This was the final dark world of today's war.
No light. No wind.
Bitter, bone-deep cold.
The figures of one Master Hunter after another floated within it.
Countless frost-shattered limbs and torsos drifted around them.
The Hunter uniforms that had once been pure black were now painted pale by frost.
The living breathed.
The dead were silent.
Every Master Hunter present from the First Group was among the Auling Hunter Corps' first echelon of elites beneath the Apex Hunters—powerful and ruthless figures who had witnessed countless grand battles and slain innumerable savage prey.
And yet, just moments ago, they had endured the most terrifying, bizarre, unimaginable, and despair-inducing ultimate battle of their lives.
No gravity.
No air.
The temperature had plunged without end, swiftly passing the threshold of "minus two hundred degrees Celsius" before finally reaching the ultralow extreme of "minus two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius."
This vacuum, where the environment had become absurdly hostile, had been the main stage upon which the Hunters and their prey had fought.
For the vast majority of Hunters, what they had just experienced was like a journey through hell.
Only, this hell had no blazing flames and no desolate scorched earth. It possessed only a cold so extreme it froze one's very marrow.
And that horrifying colossal beast, a hundred meters tall and a thousand meters long—its body pitch-black, wrapped from head to toe in densely packed root-like veins and long auxiliary limbs; its swollen head covered in pale sideburns; its smooth face without eyes or nose, bearing only a gigantic cross-shaped gash for a mouth.
It was the architect of this stage, and also the last of the nine Abyss Apostles—Apostle "Freezing Cold."
Not long after fully engaging the Hunters present, "Freezing Cold" had dragged them all into its domain, into