Chapter 537: Snow Lionheart vs Cosmos (1)
The battlefield had descended into utter chaos, swallowed by a thick, all-consuming fog.
Nightmare creatures attacked without pause, and the Empire’s side was the sole loser in this exchange.
While soldiers fell one after another, dropping like flies, the Ultras had done nothing but unleash the nightmare beasts upon them. In other words—despite the oceans of blood spilled and the savagery of the clash—
the Ultras had not lost a single life in the most recent engagement.
The Empire’s situation was dire, and the miasma of the Ghasts, fused with the power of the Cosmos, only made things worse.
Unity was no longer an option—everyone was fighting their own desperate battle somewhere inside that fog.
Among them, Snow Lionheart’s fight was surely the most grueling of all. He was forced to face the Nightmare Lord directly while fending off countless other abominations.
The Cosmos’ fighting style was unlike anything he’d ever seen—appearing one moment, vanishing the next, like some kind of phantom.
A mere touch from it was enough to melt human flesh to nothing, leaving behind nothing but bone.
Snow Lionheart was suffering heavily against such a maddening foe. He unleashed the War King form without restraint, bringing forth his entire arsenal of elemental might.
Harnessing black lightning in great quantities, Snow lunged at the Cosmos, sending a furious bolt crashing toward the beast. But the devastating strike simply passed through its body, which vanished in a strange blur, only to reappear behind him without warning.
The Cosmos lashed out with hundreds of long, whip-like arms, trying to crush his body. Snow barely evaded the blow by using Void Step—a skill that allowed him to erase the space between them in the blink of an eye.
Using that momentum, he tried to smother the Cosmos in a massive flood of azure fire—rabid, raging flames erupting from both his sword and his body in such volume that they should have consumed the creature completely.
Yet once again, the attack simply passed harmlessly through the Nightmare beast’s body before it faded like a ghost and struck from behind.
Snow kept evading by the skin of his teeth, but no matter what he tried, he couldn’t lay a finger on the Cosmos.
The battle became a game of chase—an endless loop where Snow’s most powerful strikes phased through the Cosmos, and in turn, the Cosmos’ relentless counterstrikes were narrowly dodged with Void Step.
It repeated so many times that they were trapped in a meaningless cycle.
Snow was beginning to lose his composure.
"This will turn into a battle of attrition..."
Engaging in this kind of fight was never to his advantage. Unlike him—who was burning vast amounts of aura with every grand display of power—the Cosmos used nothing but its long limbs and that absurd ghostlike body.
"Its ability... it’s similar to that of Gavid Lindman, Lord of the Ultras. But unlike him, there are no weaknesses in the Cosmos’ case..."
The Phantom Form was indeed a formidable power, but it came with flaws. For Gavid, if he neither saw nor sensed the attack, he couldn’t phase his body to avoid it.
But with the Cosmos, no matter how fast Snow struck, no matter how many blind angles he attacked from, he simply couldn’t touch it.
Worse still, other nightmare beasts kept interfering in their fight, forcing him to split his awareness across multiple fronts.
"Where the hell are all these cursed creatures coming from?!"
Unleashing three elements at once—fire, lightning, and gravity—Snow became a natural disaster incarnate, annihilating anything foolish enough to approach him. Yet despite holding his ground so far, his light was beginning to fade.
For all his lethal powers and the War King form pushing him to his peak, his aura reserves were modest compared to his enemies’.
Vermithor had been feeding him a massive supply of energy, but even that wouldn’t let him fight forever.
The longer the battle dragged on, the tighter the noose around Snow became.
"The Cosmos isn’t affected by anything I throw at it... the nightmare creatures just keep coming from that fog without end... and I can’t tell what’s happening inside its range."
The unnatural force within the fog had completely crippled his senses. He had no way of knowing how his allies were faring.
He was especially worried about the Hollow, Ludwig—Ghost Umbra and several S-rank fighters had taken on the task of stopping him.
But the fog had cut them off entirely, leaving Snow blind to their struggle. Ludwig was an SS-rank combatant with completely unknown abilities—in other words, there was no guarantee Ghost and the others could hold him back.
And then there was the sheer scale of the bloodshed, the corpses piling up in every direction thanks to the nightmare assault.
Little by little, under the War King form’s side effects, Snow was losing his balance—realizing that every soldier who had followed him here might well be annihilated.
Gripping his sword tightly, he bared his teeth in fury and charged at the Cosmos with even greater speed.
"You’re telling me I’m still powerless to change anything, even after all these years?!"
Shrouding himself in Starlight Aura, Snow chased the Cosmos with a relentless flurry of light slashes.
The ferocity of his assault severed the Nightmare Lord’s limbs with ease, yet he still couldn’t touch its true body. With no other choice, he pushed himself harder, trying to finally reach it.
Nightmare creatures closed in to trap him again, but anything that entered his range was reduced to dust.
Calling upon six elements at once, Snow Lionheart pushed himself beyond his limits.
The fog worked its sinister magic, hallucinations gnawing at his mind.
That curtain of smoke had hidden the fates of every soldier who had followed him blindly—and now he was beginning to picture the scene: the fog lifting, revealing nothing behind him but corpses, blood, and death.
From the start of this battle, nothing had emerged from that fog but monsters.
Not a single human had appeared—only nightmare creatures whose numbers did not diminish, but instead continued to grow.
"Am I truly this weak...? So powerless that I can’t change a thing, even with all the talents and blessings granted to me?"
His blessed body, the overwhelming talents and abilities that had placed him above his peers...
He had been born with gifts no other human before him had possessed, yet even so, Snow Lionheart was still losing miserably in the face of his very first true challenge.
The hallucinations intensified to the point where he began to see old, buried memories resurfacing within his heart.
As he dashed across the battlefield, striking down anything that dared approach, he would, from time to time, catch glimpses of children running around him—only for flames to ignite and consume them one after another.
From afar, he saw their silhouettes—an entire group of children standing behind a single man, hiding behind his back, all casting upon Snow every shade of disdain.
Especially that cursed director... the monster who had left a scar on Snow’s life.
Snow knew well that this was nothing more than an illusion conjured by his enemy...
But he could not stop the boiling fury inside him, for what he was facing now was nothing less than a brutal reminder of his own weakness.