Ancestral Lineage - Chapter 283

Chapter 283: Ice and Metal, Cold Weapon
The forest screamed.

Not with the voice of a single beast, but with thousands—all crying out in fear, in agony, in confusion. The ground quivered beneath them, as though the earth itself had learned terror and now trembled like a cornered animal.

Birdsong had vanished.

There were no chirps, no flutters of wings—only the sharp cracks of splintering trees and the thunderous crashes of ancient trunks falling like the dying gods of nature. Smoke and mist danced with the falling leaves, and through it all, something loomed.

Massive craters, as wide as cottages and deeper than graves, marred the landscape—each a scar left by something that had not come to visit, but to conquer. Fissures split the terrain like open wounds, and frost spread across the forest floor in serpentine tendrils, freezing beasts mid-sprint, turning them into jagged statues of ice and desperation.

Mothers roared for their young.

Cubs bleated and whimpered, lost in the chaos, trampled by stampedes or swallowed by the cold silence that followed in the wake of the thing.

And then—

Night fell.

It wasn’t natural.

The sun vanished as if swallowed whole by a cosmic mouth. Shadows stretched unnaturally, pooling like ink. The wind howled, carrying with it a whisper of something unspeakable, and the temperature dropped again—this time beyond mortal reckoning.

The beasts stopped.

Every single one froze where it stood—muscle, bone, and blood seized by something beyond instinct. Their eyes widened, their breathing halted. Every heartbeat thudded in unison, a final defiance against what came next.

They felt it.

Not footsteps—there were none. Not breathing—there was none.

Only presence.

Heavy, suffocating. Ancient. Predatory.

It moved slowly, like a glacier, but with the promise of death coiled around every step. Not rushed, not eager—it knew nothing could flee. It didn’t need to chase.

It chose.

Its eyes appeared first. Twin glows, dull, blue, and hollow, yet filled with unrelenting hunger. They weren’t eyes as much as voids—mirrorless and deep, as if peering into them could unravel your existence.

And the beasts—those with hardened hides, towering frames, and predatory dominance of their own—collapsed. Not from wounds. Not from visible force.

They simply ceased.

Souls plucked like feathers, lives extinguished like the flame of a candle pinched by invisible fingers. They died without knowing they were prey.

The silence that followed was not peace.

It was mourning.

The forest, now a graveyard, bent beneath the will of the predator that should not exist.

And still—it kept coming.

Its eyes appeared first.

One shimmered with the deep, ancient glow of a glacier, not simply cold but sentient—a piercing, frigid stare that reached into the marrow of all things and silenced them. The other was unnatural, a thing forged rather than born—mechanical and alive in a different way. It rotated and adjusted with smooth, near-silent clicks, reading everything in sight with a calculating gleam. This eye did not see life; it scanned existence.

Then came the rest.

White hair, straight and unbothered by the wind, fell like a curtain of frozen silk around a face untouched by time. Metallic blue streaks pulsed at the tips, glowing dimly as though remembering the starlight of another age. His skin—if it could be called that—was alabaster pale, tinged with the sheen of moonlight filtered through a frozen lake. It wasn’t merely pale. It was dead. Icy. Skin that knew no warmth, no sun, no touch—only slumber in eternal frost.

He walked through the devastation in silence. Trees bowed away from him, frost racing up their trunks, splitting bark and freezing sap. Shadows curved unnaturally, as if avoiding his gaze.

He was tall—easily towering over any man. His figure was humanoid, yes, but not human. Not anymore.

He was the meeting point of two worlds: Ice and Metal.

A cyborg. A predator. A being sculpted by two opposing forces, now made one.

His clothes were minimal. Simple black trousers hugged his legs, tucked into high-tech boots that thudded gently against the frostbitten earth. His upper body was bare—not from carelessness but from necessity. His chest wasn’t just flesh—it was a masterwork of bio-synthetic fusion. Lines of dark silver metal wove into his skin like rivers of power, glowing softly with blue light. Energy moved beneath the surface, pulsing with slow certainty, each beat resonating like a second heart—one mechanical, immortal, and unfeeling.

He tried to smile.

But he couldn’t.

His face twitched slightly—just enough for the gesture to be recognizable—but it was hollow. There was no warmth behind it. No joy. No triumph. He felt nothing. Not anger, not sorrow, not even the satisfaction of a hunt completed.

He was empty.

A man turned into machine. A machine given the shape of a man. He was a being shaped by suffering, by purpose, by design—a hybrid of evolution and engineering. A vessel of destruction with no need for justification.

The beasts had fled, but not because he pursued.

They fled because instinct told them: this is where death lives.

And now, he stood alone in the silence his existence demanded.

A predator made not of blood and bone—but of ice and metal.

The storm had already begun to freeze the horizon when Kaldaroth appeared.

He stepped into the ruin of the forest like a phantom knight risen from a glacial tomb. The dark blue armor clanked softly with every footstep, runes along the surface faintly glowing with curse script and frostfire etchings. Frost billowed from his back like a living cloak, and every tree near him withered into dead crystals.

His red eyes glowed beneath his helm, locking onto the tall figure standing amid the frozen chaos.

“You,” he said. His voice echoed like iron chains being dragged across ice.

The Ice-and-Metal being didn’t move, didn’t blink. His mechanical eye whirred slightly, adjusting to capture Kaldaroth in full clarity.

“You are not part of this world,” Kaldaroth growled. “Or perhaps you are… but something changed you. Something broke you.”

The being said nothing. He simply turned his head slowly, silently, like a statue learning how to move again.

Kaldaroth raised his armored hand. The sky responded.

A wave of cursed ice exploded from behind him, laced with black veins of magic that shimmered in the air. The wind howled with the shrieks of a hundred dying beasts trapped in his curse. His frost was not pure—it was corrupted, dead, and poisonous. It killed the world as it froze it.

The being raised his hand slowly in response. A clean, clinical wave of arctic light swept forward. It wasn’t magic. It was absolute temperature drop. Molecular stillness. The death of motion.

The two forces collided.

The impact ripped the ground apart. Craters exploded outward like blooming ice flowers. Cursed frost cracked against perfect cryostasis. Trees turned to dust. The air itself shattered into shards of pressure.

Kaldaroth appeared behind him, warhammer-axe in hand—a massive weapon made of soulsteel and bound curse sigils. He brought it down, but it passed through mist.

The Ice-and-Metal being was already beside him. A chain made of light and sub-zero steel wrapped around Kaldaroth’s wrist before he noticed.

The pain wasn’t just physical. It ate into his soul.

Kaldaroth roared and shattered the chain with a burst of cursed ice, backflipping away as spikes of frozen death erupted in every direction.

Their battle continued—one a harbinger of order and freezing silence, the other a vengeful knight cloaked in entropy and frozen wrath.

But soon… Kaldaroth began to understand.

Each move he made was perfectly countered. Every trick he pulled was mirrored or nullified. There was no passion in his opponent, no hatred, no fury to exploit. No emotion. Just cold logic and immense, measured power.

Kaldaroth panted, kneeling atop a fractured stone as steam and frost clashed in the air around him.

“This is… a waste,” he muttered, eyes narrowing.

The being stood still, one eye blinking with the rhythm of a pulse that wasn’t human.

“I don’t know who or what you are,” Kaldaroth said, rising to his feet. “But this battle is meaningless. You are not my target. You are just… in the way.”

He turned without a word more.

For a moment, the being tensed, as if to stop him—but then let him go.

Perhaps even it knew.

Kaldaroth vanished into a vortex of snow and shadow, his curse following him like a loyal pet.

Behind him, the Ice-and-Metal figure stared at where the knight had stood, unmoving. Then, as if responding to some distant signal, he turned and walked deeper into the dead woods.

The battle had ended, but the war of their purposes had only just begun.

The sound of the wind returned once the battle ceased. The forest, broken and desecrated, fell into a silence that bordered on reverence—like the world itself was trying to understand what it had just witnessed.

The Ice-and-Metal being stood unmoving. Only his mechanical eye shifted, rotating with a low whirrr as it adjusted its lens. He stared at the path Kaldaroth had taken, scanning the evaporating traces of corrupted frost and residual curse energy left behind.

Data poured in.

Classification: Ice–Curse hybrid. Male. Enhanced. Intelligent. Extreme hostility. Restraint exhibited.

The blue eye narrowed. Readings flickered across its surface in sharp, coded glyphs—an ancient language of logic and compression.

Then… something flickered.

Seal detected. Identity marker: Ethan. Title: Emperor.

“Ethan…” the being said aloud, his voice cold and toneless—neither human nor truly robotic.

He lifted one hand, and from his palm, a soft projection flickered to life—a vague, glowing symbol etched in silver-blue light. It was Ethan’s seal. He didn’t know how he recognized it. He just did.

“He belongs to Ethan,” the being muttered.

A pause.

Then again, quieter, “He serves Ethan.”

He slowly walked through the battlefield, passing frozen husks of trees and shattered stones. Beasts that had died in the skirmish lay buried beneath the ice. Their pain was gone now—replaced by eternal stillness. His presence barely made a sound.

The wind whispered between the branches, disturbed only by the occasional ping of scanning protocols continuing their work.

But the being’s thoughts… grew louder.

“Why do I want to see him?” he asked the silence.

There was no reply.

The mechanical eye clicked again. His biological eye—icy, tired, ancient—shimmered faintly with something too faint to call emotion.

Curiosity? Longing? Remnant impulse?

None of these made sense. He was built beyond impulse. Beyond need. Wasn’t he?

“Ethan,” he repeated. “My memory banks do not contain a clear image of him… but his name echoes within.”

A sharp pulse ran through his spine. Not pain—an alert. A tremor of recognition.

He reached behind his back and unsheathed a long, narrow device—not a sword, but a tuning rod made of pure crystal and metal alloy. He pressed it to the frozen ground.

Lines of runes burst out in a spiderweb pattern.

From beneath the surface, the ice pulsed… and then part of the forest shimmered in glitch-like sparks. A fissure of reality.

There was something more to this realm.

Something buried… perhaps in him.

Perhaps tied to Ethan.

The being stood still again, staring into the distance where Kaldaroth had gone. That knight was powerful. Not just in might, but in will. He was tied to a cause… to a person.

So why—he wondered again—why did the very sound of that person’s name awaken something in him?