Sovereign's Path

Chapter 19: Leon vs Nine tails ll

The words left him quietly, almost conversationally, but what followed them was anything but quiet.

The temperature in a three hundred meter radius did not drop gradually. It simply stopped. All of it. Every molecule of heat, every trace of warmth that the hellfire carried, every degree that Nine Tails had poured into her attack, all of it encountered the edge of Leon’s domain and ceased.

The nine streams of hellfire hit the boundary of the domain and froze.

Not extinguished. Frozen. Mid air. Mid motion. Nine spiraling columns of violet flame suspended in perfect stillness, crystallized into translucent violet ice that caught the moonlight and threw it back across the devastated forest in cold fractured beams.

The sight of it, her own hellfire, ancient and absolute and consuming, suspended motionless in the air by a child’s spell, made Nine Tails go very still. free𝑤ebnovel.com

’Impossible.’ She thought.

But she was looking directly at it.

Leon lowered his arms.

Then he inhaled.

And exhaled.

What came out was not breath.

It was winter. Not the metaphor of winter, not the suggestion of it. Winter itself, compressed and concentrated and released in a single sustained wave that rolled outward from him in every direction like a slow tide. It moved through the frozen hellfire columns and they shattered, the crystallized violet flame exploding outward in shards of frozen light that rained down across the crater floor. It moved through the air and the moisture in it crystallized instantly, filling the space with a sudden dense fog of ice particles that caught what little light remained and made the entire devastated stretch of forest glow faintly blue white.

It moved through the trees.

Beastglade’s eastern interior, already savaged by the earlier exchange, met the chilling wave and the remaining standing trees, ancient things that had survived storms and monster hordes and two hundred years of steady encroachment, froze from root to crown in an instant. Not gracefully. They didn’t simply ice over and remain upright. The sudden crystallization of every cell simultaneously caused them to crack from the inside, great splitting sounds that rolled through the forest one after another like distant cannon fire, and then they fell, massive frozen forms shattering against the ground and against each other in cascading crashes that threw ice shards the size of doors spinning through the air.

The rivers that ran through that section of Beastglade, unnamed waterways that had flowed uninterrupted for longer than the nation of Everett had existed, stopped.

Just stopped.

Frozen solid to their beds in an instant, the water within them crystallized mid current, preserving the shapes of their ripples and eddies in perfect motionless ice.

The creatures of the forest that had not already fled the earlier devastation fled now, pouring outward from the advancing wave in a panicked tide, predators and prey running side by side with no interest whatsoever in their usual arrangements, every survival instinct they possessed screaming the same single instruction.

Away.

The wave continued to roll outward, slower now, losing intensity with distance, but still moving, still consuming, turning the eastern interior of one of Novaria’s most vast and ancient and dangerous forests into something that looked like the surface of a dead world. Silent. Still. Blue white and motionless under the moon.

When it finally dissipated, the silence it left behind was total.

Nine Tails had not moved.

She stood in the air above the crater, her nine tails drawn in close, her golden eyes tracking across the devastation that extended in every direction from where Leon stood. The frozen hellfire shards were still settling across the crater floor. The sound of frozen trees continuing to crack and fall reached them from some distance away, one after another, a slow diminishing percussion fading into the deep forest.

She looked at what remained of her barrier’s surrounding territory.

The eastern approaches to the gate, the carefully maintained wilderness she had cultivated over centuries to serve as both camouflage and buffer, was gone. Not damaged. Gone. Replaced by a field of frozen splinters and ice sculptures that had once been living forest.

She looked at the child responsible for this.

He was breathing harder now. Not labored, not struggling, but noticeably deeper than before. The first real sign that any of this had cost him anything at all.

She had constructed her barrier to be impenetrable to anything short of a divine being. This child had walked through it without effort, without apparent awareness that he was doing anything remarkable at all.

And now he had frozen her flames.

Her hellfire. Flames she had cultivated and refined over four centuries, fire that devoured the concepts of things rather than merely their physical forms, fire that she had never once seen stopped by anything that was not itself divine.

Frozen.

By a human, a kid at that.

She descended until her feet touched the crater floor, landing in a patch of scorched earth between two frost fractal formations, and she looked at Leon across the space between them with four centuries and change of accumulated judgment brought to full and complete focus.

"That spell." She said. Her voice was different now. The warmth was still there but underneath it was something older and more careful. "You froze my hellfire. Do you understand what that means ?"

"It means it was hot." Leon said.

She stared at him.

Then she laughed, and it came out genuine and startled, nothing like the composed musical sound from before, just an actual laugh pulled out of her without permission.

"It means," she said, recovering, "that centuries, nothing has ever done that. Not once."

Leon looked at the frozen violet shards still scattered across the ground around them.

"Hm." He said.

She studied him for a long quiet moment. The tails behind her swayed slowly, winding down from their combat state the way a storm slowly unwinds after it has spent itself.

"You are either the most dangerous thing I have encountered in my very long life," she said. "Or the most interesting. I am currently undecided which."

Leon met her golden eyes with his sapphire ones.

"Can it be both." He said.

Another silence.

Her mouth curved.

"...Yes." She said quietly. "I suppose it can."