Chapter 160: Blood Weaponry, Lilith.
Victor kept his hand closed around Jake’s deformed wrist for a few more seconds, letting Black Lightning run through the Black Ice like a current trapped in living flesh. Jake’s body locked, his muscles contracting in violent spasms, and the Berserker aura around him flickered irregularly, like a flame fed by bad oil. There was still strength there. Too much strength. Even bound, even previously impaled, even with his body deformed by the abuse of his own ability, Jake continued trying to advance. His rage did not diminish. On the contrary, every pain, every humiliation, and every word from Victor only served to sink him even deeper into that grotesque state.
Grace watched from a few meters away, ice already prepared around her fingers, but without moving. She understood that the fight had already entered a phase where interfering the wrong way could be worse than doing nothing. Even so, her eyes followed every crack in Jake’s body, every change in Victor’s flow, every sign that this could slip completely out of control. The Ritual had already been broken in spirit. This was no longer a competition between vampire heirs. It was a confrontation between two aberrations using the entire dimension as disposable ground.
Jake tried to pull his arm again. The force was so absurd that the Black Ice around his wrist cracked in several layers. Victor did not resist directly. He released at the right moment and allowed Jake’s own momentum to destabilize him for half a second. That small mistake would have been insignificant against any other opponent, but Victor was observing everything with attention too cold and irritated to waste. He took one step back, opened his left hand, and felt the ring on his finger vibrate for a fraction of a second, as if something inside it was still awake, irritated, and watching.
Victor ignored that for now.
Jake advanced again, his deformed body leaning forward, his hands looking more like claws than fingers. The Berserker aura wrapped around his shoulders like a red and dark mass, and his face no longer seemed completely rational. His jaw was wider, his teeth sharper, his eyes taken by an almost continuous red light. He opened his mouth to shout another insult, but Victor moved first. Not to attack. To decide.
"Grace," Victor said, without taking his eyes off Jake. "Move away."
Grace frowned.
"How far?"
"Stay where my ice will not touch."
That was enough to make her retreat without arguing. Grace was not a coward, but she was intelligent. And when Victor spoke like that, without humor, without provocation, and without that sick amusement he had maintained during the fight, it meant he had stopped playing. She leapt backward, using her own ice to slide over the broken ruins until she reached a safe distance at the edge of the devastated clearing. Even so, she kept her eyes fixed on him, ready to react if this turned into something that threatened the entire dimension.
Jake noticed the movement and laughed, though the laugh came out distorted through his damaged throat.
"Are you going to run behind her? Going to hide behind the ice girl now?"
Victor slowly raised his right hand.
"No."
The ground answered.
It was not an explosion. It was an imposition. A layer of Black Ice spread from Victor’s feet in a perfect circle, so fast and silent that the earth itself seemed to lose the right to resist. The ice crossed stones, ruins, roots, blood, corpses, and craters. Everything it touched froze immediately, not only on the surface, but from within. The moisture in the air became dark crystals. The spilled blood turned into red glass trapped in obsidian. The fragments of broken trees were covered by a black crust so cold they stopped releasing smoke.
The domain advanced until it reached an exact limit.
It stopped before Grace.
The circular line stood clear before her, a perfect border between the destroyed world and Victor’s territory. Grace looked down and saw the Black Ice stop a few centimeters from her feet, as if it had recognized her presence and decided not to cross. That bothered her more than if he had frozen everything without control. Because it was not only raw power. It was precision. Even irritated, even wounded, even using an absurd amount of energy, Victor was still calculating.
Inside the circle, everything became still.
Even the air seemed frozen.
Jake tried to advance and realized too late that his feet were trapped. The Black Ice had climbed to his ankles, not like a simple prison, but like dense roots gripping flesh, boots, bones, and the flow of energy. He roared and broke the first layer with brute force. Then the second. Then the third. But every time one part broke, another appeared, not trying to stop him completely, only delaying him. Reducing him. Forcing resistance. Buying time.
Victor opened his left hand.
Blood came out of his fingers.
Not in scattered drops.
In controlled threads.
Grace immediately noticed the difference. That was not Black Ice. Not Black Lightning. Not White Fire. It was the principle Scarlet had taught him. Blood Armament. But not that simple, identityless form Victor had created when he began training. The blood spun around his hand as if it had a memory of its own, accumulating, compressing, refining.
First came the hilt.
Then the guard.
Then the blade.
It was a long sword, elegant, but without delicacy. The base of the blade was dark red, almost black, formed from blood so compressed it resembled living metal. Internal veins glowed beneath the surface, pulsing in the same rhythm as Victor’s heart. The guard had curved and aggressive lines, like open fangs, and the hilt seemed made to fit his hand and only his hand. It was not a generic weapon. It was not a long, pointed object. It had intention. It had form. It had a name.
Victor closed his fingers around it.
"Lilith."
The sword answered.
A pulse crossed the domain of ice.
Grace felt her own blood react, even from a distance. It was different from any blood weapon she had ever seen inside the Ritual. Most vampires created weapons as temporary extensions of energy. Victor had created something closer to a declaration. A blade that carried his violence, his pride, and Scarlet’s clear influence in its structure. There was refinement in the balance, brutality in the edge, and a density that only someone trained by a swordswoman obsessed with cutting could have helped polish.
Jake pulled his trapped leg and advanced one step, breaking more Black Ice beneath his feet.
"A sword? You think that will stop me?"
Victor looked at him.
"No."
White Fire appeared first.
The flames wrapped around Lilith without consuming the blood of the blade. They ran across the surface as if searching for something to devour, but Victor kept them bound to the sword’s edge, turning the cut into a line of pure combustion. Then came Black Lightning, entering through the internal veins of the weapon, crackling in short arcs between the hilt and the tip. The sword vibrated violently, but did not lose its shape. Finally, Black Ice rose from the domain around them and covered part of the blade in thin layers, creating an outer edge that was dark, rigid, and absurdly cold.
Blood.
White Fire.
Black Lightning.
Black Ice.
Four forces occupying a single weapon.
The structure almost failed.
Grace saw the blade tremble as if it were about to break. The air around it distorted. The energy was too contradictory. The blood wanted to flow. The ice wanted to stabilize. The fire wanted to consume. The lightning wanted to move. Any mistake would make the sword explode in Victor’s hand. He knew that too. That was why he did not hurry. He breathed once, adjusted his wrist, reinforced the hilt with more blood, and let the Black Ice create internal channels to guide the Black Lightning without rupturing the central structure.
Jake continued advancing.
Each step broke parts of the domain, but the price was clear. His body was worsening. Berserker still increased his strength, but there was no balance left. Flesh expanded in the wrong places. Bones pressed beneath the skin. Regeneration tried to keep up with the deformation and failed to correct everything. He was a mass of strength and hatred, dangerous enough to destroy anyone who approached, but already too far from control to be called a warrior.
Victor raised Lilith with both hands.
"I wish I did not have to kill you," he said, his voice low enough not to sound like a speech, but clear enough for Jake to hear. "Rakshasa wanted to have fun with torture, revenge, and things like that. It would be fair to leave you to her."
Jake roared and tried to accelerate.
The domain reacted.
Hundreds of small claws of Black Ice emerged from the ground and seized his legs, hips, and arms for fractions of a second. He destroyed almost all of them immediately, but the delay was enough.
Victor continued:
"But you irritated me."
The word did not come as a shout.
It came dry.
Simple.
Definitive.
Grace felt the pressure change.
The entire domain began to converge toward Victor. Not retreating, but aligning. The ice beneath his feet formed lines toward the sword. The frozen blood on the ground vibrated. The white flames around Lilith became thinner, more concentrated. Black Lightning stopped crackling randomly and began to circulate through the blade in closed cycles. Victor lowered his center of gravity, held the sword at the side of his body, and concentrated everything into a single strike.
It was not only strength.
It was architecture.
He was assembling the attack in layers.
The first layer would be the blood cut, the base blade that would give direction. The second would be Black Ice, which would freeze and preserve the opened path, preventing dispersion. The third would be Black Lightning, accelerating the release and increasing the impact at the point of contact. The fourth would be White Fire, consuming everything that survived the initial opening.
Four forces.
A single vector.
Jake broke the last prison around his leg and charged forward, completely consumed by fury. His grotesque body crossed the domain like a living battering ram, destroying pillars of ice that rose to delay him. He roared insults, threats, and words so distorted they no longer formed clear sentences. Berserker kept him standing through pure hatred.
Victor closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
He murmured:
"Four forces. One purpose. No mercy. Only balance."
Then opened his eyes.
Jake was less than ten meters away.
Victor cut.
At first, the strike did not look large.
The sword moved in a clean horizontal arc, almost simple. Grace almost thought she had expected something more explosive. Then the world in front of Victor split apart.
The line of the cut crossed Jake first.
The blood blade gave direction to the attack and entered his body like a sentence. Black Ice came with it, freezing flesh, blood, and aura the instant it opened the path. Black Lightning exploded through the line of the cut, multiplying the force in a release so fast Jake had no time to react. White Fire appeared last, filling everything that had been separated with a white flame that consumed without spreading, as if destruction itself had been compressed into a perfect line.
Jake was split in half.
But the strike did not stop at him.
The energy crossed the forest.
Not as a circular explosion.
As a straight sentence.
A gigantic ravine opened before Victor, tearing the world in a line one hundred kilometers long. Earth, stone, trees, ruins, monsters, and artificial hills were split by the same cut. The ground opened into two dark walls, frozen by Black Ice along the edges, while White Fire burned at the bottom of the fissure without producing ordinary smoke. Black Lightning ran through the walls of the ravine like living veins, electrocuting anything that still dared move too close.
The dimension trembled.
Not only the clearing.
Everything.
The artificial sky flickered. The false clouds tore along the direction of the strike. Monsters dozens of kilometers away stopped moving. Distant participants fell to their knees, feeling the pressure pass through them like a warning of death. The line opened by Victor was not only physical destruction. It was a marker. A scar in the Ritual.
Grace remained motionless at the edge of the domain, eyes wide despite all the self-control she possessed.
She saw Jake’s body fall in two parts.
There was no roar this time.
No insult.
No advance.
The upper half fell first, sliding over the black ice covering the ground. The lower half remained standing for one absurd fraction of a second, sustained by Berserker’s last spasm, before toppling to the side. His blood tried to boil, regenerate, react, but the Black Ice clinging to the cut slowed everything, the White Fire burned the edges, and Black Lightning destroyed any attempt at energetic reconnection.
Victor remained still at the end of the motion.
Lilith was still in his hands.
The blade trembled.
Then cracked.
The White Fire went out first. Black Lightning dispersed into small sparks. Black Ice loosened into dark fragments. Finally, the blood sword itself lost cohesion and slowly dissolved, returning to Victor’s body as exhausted red threads.
He took a deep breath.
Once.
Then again.
The ice domain remained for a few more seconds before beginning to silently come apart. The circular line that had stopped before Grace slowly retreated, like a black tide returning to the ocean. The cold remained in the air, however. The ravine opened by the strike was still there, burning, freezing, and crackling with electricity across an absurd distance.
Grace slowly walked to the edge of the former frozen area, without taking her eyes off Jake.
"That... was unnecessary."
Victor looked at her, his face still covered in blood.
"He was irritating."
Grace stared at the one-hundred-kilometer ravine.
"You opened a scar in the dimension because he was irritating?"
Victor looked at the result of his own strike.
Then shrugged.
"I also wanted to test the sword."
Grace fell silent.
There was no adequate answer to that.
Victor looked back at the two halves of Jake. The body was still trembling faintly, but there was no real threat left. Berserker had been split along with him. Even if he remained alive for a few more seconds, the fight was over. Victor took one step forward, then stopped when he felt the ring on his finger vibrate again. For an instant, Rowena’s presence echoed somewhere distant, irritated, wild, and awake.
He looked at his own hand.
Then at Jake.
"It is over."
Grace did not answer immediately. She was looking at Victor now, not Jake. There was something different about him since the ring. Something she did not understand, and perhaps he did not either. But in that moment, with the colossal ravine open before them and Jake split in half on the ground, one thing was impossible to deny.
The Ascension Ritual could no longer continue normally.
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