Chapter 1072: The Way An Origin Fights
Northern knew it was not proper for him to be punched a second time. He knew he could really die from it. But at the same time, what could he do about it?
If an Origin wanted to punch him, then the world wanted him to be punched. His will was not strong enough to override the will of the world, so he was screwed.
’I’m going to die...’
Kryos’ hand flew forward without the concept of speed, and time fractured the moment Kryos’s knuckles connected.
Northern felt the impact before it happened—a sensation that defied causality itself. This time, his body registered the blow three heartbeats ahead of contact, every nerve screaming in anticipation of destruction that was simultaneously inevitable and impossible to comprehend.
When the fist finally met his chest, reality simply... gave up trying to make sense of what was occurring.
The punch didn’t land like a physical strike. It arrived like the concept of violence itself, distilled into a single point of contact that rewrote the fundamental laws governing Northern’s existence. The force didn’t travel through his body—it became his body, every atom suddenly remembering what it felt like to be the epicenter of a cosmic collision.
Northern’s ribcage didn’t simply break. The bones forgot how to be solid, their crystalline structure unraveling at the molecular level before reforming into patterns that hurt to exist within. His sternum collapsed inward, then outward, then seemed to occupy multiple positions at once, each iteration more wrong than the last. The pain was architectural—not just felt, but built into his very being, a cathedral of agony constructed from his own reformed anatomy.
But the physical damage was merely the opening movement of a symphony of destruction.
The Origin’s power flowed through the point of impact like liquid madness, spreading through Northern’s nervous system with purposeful malice. His vision shattered into kaleidoscopic fragments, each shard showing him a different angle of his own destruction. In one fragment, he saw himself being punched through seventeen different dimensions. In another, he watched his own soul being methodically unraveled like a tapestry pulled apart thread by thread.
His hearing split into layers—the sound of his own bones breaking played at frequencies that shouldn’t exist, harmonizing with the wet percussion of organs rearranging themselves and the crystalline chiming of his ice powers being systematically corrupted.
Beneath it all, he could hear Kryos counting, each number corresponding to another fundamental aspect of his being that was being dismantled and rebuilt wrong.
"One."
Kryos whispered, and Northern’s sense of up and down inverted.
"Two."
His memories of childhood winters became searing heat.
"Three."
His understanding of his own name became a question rather than a certainty.
The force carried him backward—or perhaps forward, or perhaps through directions that didn’t have names—across the maddened landscape that now seemed to cheer his destruction rather than prevent it.
The ice formations he passed through didn’t shatter from his passage. Instead, they reached out with crystalline fingers to caress his broken form, each touch adding new layers of wrongness to his already corrupted state.
He struck one mountain with enough force to level a city, but instead of demolishing the peak, his body somehow passed through it while being pulverized against it at the same time.
The contradiction didn’t resolve—it simply existed, another impossible truth added to the growing collection of realities that his mind was failing to process.
The second mountain caught him differently, wrapping around his form like a closing fist before spitting him out the other side. But not before every ice crystal within had whispered a small madness directly into his bloodstream. His veins began to glow with a sickly light as Kryos’s influence spread through his circulatory system, each heartbeat pumping corruption deeper into his core.
By the third impact, Northern realized he wasn’t just being physically destroyed—he was being rewritten.
The Origin’s power wasn’t content to simply break him. It was editing the very concept of what Northern was, line by line, until the finished product would be something that remembered being him but had never actually existed.
His ice talents, which he had praised as one of his greatest strengths given the way he could control them, became his greatest vulnerability as Kryos’s madness flowed through the frozen constructs he had created.
The fourth mountain received him like a lover, embracing his broken form and crooning softly as it absorbed the chaotic energies radiating from his body. The ice began to change, taking on the same sickly crimson glow that had infected the rest of the landscape. But somehow worse—because this was his ice, his power, being turned against not just his body but his very identity as a wielder of winter’s might.
When he finally came to rest—if ’rest’ was the right term for the strange suspension he found himself in—Northern was no longer entirely sure which parts of his body belonged to him and which had been borrowed from the maddened landscape around him. His left arm seemed to be made of the same corrupted ice that had once been his fortress, while his right leg appeared to exist in a state of constant phase transition between solid and liquid and something that defied classification entirely.
The pain was no longer just physical. It had evolved into something metaphysical, a wrongness that extended beyond his body into the very idea of him. He could feel parts of his personality dissolving, memories becoming uncertain, convictions wavering like heat mirages. The punch hadn’t just damaged his body—it had introduced chaos into the ordered narrative of his existence.
Through vision that kept fragmenting and reforming, he saw Kryos approaching with the leisurely pace of someone who had all the time in the universe.
The Origin’s form seemed to shift and blur, sometimes appearing as the man who had stood before him moments ago, sometimes as a towering colossus of living shadow, sometimes as something that hurt to look at directly and left afterimages burned into Northern’s retinas.
"That... was approximately point-zero-zero-one percent of my actual strength. I thought you should know, so you can properly contextualize what just happened to you."
Northern tried to speak, to respond, to assert some measure of defiance, but discovered that his voice had become a symphony of breaking glass and weeping ice. When he finally managed to force words through his reconstructed throat, they came out as whispers in languages he didn’t recognize, carrying meanings that made his own ears bleed to hear.
Both punches had lasted less than a second in real time, but Northern understood with crystal clarity that he would be feeling their effects for the rest of his existence—however long or short that might now be.
Because this was what it meant to be struck by an Origin: not just to be hurt, but to have the very concept of not being hurt edited out of your personal reality.
And Kryos was just getting started.
’...ah, crap.’