52: Chapter 52 The Permafrost Coffin

Lin Yan and his group crossed several hills, killing a few scattered Brainless Giants along the way.

[Tank Engine stacks +9, current 14 stacks, body size 3.5 meters.]

Qin Chuan looked up at Lin Yan, "Boss, your talent doesn't have a limit, does it?!"

"It doesn't. But it will revert once we leave the Dungeon."

"What a terrifying talent."

Listening to their conversation, Jiang Ruoxue tilted her head slightly, emotions churning in her eyes as she silently watched Lin Yan.

"Boss, if you get any bigger, can I sit on your shoulder?!" Shen Xin said excitedly.

Lin Yan ignored her and walked at the front of the group; his 3.5-meter height gave him a much broader field of view than the others.

From afar, he spotted a patch of red in the open area ahead, with at least twenty or so Brainless Giants scattered across the gentle slope.

The smallest were 5-meter class, mixed with six or seven 10-meter class ones, and in the deepest part, there was a behemoth.

That giant's size was estimated to be nearly thirty meters, its muscles bulging like boulders, and every step it took caused the ground to crack.

Its skin color was darker than the other giants, and its scarlet muscle fibers looked as if they had been soaked in molten iron, shimmering with a dull luster under the sunlight.

Qin Chuan stepped out from behind Lin Yan and gasped, "Twenty-something... Holy crap! They're all charging at us together—"

These giants charged over in twisted postures, and for a moment, the entire earth trembled with their running.

Shen Xin stopped in her tracks, her hands subconsciously glowing with a pale golden light: "Boss, can you hold them off?"

Lin Yan flexed his wrists, just about to say "I'll try," when a cold voice came from behind him.

"Let me."

Jiang Ruoxue walked out from behind the three of them.

Her left hand rested on the hilt of the longsword at her waist, her pace steady and unhurried. As she passed Lin Yan, those ice-blue eyes swept over him indifferently before she cast her gaze toward the group of giants in the distance.

That look was like she was staring at a group of prey already frozen to death.

"You guys move back," she said.

Without a word, Qin Chuan pulled Shen Xin back several dozen meters, hiding behind a huge rock, with only half his head peeking out to watch.

Lin Yan didn't retreat too far; he stepped back to a protruding rock ten meters away, stood firm, and crossed his arms over his chest.

He had seen Jiang Ruoxue cast ice-type skills in the training hall, but that was in a simulated environment where targets didn't move, didn't counterattack, and didn't roar as they lunged.

He had yet to see with his own eyes just how strong her talent really was on a real battlefield.

Today was the perfect chance.

Jiang Ruoxue drew the longsword from her waist.

The blade was entirely ice-blue, not the kind of blue from paint, but the cold light emitted by the metal itself.

Embedded at the crossguard was a thumb-sized frost-blue crystal core, with fine light patterns slowly circulating within it.

This was an ice-type BOSS core that her father had hired someone to embed as an amplifier for the weapon.

She gripped the sword with both hands, the tip pointing diagonally toward the ground.

Then, she closed her eyes.

Three seconds.

Five seconds.

The surrounding temperature began to drop.

Hiding behind the rock, Qin Chuan's breath turned into white mist. He rubbed his arms and whispered to Shen Xin: "It feels like it suddenly got dozens of degrees colder..."

Shen Xin didn't speak; she was also rubbing her arms.

The change on the grass was even more obvious; with Jiang Ruoxue as the center, a layer of thin frost spread in all directions.

The blades of grass became stiff and brittle under the coating of ice film, making a faint cracking sound whenever the wind blew.

Jiang Ruoxue opened her eyes.

In those ice-blue pupils, it looked as if glaciers were flowing.

[A-Rank Talent: Frost Dominion] activated at full power.

She raised her longsword, pointing the tip toward the sky.

"Frigid Domain."

There was no roar, no explosion, only a very light, crisp sound, like ice cracking.

With Jiang Ruoxue as the center, the air within a fifty-meter radius suddenly solidified.

The fine drizzle originally drifting in the sky turned into ice needles mid-air; they were no longer soft water droplets, but ice crystals as thin as hair and as hard as iron.

They landed on the ground, making a faint clinking sound, like someone tapping on glass in the distance.

The grass was covered by a layer of translucent ice shell within a fraction of a second, reaching a thickness of two or three centimeters, sealing every blade of grass inside.

The gravel on the ground was frozen until it shattered, emitting a crackling sound.

The moisture inside the stones expanded below zero, forcing the stones to crack with fine fissures, and some smaller pieces of gravel simply crumbled into debris.

The giants in the distance finally noticed the abnormality, their black hole-like eye sockets "looking" in the direction of Jiang Ruoxue.

The thirty-meter class giant opened its massive mouth and let out a roar that shook the valley.

That roar was too loud, so loud that even the air was vibrating.

Qin Chuan covered his ears, and the surface of Lin Yan's breastplate was vibrating slightly from the sound waves.

But the roar only traveled halfway.

Frost condensed in the air along the path of the sound waves, and the vibration of the sound was absorbed, scattered, and weakened by the ice crystals.

By the time that roar, which should have resounded through the sky, reached Lin Yan's ears again, it had turned into a dull low growl, like something heard through a wall.

Jiang Ruoxue turned the tip of her sword from the sky toward the group of giants.

"Glacial Fracture."

She pressed the sword tip downward.

The earth split open.

Dozens of ice-blue cracks radiated outward from the tip of Jiang Ruoxue's sword, spreading across the ground like a giant ice web.

The direction of the cracks was not random; each one pointed precisely at a giant.

Wherever the cracks passed, the ground rose.

Pillars of ice gushed out from deep underground.

They didn't grow from the ground; rather, it was a cold current drawn from the rock layers deep underground. Jiang Ruoxue's frost power penetrated dozens of meters of soil, reaching the underground rock layer, freezing, expanding, and Rending the trace moisture remaining in the rocks and air, then pushing these ice crystals along with rock fragments up to the surface.

The ice pillars pierced into the giants' feet and burst out from their bodies.

The first 5-meter class giant's thigh was pierced by an ice pillar; the pillar was as thick as an adult, piercing through the sole of its foot and out through its thigh. Ice crystals spread rapidly at the wound, creeping up along its lower leg.

The giant's skin was made of scarlet muscle fibers, but once the ice crystals covered it, the scarlet was instantly replaced by a deathly pale.

The giant lowered its head to look, trying to pull it out with its hand.

But the moment its fingers touched the ice crystals, the frost climbed up its fingers to its wrist.

Ice crystals accumulated, condensed, and set between its fingers, freezing the five fingers into a rigid whole.

Three seconds.

Within three seconds, all twenty-something giants were pinned to the spot by the ice pillars.

The shortest ones were pinned by their feet and couldn't move.

The tallest 30-meter class giant did not escape either; an ice pillar pierced its lower leg. Although it wasn't completely pinned down, the ice crystals had already formed a hard shell around the wound, limiting its range of motion.

Twenty-something ice sculptures stood on the hills, in various poses.

Some still maintained the posture of stepping forward, some were frozen halfway through turning, and some had their hands raised above their heads as if blocking something.

The 30-meter class giant was still struggling.

Its size was too massive, and the ice pillar hadn't hit a vital point.

It roared and pried hard with both hands.

Ice chips flew, cracks appeared on the ice pillar, and the pillar broke.

Jiang Ruoxue frowned slightly.

She thrust her longsword into the ground and formed a seal with her hands in front of her.

That was not a gesture for a system skill, but some kind of more ancient, more primitive way of casting magic—perhaps taught by the indigenous people of some world, or perhaps a secret combat technique passed down by her family.

Her ten fingers flew, the angle of every knuckle precise to the millimeter, as if she were playing a piece of music that only frost could hear.

"Eternal Frost Coffin."