Yenna moved like a missile with her fist first coated in ice as trailing ice crystals that shattered against the air itself. The plant woman’s eyes widened.

The plant woman’s hands came up. Vines erupted from the warehouse floor, weaving together in a split second, forming a dense circular shield of interlocking wood and thorns. The shield was thick—nearly two feet of compressed plant matter, reinforced with mana.

Yenna’s fist hit the shield.

BOOM.

The shield held for a few seconds.

Then the frost spread through it. Ice crawled through the vines like poison through blood, crystallizing the cellular structure of every plant fiber in the shield. What had been flexible, living wood became rigid, brittle, dead in the span of a heartbeat.

CRACK.

The frozen shield shattered.

The impact transferred through—full force. The plant woman took the remainder of Yenna’s punch directly in her chest.

Her eyes bulged.

The wall behind her didn’t stand a chance.

CRASH.

She went through as all of it exploded outward in a spray of debris as the plant woman’s body carved a human-shaped tunnel through the warehouse’s eastern wall and kept going.

She hit the wall of the adjacent building.

The wall broke.

She kept going—through empty air, through a narrow alley, through a pile of accumulated garbage—before finally embedding herself in the far wall of a slum dwelling. Plaster dust billowed. Bricks tumbled. A cooking pot that had been sitting on a windowsill clattered to the ground with an indignant clang.

Silence.

Then heads started popping out of doorways.

Slum dwellers. Thin, worn, suspicious—the kind of people who learned early that attention meant trouble. They peered at the woman-shaped crater in their neighbor’s wall with expressions ranging from terrified to confused to vaguely interested.

"Is she dead?" someone whispered.

"I think she’s dead."

"Look at her—she’s not moving."

"Check if she’s got a ring."

That last voice cut through the murmuring like a knife. Suddenly, everyone was looking at the woman’s hand. Sure enough, glinting on her finger—barely visible beneath the dust and plaster—a storage ring. Simple silver band, but in the slums, even a basic storage ring was worth more than most families earned in a year.

Three men moved first.

They approached the embedded woman with the careful caution. One of them poked her cheek with a stick.

She didn’t respond.

"She’s definitely dead."

"Get the ring."

Hands reached out—

VINES EXPLODED FROM THE WOMAN’S BODY.

"AAAHHH—!"

Three simultaneous screams rang out as vines erupted from the plant woman’s torso like iron spears, punching through the men’s chests with wet, crunching sounds that echoed through the narrow alley. Blood sprayed across the crumbling walls. The men’s feet left the ground, dangling like grotesque puppets, twitching once before going still.

The plant woman pulled herself out of the wall.

Bricks fell from her shoulders. Plaster dust cascaded off her hair. Her clothes were shredded, her body battered, but her eyes were bright with vicious life.

She looked at the three impaled men with disgust.

"Filthy pests," she muttered.

Then she looked at the other slum dwellers who had witnessed the entire thing.

They were already running.

Trampling each other in the narrow alleyways, disappearing into the labyrinth of crumbling buildings like rats fleeing a fire. The sounds of panic faded into the distance within seconds.

Yeena quickly rushed over only to see the disaster.

The plant woman snorted and turned around—

And met Yenna’s eyes.

Yenna stood on top of the nearest building as her jaw tightened.

The plant woman followed her gaze and smirked.

"Well they died ’cause of you, can’t blame me." She shrugged, vines retracting, the three bodies dropping to the ground with soft thuds.

Yenna didn’t respond.

Her hand went to her storage ring. A flash of light—and something materialized in her grip.

A transparent sword impossibly clear, like it had been carved from a single block of pure ice.

A Tier 2 weapon.

But it wasn’t the tier that made the plant woman’s smirk vanish.

It was the aura.

Cold poured off the blade like water from a broken dam. The air around Yenna seemed to thicken. Frost spread across the ground in a slow, deliberate circle.

The plant woman’s eyes widened.

"What the hell is that—"

Yenna traced her fingers along the blade. Almost gently. Almost lovingly.

"I would have loved to torture you," she said quietly. "Truly. Make it last. Make you scream until your throat bled."

The plant woman took a step back.

"But I have to make this quick." Yenna’s ice-blue eyes locked onto hers. "The sword’s special ability is enough torture for you. You’ll feel every second of your blood freezing."

She raised the blade. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

"Frost Zone."

The cold exploded outward as a pure, overwhelming frost energy spreads in a perfect sphere from Yenna’s position in a thirty meter radius. The ground froze solid. The walls of the surrounding buildings crackled with ice. The three dead men were encased in frozen cocoons before their blood could finish pooling.

A dome of translucent ice formed at the boundary.

The plant woman acted fast. Vines erupted from her body—dozens of them lashing toward the dome’s inner surface, trying to break through, trying to shatter the ice and escape—

But they all froze.

Every single vine stopped mid-lash, ice crawling along their length, killing them before they could touch the dome’s inner wall. Frost spread from the points of contact, creeping backward toward the plant woman’s body.

Her mouth fell open.

"Frost Intent," she breathed. "How do you possess such strong intent at such a young age?!"

Intent wasn’t a technique. It wasn’t something you could learn from a manual or purchase from a shop. Intent was the crystallization of comprehension—the moment when a cultivator’s understanding of their element became so profound that it transcended mere manipulation and became something like... personality. Will. Soul.

Frost Intent at Foundation Establishment was rare. Extremely rare that she had never seen in her 60 years of cultivation. Frost Intent this strong at Foundation Establishment was almost unheard of.

Yenna didn’t answer.

She pointed her sword at the plant woman.

The plant woman raised her hands—vines forming barriers, roots rising from the frozen ground, every defensive measure she could muster in the span of a single heartbeat—

It wasn’t enough.

Yenna moved.

The ice sword became a streak of transparent light. Pure killing intent channeled into a single thrust.

The plant woman’s eyes couldn’t track it.

The vine barrier couldn’t stop it.

The sword entered her chest.

It only stopped when it kissed her heart.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the cold set in.

The plant woman looked down at the blade buried in her chest. At the frost spreading from the wound in delicate crystalline patterns across her skin. At her arms, her shoulders, her neck—ice crawling outward from the sword like it was using her body as a canvas.

She tried to speak.

Nothing came out. Her throat was freezing.

She tried to move.

Her limbs wouldn’t respond. The cold had reached her joints, her muscles, her nerves—locking everything in place while leaving her consciousness painfully, perfectly intact.

She could feel it.

Every Single Second.

The blood leaving her heart. Freezing as it passed the blade. Crystallizing in her veins. Spreading through her body like winter through a dying world. Her fingers went numb. Her toes went still. The cold climbed higher—through her stomach, her lungs, her throat—

Her eyes were still moving seeing and feeling every moment of it.

The last thing she felt was her brain turning to ice.

Then nothing.

Yenna pulled the sword free. The plant woman’s frozen body stood for a moment—a perfect statue of horror, mouth open in a silent scream, eyes wide with agony that would never end because death had claimed her before the suffering could.

Then she fell.

SHATTER.

The frozen body hit the ground and broke into pieces. Ice scattered across the alley floor like shattered glass.

The dome dissolved.

Yenna sheathed her sword and turned away.

"Trash."

She walked back toward the warehouse without looking back.