Chapter 163: Fucking Bird
The Ice Phoenix’s glowing light-blue eyes suddenly flashed with an unhinged malice.
To the ancient beast, any mortal holding its offspring was a thief that needed to be cleansed from existence.
It didn’t reach for the egg.
SCREEEEEECH!
Without a single second of warning, the Ice Phoenix thrust both of its massive crystal wings forward, unleashing a point-blank apocalyptic Glacial Blizzard straight into Klaus’s chest!
KRA-BOOOOOOM!
The staggering force of the blast was terrifying as a wall of compressed sub-zero ice pressure slammed into the clearing.
Even though Klaus had passively reactivated a tight Soul Mana shell around the carriage behind him, the physical shockwave picked up the multi-ton oak carriage and sent it flying fifty feet through the air like a wooden toy.
THUD-CRUNCH!
Thanks to the carriage’s reinforced chassis and Klaus’s earlier binding, the heavy vehicle landed cleanly on all four wheels in a deep snowdrift fifty yards away, completely undamaged, though the girls inside let out surprised yelps at the sudden displacement.
Out on the snowpack, Klaus had already moved.
SHHHHK!
The point-blank blast hit the empty space where he had been standing a second prior, vaporizing the snowbank into an ice crater.
’Fuck!’
Klaus was skipping backward across the slick permafrost at high speed with his heavy combat boots carving deep smoking trenches into the ice.
Holding the massive, two-foot egg securely under his left arm like a football, he blurred across the snowpack, executing a rapid series of low athletic back-switches.
KRA-THOOM! KRA-THOOM! KRA-THOOM!
Where he had just stepped, three massive lance-like beams of solid blue ice blasted down from the sky, shattering the permafrost into craters of frozen shrapnel that rained down across the clearing.
The Ice Phoenix was relentless, flying low through the raging blizzard it had created with its beak open as it rained down continuous lethal strikes of absolute zero magic to annihilate him and reclaim the egg from his corpse.
The bird flapped its massive wings, generating two colossal ice tornadoes that swept across the valley, grinding rocks and trees into powder as they converged on Klaus from both sides.
The air pressure dropped so low that the ambient oxygen began to freeze into visible blue crystals.
Klaus ducked under a fourth ice beam with the freezing wind whipping his long, luminescent silver hair wildly across his face.
He blurred between the two converging ice tornadoes, his agility allowing him to weave through the razor-sharp ice shrapnel with godlike precision.
’I fucking hate you...’
He brought his boots to a sudden grinding halt on a patch of slick ice fifty yards away from the beast.
"Haah... Haah..."
He stared through the whiteout at the giant shrieking Ice Phoenix circling in the sky above him, its crystal wings radiating an oppressive aura of dominance.
His piercing silver eyes narrowed into lethal slits as a dark thoroughly pissed-off grin slowly spread across his handsome face.
"Even after I chose to be the bigger person..." Klaus growled softly. "...even after I offered to forgive you for blasting my ride and give your damn kid back... you still choose to throw a tantrum?!"
His patience had officially hit zero.
"Fine," Klaus stated coldly. "Have it your way."
He kept the massive egg tucked securely under his left arm against his bare, muscled ribs.
With his right hand, Klaus reached toward his spiritual interface, tapping directly into his inventory.
VWOOM!
A heavy matte-black artifact materialized out of a rift of white light, dropping squarely into his right hand.
It was the transmuted Soul Sniper Rifle... the heavy mechanical nightmare forged from the living, compressed soul of the dire wolf he had overwritten nights before.
The glowing white circuit carved into the side of the receiver flared to life, pulsing with a rapid rhythm as it recognized its master’s intent.
The Ice Phoenix, sensing the sudden spike in spiritual pressure, let out another deafening screech.
"SCREEEEEE!"
It didn’t just fire a beam this time.
The beast folded its wings, diving straight down from the clouds like a falling meteor, coating its entire sixty-foot body in a thick unstoppable drill of ice magic.
The force of its descent created a vacuum that dragged the entire blizzard along behind it but Klaus didn’t panic.
He didn’t take a defensive stance, nor did he need to use a bipod to steady the massive two-hundred-pound weapon.
When he had brutally executed Valeria, the Crimson Sharpshooter, and harvested her soul into his vessel, her marksmanship had been permanently integrated into his muscular memory through a skill after all.
His hands didn’t shake and his vision didn’t blur.
The world around him slowed down to a crawl as he could see every individual ice crystal forming on the bird’s diving beak.
Klaus casually hoisted the heavy black rifle with his right arm, resting the stock against his bare shoulder, aiming the long hollowed-bone barrel straight up into the center of the descending meteor.
He didn’t use the optical scope.
He looked down the barrel with his bare, glowing silver eyes, locking onto the Ice Phoenix’s head through fifty yards of thick descending blizzard.
"Valeria," Klaus grumbled. "Don’t let me miss."
"You never miss, my King," Valeria’s ethereal voice echoed proudly in his mind.
Klaus tapped into his divine core, flooding the weapon’s receiver with a dense concentrated surge of pure white Soul Mana.
The trapped wolf soul inside the rifle let out a silent spiritual howl, compressing itself to condense a bullet forged from raw weaponized life force.
The Ice Phoenix dove through the clouds with its massive beak open, charging a final apocalyptic ice beam aimed directly for his head.
Klaus’s finger pulled the cold iron trigger.
KRA-THOOOOOM!
The sound was apocalyptic.
A deafening shockwave erupted from the muzzle, blowing away the surrounding blizzard in a fifty-foot radius, melting the snowpack beneath his boots into steaming water.
The white soul-bullet launched from the barrel at high speeds, leaving a vacuum-sealed tunnel of distorted warped space in its wake.
The Ice Phoenix didn’t even have time to blink.
KRA-CRUNCH!
The soul-bullet punched straight through the center of the giant bird’s skull, shattering the ice drill surrounding it.
The kinetic and spiritual transfer upon impact was simply too much.
The projectile shattered the crystal ice-armor covering the beast’s head, blowing out the back of its skull in a massive, exploding geyser of frozen blue blood and shattered crystal brain matter.
The Ice Phoenix’s eyes instantly went dull.
The energy sustaining its sixty-foot body vanished in a single second as the massive mythical beast collapsed mid-air with its giant crystal wings folding uselessly as its heavy corpse plummeted toward the earth like a falling mountain.
KRA-BASH!
The dead Ice Phoenix hit the valley floor with a deafening crash, kicking up a colossal sixty-foot wave of white snow and shattered ice that rained down across the clearing.
The ground shook so hard that massive fissures cracked through the permafrost for hundred of yards.
Silence descended over the valley.
The raging blizzard, deprived of the beast’s magical core, rapidly began to dissipate with the storm clouds clearing to reveal the bright morning sun breaking over the mountain peaks.
Klaus stood in the snow, the heavy black rifle resting lazily on his bare shoulder with steam rising from the hollowed-bone barrel.
He looked at the dead, sixty-foot bird lying motionless in the snowpack, then looked down at the rifle in his hand.
"Damn good gun," Klaus muttered, thoroughly impressed by the weapon’s raw instantaneous lethality.
He opened his inventory, casually tossing the heavy black rifle back into the spatial rift, where it dissolved into white light.
Klaus walked slowly across the snowpack toward the dead Ice Phoenix. As he walked, he raised his right hand, giving a lazy flick of his wrist.
VWOOM!
The protective spiked Soul Mana dome surrounding the carriage fifty yards away smoothly dissolved, lowering the barrier so the interior was safe once more.
Klaus reached the colossal corpse of the mythical bird.
He stood beside its massive, sixty-foot wing, looking down at the brilliant, luminescent blue feathers that gleamed like polished sapphires under the morning sun.
"Might as well claim my immortality..."
He leaned down, wrapping his calloused fingers around the base of a particularly large, glowing feather near the wing joint, and pulled.
RIP!
The feather came free with a soft metallic chime.
It felt light as a breeze, but thrummed with a heavy frozen vitality that vibrated right through his skin.
Klaus summoned his system interface, scanning the feather with his basic identification skill.
A series of dark blue translucent notification tabs instantly materialized before his eyes.
[Item: Ice Phoenix Feather]
[Tier: Tier 4]
[Description: A pristine elemental feather plucked from an Apex Glacial Phoenix. While incapable of physical necromancy or soul resurrection, this material carries an extraordinarily concentrated, hyper-pure reservoir of ambient elemental mana. When refined or processed into an alchemical brew, it violently expands the consumer’s foundational mana reserves, granting massive permanent progress toward higher tiers.]
Klaus stared at the hovering text with his glowing silver eyes widening slightly.
A dark satisfied grin spread across his face, and his mouth practically watered.
"I could break through with this..." Klaus whispered aloud to himself.
Currently, despite possessing a divinely reconstructed body and a thudding nuclear reactor of Soul Mana in his ribs, Klaus’s core was sitting at Tier 2.
To officially break through to a Tier 3 Wizard Apprentice or achieve the status of a true Tier 1 Full Wizard, he needed an immense volume of pure raw mana to expand his internal pathways.
He had been wondering how he was going to grind enough mana before reaching the Academy.
Now, sitting right in front of him, was a sixty-foot mountain of Tier 4 legendary feathers.
Sure, he felt a brief microsecond ping of mild disappointment that the game rumors about these feathers granting physical reincarnation or resurrection weren’t true.
But that disappointment vanished in a heartbeat.
"Fuck that," Klaus chuckled, tossing the glowing blue feather in his hand. "Who the hell cares about reincarnating anyway? I’m already alive. Just give me the damn mana..."
"Master!"
Mirela’s panicked voice called out from the carriage.
The heavy oak doors of the vehicle burst open, and Mirela, Tasha, and Anya hurried out onto the iron runner, stepping down into the deep snowpack.
They had felt the carriage get tossed through the air earlier, and as soon as the barrier lowered, they rushed out to see what had happened.
As the three girls ran across the clearing toward him, their steps abruptly slowed to a complete halt.
Their jaws literally dropped open.
They stood there in the snow, staring up at the colossal, sixty-foot dead Ice Phoenix lying in a crater of shattered permafrost with its massive sapphire wings resting uselessly on the ground and blood pooling around its shattered head.
"By the heavens..." Tasha breathed out, her light blue eyes wide with stunning disbelief.
Her hands were trembling as she looked from the dead mythical bird to Klaus’s bare, muscled torso. "The... The Ice Phoenix?! A calamity-class beast of legend... you killed it in two minutes?!"
’I see... is this thing that strong? A beast of legend?’ Anya thought, it used to be the chicken of the old era.
Mirela just stared at the dead bird, then looked at Klaus with an expression of worshipping devotion.
"Master... are you hurt?"
"I’m fine," Klaus drawled, rolling his broad shoulders.
He held up his left arm, revealing the massive two-foot blue egg he was still holding securely under his elbow.
"Look what the dead black-haired guy left us," Klaus announced, a lazy smirk on his face. "We have a little phoenix here."
Tasha gasped, her eyes snapping to the egg. "An Ice Phoenix egg...?! I think that’s worth an entire kingdom’s treasury!"
Klaus didn’t care about selling it.
He walked over to Anya, crouching down so he was eye-level with the six-year-old Shinigami. He held out the heavy, pulsing blue egg toward her small hands.
"Here you go, kid," Klaus said gently. "You’re in charge of this. I’m trusting you to take care of it, keep it warm, and grow us a brand new phoenix."
Anya looked at the massive egg, then looked up at Klaus’s silver eyes.
A bright pink blush bloomed across her pale cheeks. She reached out with both hands, taking the heavy egg into her lap, hugging it tightly against her blue dress.
"I accept this assignment, Father," Anya reported, her melodic voice carrying a rare affectionate warmth. "I will fortify its developmental matrix. It shall be my personal familiar."
"Good girl," Klaus smiled, ruffling her silver hair.