Chapter 1075: Evolution
Even though Northern had managed to tear his way through the world’s crushing fear and reached the heart of the battle, he still had to pause—even he couldn’t afford to venture any closer.
There was something fundamentally wrong with the space surrounding their clash. It resembled what Kryos had done to the terrain when he’d frozen everything solid, but amplified to a level of savagery that defied comprehension.
The very land, the atmosphere itself, had been perverted into weapons of mass destruction. When something descended upon Ul, it wasn’t merely Kryos’s sword—it was the entire world crashing down, yet simultaneously not the world Northern recognized.
It was as though Kryos had conjured a realm of pure, undiluted madness. His strikes birthed vicious laws of insanity that transformed empty air into jagged spikes or wove cages around Ul while his devastating blows hammered down upon her.
Northern couldn’t track the lightning speed of their attacks despite his own proven velocity. They moved beyond the threshold of his perception. The most he could manage was piecing together explanations from the wreckage they left behind.
The battle raged with such apocalyptic ferocity that realities were instantaneously born, buckled, and warped around the combatants—others simply exploded into nothingness before they could draw their first breath.
Northern watched in horrified fascination as Kryos’s blade didn’t merely slice through space—it rewrote the fundamental laws that governed existence itself.
When his sword carved its arc, the very concept of distance became liquid, allowing him to strike Ul from impossible angles, his attacks arriving like thunder before the lightning of the swing itself.
Ul, however, might not have been winning, but she was a galaxy away from helpless. Her form flickered between states of being—sometimes solid flesh, sometimes a living river of pure light, occasionally becoming something that Northern’s mind violently rejected processing. When Kryos’s reality-bending strikes should have connected, they carved through empty air as she existed in the spaces between heartbeats, dancing through the hairline fractures in his manufactured insanity.
The ground beneath them had long since abandoned any pretense of being earth. It writhed like tortured flesh, birthing crystalline formations that sang with harmonies that could drive men mad. These weren’t mere obstacles—they were extensions of Kryos’s murderous will, clawing upward to seize Ul with a hunger that transcended every physical need.
Northern pressed his palms against his ears as the symphony of their clash reached him—not the familiar ring of metal kissing metal, but something infinitely more disturbing. It was the sound of concepts shattering like glass, of fundamental truths being pulverized and reborn in real time. Each thunderous impact sent shockwaves through existence itself, and Northern could feel his own sense of self fraying at the edges like old rope.
In the fleeting moments when their movements slowed enough for him to snatch glimpses of the actual combat, Northern realized they were no longer truly fighting in the same dimension. Kryos would strike downward while somehow simultaneously attacking from below, his sword existing in multiple states like a quantum nightmare. Ul countered by being everywhere and nowhere, her responses flowing from directions that didn’t exist until the precise moment she willed them into being.
’What in the world...’
How was he supposed to enter a battle like this!
It was a dilemma that Northern couldn’t crack, yet something was happening to his eyes—something primal. They radiated savage desire, a lust so pure it burned, an intensified hunger that consumed everything else!
’What they’re doing with will is insanely magnificent! I want it! I need to be able to do something like this!!’
Northern’s eyes had become so laser-focused they appeared glassy, as though death had already claimed him. But his eyeballs moved with terrifying speed, darting like caged lightning.
As he stared—despite being unable to follow the action, only drawing conclusions from the devastation—something extraordinary was occurring. His eyes were slowly adapting. He had plunged into a trance so deep it bordered on terrifying, and the Demon of Emulation had been studying the battle style with predatory intensity.
The intricacy.
The impossibility of its uniqueness.
The flow.
As Northern’s eyes evolved, the chaos began to crystallize into something even more terrifying—patterns. What had seemed like pure madness revealed itself to be choreography of the most impossible kind.
He could see it now: Kryos wasn’t just fighting Ul in the present moment. His strikes were cascading through multiple timelines simultaneously.
When his blade moved, it birthed echoes—some striking moments before the original swing, others landing seconds after, all targeting identical spatial coordinates but across different temporal planes. It was as if he was conducting a symphony of violence across the fourth dimension itself.
Ul’s responses were equally mind-shattering. She wasn’t dodging in any traditional sense. Instead, she was editing herself out of existence at the precise microsecond of impact, then rewriting herself back into reality from a position of devastating advantage. Northern studied her body language—there was a subtle rhythm to her disappearances, a hidden pattern to where she chose to rematerialize. And it was truly breathtaking, considering she was accomplishing all of this while trapped within the fragile shell of human flesh.
But what truly set Northern’s eyes ablaze with hunger was the raw will behind their movements.
Kryos’s will was like a hurricane system of pure intention, generating its own weather patterns of reality distortion. Each thought, each deadly purpose, spawned subsidiary realities that served his combat needs.
When he decided to strike from above, gravity itself became his willing slave, pulling not just his sword but the entire concept of "downward force" into his attack.
When he chose to cage Ul, space folded inward like origami made of nightmares, creating geometric impossibilities that trapped her in angles that shouldn’t exist in any sane universe.
It was something Northern recognized—Kryos had used similar techniques against him, and Northern had tried desperately to use them to overcome the world’s crushing will. But his fumbling attempts and Kryos’s mastery were separated by an ocean of skill.
Because now he could see it. He could understand with crystal clarity that the difference was an endless chasm.
Ul’s will was the antithesis of Kryos’s—more surgical, more precise than a scalpel made of pure thought. She treated reality like a text she could edit at will. Where Kryos created new laws, she found loopholes in existing ones. Northern watched her read the battlefield like a scholar, identifying the hairline fractures in Kryos’s manufactured insanity and slipping through them like threading a needle made of pure concept.
The most incredible revelation was how they were both operating on multiple layers of intention simultaneously. On the surface, they were trying to land killing blows. But beneath that deadly dance, Kryos was attempting to trap Ul in a reality where victory was mathematically impossible, while Ul was systematically dismantling the logical foundations that allowed his reality manipulation to function.
Northern’s breathing became ragged as something extraordinary began to happen to his eyes.
They began to burn him alive, but he refused to surrender and close them. His sclera turned crimson as though blood was flooding into it, but Northern was too stubborn, too hungry—he refused to close them, refused to blink for even a heartbeat.
He was drinking in the sight of this battle like a man dying of thirst, and it was making his heart thunder with euphoria. His eyes would burn to ash before he’d even consider blinking.
However, that wasn’t his destiny.
Instead, the runes blazed to life. Northern glimpsed them with his peripheral vision, which somehow divided into another segment of sight entirely.
That’s right—his segmented vision had returned, and in this second field of vision, Northern could see the impossible:
[Demon of Emulation is Evolving]
[Demon of Change is Evolving]
[All Eyes is Evolving]
[The Seed of Endless is Evolving]