Kaelen had already walked up to him and spoken, sounding as though he was asking a question.
Alice turned her head and spoke in a slower tempo that Luo Xun could follow.
“He is asking who you are.” Luo Xun remained silent.
He looked at the warm, welcoming smile on Kaelen’s face, and then at the flowing gray beneath his skin.
His attention was pinned entirely on that gray film.
It was slowly spreading out as if alive, trying to envelop more of the golden light.
The enthusiastic smile on Kaelen’s face looked indescribably bizarre right now.
It was as though something was crouching beneath his skin, using that smiling face to peer out at the world.
“Luo Xun,” he stated his name, while taking a half-step forward to shield Alice behind him.
Kaelen raised an eyebrow.
He said something else to Alice, his tone carrying a hint of lighthearted banter.
Alice shook her head and replied briefly.
In the exact split second she was distracted by her reply…
Kaelen’s right hand dropped naturally to his side.
Concealed beneath his sleeve, his fingers traced a rapid gesture.
In Luo Xun’s field of vision, the gray film suddenly boiled over.
Like a pot of boiling oil splashed with cold water, icy-blue specks of light gathered frantically within the gray mist, twisting into a chaotic vortex of energy in the blink of an eye.
“Get down!” Luo Xun roared, lunging forward at the same time.
There was no time to draw an arrow.
Gripping the middle of the bow with his left hand and the upper limb with his right, he swung the entire carbon-fiber bow like a broadsword, smashing it down toward the hand Kaelen was casting with.
*Bang!* The bow slammed into Kaelen’s wrist, interrupting the spell.
The condensing sphere of icy-blue light was knocked off course, grazing past Luo Xun’s left arm as it discharged.
A bone-chilling cold pierced his flesh, feeling as if countless ice needles were stabbing him simultaneously.
His entire left arm instantly went numb, a layer of white frost forming over his cuff.
His fingers lost their grip on the bow, nearly letting it slip.
Kaelen staggered back, his smile twisting into a hideous snarl.
He flung his left hand up, and three icicles materialized out of thin air, hurtling straight at Luo Xun’s face!
Too fast.
Luo Xun’s left arm was paralyzed, his right hand had only just caught the falling bow, and his center of gravity was completely off-balance.
He twisted his body desperately to dodge.
The first icicle grazed past his ribs, tearing through his clothes and carving a burning gash in his skin.
He barely managed to deflect the second one with the bow’s riser, the impact rattling his hand so hard the weapon almost slipped again.
He couldn’t dodge the third one.
The icicle pierced his right shoulder, and the freezing chill exploded instantly.
Luo Xun let out a muffled groan and dropped to one knee.
His right arm also began to lose sensation.
His right side was half-crippled.
Only then did Alice fully react.
Her golden eyes first flashed with a blank astonishment—at Luo Xun’s sudden attack, then at Kaelen’s violent retaliation.
Finally, that blankness was filled with a frigid, burning wrath.
She recognized the residual aura in Kaelen’s hand—a death-chilled energy that shared its source with the undead.
“Traitor!” she shrieked in the elven tongue, her voice shaking violently from a mix of rage and exhaustion.
She raised her hands to cast a spell, but only a few scattered golden sparks sputtered in her palms before dying out.
Her mana had long been depleted, drained so dry she couldn’t squeeze out even a drop.
Yet, she didn’t just stand there.
Stumbling forward, she threw her body between Luo Xun and Kaelen.
She tottered precariously, but her intention was clear: she wanted to trade her life to buy Luo Xun the chance to shoot one arrow.
Kaelen let out a sinister laugh.
Shaking out his bruised wrist, he glanced at the icicle melting in Luo Xun’s shoulder, then at Alice’s futile efforts.
“Get out of the way, Alice.
In your current state, you can’t even scratch me,” he mocked in elven, raising his hand once more.
This time, he aimed directly at her weakened form.
A thicker, icy-blue light gathered at his fingertips, dropping the temperature of the air by several degrees.
Luo Xun knelt on the ground, the freezing numbness in his right shoulder still spreading.
Yet, everything was clear in his vision.
The gold and gray on Kaelen’s body were violently tearing at each other, and near the left side of his chest, a chaotic vortex of icy blue and gray energy was swirling.
That spot had to be a node for his mana flow.
If he hit there…
Almost instinctively, without even fully standing up, he drew his bow from his kneeling position.
He aimed the arrow tip at that chaotic energy node.
He let go.
The instant the arrow left the string, Luo Xun saw a faint, lukewarm golden glow pass over his right hand.
It flowed down his arm to the riser, crawled up the shaft, and finally enveloped the arrowhead.
Kaelen sensed the danger, but he looked down on this short-lived species far too much.
Believing it was nothing more than a normal arrow shot in a desperate struggle, he merely turned his body slightly, intending to deflect it with his frost armor.
He was dead wrong.
The arrow struck the left side of his chest.
It didn’t pierce the armor, but the moment it made contact, the faint, warm gold light attached to the tip exploded.
*Boom!* It wasn’t the soft pop of a bubble, but a detonation like muffled thunder.
Kaelen’s already chaotic energy node was forcefully disrupted by this foreign force.
The fragile equilibrium within the node shattered instantly.
Icy-blue and gray light imploded from within his body—not exploding outward, but collapsing inward.
It was as if someone had stuffed a hand grenade into his chest and pulled the pin.
Kaelen screamed as he was sent flying backward as if struck squarely by an invisible sledgehammer, slamming heavily into a tree.
A massive spray of blood erupted from his mouth, freezing into icy shards before it could even hit the ground.
It showered down over his chest with a clinking sound, mixing with the shattered fragments of his frost armor.
His handsome face twisted in sheer agony and disbelief, his eyes widening to the point of tearing.
He struggled to crawl up, but the excruciating pain of the energy backlash kept him pinned to the ground.
He could only point a trembling finger at Luo Xun, shrieking in elven: “A Spellbreaker?!
Impossible!
How could a human be—” He never finished.
Luo Xun’s second arrow arrived.
This time, he aimed for the throat.
*Splat.* The arrow pierced Kaelen right beneath his Adam’s apple and exited through the back of his neck.
His shouting stopped abruptly.
His eyes remained wide and his mouth hung open, frozen in a final expression of resentment and terror.
The golden light on his body died out completely.
The gray film suddenly swelled, as if something was trying to break free from the corpse, but after squirming in the air for a few seconds, it too dissipated into nothingness.
Silence returned to the forest.
Only the howling of the wind and Luo Xun’s own heavy breathing remained.
He looked down at his right shoulder.
The icicle was melting rapidly—not turning into water, but dissolving directly into white frost mist.
The numb stiffness in his left arm was also quickly fading, feeling returning to his fingertips.
Looking at the wound, there wasn’t much blood, but the bone-chilling cold that had penetrated deep inside had vanished too quickly.
Unnaturally fast.
It was as if it had been swallowed by something from within.
As if…
it had been absorbed.
Instinctively, he looked at his right hand.
The faint, lukewarm golden glow had flowed out from here when he shot the arrow earlier.
Now, this hand felt slightly warm, and the frost around the wound was receding at a rate visible to the naked eye.
This recovery speed…
He raised his head to look at Alice, who was slumped on the ground not far away.
She was staring at him.
The shock hadn’t fully faded from her golden eyes, but beneath it lay something he couldn’t quite decipher—an emotion somewhere between awe and utter bewilderment.
It was as if she were looking at something that simply did not fit within her understanding of the world.
In the distance, from the depths of the forest, the low growl of the undead echoed once more.
Luo Xun didn’t move.
He looked down at his right hand.
There was still a lingering warmth in his palm.
The skin around his wounds was already knitting back together.
The freezing chill that had pierced his bones had been completely neutralized by something.
He slowly clenched his fist.
*What the hell…
is this?*