"[ᚻ]! [ᛒ]! [ᛚ]!"
In Scandinavia, Skadi, the Goddess of Winter, had charged too deep and fallen into the encirclement of the angelic army. The wand in her hand tapped and traced points in the air one after another. As she solemnly chanted Runes, her right foot stomped hard.
At once, a frozen blizzard swept outward. Every bizarre angel caught in its path froze into a solid ice sculpture.
"Its origin is light, its might is flame! Burn! Burn! Burn!"
Even with their mouths sealed shut, the angels' voices still rang out from inside their bodies through strange vibrations, vast and resounding.
In an instant, blazing white flames of light burst out from within those monsters, roasting the frost that had locked their movements. The outer layers of crystal cracked one after another.
Bang!
But just as those radiant bodies were about to break free, the sound of something heavy striking the ground came from the skeletal ghost ship smoking black in the air. A figure bent her knees to absorb the impact and landed on the battlefield.
Hum!
At the same time, the surrounding space opened faintly. A brilliant vortex shimmering with Runes connected to a world shrouded in cold mist, where even Ether had frozen into ice-blue particles.
"The flourishing must perish. Such is the law of the world. The morning sun must meet its dusk. What I desire is a pure white landscape.
What I desire is a beautiful world of death.
What I desire is an eternity where all ugly things are drowned, frozen, and sealed.
Frozen Land of Death, obey my roar and grant this world an even colder and more silent death. Winds of Niflheim!"
Along with that cold, solemn murmur, an icy-blue Ether storm suddenly surged around them. The radiant angels along its path were sliced apart as if by hundreds of millions of tiny ice blades, instantly turning into scattered dust.
So strong!
Skadi looked over the white earth swept clean by that absolute-zero ice wind, then turned toward the graceful figure standing in front of her, radiating an aura that warned all living things away. Her expression tightened slightly.
"Your eyes..."
"This?"
Holo formed a piece of ice crystal between her fingers and looked at her own eyes, now tinted ice-blue. She lazily yawned out of habit, thought for a moment, and casually explained.
"I guess it probably has something to do with Ragnarok. Hela, Samael, and I are Beasts of Calamity. Under certain conditions, we activate our destiny traits, and our divine power reaches a height above the gods. Otherwise, how could mere descendants of Loki destroy veteran Main Gods like Odin?
In Samael's words, this is called 'the Mandate of Heaven is mine.' When Scandinavia is unlucky, I'm the Mandate of Heaven!"
The calamity giant wolf of Scandinavian mythology planted her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest, her tone proud and her expression teasing. After admiring herself in the mirror of condensed ice crystal for a moment, she nodded happily.
Mm-hm. Ice-blue. It looks pretty good.
That simple explanation immediately helped Skadi understand why Holo's strength had suddenly surged and why her appearance had changed like this.
Holo's lazy attitude, no different from usual, also put the Goddess of Winter at ease, and her tense muscles relaxed slightly.
Good. This change had not made the Beast of Calamity before her lose her reason or feelings.
"Hey, what's with that look? Even if you don't trust me, you should trust your little Samael, right? To prepare for this, that kid spent plenty of time feeding Hela and me motivational speeches, plus all kinds of scenario simulations and contingency plans. He scared us more than a few times..."
Holo rolled her eyes and complained, yet the corners of her lips unconsciously curved into a nostalgic smile.
Then, seeing the angelic army gather and attack again, Holo crossed both hands and swung them down. Ice-crystal claws extended from her ten fingers. She moved behind Skadi and stood back-to-back with her, not forgetting to turn and look at Skadi, whose breathing was still uneven.
"How about it? Can you hold on?"
"I'm fine. By the way, where is Loki?"
Skadi eased her breathing, frowned, and asked. At the same time, her lips moved as she began a high-speed chant of divine words.
In an instant, Rune after Rune appeared before the Goddess of Winter and shot out like tracking missiles toward the angels closing in from every direction, once again clearing the surrounding airspace.
According to their battle formation, Loki should have been leading the frost giants and her mountain giants to break in and divide the enemy, forming mutual support.
Yet after less than a few hours, the other side had gone offline, leaving Skadi to advance alone and become heavily surrounded.
"That guy ran into a few particularly troublesome Seraphim and nearly got beaten half to death. Luckily, Hela stepped in just in time, or the army would have collapsed..."
Holo jerked her chin irritably toward the rear, complaining about her own old father without the slightest respect.
"He can't even beat Heimdall. Counting on him to make a heroic stand is basically hopeless."
Skadi's mouth twitched when she heard that. She turned to look into the distance and saw that on the battlefield shrouded in gray-black cold mist, a cold, bewitching goddess in a black cloak, wearing a skull crown and wielding two Swords of the Night Sky, was cutting down thousands of angels as if chopping vegetables. A striking vacuum had formed around her, as though a War Goddess had descended.
The same transformation had happened to this Goddess of Death. The half of her body once covered in uncontrollable death and decay had actually grown complete flesh and blood, and a surging power of death was being released without restraint.
As for the handsome young man in a horned helmet, bruised and swollen, he hid timidly behind Hela. From time to time, he threw flying knives to ambush the enemy, or very insidiously stabbed out from blind spots in their perception. He seemed especially fond of admiring the stunned reactions and expressions of his victims when they were stabbed.
Everything was exactly as Samael had summarized. A warrior-tank bloodline, wizard stat allocation, and assassin behavior...
All things considered, he had not wasted that sleazy, criminal-looking face or that wicked, cheap aura of his.
Skadi looked at Loki hiding behind Hela, having the time of his life and clearly forgetting his actual work. Her mouth twitched, leaving her speechless.
As time passed, the war entered a white-hot stage.
"[ᚠ], [ᚢ], [ᚦ], [ᚨ]!"
The Goddess of Winter chanted Runes at incredible speed and poured out Mana wildly. After bombarding the angels closing in and clearing the area once more, she could not help frowning and asking.
"According to the plan, we've already split up the angel legions and lured them into the Nine Ages of Gods. When exactly do we counterattack?"
"It's already begun..."
Holo crossed her hands and swung them down. A chaotic storm of ice blades tore dozens of radiant bodies apart. At the same time, her eyes flickered, and she spoke quietly.
"Don't you think there are a lot fewer angels now?"
Skadi was instantly startled awake by that sentence. After observing carefully, she was shocked to discover that the attack frequency and intensity of the angelic army had weakened without her noticing. Even their formation had become visibly thinner.
By contrast, her own Mana had gone through round after round of consumption, yet showed not the slightest sign of drying up.
Could it be...
"The World Tree!"
As the answer left Skadi's lips, a pleased smile curved Holo's mouth. Her ice-blue eyes gazed faintly at the Great Hollow in the sky, which seemed to have shrunk.
"Mm-hm. If I'm guessing right, the World Tree isn't just a defensive line against Ragnarok. It's also a new life-cycle system..."
Just as bones are often buried beneath brilliant cherry blossoms.
And "trees" eat people.