Chapter 322: Ashen-Haired Barbarians of the White Snowfield (4)

“Ahahahaha!”

“We will kill you!”

Three axes flashed at once, each strike angling for a different line as if the wielders were racing one another to carve Necrobix apart. Necrobix lifted a hand, movements crisp and economical.

“Darkness becomes my wall,” it chanted.

A wall of black split the air and locked into place, a calculated defense meant only to steal a heartbeat to read the field. Steel crashed against shadow, and the ring of impact cut sharply through the ruined plain. Thin cracks spiderwebbed across the dark surface like spreading frost, and the barbarians twisted their mouths in open contempt.

“Coward!”

“Stop hiding and face us!”

The barbarians swung again and again, rhythm mounting, and hairline fractures raced outward until the wall resembled a spiderweb. Barriers that even Heroes struggled to shatter fell apart in seconds under that pressure.

“Who are you...,” Necrobix murmured.

They were strong, yet their strength refused the usual categories. No Myst coiled around their limbs or glimmered in their eyes. These were not ordinary barbarians. In truth, they were not ordinary anything. Even so, they were breaking its wall.

The flavor of their presence did not belong to this world.

“Anomalies...?” Necrobix murmured.

The wall buckled at last. It split with a dry thunderclap, and the axes swept through the gap with murderous precision. Necrobix threw a coil of shadow around itself and slid sideways across the broken ground to open space.

“Do not run!” Greta shouted.

The three roared and chased. Necrobix drew them into a shallow curve, letting their footfalls drum past it while it mapped their tempo and chose its answers.

“You are barbarians of the White Snowfield,” it decided.

Necrobix had heard of them in the era of the old Emperor. In truth, it had known of them before that, because it had existed before the Demon Realms. The seals the gods and demons had placed upon the Demon Realms had weakened. Things from within were crawling toward the open air. The Ugly Rat had already cost it the northern front. Necrobix knew the symptoms when it smelled them.

So you have followed your king outside,

Necrobix thought.

That is troublesome.

These three barbarians assaulted Necrobix because Ketal had commanded it. The pattern fell into place with a single glance, and because it understood the pattern, it recognized the danger.

This variable does not favor me. I wonder what kind of power they’re using,

Necrobix asked itself.

It listened with more care. It was not Myst. It could not taste even a trace of Myst in their bodies. They carried something else, an odor unlike any it had cataloged. Since the birth of the White Snowfield, nothing like these creatures had walked under the true sky. That left Necrobix without files to consult.

Surely each one has not mastered the Abomination’s power,

it thought.

Their king, Ketal, used that power. Suspicion followed with natural ease.

I must seal my authority of death for now.

Necrobix intended to uncover the nature of the barbarians’ power before deciding how to act. It gathered miasma in its palm, let it swell to a crest, and then released it.

“The wave rises upon the world,” Necrobix chanted.

A tide of darkness heaved to life. It swallowed space and rollicked forward, a moving cliff that would have pulped even a Hero caught beneath it with only flesh for shelter.

It considered the responses available to sane adversaries. They could try to run, banking on speed and angle, or they could stand and split the wave with force. It had prepared lines for either approach and waited to see which they chose.

However, the barbarians chose neither. Instead, they sprinted straight into the surge, their bodies vanishing as the black water swallowed them whole.

What?

Necrobix thought, eyes narrowing.

Laughter rang out from the heart of the wave. The tide burst apart like a struck cistern, and the three emerged with axes raised high. Their condition was grotesque; anyone who had met that tide with only skin and bone would have looked the same. Their bodies were flayed down to ivory in places, shreds of flesh dangling like seaweed from ribs and shoulders, with bone showing clean and white.

What is this?

it thought.

Charging headlong into a probe and stepping closer to death without purpose was no strategy at all—it was pure delusion. Then Necrobix caught their next motion and grasped a sliver more of the truth.

The ruin of their flesh began to mend as the axes slammed against its guard. Necrobix sprang back, weaving a second wall between them, only to watch it shatter beneath their raw strength. Shards of condensed shadow burst upward, spinning into the air in a glittering cloud.

Necrobix snapped its fingers, preparing for its next attack. “Shards become blades.”

The fragments twisted midair and shot inward, converging as a storm of knives. It was not a swift pattern, and with the barbarians’ strength and speed, they could easily have slipped through the gaps or smashed the blades aside without difficulty.

However, they did neither. They kept running, as if to say that time spent parrying was time stolen from joy. The knives went through arms and thighs. Several sank to the hilt in their abdomens. Necrobix slid away again, accepting distance as the price of living long enough to complete its read.

“Stop running!” Thomas bellowed.

“Coward!” Anna said, and the contempt in the single word would have driven a lesser man to rashness.

“I am a mage,” Necrobix said. “There is no reason for me to stand still and trade with brutes.”

It ignored the clangor of their insults and watched the way steel stuck from their flesh.

What are you,

it asked again.

They should have been dying. The wounds were absolute, the kind that admitted no survival. Several of them would have felled an ogre in seconds. Yet the blades began to slide free of their bodies as though the flesh itself were forcing them out. Tissue swelled and smoothed, and the skin drew closed and held fast.

Necrobix recognized the pattern as regeneration, but not exactly. The rhythm did not follow the usual rise and knit. Instead, it was closer to reversal, a stubborn insistence on returning to a prior state, and that was not a faculty granted to humans. These barbarians were not human. Something else had braided itself through them.

“You’re already halfway to becoming the Oldest Ones,” Necrobix murmured. “I never thought humans could be twisted into such a mix.”

How did ordinary barbarians survive in the White Snowfield,

it wondered.

They had adapted to the White Snowfield, and because the land of Anomalies, they had become beings just as alien.

Even so, pain should have mattered. Necrobix should have been able to shape their behavior with suffering.

“You are fools

,

” it said, and the words came out tinged with genuine interest.

But how did they mix?

Necrobix thought.

How fragments of the Demon Realm had fused with those of the Mortal Realm was a mystery. Such a thing should have been impossible. Even Necrobix, with all its black magic, could only mimic the abomination’s authority from the outside—the essence remained different. Yet if it could study these three, perhaps it could carve open a window into that sealed chamber of secrets. For the first time since arriving in force, its fingers itched for an experiment.

No,

it told itself.

It suppressed the urge. It stood here as a Pillar of Hell, not a scholar or a thief of secrets. It could not move purely for its own satisfaction.

Still, a little greed should be allowed

, Necrobix thought.

I cannot take them alive, but I can take the bodies. I can cut answers from bone and marrow.

Necrobix made its decision. The analysis of these barbarians was already complete. It felt no trace of the Abomination’s authority in them. That meant Necrobix was free to use the authority of death.

“Piercing Round,” Necrobix chanted. Dozens of bullets of shadow streaked toward the charging barbarians. It spoke as they flew. “You are smarter than you look.”

They had taken earlier hits with their bodies because those hits would not kill them. By ignoring everything that failed to reach a threshold, they had closed the distance quickly and given Necrobix less time to stack spells. It was simple in form and precise in its arithmetic.

“I guess you cannot live by stupidity alone inside that place,” Necrobix murmured. “But this time will be different.”

Necrobix had threaded death into the bullets so that even these creatures would fall if a shot struck a heart or skull, for their bodies could not reverse that; Necrobix drew demonic energy into its hands and folded the retreat path shut the instant they chose a defense, and whether they leaped or raised their axes, it would block the exit and finish them.

“Hahaha!” the barbarians shouted.

They did not alter their pace. Instead, they laughed and pushed themselves faster, the rounds tearing through legs, arms, and bellies. Blood sprayed in long ribbons as they burst out of their own gore and closed the distance, crashing down on it in a single, impossible rush.

Necrobix blinked in disbelief. It had never imagined they would meet death itself with the same reckless answer. Its next wall came too late, the spell too thin. Axes smashed it to pieces, and one drove into its forearm up to the haft.

“Repel,” Necrobix chanted.

The ground leaped like a struck drum. The three flew backward, tumbling end over end, and bounced to their feet with bright eyes.

“At last!” Greta shouted. “You finally let us hit you, coward!”

“We will kill you,” Thomas said, and his voice held the lightness of a man promising a friend a drink.

Necrobix looked down at its arm. The wound should have sealed itself at once, yet it did not. The barbarians’ anomaly gnawed at the edges and stalled the repair, but that was not what drew the tightness into its gaze.

𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

“What are you...?” Necrobix said.

It had woven death into the attack, and a round through the head or the heart would have ended even them. Several of the holes still gaped, raw meat visible inside. Their bodies were not reversing cleanly, and they had to know what it had done, at least with the instinctive knowledge that lived in the bones of fighters at their level.

However, they had charged anyway.

“I could have killed all of you,” Necrobix said. “If those bullets had gone through your skulls or your hearts, you would be corpses now.”

“So what?!” Anna said, baring her teeth.

“What exactly do you want us to do with that?” Thomas asked it, equally delighted.

“The Outside is not weak,” Greta said. “This is fun!”

Their assault only grew fiercer, the rhythm they set leaving no room for self-preservation. Necrobix answered with a surge of power, trying to blast them back and carve out space. Demonic energy erupted like a mine, but they ignored it. One swung with an arm that dangled in strips, and an axe brushed its thigh, carving a deep furrow.

Necrobix grunted.

They had not taken the hits because they were incapable of dying. They had taken them because death itself held no weight. Their lives were coins to be spent on an impulse; if they died, then they died, and if they lived, then they lived. It went no deeper than that.

“You are mad...,” Necrobix murmured, finally understanding the barbarians’ true essence.

The barbarians of the White Snowfield had ancestors who loved the power of the Demon Realms so much that they built themselves a prison. In all the realms beneath the heavens, across the Mortal Realm, Hell, and even the higher halls, there were no creatures more committed to madness.

“Hahaha!” Necrobix burst into laughter, clearing away the turmoil in its mind with sharp ease.

Common sense held no sway over these beings. Reason, intelligence, judgement, and calculation meant nothing to them. They moved for one thing only—for the purity of killing and dying. Necrobix decided to move in the same way.

“It has been a long time since my head felt this clear,” Necrobix said.

It could not remember the last time it had faced such pure intent. The satisfaction that came with it surprised it and then turned its mouth upward.

“Creatures most mad in all the world,” it said. “I acknowledge you. So, I will make one thing clear: I will kill you.”

Power tightened around it, coalescing into a single, razor-sharp line as the horizon tilted and the world began to strain beneath a force fit for gods; even the barbarians of the White Snowfield would have to meet death with open eyes.

However, the barbarians bared their teeth as if Necrobix had offered them a gift, knuckles whitening on the hafts of their axes as their charge deepened, and Necrobix released the gathering storm.

Hell met the Demon Realm in full collision.