She drew back the bowstring, murmuring words in a tongue no one present could understand. As the chant continued, her body slowly lifted away from Ethan's back, no longer resting against him as if some unseen force were bearing her weight.

Lyla's chant was not especially long, yet the moment it ended, the magical arrow forming on Frostbound Reverie began to tremble violently. At its tip, a white vortex spun into existence, drawing in waves of frigid air from within itself as it rotated. It felt as though the vortex connected to some distant realm, siphoning its unbearable cold into this world. As the seconds passed, that freezing energy condensed, layering upon itself until it formed an enormous arrowhead of solid ice.

Ethan hovered at an altitude of nearly a thousand meters. Even so, the violent fluctuations of magical power radiating from Lyla's Forbidden Spell were still sensed by the NPC garrison stationed far below.

NPCs were still just NPCs. They could only look up at the sky in confusion and alarm. At this stage of the game, none of them possessed an air force, which was the only reason Ethan dared to attempt something like this. If it were the mid-game, when NPC factions gained aerial units, remaining suspended in the air like this would have turned him into nothing more than a target waiting to be shot down.

Two minutes passed, and the massive ice arrow continued to solidify.

"Lyla, why is it taking so long this time?" Ethan asked, his teeth chattering despite himself. An intense cold seeped into his back, sharp and biting. If not for the party-sharing system mitigating the damage, he had no doubt that this chill alone would have frozen him solid. Even so, his body could not stop shivering.

Ten minutes passed.

Lyla was still channeling, her expression calm but distant.

Ethan frowned as he thought back to the last time she had used this spell, at the Iron Mountains. Back then, the channeling had only taken a few minutes. Now, more than ten had already gone by, with no sign of it ending.

The ice arrow continued to grow, expanding far beyond its original size. Within the translucent frost, faint streaks of purple gradually appeared, thin and threadlike, weaving themselves through the frozen mass like veins.

Seeing those purple patterns, Ethan's thoughts drifted to Lyla's dual-element Poison and Water dragon pet. A strange suspicion surfaced in his mind. Could this spell somehow be tied to that creature?

"Forbidden, Winter's End…"

Lyla's voice rang out suddenly, answering his unspoken thought. Normally clear and bright like a silver bell, it now carried an endless, bone-deep chill that seemed capable of freezing the soul itself.

After nearly twenty full minutes of channeling, she finally spoke the spell's true name.

Ethan's heart leapt into his throat. 'This is it.'

As the final syllable left her lips, the fingers holding the bowstring released.

Shiiiiing—

The sound tore through the air as the crystalline arrow launched forward, carving a white scar across the sky, as though the very atmosphere froze in its wake.

Ting…

A light, almost musical sound rang out as the arrow struck the exact center of the fortress below, then vanished into the earth as if it had never existed.

That single sound was enough to alert every NPC defender within the city. One after another, they began converging on the impact point, drawn by instinct and alarm.

Crack… Crack, crack…

From deep beneath the ground, the sound of something breaking echoed upward, dull and ominous.

Then, from his vantage point high above, Ethan saw it.

From the point of impact, an endless tide of white frost erupted outward. It surged in all directions without pause, spreading at a speed that defied belief.

Ethan could only stare, stunned.

The fortress beneath him spanned a full five kilometers. He had thought it would already be impressive if Lyla's spell managed to freeze even half of that distance.

What unfolded before his eyes shattered that expectation completely.

In the blink of an eye, the entire five-kilometer fortress was sealed in glittering frost. Ice crawled up its towering walls and spilled over the edges, surging outward until it finally stopped dozens of meters beyond the outer fortifications. The once-formidable stronghold had transformed into a vast, frozen ocean. Across the ice-covered surface, those same purple streaks pulsed faintly, forming a massive web that seemed to ensnare the entire structure within its grasp.

Lyla's body remained suspended in the air, unmoving. Her eyes glowed with a pure, featureless white, her pupils completely gone. She looked down at the frozen fortress below, her lips parting slightly as she spoke a single word, soft and absolute.

"Break."

Her voice became the trigger.

Boom! Boom, boom, boom!

Every frost-covered NPC defender shattered in an instant, their bodies exploding into countless shards of ice. Defensive emplacements along the walls, ballistae, turrets, and spell nodes, anything that possessed a health bar, all displayed the same sight above them at once, a single number scrolling endlessly upward.

-9999999…

The ellipses that followed stretched on, the true value impossible to read. Ethan recognized the display immediately. In Ethereal, this only appeared when something was erased outright, when the system did not even bother calculating damage. It was the same visual you saw when a max-level player casually crushed a Level 1 mob with a normal attack.

The fortress's entire defensive system failed simultaneously. Structures cracked, froze, and collapsed into heaps of shattered ice, leaving behind nothing but frozen debris.

Ethan could only stare.

'Too fierce.'

Lyla's Forbidden Spell felt as though it existed completely outside the normal framework of skills. The last time she had used it at the Iron Mountains, he had not seen damage numbers either. This was the same phenomenon. And the NPCs here were no fodder. Each one was at least Level 60. NPCs were not monsters. Their system-granted intelligence was far superior, their combat capability far more refined than any creature of the same level.

Yet she had wiped out the entire fortress in a single spell, leaving the walls themselves intact.

That alone was absurd.

But the defensive turrets being destroyed did not concern him. He still possessed the one and only Fortress Defense System schematic. Once it was constructed and installed here, this location would become virtually unassailable at this stage of the game.

"Lyla, you're amazing… I love you! I'll definitely reward you properly tonight. Heh heh!"

The first part of his praise was sincere, and Lyla felt it, her expression softening for a heartbeat. Then she processed the rest.

Her face flushed red as she shot him a sharp glare and stomped her foot hard against his feathered back.

"Ethan! You're the worst!" she huffed, turning her face away and refusing to look at him again.

Ethan laughed quietly to himself, clearly enjoying her reaction, and angled his dive toward the ground.

As he descended, his eyes swept across the frozen fortress below, and a faint sense of unease crept into his chest.

The central plaza was clearly visible now.

But there was no capture flag.

His expression darkened. "Something's wrong… there are still NPCs alive."

He abruptly halted, hovering roughly a hundred meters above the ground.

At that exact moment, a violent whirlwind erupted from atop a tall, spire-like structure to the side. It was the fortress's command center, the location that would later become the guild hall. The instant Ethan sensed the killing intent carried within that vortex, he twisted his body and rolled violently through the air.

"Ahhh!" Lyla cried out as she dropped into a crouch, clutching fistfuls of his feathers to keep from being thrown off. There had been no time for a warning.

The whirlwind tore past them, missing by a narrow margin. Only then did Ethan see what it truly was.

A massive battle-axe, long-hafted and brutal in design, spinning end over end through the sky. It curved smoothly through the air, then arced back toward the top of the spire as if guided by an unseen hand.

Ethan's gaze snapped upward.

A figure stepped out from behind the pointed roof. He wore gleaming plate armor embossed with a lion's head across the chest. With casual ease, he caught the returning giant axe in one hand, as though it weighed nothing at all.

"Dammit… how did I forget about him?" Ethan muttered under his breath.

"Ethan…" Lyla straightened, lifting Frostbound Reverie and fixing her eyes on the armored figure.

"Shoot him." Ethan's eyes narrowed as he pulled upward, gaining altitude once more.

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