Frozen Blood, Shattered Bones

  Victory was a breath away. Kai could almost taste it as his blade carved through the monster’s throat. But in the split second before the killing blow, a white-hot agony flared in his wrist. Because of the adrenaline, Kai only felt that something was wrong, and only then did he realize it. The bone gave way completely. The sword slipped from his nerveless fingers, clattering to the ground. When the sword hit the ground, it felt as if it took all of Kai’s hopes of winning along with it.

  The monster, its yellow eyes wide with a mix of fury and survival, ripped Kai’s own sword out of its eye socket. It didn't waste the opportunity.

  Kai plummeted toward the earth, watching helplessly as a swarm of ink-black tentacles rose like spears to impale him. He closed his eyes—a raw, human fear he hadn't felt in a long time washing over him. He waited for the cold steel of death to pierce his chest. He waited for an eternity. He expected to feel something—a dull, unbearable pain—or perhaps to feel nothing at all, thinking he might already be dead.

  But the pain never came. Not only that, but he wasn't dead yet; he could still hear the sound of the falling leaves.

  Kai snapped his eyes open and his heart nearly stopped. John was there. He had thrown himself into the path of the attack, his body riddled with tentacles. He had chosen to be the shield so Kai could live.

  The monster let out a sickening screech, shaking John’s limp body off its appendages and tossing him into a tree like a broken doll.

  "Do you feel it?" the monster hissed, its face tearing further away from reality. "Your friend’s Jonk is flickering out. That only happens when you die!"

  Kai’s vision blurred with rage. He tried to grab John’s fallen sword, but the blade began to turn into ash before vanishing completely. With his right hand, he tried to reach for his own sword lying nearby, but his right arm was just dead weight. On top of the shattered wrist, he had landed on it during the fall. Kai turned and gripped the sword with his left hand. His right hand was barely a stabilizer now; he placed it on the hilt only so he wouldn't be exposed to the monster’s attacks.

  The monster didn't stop. It tore pieces of its own shadowy essence, launching dozens of black spears. Every one that flew past Kai induced a mixture of sensations: despair, fear, but certainly no hope.

  Kai was hit—shoulder, thigh, abdomen—none lethal, but enough to slow him. His body was closing the wounds as fast as they appeared, a desperate, instinctive regeneration fueled by pure adrenaline and grief. Even so, it was a very weak regeneration; it didn't even close the wounds, it only minimized the blood loss.

  John died for me... Kai thought, his muscles tearing and bones grinding. He took every hit, and in the end, I couldn't save him. It wasn't enough.

  The monster prepared its final, killing strike. Kai, exhausted and broken, dropped to one knee—not because he wanted to, but because his body could no longer continue.

  Then, in the darkest corner of the forest, something impossible happened.

  John’s corpse began to pulse. A rhythmic, heavy thrumming that echoed the heartbeat of the earth itself. An unnatural cold swept through the trees—a frost so bitter it made even the monster pause. Ice began to crystallize within the gaping holes in John’s chest.

  The monster lunged at Kai, a strike meant to end the story.

  CLANG.

  The sound of metal meeting shadow shattered the silence of the woods. Kai opened his eyes to find John standing. He had blocked the strike with a single hand covered in ice—but not normal ice, one made of pure Jonk. But this wasn't the John he knew. Something was different about his power.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  A massive Jonk radiated from him, but not a normal one. It wasn't like everyone else's; there was something special about it. The sheer pressure emanating from John was no longer one that just crushes you, but it offered a sensation of cold so raw and so foul that you couldn't even compare it to normal cold. It was Kaijiu.

  Frost crept across John’s face, covering his left eye in a jagged mask of blue ice. The entire forest began to freeze—not with water, but with solidified, pure Jonk. The trees didn't just seem to be covered in that ice, but they seemed to be corrupted, becoming ice themselves—a tool at John's disposal. The monster didn't hesitate; in an act of fear or perhaps strategy, it tore a part of itself, shaping it into dozens, maybe hundreds of spears. The monster’s spears, launched in a desperate flurry, froze mid-air, suspended in time.

  John grinned, his voice sounding like cracking glaciers. "It’s not time to give up yet, Kai!"

  Before Kai could speak, a numbing cold wrapped around his own wounds and his shattered wrist. The pain began to slowly vanish until he barely felt a fraction of it—so little that if he didn't focus, he couldn't even feel it. That ice offered a sense of protection that made Kai lose himself in his own world for a moment, but something broke the silence of the forest.

  "This ice is one of my Kaijiu's gifts," John said, parrying strikes at a speed Kai could barely track. "It will melt in fifteen minutes. Until then, you feel no pain. Fight as hard as you can, Kai! This is our last chance to take that monster down! After those 15 minutes are up, not just you, but I myself will no longer be able to fight. Honestly, I don't even know if we'll survive even if we beat the monster, so treat this battle as the last one you'll ever have."

  The monster stopped its ranged attacks, realizing they were useless. Kai stood beside John, gripping his sword with both hands, the ice acting as a perfect splint for his broken bones. "I’m in your debt, John. More than I can ever pay. You call the play."

  The monster was frustrated. It was nervous. All the wounds it had caused seemed to have become useless; the fact that they were still standing felt like an insult worse than any sword to a monster's ego. However, John and Kai didn't waste time; time was precious—suddenly more precious than it had been in their entire lives.

  Without a word, they moved as one. Synchronized by soul, not by speech.

  John drew the monster’s focus to the left while Kai circled right. The beast manifested a claw the size of a redwood tree, a blow meant to crush a mountain. John simply breathed. A gargantuan wall of ice erupted from the earth, catching the claw which seemed to change the temperature of the entire forest, not just the monster's zone.

  Kai launched himself, flaring his Jonk to a desperate 15%. He struck the trapped limb, the impact causing a massive explosion of orange and black energy. The claw evaporated.

  Kai fell to his knees, his energy reserves hitting zero. "My part... is done. Finish it, John!" Kai had faith not in himself, not in his sword, but in his friend. Maybe this is the last time they would fight together, so trust is something more important than words can express.

  Through the smoke of the explosion, John emerged like a god of winter. He conjured chains of ice that snared the monster’s shifting form, locking it in place. With the creature's head exposed, John funneled his new, overwhelming power into his blade.

  The two energies—John’s Kaijiu frost and the monster’s abstract darkness—clashed in a blinding struggle. John pushed, his arm groaning under the pressure of his own power, until the blade finally cleaved through the monster’s skull.

  John collapsed as the abstract form began to evaporate, the ink-black sphere dissolving into the wind. The forest returned to its natural, eerie quiet. They had won.

  But the silence didn't last.

  A new pressure descended on the clearing. It was gargantuan—heavier than any Leader, darker than any monster. It was something... wrong.

  John scrambled to his feet, his Kaijiu power still humming, ready to fight. But before he could utter a word, he was slammed into the ground by an invisible weight. A weight that was sinister, one that belonged to neither man nor monster—something that seemed to induce fear not just because of its power, but because of how it felt. With John on the ground, the ice began to disappear and the forest returned to normal; however, the only ice that remained was the one keeping Kai alive.

  Kai looked up, his eyes widening until they were nearly all white. His mind struggled to process what he was seeing. Confused, terrified, and paralyzed, he could only stare at the figure emerging from the mist. He couldn't see what it was or how it looked; all he saw was a vague outline, so faint that he didn't even know if it was a human, a monster, or perhaps something else entirely. However, he knew for certain that slowly, whatever was there was approaching them, because the pressure was becoming greater and greater, and Kai’s body was trembling.