Chapter 1659: Hour of Reckoning.

Chapter 1659: Hour of Reckoning.

The skull of Sunny's battered Shell had cracked, and the upper part of it had fused with the ice. That part was torn off when he pushed what remained of his body into the fractured ice, spilling shadows like a tide of black blood.

But his jaws were still intact.

With most of his limbs gone and his colossal body swiftly turning into ice, Sunny let out a frenzied growl as he opened his skeletal maw and bit down on the small silhouette encased in the heart of the Winter Beast's appalling vessel.

Slicing it in half.

A moment later, his teeth exploded into a rain of ice. His mutilated Shell was far too damaged, and would have already crumbled if it had not been fused into ice, becoming a part of it.

His soul was cold, cold... cold enough that even the terrible pain ravaging it had been swallowed by a peaceful numbness. That peace was a herald of death.

But none of it mattered.

Because the moment Sunny destroyed the source of the Winter Beast, the abominable sculpture of Ice that served as its body shuddered.

And then, it started to crack.

He heard a gleeful laughter ring in his mind, breaking through the haze of stillness that was consuming it. Glee, triumph, vindication, pain, sorrow, guilt, hatred... countless emotions were fused into that laugh, creating an eerily disturbing mixture.

Sunny recognized the laughter as his own.

Or was it a scream?

He was laughing... because the Winter Beast was dead. There was no Nightmare Spell to celebrate his Idll, but Sunny had sensed a trickle of shadow fragments entering his soul.

The harrowing titan, Winter Beast, the bane of the Antarctic Center and the executioner of Falcon Scott, the abominable horror that had stolen the lives of Sunny's soldiers and taught him how unbearably crushing a defeat can be, was gone.

Slain by his own hand, no less.

Vengeance... was so sweet.

But that sweetness was also so indescribably bitter, because it carried the memories of what it was exactly that Sunny had longed to avenge.

«Ah...»

Imprisoned in the depths of a frozen Shell, Sunny cut off his senses for a fleeting moment.

Left alone in the darkness, he whispered:

There was no sign of the vague silhouette that he had bitten in half anywhere in sight. It must have turned to ash like the rest of the corpses fused with the abomination.

The remaining ice — what had been the innermost core of the titan's body once — was not melting, but neither was it radiating a sense of fatal cold. That cold was there, still, but now, it seemed to be contained within the ice instead of spreading outward like a curse.

In the flaming darkness of the obsidian lake, the mystical ice looked almost like frosty metal.

Sunny hesitated for a few moments, then sighed, coughed violently, and summoned the Covetous Coffer.

He placed everything Inside — the soul shards, the fragments of frozen shadows, and the pieces of pale ice.

«It's over.»

The Winter Beast was dead. He had settled the score and avenged himself.

He had avenged everyone else, as well.

His business in Antarctica was finished.

Suddenly, Sunny looked tired.

He glanced around, his gaze a little lost, and then asked quietly:

«Now what?»

Of course, there was no response. There was no one to respond, either.

In the silence of the obsidian lake, Sunny rubbed his face tiredly and closed his eyes.

«I'm tired... of this place.»

Not the depths of Mount Erebus. Not the ruins of the Erebus Field, and not even the Antarctic Center.

Sunny felt tired of this world.

Nothing was holding him back here anymore.

And so, he decided to leave.

A dozen seconds later, his figure disappeared from Inside the broken volcano... and off the face of the Earth.

He would not return to the waking world for three long, lonesome years.