The Ice King moved first.
Not with haste, not with rage, but with the lazy certainty of a predator that already owned the battlefield.
The spear vanished from his hand and the floor exploded.
A forest of ice lances burst upward where Damien had been standing, each one thick as a tree trunk and sharp enough to split steel. Damien twisted mid step, boots skidding across frost as he leapt between the rising spikes, daggers flashing as he carved footholds into solid ice to redirect his momentum.
He landed hard, knee biting into frozen stone.
The air screamed.
A wall of compressed frost roared toward him like a tidal wave. Damien crossed his daggers and braced. The impact hurled him backward, armor screeching as it scraped across the floor. Ice crept over his chestplate instantly, trying to root him in place.
The King's voice echoed calmly.
"Too slow."
The wall shattered into thousands of shards, each one spinning with lethal precision. They curved in midair, hunting him. Damien rolled, ducked, slid, but not all of them missed. Blades of ice tore across his shoulder, pierced his thigh, sliced his ribs. Blood splattered onto the floor and steamed as it hit the cold.
Damien gritted his teeth and pushed forward anyway.
He vanished.
Not teleportation. Footwork.
A sudden burst of speed that left afterimages behind him as he closed the distance, daggers aimed straight for the King's throat.
The Ice King stepped back once.
Just once.
The ground between them turned into a mirror smooth lake of ice. Damien's foot slipped for a fraction of a second. That was enough.
Chains erupted from the floor, coiling around his legs and torso, freezing solid the moment they touched him. The King raised a hand and the chains yanked Damien off the ground, slamming him into a pillar hard enough to crack stone.
Crack.
Bones screamed.
The King flicked his fingers.
A hailstorm formed inside the hall itself, swirling in tight spirals, every shard accelerating faster and faster. Damien tore free of the chains at the cost of flesh and blood, diving behind a broken column as the storm shredded everything in its path. Stone disintegrated. Ice screamed. The throne room became a blender of frost and ruin.
"You rely on blades," the King said, walking through the storm untouched. Ice parted for him like a bowing court. "Against a world that obeys me."
A massive ice construct formed behind him, a giant with a crown of spikes and fists the size of houses. It slammed its hand down.
Damien was too slow.
The impact crushed him into the floor. His vision blurred. Something in his side snapped. Cold seeped into his lungs. He coughed blood and forced himself to stand, daggers shaking in his hands.
No shadows.
No reinforcements.
Just him.
The Ice King lifted his hand again and the giant mirrored the motion, a spear of glacial ice forming that hummed with lethal mana.
"Die," the King said.
The world stopped.
The armor reacted.
Reality peeled back like a curtain.
Five seconds unfolded in Damien's mind with merciless clarity. The spear's trajectory. The secondary lances hidden beneath the floor. The delayed explosion meant to catch him mid dodge. The exact moment the King would shift his weight to counterattack.
Damien breathed once.
And moved.
The spear fired.
Damien stepped aside before it even existed, slipping through the only safe gap between converging attacks. Ice erupted behind him uselessly. He ducked under a sweeping frost blade he had already seen, leapt over a spike that had not yet formed, and ran straight through the storm as if the battlefield itself were confessing its secrets to him.
The Ice King's eyes widened for the first time.
Damien was already there.
His daggers flashed.
One clean arc.
The King's right hand hit the floor with a wet thud, severed at the wrist, blood splashing across ice.
The scream came a heartbeat later.
Damien did not stop.
He stepped in, blade rising for the throat, intent sharp and absolute.
Ice exploded up the King's neck in an instant, layers forming faster than steel could bite. The dagger skidded, carving a shallow groove instead of ending it.
The King snarled and drove his knee forward.
The kick hit Damien square in the chest.
The world spun as he was launched backward, crashing through broken pillars and skidding across the frozen hall, blood trailing behind him.
The Ice King clutched his frozen neck, frost sealing the wound as his severed hand dissolved into ice dust.
His smile was gone.
Only rage remained.
The Ice King's roar shattered what little calm remained.
The storm answered him.
Wind howled like a living thing, a spiraling maelstrom of razors and frost that wrapped around his throne room and turned it into a death zone. Snow did not fall. It hunted. Every step Damien tried to take forward was punished by slicing cold that tore at flesh and armor alike, forcing him back no matter how sharp his timing was.
The King raised his remaining arm.
Ice crawled over the stump where his hand once was, condensing, shaping, screaming as mana was forced into form. In seconds, a new arm existed, larger than the original, jagged and translucent, veins of blue light pulsing beneath its surface. He flexed it once, the sound like glaciers grinding.
"Your death," the King said, voice warped by fury, "will not be merciful."
He vanished.
Not in a flash of light, but in a burst of compressed frost. The distance closed instantly and the Ice King struck, fist colliding with Damien's daggers in a clash that sent shockwaves rippling through the hall. Damien skidded backward, boots carving trenches into the ice, eyes wide.
Fast.
Too fast.
The King followed with another blow, then another. Each strike carried the weight of a monster wearing a mage's skin, ice reinforcing muscle, joints, momentum. Damien parried, twisted, ducked, but the cold punished him every time he tried to counter. The storm bit at him, slowed him, tore blood from his skin even when attacks missed by inches.
He slashed.
The blade struck true.
And stopped.
Ice bloomed over the King's body instantly, layers forming the moment steel met skin. The dagger scraped uselessly, sparks and frost exploding outward. The King laughed and drove an elbow into Damien's ribs, sending him flying again.
Damien rolled, breath ragged, blood staining the ice beneath him.
He understood it now.
He could survive.
He could dodge.
But he could not kill.
Every path forward was sealed. Every opening turned false the moment he reached for it. A perfect stalemate, forged from raw power and an environment that rejected him entirely.
For the first time in a long while, the thought surfaced.
Retreat.
Let the shadows finish outside. Let them flood in. Let numbers solve what skill could not.
The thought tasted wrong.
He did not know the rules of this dungeon well enough to gamble everything on an escape. Failure was not an option. Not after coming this far. Not after carving his way to this throne.
His grip tightened around his daggers.
"No surrender," he murmured.
The blades answered.
They stirred.
At first it was subtle. A faint tremor in his hands. Then darkness began to coil around the metal, slow and deliberate, like ink spreading through water. These weapons had never boasted flashy effects, never screamed with borrowed power. Hephaestus had made them empty by design.
So they could be filled.
By him.
By will.
By conviction.
Damien's shadow peeled itself from the floor and crawled up his arms, wrapping around the daggers as if recognizing an old command finally spoken aloud. The air grew heavy. The storm faltered for half a heartbeat.
Damien smiled.
"I see."
He moved.
Not forward.
Not through the storm.
He was simply behind the Ice King.
No sound. No warning. No visible strike.
The King turned, confused, just in time to feel it.
Darkness erupted.
Slashes appeared across his body, not one, not ten, but a cascade. Clean, precise, invisible. Sixty cuts of pure shadow tore through ice, flesh, and mana alike, each one carrying the weight of a shadow under Damien's command.
One slash for each.
The Ice King's mind failed to process what was happening. His body came apart before the pain could arrive, pieces falling away in silence as the storm died with him.
The throne room stilled.
The corpse collapsed into fragments of frozen ruin.
Damien stood alone, blades humming softly with fading shadow.
He spoke only two words.
"Shadow Slash."
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