Northern’s eyes blazed with cold fury as the clone’s grip tightened around his throat.
He channeled wind around his body—not as visible blades this time, but as pure cutting force. The invisible wind sliced at the clone’s arm, forcing it to release its grip. Northern dropped to the ground and immediately gestured with both hands, unleashing a lethal wind blade.
Wind blades had two types: the one that cut the body and the one that severed the soul. Northern figured he’d end this once and for all and help the Chaos Prince by cutting down whatever twisted soul animated this clone.
The translucent cutting wave sliced through the air with surgical precision, aimed directly at the clone’s center mass. It should have ended everything instantly. Northern had expected to see the clone collapse to the ground.
Instead, the demented bastard was still standing.
Northern frowned for a moment, but it didn’t take him a second to realize.
’Of course... it has no soul.’
The clone was nothing more than corrupted flesh and stolen power—a hollow imitation animated by madness alone. All of Northern’s most devastating abilities were useless against something that existed without the fundamental essence of life.
Northern’s expression shifted, cold calculation replacing his earlier shock. His right hand moved to his side, and a swirl of sparks appeared around that area, manifesting into a sword. His fingers wrapped around its hilt. The blade of the Illusioned Hefter shimmered coldly in the setting sun and golden world.
He could hear the sound of impact and feel the ground vibrate tremendously from the battle between Chaos Prince and his father. The Prince was not supposed to fight alone. And Northern didn’t trust the Chaos Prince enough to let him act independently.
Which led him to realize that the battle was already dragging on too long. This would be because the damned clone was adapting at a fascinating yet frustrating rate.
Northern’s pride probably wanted to deal with it easily and refused to accept that he would need to employ his battle intelligence and full repertoire of abilities to actually defeat the mad thing.
Such reality scratched his pride brutally. But he was also grinning for some reason.
Perhaps he was enjoying it too.
Of course he was.
Not many times does one get the opportunity to fight a maddened version of themselves—one able to adapt at such an incredible rate.
Northern was witnessing what he was capable of. He was seeing what the Demon of Adaptation and Emulation truly meant.
He was forced to discover, in the course of their intense battle, that for adaptation to happen—for such insane evolution in one’s abilities to be provoked—one actually had to hit a dead end, a mountain too high to be climbed.
However, that was Northern’s one fatal flaw.
Northern’s undoing, his own weakness, was his strength. If he wanted to grow, he simply needed to meet stronger enemies.
Central Plains was already saturated—no one could give him the thrill he was feeling right now. Even with the Rughsbourgh battle, even though he was furious and fought like his life depended on it, Northern enjoyed and savored every moment of it.
How else would one achieve enlightenment during such a battle? Only he would dare.
Fighting his clone, fighting a demented version of himself, just helped him realize how much he lacked opponents who would truly push him to his limits. Who would make him feel like no matter how much he tried, he would never be able to advance.
Perhaps this was the trigger the Demon of Adaptation needed. He could try to emulate things and consciously train himself to adapt.
But Northern suddenly suspected that the true meaning of the attribute lay in the first word.
To become a Demon.
Of course, this was merely speculation from observing his clone as they fought. But there was no manual for how these abilities worked. Now that they were all somehow mixing with each other—Infinite-Eyes, Endless—Northern felt like the closer he got to truly realizing how to use his dormant abilities, the more powerful he would become.
But that essentially started with the fact that he was still continually asking himself a critical question.
Was it that he wasn’t powerful enough, or was he not utilizing his arsenal to its fullest potential? Northern needed more internalized growth than searching for something external.
But that internalized growth was so much harder than severing an Apex Leviathan’s hand. Northern was rattled to his core. He actually wished he had reasonable guidance. He wished these things came with a manual.
But they didn’t. He needed to navigate it all on his own.
Northern settled into a stance that felt as natural as breathing.
"Looks like I have no choice but to treat you like an opponent."
The clone sensed the change immediately. Its predatory grin faltered as Northern’s entire presence transformed. This wasn’t the man who had been hurling elements at it moments before—this was something far more dangerous.
Northern launched forward, Illusioned Hefter cutting through the air in an arc that defied prediction.
Northern’s strikes flowed seamlessly into each other, creating a pattern that existed without pattern—an endless dance of blade and power.
Fire erupted along the sword’s edge mid-swing, turning a horizontal slash into a blazing crescent that the clone barely dodged. But as it leaned back, Northern’s follow-up was already in motion—ice crystallizing along the blade as he thrust forward, the tip wreathed in freezing mist that would have pierced the creature’s heart.
The clone twisted aside, but Northern had anticipated this. His eyes glowed softly as the clone’s steps and movements fell into view one second before they happened. His blade curved impossibly, defying physics as the wind guided the strike into a rising cut that opened a gash along the clone’s ribs. Black ichor sprayed, but before it could regenerate, lightning crackled down the sword’s length, cauterizing the wound and delaying its healing.
The clone snarled and lashed out with inhuman speed, but Northern was already gone, his form blurring as he flowed around the attack like water. His blade sang through the air, each cut infused with a different element in combinations the clone couldn’t predict and moving faster than the clone could adapt to.
This, of course, was Northern’s Heritage. The core of his combat style. The Path of the Endless.
There was no beginning or end to the style—it existed simply as an infinite flow of strikes that built upon each other in ways that defied comprehension. The clone, for all its maddened evolution, couldn’t keep pace with swordsmanship that existed beyond conventional technique.
Simply because evolution was solely dependent on convention. It was a pathway that needed to exist for adaptation to occur. Northern gave the clone nothing to adapt to, at a speed it could never match.
It was a simple, vicious, and overpowering moment where even madness realized terror.