Soulbound: Dual Cultivation

Chapter 564: Ice belle vs Ken

Below, Rus had turned into something that no longer felt like a city under siege, but a battlefield written across the sky.

People in the streets had stopped running.

Not because the danger was gone—but because it was no longer something they could outrun.

Every few seconds, the heavens above would fracture with bursts of pressure, cold shockwaves, and rippling distortions in the air that made even standing feel unstable. Buildings creaked under indirect force. Ice formed in unnatural patterns along rooftops and shattered moments later from sheer impact pressure alone.

And all anyone could do was look up.

Because what was happening above them had surpassed anything ordinary soldiers or citizens could meaningfully comprehend.

The two remaining celestials hovered at a distance, no longer participating directly, their role reduced to observers maintaining formation and readiness. Even they understood that stepping in carelessly now would be meaningless. The real fight had narrowed.

Only two figures remained at its center.

Ken.

And the Ice Belle.

They faced each other mid-air, suspended above the ruined skyline, while the wind itself seemed unwilling to move freely between them.

Ken moved first.

Not fast in a chaotic sense—but decisively, like every motion had already been calculated before it happened. His aura condensed inward instead of exploding outward, forming a dense pressure field around his body that distorted the air like heat haze in reverse.

The Ice Belle answered instantly.

Frost spread beneath her feet in a circular pattern, not expanding wildly but layering into structured rings of cold energy that stabilized her position in space. Every step Ken attempted forward was met with subtle spatial resistance, like the air itself had become resistant to intrusion.

Ken struck.

A single forward palm release.

No theatrics.

Just compressed force unleashed at extreme velocity.

The air between them collapsed instantly.

The Ice Belle tilted slightly, and the attack didn’t meet her directly—it passed through a shifted pocket of displaced space, striking instead a frozen afterimage that detonated behind her in a silent burst of fractured pressure.

The shockwave rolled outward anyway.

Even from a distance, spectators on the ground felt it.

A few collapsed to their knees instinctively.

Others shielded their heads as debris lifted from rooftops far below.

Ken’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“Spatial displacement,” he observed calmly.

The Ice Belle didn’t answer.

She raised her hand slightly, and the temperature across a wide radius dropped sharply again. Thin vertical lines of frost appeared in the air around Ken—not attacking him directly, but segmenting the space he occupied into layered cold zones.

Ken shifted once.

Then disappeared from that exact point.

He reappeared slightly to the side, already countering, but the Ice Belle had predicted the repositioning. A second frost layer activated mid-transition, forcing his movement to adjust again.

The two began exchanging positions in rapid succession.

Not simple movement.

Not brute exchange.

But a layered battle of prediction, spatial control, and compressed force release.

Every time Ken advanced, the Ice Belle denied the path—not by blocking him, but by invalidating the space he intended to occupy.

Every time she created an opening, Ken responded by collapsing it with sheer pressure before it stabilized.

Below them, the ground forces could only watch fragments of the exchange.

A flash of light.

A sudden drop in temperature.

A shockwave that bent smoke and dust into spirals.

Then silence.

Then another impact.

The two remaining celestials in the air maintained distance, eyes tracking everything but intervening only when necessary, clearly aware that stepping between these two directly could end badly for either side.

Ken finally spoke mid-exchange, voice calm despite the intensity.

“You are protecting more than him.”

The Ice Belle’s gaze remained fixed.

“I am finishing what I started.”

Ken’s aura tightened slightly.

“That is not an answer.”

He moved again—faster this time.

The air around him compressed violently as he closed distance, forcing a direct clash point for the first time in this phase.

The Ice Belle didn’t retreat.

She met him head-on.

Cold and pressure collided in the sky above Rus, and for a moment, the entire battlefield seemed to hold its breath.

Even the spectators below felt it.

Because they all understood the same thing at once:

This was no longer a pursuit.

It was no longer a rescue.

It was a duel between two forces capable of deciding the fate of everything beneath them.

The clash in the sky didn’t slow.

It tightened.

Each exchange between Ken and the Ice Belle began compressing into shorter, sharper bursts of movement—no longer wide battlefield maneuvers, but instantaneous collisions at near point-blank range in mid-air. Every time they met, the air cracked with pressure so dense it distorted vision itself.

Below them, the spectators could no longer clearly follow what was happening.

Only aftermath.

A sudden drop in temperature.

A shockwave that rippled outward like an invisible hammer strike.

Then silence.

Then another impact.

Ken blocked a descending strike from the Ice Belle with a reinforced palm coated in condensed energy. The collision sent both of them drifting apart slightly, air exploding outward in a circular blast that carved spirals through the clouds.

He stabilized mid-air instantly.

But his eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second.

Because he felt it.

The force behind that strike.

It wasn’t just strong anymore.

It was equal.

Ken’s expression remained controlled, but internally something shifted as he recalibrated his understanding of her current state.

This level…

He attacked again, this time faster—appearing directly above her with a downward pressure strike meant to collapse her position entirely.

The Ice Belle responded without hesitation.

A rotating frost field expanded upward, not defending passively, but actively redirecting the trajectory of his force. Instead of meeting resistance head-on, Ken’s attack was subtly deflected sideways, dispersing into fractured energy that scattered harmlessly into the sky.

Ken flickered backward immediately, eyes sharpening further.

And for the first time—

A thought formed clearly in his mind.

She’s not below me.

The realization settled in.

Then deepened.

He advanced again, but this time more carefully, testing instead of overwhelming. A series of controlled strikes followed—each one probing for weaknesses, variations in timing, changes in reaction speed.

Every single one was answered.

Not only defended.

But understood.

The Ice Belle wasn’t just reacting anymore.

She was anticipating.

Ken’s gaze narrowed slightly as another exchange ended in a clean neutralization, their forces canceling each other out mid-air and dispersing in opposite directions.

He paused for a fraction longer than before.

And in that pause—

It hit him fully.

Her growth.

It wasn’t incremental.

It wasn’t gradual.

It was exponential.

Lechia had shown a version of her power he had accounted for.

This—

This was something else entirely.

Ken’s eyes darkened slightly as he drifted back a few meters, breaking direct contact for the first time since the duel escalated.

She is on my level.

The thought was not emotional.

It was factual.

And that made it more dangerous.

The Ice Belle stood steady across from him, frost gathering subtly around her fingertips again, ready for the next exchange. Lucas remained secure in Henrietta’s distance far below, out of this immediate equation, but the battle above had already evolved beyond retrieval.

Ken exhaled slowly.

For the first time, a faint shift appeared in his expression—not fear, not hesitation…

But recalibration.

“I understand now,” he said quietly.

The Ice Belle didn’t respond.

Ken’s aura tightened, no longer testing casually.

“Lechia wasn’t an anomaly,” he continued. “It was a warning.”

A pause.

His eyes locked fully onto her.

“And I ignored it.”

The air between them grew heavier again as both sides adjusted.

Because now Ken no longer treated her as an obstacle.

He treated her as an equal threat.

And the next exchange was no longer going to be probing.

It was going to be decisive.