front of him, blotting out the sky.
Somewhere far—or impossibly near—Kryos’s chuckle rolled through the air, bending around corners it shouldn’t have been able to reach.
He said:
"Have you ever been punched by an Origin before?"
Northern frowned.
The ground beneath his feet suddenly shrank along with distance, and he found himself standing right before Kryos. The Origin clenched his fist and drew his hand back.
Northern didn’t even have time to brace.
The distance between them vanished in a single, gut-wrenching blink, the way a nightmare skips from one scene to another without logic. One moment he stood in a labyrinth of frozen domes, the next, the only thing in his world was Kryos’s fist—a looming, obsidian blur that seemed too vast to belong to any mortal arm.
The strike didn’t start with impact—it started with silence.
Every sound in the world cut away: the groaning ice, the restless wind, even the whisper of his own breath. Then came the pressure. It slammed into him before the knuckles did, an invisible wall of force so dense it felt as though the air itself had turned to stone and crashed into him. His ribs bent inward.
And then the punch landed.
It wasn’t so much a blow as it was an entire epoch of violence compressed into a single instant. The shockwave wasn’t sound—it was a roar that existed inside his bones, rattling his marrow and trying to turn it into dust. His vision shattered into shards of color; every fragment showed Kryos’s fist from a different angle, each more inevitable than the last.
The world folded in on him. Ice mountains miles away exploded into blizzards without ever being touched, their peaks crumbling into powder under the backlash alone. Valleys buckled and rose like startled beasts, the ground curling into enormous waves of frozen earth that crashed down and split apart.
Northern felt his body give before his mind caught up. Skin split in web-like patterns across his chest and arms, blood spilling through the tears. His spine screamed under the torque, each vertebra grinding against the next as though trying to flee the oncoming force.
He flew—not backwards, not forwards, but everywhere. The punch wasn’t a line of force, it was a sphere, a collapsing star of violence that erased direction itself. His body ricocheted between frozen ridges like a stone skipping across an ocean, each collision carving a crater into the ice, each crater birthing avalanches that swallowed entire mountains.
For a fleeting heartbeat, he thought he could control the momentum, stop himself or redirect it, twist his body and ride the shockwave like a current. But even though he instantly became Burning Storm, the punch didn’t end.
It lingered like a momentum that obeyed its own laws and existence.
The Origin’s power was embedded in it, a self-sustaining detonation that kept feeding itself long after the initial strike. It was like being hit by a tide that never receded, each wave heavier, sharper, more personal than the last. By the third impact, his right arm had gone numb; by the fifth, his vision had tunneled down to a single pinprick of white light.
The terrain tried to resist, tried to shield its creator. Ice mountains bent toward him, forming walls, domes, jagged shields—but Kryos’s force tore through them as if they were paper, the shock ripping them into spirals that were sucked into the wake of the punch.
The air was thick with glittering shards, each fragment spinning so fast they hissed, each catching the dim light in blinding flashes. It was beautiful in the way certain disasters are beautiful—impossibly precise, horribly final.
Northern hit the ground at last. Not the battlefield as he remembered it, but something unrecognizable—an endless plain of fractured glass, every sheet of ice tilted at some unnatural angle. The impact crater yawned beneath him, wide enough to swallow a city. He lay at the center, a single figure in a wound carved into the world.
He could feel it in his bones, in his teeth, in the rhythm of his heart: part of him was gone. The punch had stolen more than flesh and strength—it had stolen time. He had the sickening sense that a portion of his life had been erased in that instant, a slice cleanly cut and tossed away.
Above, Kryos descended through the broken air, his shadow bending across the tilted sheets of ice. He landed without a sound, the cracks in the terrain spreading toward him as though drawn to his presence.
Northern forced himself upright, every muscle a snarl of pain. He spat blood—or something like it; it steamed as it hit the frozen ground. His fingers tightened around his sword, but the hilt felt foreign now, like a relic from another life.
Kryos studied him, head tilted with faint surprise.
"You’re still here. That’s... convenient."
Northern inhaled once, the cold air biting his lungs. The pain was real, the exhaustion crushing, but beneath it all there was a sliver of something else—a spark born from knowing he had survived. Barely, yes, but survival against an Origin’s punch was not nothing.
He didn’t employ any extra defense mechanism to survive. His body had simply endured it all.
The Origin stepped forward, each pace warping the ground beneath his feet.
"Shall we see if the second one finishes the job?"
Northern’s grip on his blade firmed. He exhaled slowly, a mist curling from his lips. The ice mountains around them groaned as if answering an unspoken command, their shattered pieces beginning to stir again.
He definitely could not get punched a second time.
The first punch had been a cataclysm.
The second would decide the world.