Nothing is more terrorizing than realizing a step is missing while descending a flight of stairs— the sudden panic as the ground seems to vanish, hurtling you into the void. That's what Evalyn felt after stepping off her icy disk, plummeting her 120 feet toward the shimmering ocean below.
pαпᵈα-noνɐ1.сoМ Skydivers struggle to think clearly amid the biting, whistling wind numbing their faces, but Evalyn Skye was immune to the cold. With eyes closed, she listened to the needles, forming a mental image and waving her hand.
Shiiiiiiiink!
An icy slide materialized beneath her feet, creating a curve she road like a snowboard. Fog billowed from her boots, lightly freezing their treads to the ice for better grip.
WhooOOooOoSH! WhoOOoSH! WHooOOSH!
Evalyn's heart pounded after every needle whizzed past her, spiraling downward. Despite surviving each one, she found no solace. "How do I stop!?" she cried, struggling to maintain her balance while plunging eighty feet toward the ocean.
Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiink!
In desperation, she veered west toward the shipping yard a mile away, forming a continuous slide to the ocean, gliding unrestrained. "Far below zero!" she shouted, frantically waving her hand upon hearing the low tide below.
CrreeeeaaakKKkKKkkKkK!
The ocean water froze and splintered, clashing with the ice. She slid over it at a breakneck speed as she landed, maintaining her balance not by instinct but through brutal practice. "I never thought I'd be thankful for Crux's lakeside training!"
Sliding across the water felt far more natural than sliding in the sky. It's what Evalyn needed to take her the final half mile. "Almost there!" she gasped, encouraging herself as the colored shipping containers loomed into view.
WhooOOooOOSH!
"You've got to be kidding me!" Evalyn exclaimed, veering off course, the ocean freezing in her wake.
CRaaACK! SPLASH!
A Guided Arrow plunged through her ice, generating waves that shattered the fragile ice she created for evasion. With every surge of the tide, she refroze it, struggling to stay afloat.
Evalyn's limbs began to fail her.
Qi deprivation set in.
Her vision blurred, sharpening and fading between waves.
So close.
The multicolored shipping yard was within reach.
Ice General Skye could see the rust on the multi-colored shipping containers when her vision focused. She could smell the remaining fish the civilians were cooking.
Her people were right in front of her—
—but they couldn't hear her.
Evalyn was just far enough that her voice wouldn't reach when her limbs finally gave way, lying on a shaky glacier drifting toward shore. She closed her eyes and listened, "You cunt…."
Wanda appeared behind her, Guided Arrow at the ready but hesitating to shoot. "It's a pity," she said, concealing her ragged breaths. "You'd be a cultivation lord in less than a century if you were born in the Sky Plane."
"No, I wouldn't have," the Ice General laughed, hearing the hesitation. She could tell the cultivator was on her last leg and didn't know whether to use her last attack to kill her.
Evalyn clenched her hand subtly, using her thumb to search for the ring Kaze made her. It had an emergency spatial rift made from Soul Qi, allowing her to use the technique without Qi once.
"If I were born on the Sky Plane, it'd take me a millennium to become a 'lord' like the rest of you," she goated. "I doubt you cultivation-solves-all people even know the temperature at which ice freezes."
"Don't patronize me like an intellectual!" Wanda demanded, her emotions visibly taking hold. "Freezing water is like boiling water: you cool it until it freezes. You create cold far beyond the freezing point, so it's irrelevant!"
"It's irrelevant?" Evalyn mused, raising an eyebrow with a condescending smirk. "Watch what happens when you keep cooling water below its freezing point." She conjured a ball of water, froze it, and continued freezing it until—
CreeeakKKkkKkkKkKRACK!
Wanda's eyes widened in confusion as the ball cracked in the center and broke in half. "What did you do to it?"
"Are you deaf?" General Skye taunted, imitating Kaze. "I kept cooling it, as you said. After -40 degrees Fahrenheit, ice becomes increasingly brittle until it shatters like thin glass.
Do you still think that temperature is irrelevant?"
"This is nonsense!" the brunette snarled, aiming her Guided Arrow at the smug blonde. "You use ice far colder than that! Don't take me for a fool!"
"It is colder—it's just not water," Evalyn smirked. "Water ice is warm, weak, brittle, and hard to make in dry environments. My ice is formed from different molecules—watch."
The blonde presented both palms to Wanda. In her left hand, a water ball materialized and froze into a golf ball-sized ice ball. A familiar white gas swirled into a cyclone in her right palm, eventually solidifying into an identical ball. Both emitted an unnatural ghostly fog, adding an eerie quality and suspense.
"That's what you do…." Wanda muttered, her anger shifting to curiosity as she observed the ball in Evalyn's right hand. She had seen that gas a hundred times that morning. "They look exactly the same—is there really a difference?"
"Lethal difference," Evalyn smiled, dramatically rolling the sphere around her fingers. "I create my blades with this ammonia ice. It's far denser, can reach negative 108 degrees, and requires more energy to melt, so it stays ice longer. As a bonus, it's even poisonous.
Despite the properties, it's the same temperature to touch, making it wieldable for heaven realm cultivators."
Ice General Skye rolled both over her fingers, letting the white gas leak from them as if to argue that they weren't harmful before floating them to the brunette. "Squeeze them, and you'll find water ice shatters like sand, and the other won't yield."
Wanda apprehensively poked the balls and found they were cold as normal ice! After gripping them and finding the ammonia ice didn't shatter, she looked at the blonde in a trance, "What does this have to do with you being a cultivator lord?"
"I didn't learn this from a technique—it's science," Evalyn smirked. "Unlike Sky Planers, Earthians understand basic thermodynamics. Therefore, we don't need techniques to teach us how elements interact."
"Bullshit!" Wanda scoffed in disdain. "You don't need techniques? Are you insane!?"
"I'll prove it." General Skye smiled. "Combustion and Frosted blades use the same sub-technique; I call it Molecular Attraction."
The blonde created a sphere of compressed oxygen, warping the atmosphere before igniting it into a flame. "For combustion, Qiites attract, filter, and accelerate oxygen," she explained. "My techniques do the same but decelerate it."
"W-What!?" Wanda gasped, witnessing the same sphere of warping Qi twist into a white cyclone and compress into a neon aquamarine gemstone. It was a breathtaking sight, almost unnatural.
As before, Ice General Skye rolled it around her palm like the ammonia ice ball, letting the gas pass through her fingers. However, it floated above her skin, and she fought through the pain.
"Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon Dioxide, Argon, Ammonia—all gasses freely accessible in the atmosphere and can make ice," Evalyn smiled, tossing the neon blue ball. "Their properties are useful and captivating. For example, oxygen ice is a beautiful blue color…."
Wanda's eyes lit up with fascination, and she tried to catch it. However, she quickly dodged after sensing the cold and turned to the general, rapidly lifting her arrow angrily. "Do you take me for—"
"Twelve times colder," Evalyn grinned, deftly flicking her wrist while snapping her fingers, "and highly combustible."
A sickening sense of deja vu twisted Wanda's mind as she looked to her left, finding that the blue sphere had followed her with a chemtrail of white gas. She only caught a glimpse before a red flash lit up the cloud of fog like lightning, proceeding thunder.
BOOOOOOOM!
—
"[Greed Online]" is out now! Search for it in the [Explore] tab search bar (with the [brackets]) to find it; I'm releasing 35 free-to-read chapters this week alongside PlayCult, so there's reading for days!
Synopsis: a syndicate orphan decides to get rich by starting a criminal empire in an MMORPG instead of playing it. However, he's web-novel-protag-grade special, so he finds himself fighting everyone in sight for the right to financially-exploit players in peace.
Genre: It's not a villain novel. It's your classic MMORPG choose-your-trope-adventure novel where all options coincidentally end with the MC being a comically terrible human being.
You'll enjoy the novel so much that you'll be torn between rooting the MC on and calling the police. Read the first chapter, and you'll see what I mean. Check it out!
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