The silence that settled over the sunken basin was heavier than the freezing northern air. On the high battlements of the Sunken Fortress, dozens of elite soldiers stood frozen, their eyes locked on the lingering cloud of glittered ice dust filtering down into the snow drifts. Fifty enchanted siege bolts, each designed to pierce the hide of a leviathan, had been ground into powder by a single upward wave of a stranger's hand.
Inside the fortress's central command tower, the heavy oak doors banged open. Duke Ironwood, commander of the northern front and uncle to the reigning monarch, strode out onto the observation balcony. His ornate silver plate armor clanked against the stone, his dark crimson cloak whipping wildly in the glacial wind.
"Reports!" the Duke bellowed, his voice laced with the harsh gravel of a veteran commander. "Was that a stray rank-seven spell from the tribal warlords? Speak!"
An adjutant scrambled forward, his face as white as the snow beneath them. "No, Your Grace! It... it is a single traveler. He walked out of the Blood-Snow Pass alone. The ballista crews fired a full salvo, but he neutralized the entire barrage without casting a spell!"
Duke Ironwood grabbed his golden spyglass, aiming it down at the snow-covered expanse below.
Through the lens, he saw Adam walking unhurriedly across the basin. The man wore no heavy furs or enchanted armor, only a simple dark tunic that remained untarnished by the swirling blizzard. He carried no weapons, held no staff, and emitted no aura of mana. To the casual eye, he looked like a scholar lost in a winter garden. Yet, with every casual step he took, the thick ice beneath his boots cracked in perfect, rhythmic ring patterns, as if the land itself was bowing under an unfathomable weight.
"Grandmaster," the Duke muttered, his eyes narrowing. "A rogue grandmaster from the southern sanctuaries..."
Suddenly, the ground beneath the fortress violently shuddered.
A deep, deafening roar erupted from the subterranean depths of the basin a sound so massive that it rattled the stone foundations of the fortress towers and sent massive icicles crashing down from the canyon walls. The blue frost-crystal gates of the fortress groaned as the frozen earth buckled upward.
"Your Grace!" an officer screamed from the lower walls. "The seal in the lower catacombs has failed! The Frost-Tide Wyrm is breaching!"
The snow beneath Adam violently exploded upward. A monstrous entity over three hundred feet long burst into the frozen sky, its jagged, ice-scaled body blocking out the sun. It was an ancient Frost-Tide Wyrm a calamity-class beast that had been slumbering beneath the fortress for five centuries, bound by the founding ancestors of the royal bloodline. Its massive, glowing blue eyes flared with blind fury as it opened its maw, releasing a cone of absolute-zero breath directly toward the main courtyard of the fortress.
The blue frost-fire rained down, threatening to freeze three thousand royal soldiers into solid ice instantly.
Adam paused his stride, looking up at the towering leviathan.
"Too much noise," Adam said softly.
He raised his right hand, extending his palm toward the falling curtain of breath.
A direct, transparent shockwave of compressed kinetic pressure erupted from his palm. The wave slammed straight through the center of the leviathan's freezing breath, instantly vaporizing the absolute-zero frost-fire into a thin cloud of harmless warm steam. The sheer force of the pressure wave continued upward without losing momentum, striking the massive wyrm squarely in the chest.
The impact sounded like a mountain collapsing. The colossal beast let out a sharp, choked groan as its three-hundred-foot frame was launched back into the air, tumbling backward through the clouds before slamming heavily into the snow drifts outside the fortress walls.
Adam lowered his hand, his expression completely flat as he continued walking toward the wide-open main gates of the stunned fortress.