I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 852: Do not stop!!!

“Do not stop because the insect is bleeding, boy!” Pho roared, his voice cutting cleanly through the gloom. “Do not let mercy dilute your ascendancy! Push your absolute threshold! Show this broken court what you were forged to become!”

The words cascaded down into the pit, vibrating through the stone beneath Rhys’s boots.

They did not merely echo in his ears; they penetrated the deepest, oldest layers of Rhys’s memory.

He remembered the relentless, agonizing nights in the sub-zero trenches of Floor Twenty-Four, where Pho had crushed his ribs with bare hands, where the freezing drafts had turned his breath to ice, where he had collapsed hundreds of times into the snow only to be dragged back to his feet by an iron claw.

He remembered the early years in the capital courtyards, the cruel laughter of the pureblood squires, the heavy wooden training swords cracking across his skull. At the same time, Theo looked down from his horse with unyielding arrogance.

Every drop of blood he had swallowed, every fracture he had endured, every silent vow he had whispered into the dark of his mother’s quarters rose within his chest.

No longer as memories of humiliation, but as absolute, unyielding fuel.

Rhys closed his eyes for a single heartbeat.

He reached into the deepest metaphysical chamber of his soul core, bypassing the mortal meridians that governed his physical body, reaching straight toward the ancient spiritual contract forged within the great spirit.

He called upon Sylph.

The primordial wind spirit answered instantly, her presence surging through his spiritual sea like a torrential storm of pure, unfettered vitality.

Just as Jack Kaiser had manifested the ancient, divine traits of the dragon Tharaxis within his physical form, Rhys’s soul began to undergo a complete, breathtaking spiritual metamorphosis.

VUUUUUUUUUM.

A dense, concussive pressure wave detonated outward from Rhys’s sternum, blowing the purple-black necrotic miasma completely out of the arena floor.

Rhys’s blonde hair stood straight up on end, waving in the air like a crown of living emerald fire.

The white strands dissolved into a brilliant, luminescent green that crackled with high-frequency wind friction and sparks of ice.

From his shoulder blades, four colossal, gossamer wings of pure, translucent wind mana tore cleanly through the leather of his vest without damaging the cloth and unfolded into spectral light.

The wings were stunning and terrifying.

Crystallized in their geometric perfection, shimmering with iridescent fairy hues that refracted the torchlight into blinding halos of emerald, gold, and azure.

They hummed with a terrifying, high-velocity resonance that generated localized drafts of pressurized air capable of lifting boulders from the earth.

Intricate, brilliant green contractual tattoos flared to life across Rhys’s skin. The glowing runes crawled upward from his wrists, coiled around his forearms like living vines, climbed the sides of his neck, and framed his sharp cheekbones with the ancient, unbending authority of the fairies.

His mana output doubled, quadrupled, multiplied ten-fold. The ambient ice and wind mana within the Spire did not merely respond to his call; it was forcibly enslaved by his presence, rushing into his open meridians in a massive, inward-flowing vortex.

Rhys opened his eyes. They were no longer the eyes of a mortal half-blood. They burned with a radiant, dual-hued brilliance.

Emerald, swirling around pupils of deep, absolute azure ice.

Rhys decided it was time to make his move.

To the mortal eye, to the ten high-born Councilors watching from the royal box, and to the dying Praetor lying in the dirt, Prince Rhys did not dash forward. He did not run.

He simply ceased to exist in the space he occupied.

BOOOOOOOOM!

A catastrophic sonic boom tore through the center of the arena, the sheer displaced air pressure cracking the solid obsidian bedrock beneath his original position into a crater three paces wide.

His velocity bypassed the visual threshold entirely. One microsecond the space was empty; the next microsecond, a blinding arc of green and blue light detonated across the arena floor as Rhys materialized instantly directly above Theo’s shattered body, his gossamer wings beating in silent, terrifying suspension.

Rhys extended both hands downward, splaying his fingers toward the basalt stone.

“Freeze,” Rhys said.

The command was quiet, but it carried the weight of an ancient sovereign decree.

A catastrophic, blinding tidal wave of pure azure ice mana detonated outward from his boots, crashing across the entire half-league expanse of the colosseum.

SH-SH-SH-SHING!

In less than a single second, the black obsidian floor of Floor Thirteen flash-froze into a continuous, unbroken sheet of ancient, blue permafrost.

The freezing cold was so fierce that the necrotic miasma clinging to the stones was instantly crystallized, falling to the ground as a harmless layer of fine purple dust.

Erupting from the permafrost, surrounding Theo’s ruined form in a perfect thirty-pace circle, rose hundreds of massive, jagged spikes of solid crystallized ice.

The spikes shot thirty feet into the air, interlocking at their apexes like the teeth of a colossal glacial leviathan, creating an impenetrable, towering cage of translucent blue ice that sealed the dying Praetor and his executioner off from the rest of the world.

Rhys dropped lightly onto the permafrost inside the ring of ice, his four fairy wings humming softly as they folded behind his back. The ice beneath his boots did not crack; it yielded to his presence, radiating a soft, gentle mist that swirled around his shins.

Theo Althalos dragged his bruised, blood-stained cheek across the frozen floor, his bloodshot eyes widening in absolute, paralyzing terror as he looked up at the radiant, winged figure standing over him.

Every trace of arrogance, every drop of pureblood pride, every illusion of House Althalos’s supremacy had been violently stripped away.

Theo looked at the glowing green hair, the shimmering gossamer wings, and the ancient azure ice burning within Rhys’s eyes, and he saw not a vile half-blood, but a god of the new era.

Tears of pure, agonizing helplessness cut clean lines through the dried blood and black soot on Theo’s pale face.

His lips trembled, his broken jaw struggling to form words as he looked into the eyes of the boy he had spent a lifetime trying to destroy.

“Rhys…” Theo choked out, a wet, rattling wheeze tearing from his throat. “Rhys… please… by the Light of the Sun… please…”

Rhys looked down at him. There was no hatred in his face, no vengeful smirk, no petty triumph. There was only the vast, unyielding cold of a judge whose sentence had already been passed before the trial had begun.

“The Sun has set on your house, Theo,” Rhys said softly, his voice cutting through the enclosed frozen chamber. “And you will not live to see the dawn.”

Rhys stepped forward, stopping directly above Theo’s heaving chest.

He raised his right hand.

Dense currents of pressurized emerald wind and razor-sharp ice mana coiled tightly around his fingers, forming a vibrating, drill-like shroud of concentrated kinetic destruction that hummed with enough frequency to pierce dragon hide.

Rhys drove his bare hand straight downward, punching clean through the dented silver plate of Theo’s breastplate.

CRUNCH!

The silver armor buckled, splintered, and gave way. Rhys’s fingers sheared through the underlying bone and muscle of the chest cavity like parchment, plunging deep into the center of Theo’s ribs.