Lilith dispelled the ice barrier she had set up.
When Aren stepped out of the cave formed by the colossal petrified tree, that familiar, sulfurous wind hit his face.
Lilith, emerging right behind him, did not break her posture despite this suffocating heat. By covering her body with a thin layer of mana, she had created a personal winter around herself.
The sickly, rotting texture continued.
The duo advanced through the dead trees, placing their steps carefully to minimize the squelching sounds made by the black, sticky slime beneath their feet.
'Basic Vision.'
That familiar golden gleam appeared in his hazel eyes. The colorful world had given way to a gray one. The flow of mana in the surroundings became visible to the naked eye.
The duo began to advance toward their first target, just as they had previously decided on the map.
Aren was in the front, his hand ready on the hilt of his sword, silently gliding with the Phantom Step skill. Lilith was following him ten steps behind, watching his blind spots and tightly gripping her broken sword.
After about a forty-five-minute walk, Aren suddenly stopped. Raising his left hand, he signaled Lilith behind him to 'wait'.
Lilith stopped instantly. She even slowed her breathing.
Aren was looking behind the thick charred tree trunks ahead with his golden-ringed eyes. Within the gray world, nearly twenty clusters of light, large and small, were flickering.
It was a pack.
Aren gestured, motioning for Lilith to join him.
"About fifty meters ahead." Aren whispered. "Their numbers are around twenty. Their auras are weak, but they have the numerical advantage."
Lilith peeked her head slightly from behind the tree. In the wide volcanic clearing between the charred trees, creatures lay whose size resembled an adult wolf, but their skins were covered in cracked layers of lava.
They looked like jackals. However, while a green liquid drooled from their mouths, there was no trace of consciousness in their vertical pupils. As they breathed, blood dripped from their thick, midnight-blue fur. As their claws pierced through the soil, they left a terrifying trail beneath their feet.
"Weak but fast creatures that hunt in packs. At least, that's how they appear." said Lilith in a whisper. She had analyzed the situation in seconds. "Even if it's you, if you get surrounded by them, you will die."
As Aren gripped his black sword, "That's why you won't let them surround me." he said, looking into Lilith's ice-blue eyes.
Lilith nodded with a faint, imperceptible smile on her lips.
"Give me ten seconds." she said.
Lilith slowly extended her right hand toward the rotting soil. Her ice-blue eyes gleamed. The pure, freezing mana inside her began to flow from her fingertips into the ground.
Something contrary to the laws of nature was occurring. A thin, white layer of frost began to spread toward the area where the jackals were, creeping silently like a snake.
One of the jackals noticed the sudden drop in temperature in the air and raised its head. It tried to stand up while growling.
But its claws were already stuck to the ice.
Lilith suddenly clenched her hand into a fist.
"Absolute Frost."
'I wonder if she isn't embarrassed saying that, her willpower is truly firm.' Aren thought.
The ice layer explosively expanded within seconds. The twenty-meter radius around the jackals was instantly buried in a freezing whiteness.
The jackals' muscles went stiff; the collision of the fire energy inside them with the ice outside rooted them to the spot.
"Now." Lilith said.
Aren shot from his position like a bullet.
He pumped a small portion of the immense energy in his Mana Pool into his sword.
Mana Reinforcement.
Golden veins appeared on the black sword. In that suffocating darkness of the forest, Aren's sword shone almost like a miniature sun.
Thanks to Phantom Step, he dove among the jackals without experiencing even the slightest loss of balance on the slippery, ice-covered ground.
While the first Fire Jackal was struggling to break free from the ice, Aren was already beside it.
The creature's natural armor, its lava skin, had become brittle due to Lilith's ice, turning into glass virtually ready to shatter.
Aren swung his sword horizontally.
There was no resistance.
The sword, covered in golden flames, lopped off the jackal's neck in a single stroke.
Experience gained.
Aren didn't stop. Using his momentum, he spun around and cleaved the chest of another jackal trying to pounce on him from behind.
Experience gained.
Lilith's magic was working perfectly. While the jackals were supposed to be fast and agile, the effect of the ice had turned them into sluggish and aimless creatures.
However, when twenty creatures panicked at the same time, chaos was inevitable.
As Aren slashed three jackals in front of him one after another, a jackal left in his blind spot that had managed to free itself from the ice leapt toward Aren's back with a growl.
Aren felt the creature's heat on the back of his neck. He had no time to turn and swing his sword. He knew his armor would absorb the damage.
But that blow never came.
A shrill whistle tearing through the air was heard.
A transparent ice spear, sparkling like a diamond, passed just a few centimeters from Aren's shoulder level, entered the open mouth of the attacking jackal mid-air, and exited from the back of its skull.
The jackal's body slumped lifelessly at the base of Aren's feet.
Experience gained.
As Aren cut down the last obstacle in front of him with his sword, he glanced back from the corner of his eye.
Lilith was standing ten meters back. Three more ice spears were floating in the air around her. The sword she held in her hand was no longer broken. She had reshaped it with ice.
Her eyes scanned the battlefield like a hawk, eliminating every threat Aren couldn't reach or that remained in his blind spot with surgical precision.
'Good.' Aren thought.
'If I were alone, wiping out this pack would take me minutes and consume a large portion of my mana. But now... I am both conserving my mana, and my risk rate is very low.'
Aren continued to dance like death incarnate within this flawlessly safe zone Lilith had opened.
Golden flames and ice spears.
One burned and tore apart; the other froze and pierced through. Two opposing elements had achieved a terrifying harmony on the battlefield.
As the last Fire Jackal also attempted to flee, its torso was nailed to a tree by the golden-flaming black sword Aren threw.
The forest, after this violent storm of a few minutes, fell back into its deadly silence.
Experience gained.
Experience gained.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Level 24>Level 25
Your stats increased by 1 point.
Aren let out a deep breath. He pulled his black sword out of the jackal's torso nailed to the tree in a single motion. The golden glow on the sword faded, giving way to matte metal.
Lilith walked over the ice-covered ground with light steps and came to Aren's side. The last ice spear floating in the air dissipated and vanished as she approached.
Aren sent his sword into his ring. He looked expressionlessly at the battlefield smelling of burnt flesh and blood.
Lilith, with her mud- and ash-covered boots, looked at a torn jackal corpse. There was a proud, yet equally cold-blooded expression on her face.
"The efficiency that emerges when your destructive power is combined with my area control... is even higher than I expected." said Lilith.
She turned her eyes to Aren. Unlike those tense moments when they first met, her gaze no longer held just a cold calculation, but a true sense of 'partnership'.
'I suppose I should praise her a bit.' Aren thought.
"You are quite successful at watching my back." Aren said, with those calm, golden-ringed eyes of his. This was considered high praise by his standards.
"Likewise, you create a safe distance for me." Lilith replied. "If we can maintain this synergy, we could genuinely defeat one of those entities with the 'Warrior' title on the map."
Aren nodded slightly in agreement.
Aren took the map out of his ring and opened it. He marked their current position with his finger and then pointed to a massive 'Cave' figure located deep within the ring they were in.
"This is where we will camp tonight. Until we get there, we will kill the other creatures on our route."
Her ice-blue eyes scanning the route.
Aren suddenly stopped.
Even that layer of squelchy mud beneath their feet was trembling slightly.
This vibration was not an ordinary tremor. It was a rhythmic, steadily increasing rumble preparing to shake the earth and sky.
"Do you feel that?" said Lilith, narrowing her ice-blue eyes as she looked through the dense, charred trees ahead.
Aren gripped his sword tightly.
'Basic Vision.'
The golden ring in his hazel eyes flashed. Within the gray-turned world, a massive wave of flames appeared, approaching them from the depths of the forest.
Not one, not ten... Easily more than fifty pure, furious, and colossal orange auras.
The auras were so dense that they painted the gray world crimson.
Within seconds, the first figures emerged from the rotten trees. Their arrival was so savage that century-old dead trees were toppling, and massive roots were being ripped from the soil.
Aren's eyes widened slightly. That mask of absolute calmness on his face experienced a millisecond shudder.
These were Wild Boars.
They were the exact same boars, the size of pickup trucks, that Rick and his group had hunted before, and which Aren had devoured.
However, there was a difference. The boar Rick had killed would look like a newborn puppy compared to these incoming ones.
Each of these boars was the height of a two-story building. Their pitch-black fur shredded the falling trees as they crashed into them, and their tusks, as thick as tree trunks, pulverized everything in their path. The flames spurting from their snouts dried up even the black mud around them.
"The one I saw before was just a cub." whispered Aren.
But the main thing that caught Aren's attention was that this colossal herd wasn't running to hunt. In their eyes lay not a savage desire to hunt, but pure terror.
Colliding, trampling each other, they were fleeing like mad.
"They are spooked by something." said Lilith, unable to hide that slight tremble in her voice. "What could terrify these giants so much?"
"We don't have time to think about that." said Aren, his rational mind instantly switching into survival mode.
He quickly looked around. The ground was a sticky slime; even if they turned back and ran in this mud, they couldn't match the speed of these giants. If they climbed the trees, the boars were uprooting and trampling them.
The herd was coming at them in this cramped part of the forest like an almost insurmountable wall of flesh and obsidian.
Aren's brain was calculating thousands of possibilities per second.
'More than fifty colossal Wild Boars. Individually, they appear weaker than that scythe-wielding creature, but they are numerous. Trying to kill them one by one with Lilith is also an option, but with a single wrong move, I'll be crushed and buried in the mud.'
In Aren's mind, a simple yet deadly rule of physics from his old world came alive.
'Cooling air compresses, its molecules condense and become heavier. When this supercooled air mass suddenly meets an immense and opposing heat, it expands violently.'
The distance between them and the boar herd had dropped to a hundred meters. Mud was splashing everywhere, the hot breath of approaching death hitting their faces.
Aren placed his left hand on Lilith's shoulder.
"Lilith, listen to me carefully." Aren's voice was so commanding, so absolute, that Lilith's ice-blue eyes instantly locked onto him.
"What are you going to do?"
"Use every last drop of mana you have. Freeze that hundred-meter area in front of us, the trees, and this black slime. The colder, the better."
Lilith looked at the fifty colossal monsters coming, crushing the mud. She knew that just freezing the air wouldn't be enough to stop these giants, but she saw that unwavering resolve in Aren's eyes. A reliable ally would not question the leader's plan.
"Understood." said Lilith.
She closed her eyes. Her already cold skin practically turned ice white. A freezing, blue mist began to emanate from her entire body. She unleashed all the energy in her mana pool outward, surpassing her limits. She swiftly thrust her hands forward.
"Ice Age!"
'…'
A deafening cracking sound was heard in the air. Within seconds, the vast hundred-meter section of the forest in front of them transformed from a sea of mud into a massive, jagged ice rink.
That sickly humidity in the air crystallized instantly, the oxygen grew heavy, and the tree trunks were coated in ice.
When the boar herd entered this freezing area, the flames on the skins of those in the front lines sizzled and went out.
Their speed was greatly cut down; their massive feet slipped in the iced-over mud, and they began to crash into each other and topple over.
However, the immense momentum of those coming from behind continued to push the front liners forward like a sled.
Even though the herd stumbled, that wall of flesh was coming at them with an unshakable mass.
The distance was fifty meters. Forty meters. Thirty meters.
In the air, there was a freezing, lung-shredding compressed cold.
"Get behind me!" shouted Aren.
While Lilith collapsed onto the frozen earth in an exhausted state, Aren stepped right in front of her, facing the herd. He sheathed his sword. For the first time, he was not going to use his sword.
He took a deep breath.
The 'Divine Phoenix Mantra' roared in his mind, literally.
That massive golden sea in Aren's Mana Pool surged.
He did something he had never done before.
With the absolute control granted to him by the 'Child of Fire' passive, he focused his mana not inside his body, but directly outward, into his hands.
He extended his hands forward.
"Burn."
From the palms of Aren's hands, a golden, divine explosion of flames erupted with unprecedented speed and intensity. This was no ordinary flame. This was the searing, pure, and destructive essence of the Phoenix.
The moment the torrent of golden flame made contact with that supercooled, heavily humid, and compressed air created by Lilith, the laws of nature shattered.
The compressed molecules expanded violently in a thousandth of a second in the face of this incomprehensible, divine heat.
The explosion started silently. First, all ambient sound was violently sucked into the vacuum.
Aren and Lilith's ears rang.
Then…
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!