Formless Ascension: My Affinity Is Limitless

"This is something meant to be taken on by a team. The best talents in an entire region of your world gathering together to tackle the floor. Not once, not twice, but several times before they can succeed.

What do you take us for? You think people who take on quests to act as the final opponents of regional dungeon floors are simply plebeians you can defeat anyhow you like?"

His tone was entirely reprimanding, full of an arrogant certainty. He was completely assured of his victory now, simply whiling away the time by berating Uhtred and Zara for their foolishness.

However, Uhtred was not about to sit and listen to someone act like they belonged to some superior order of knowledge.

He wasn’t going to let some multiversal know-it-all talk down to him as if he conformed to the basic limits of their understanding of power.

While he was definitely interested in some of this inside scoop and the details of how things worked on a multiversal scale, he was thoroughly done listening to the lecture.

"Talk, talk, talk... talk." Uhtred swayed his head side to side, his eyes bored and his tone completely pissed off as he stared into the white fog.

"You’ve been talking non-stop for the last minute. What? You seem to forget the fight is ongoing. Do you think you’ve won or something?" Uhtred’s voice was flat and dead cold. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

The Frost Daemon snorted from where he shrouded himself within the frozen haze. However, before he could respond with a scathing remark, a sudden change occurred.

In the blink of an eye, the shimmering heat around Uhtred’s body, the very spell he had been frantically fueling his cosmic essence into, suddenly disappeared.

The heat collapsed entirely, instantly exposing his skin to the raw, freezing air of the Frost Daemon’s Winter Court.

But the shimmering air didn’t just stop at a normal temperature drop.

Before the absolute cold could penetrate Uhtred’s flesh and cause frostbite, the temperature around his skin inverted at a steep, terrifying rate.

A wave of pure, violent frigid cold emanated directly from Uhtred’s body.

"IMPOSSIBLE!"

The Frost Daemon barely had the time to roar out loud in utter disbelief and shock at the sudden turn of events.

Uhtred released the wave, spreading his senses and connecting with the particles of frost essence already floating in the air.

For the briefest of moments, the area surrounding him, which wasn’t large to begin with, fell completely under his control.

His formless core had spent the entire duration of the daemon’s speech analyzing the exact vibration of the field. Frost wasn’t a separate element, it was simply the absolute cessation of motion. The inverse of heat.

Uhtred’s senses spread through the cold elements in the air, and in that brief moment, he stalled every single bit of it.

He froze the freezing field itself, reverting the hazy, swirling mist of the Winter Court into a completely stationary, visible field of ice particles.

For a single fraction of a second, the temperature stalled, completely stripping away the Frost Daemon’s shroud and exposing his exact physical position.

With all the time the Frost Daemon had spent mocking Uhtred and lecturing him about his ego, Uhtred had been entirely focused on decoding how the frost elements interacted with cosmic essence.

The daemon, secure in his conventional understanding of the multiverse, had not for a single moment imagined such a thing was possible. He had seen Uhtred controlling heat, and his mind simply couldn’t comprehend an integrated human manipulating the direct inverse element at the same time.

Not to mention that, to the daemon, Uhtred’s reserves should have been draining by the second. He had no idea Uhtred’s primordial core was greedily drinking in the ambient essence of the dungeon core to stay topped off.

This completely unexpected, first-time use of copied frost magic took the alien entirely by surprise.

The Frost Daemon, with his naturally superior control over the element, quickly reacted and snatched the control of the field back from Uhtred a beat later.

But one beat was all Uhtred needed.

When Uhtred had called for Zara earlier, he hadn’t been asking her to enter the fray blindly. He had called her specifically for this exact moment.

He had anticipated that the daemon would easily reclaim his element, but this brief window was the true trap he had been waiting for to turn the entire tide of the battle.

And Zara, upon whom the entire crux of this plan depended, did not disappoint.

In that brief window where the Frost Daemon became physically visible, before he could even process the loss of his shroud, Zara’s fist descended upon him with terrifying, raw might.

The weird magic that had given Uhtred a difficult time during their initial battle, the same magic that had given her the strength to punch literal holes through the steel-like bodies of the Level 19 Ferrum Stygite Trolls, landed squarely on the Frost Daemon’s chest.

The blow connected cleanly. Zara’s weird magic kicked into full gear, multiplying the force of the strike to a terrifying degree.

The newly re-corrected Winter Court shattered into absolute nothingness in an instant.

The Frost Daemon’s body flew backward like a broken shuttle, crashing violently into the hard stone floor and shattering the thick layer of ice coating the ground.

A spray of dark blue blood spurted from his throat immediately as his chest caved in slightly from the sheer force of the impact. His eyes were wide, filled with an utter, paralyzed horror as if his brain hadn’t even fully processed how he had been hit.

Yet, before he could even attempt to push himself back into an upright position, Zara was already upon him again.

And she wasn’t alone. Uhtred moved right alongside her.

He flashed forward, his barely-depleted cosmic essence surging fiercely through his entire body, his eyes hungry for slaughter.

What followed was the most raw, visceral beatdown the Frost Daemon had ever received in his entire existence.

Uhtred full-on dropped his battleaxe to the floor, choosing to go in with his bare hands.

Zara would land a bone-shattering blow, and Uhtred would step in next, his fists reinforced with heavy cosmic energy. They turned the Level 21 daemon into a literal punching bag, striking him blow for blow with relentless, essence-filled impacts.

Zara’s strikes were even more lethal as her weird magic continuously multiplied the damage of each strike.

By the time they finally stopped, the Frost Daemon’s prideful Winter Court was completely gone. All that was left of the alien was a mangled, spasming body slumped on the ruined floor, leaking pools of dark blue blood from multiple holes opened up by their bare knuckles alone.

Blue blood gurgled continuously from his mouth as he slowly choked on his own breath, his internal organs completely ruptured. His eyes were entirely dazed, knocked out of alignment, with each one facing a completely different direction.

Uhtred squatted down slowly next to him, casually flicking away the blue blood coating his knuckles. He looked directly into the Frost Daemon’s broken, shifting eyes and spoke:

"You were saying something earlier... Something about not knowing the breadth of the multiverse?"