The world did not seem suspended. It was suspended.
In the instant after the Supernova's final flash, time condensed into a droplet of pure paradox. The residual heat still burned the air like a stubborn nightmare, tinting dust particles amber and copper. But something deeper, older, moved on the horizon. It was not a physical movement; it was a change of state. As if reality itself had decided to freeze its own blood.
The princess rose from the smoke. It was not a rising. It was an emergence. Her body, previously marked by pulsing fissures, now seemed carved from alabaster and sapphire. Her blue eyes—a deep arctic blue, the color of an iceberg's core under the aurora's light—glowed not with light, but with an absence of heat so absolute it cut vision like crystal blades. Each blink of her eyelids hissed with an audible cold.
Mei felt the change in the wind before she saw it. A breath that was not air, but denial. It penetrated every layer of her skin, every pore, and tried, with icy, relentless fingers, to snuff out the furnace burning in her core. Her flames, dancing around her like loyal limbs, faltered. The blood-red darkened; the blinding gold dulled. For the first time since the battle began, the sweat on her forehead did not evaporate—it froze, forming a thin crust of ice.
— Interesting… — the princess's voice reached her, not as sound, but as the crackle of expanding ice on a lake at night. It was crystalline, clear, laden with a power that was the pure antithesis of Mei's existence. — You are truly impressive. A human furnace defying the end of fire.
Mei forced her facial muscles to move. A broad, defiant smile appeared on her face, cracking the thin layer of ice on her lips.
— Ah, praise from a princess… thank you! — her voice came out hoarse but infused with a fierce energy. The flames around her reacted, undulating like crimson light serpents raising their heads against the storm. — But it is not over yet! The party has barely started!
Then, silence fell.
It was not a silence of absence of sound. It was a silence of absorption. As if all the world's noises—the crackle of distant fires, the groan of ruins, the very beating of their hearts—were sucked into an abyss of ice.
The temperature plummeted.
It was not a gradient. It was a straight line falling off a cliff. The heat still emanating from the ground vitrified by Mei was extinguished in an expanding wave of cold. The ground, seconds ago hot enough to melt steel, now emitted a sharp, piercing shriek—the sound of matter itself contracting, cracking, freezing in fractions of a second. The steam rising from fissures froze in the air, turning into a mist of tiny ice crystals that shimmered with a hypnotic blueish light, reflecting not the sun, but the princess's own icy aura.
This was the Abyssal Frost. Not a common ice technique. It was the physical manifestation of the essence of the void, of what the abyss was before fire and darkness: the pure, absolute, inert cold of non-existence. It did not create ice; it molded the environment into an extension of its own being, transforming every molecule of air, every particle of dust, into a conduit for its glacial will.
Mei retreated. Instinctively. For the first time in that combat, her feet moved not from strategy, but from survival. Her flames, her eternal companions, dwindled. The flame dancing in her palm shrank until it was little more than a trembling ember. The cold was not external; it was invasive. It sought to extinguish the flame in her spirit.
But Mei's golden eyes did not falter. Within them, the embers of logic and creativity still burned. Gravity, spiritual energy, physical manifestation, pressure… and now ice. How vast is the abyssal arsenal? What is the common denominator? Adaptation. She does not create from nothing. She reacts. She adapts to my power and transforms it into its opposite. Fire becomes cold. Heat becomes absence. It is an inversion.
The princess advanced. Her steps made no sound on the newly formed ice. Each movement was economical, lethal, laden with a frigid energy that weighed down the air. Around her, the ice was not static. It grew. Like living crystal roots, it sprouted from the ground, twisting, bifurcating, extending at surprising speeds. Sharp, translucent blades emerged from these roots, trying to pierce every cubic centimeter of space around Mei, not seeking a specific target, but creating a forest of cutting death closing in on her.
Mei leaped, spun, contorted in the air. Every movement was a deadly test of superhuman reflexes and desperate creativity. She could not burn the blades—heat did not exist here. She shattered them with micro-implosions of gravity, creating small points of infinite pressure that shattered the ice like glass. But for every blade destroyed, two new ones sprouted.
— You will not withstand the abyss's cold — the princess's voice came to her, a whisper laden with glacial certainty. It was an audible smile, as sharp as the ice blades. — I will extinguish you. I will extinguish your fire, your light, your warmth. I will reduce you to a silent crystal, an ice statue to decorate my realm.
Mei felt the words. They were not just provocation. They were a prophecy the environment tried to fulfill. The psychological impact was a separate wave of cold, trying to freeze her will.
And then, she laughed.
It was not a laugh of empty defiance. It was a wild, hot roar that tore through the icy silence, an explosion of pure, indomitable personality.
— Extinguish? Hahaha! — the sound echoed, making the surrounding ice crystals vibrate. — You will need more than ice and cold air to stop me, princess! You know fire, but you do not know the furnace!
Mei's flames, previously dwindling, reacted. Not to the environment, but to her own willpower. Small explosions of heat, not of air, but of pure spiritual energy, bloomed around her body like a constellation of miniature suns. They did not melt the ice; they rejected it. The ice that touched these explosions simply disintegrated, not into water, but into a fine vapor immediately sucked away by the cold vacuum. Simultaneously, Mei manipulated gravity in a frantic pattern. Micro-singularities opened and closed at strategic points, distorting the air, creating lenses that deflected the ice blades and, crucially, compressed the cold air, trying to concentrate it, superheat it by sheer pressure.
It was an insane dance between two cosmic extremes. Heat struggling to exist against a cold that denied the existence of heat. Each of Mei's movements was an impossible equation solved with her body: speed against immobility, fire against negation, living strategy against infinite adaptation.
— Impressive… — the princess's murmur sounded genuinely surprised. Her blue eyes, fixed on Mei, narrowed. — But the testing phase is over. Enough playing with the furnace.
She exhaled. It was not a breath. It was an expulsion.
The temperature, already unimaginably low, plummeted to a new plateau of impossibility. The air did not cool; it solidified. A mantle of pure ice, so transparent it seemed like air, enveloped the ground within a hundred-meter radius, rising in spirals and columns that captured the residual light and refracted it into a deadly spectrum of blues and whites. Debris, stones, twisted metals—everything was ensnared, levitating in the air as if part of a cosmic sculpture, each fragment now a sharp crystal point. The Abyssal Frost had not transformed the battlefield; it had claimed it. That area was no longer a combat zone. It was the physical manifestation of the princess's domain. A place where heat was not merely weak; it was an intruder to be eliminated.
Mei felt it. The flames in her hands shrank until they were two small, painfully hot embers pulsating against her own skin. Her muscles burned from effort, not from heat, but from the titanic struggle to maintain basic functions against the cold seeking to stop her heart. But she stood up. Straightened her back. And her golden eyes shone not like embers, but like miniature suns, concentrating within them all the fury, all the creativity, all the stubbornness of her existence.
She took a deep breath. The air entering her lungs hurt as if made of needles. And then, she focused. Not just the remaining heat. She focused the residual gravity she manipulated, the pressure of the air that still obeyed her distortions, and the last remnant of her raw spiritual energy. Everything converged on a single point: her own body.
An aura was born around her. It was not of flames. It was of pure heat, a visible distortion of space, like the air above asphalt on a scorching day, only intensified a thousandfold. It was an active barrier, a thermodynamic force field. The ice that touched this aura did not melt—it vaporized instantly, with a violent hiss and explosions of superheated steam that created pockets of chaos in the frost's ordered field. It was an absolute, violent, desperate contrast. The last bastion of fire in the realm of ice.
— Cool… — the word left Mei's lips, wrapped in steam. She looked at the princess through the hot mist, a sharp-toothed smile stamped on her face. — I love challenges that make me think. Fire against ice. Heat against cold. Creativity… against adaptation. Let us see who will laugh last. Or who will freeze first.
The battlefield was now a living diagram of warring primordial forces. On one side, a domain of perfect, silent, deadly ice, where every crystal was a sentence. On the other, a human furnace, a point of incandescent heat and chaos that refused to be extinguished. Every steam explosion, every jet of residual flame, every new ice column trying to pierce the heat aura, was a chapter in this epic conflict.
Mei knew, with the cold clarity of extreme exhaustion, that she could no longer merely attack. Every variable was now a weapon and a weakness: gravity, pressure, spiritual energy, residual heat, and the very physics of the abyssal cold. The battle transcended brute force. It was living strategy, pure and cruel. A chess game played with the very fabric of reality, where every second, every thought, decided who would be the sovereign of that desert of fire and ice.
And the battle escalated. Always one level higher. Always one step closer to the absolute limit.
The question burned, not in the hot air, but in Mei's exhausted mind: For how long?
And more importantly, more terrifyingly: How much longer can I endure?
The cold that hit the group was not a natural phenomenon. It was a violation.
It was not the biting breeze of dusk, nor the cold air of altitude. It was something born from the denial of heat, an active presence that did not cool the air, but extracted from it any possibility of temperature. It penetrated clothing as if it did not exist, into bones as if they were sponges, and settled in the center of the chest with the insistence of a glacial parasite. It was the kind of cold that made blood seem slow and heavy, that turned every breath into an agony of ice needles in the lungs.
Stella was the first to stop completely. Her feet anchored to the ground, her golden eyes—normally so full of light and calculations—narrowed, focusing on the horizon with laser intensity. Her breathing, which had been normalizing, became visibly labored, each exhalation forming a thick, persistent cloud that did not dissipate.
— It is not just the air… — she murmured, her voice low and laden with dangerous analysis. — This has a source. An active origin. It is coming from a specific place.
Dan clenched his left fist instinctively. The sound of his gloved fingers creaking echoed in the icy silence. His body, always relaxed and ready for action, tensed, every muscle alert.
— The source… — he said, his voice a low growl. — It is out there. Where Mei is. But… it is not just her.
Tekio narrowed his eyes, trying to force his vision and perception through the disturbing haze and ghostly ruins. Even at that monstrous distance, he could feel the clash. Two auras colliding, but the signature… had changed. The abyssal energy that once fought with fire now fought with something… different. It was as if the very flavor of the battle had shifted from spicy to icy.
And then, rising above the line of debris, they saw.
They were structures. Not of stone or metal. Of ice. Gigantic, impossible, rising against the sickly sky like cathedrals built by an insane god. They were not static. They contorted. Spiral columns of blue-white ice twisted over each other, growing, cracking, recomposing, like living roots of a cosmic tree frozen at its moment of greatest agony. On the other side of this glacial nightmare, a stubborn chimera still burned. Red and gold. A small, obstinate spot of heat on the map of cold.
Two luminous points in the desert of destruction. Parallel, yet opposite.
One, a blue that covered everything, that dominated.
The other, a red that resisted, that denied domination.
Stella bit her lower lip until she tasted blood, a flash of warmth amidst the cold.
— It is not Akira — she declared, her voice firm. — Not Dante either… the spiritual signature is another. It is as if… they switched opponents mid-round.
Tekio confirmed with a slow, grave nod. The cold emanating from there had a different spiritual taste. More… pure. Less chaotic. More focused.
— It is someone else. Or another thing. I feel it in my soul. As if the piece on the board was replaced.
A new layer of weariness, not physical but existential, fell upon the group. The war had no end. Enemies seemed to sprout from the void itself, immortal or infinitely replaceable. The sensation of running on a treadmill, fighting a sea that always gave way to another wave, was crushing.
The shock, however, did not stop there.
The earth shook.
It was not the tremor of a distant impact. It was something deeper, more visceral. As if a giant asleep in the world's heart had turned in its slumber. The ruins around them vibrated, loose stones slid from rubble piles, and even the distant mass of the floating city, hovering like a ghost in the sky, quivered.
And then, the sky exploded.
Not with fire. With light. A celestial blue light, intense, pure, but laden with such spiritual density that it made the air vibrate like thin glass about to shatter. It was the Abyss, but not the flaming, chaotic face of Dante. It was another manifestation. Older, perhaps. More… fundamental. An essence of pure power that expanded in a silent, suffocating pulse, pressing down on their souls like a giant hand.
And the direction was unmistakable.
It was not from where the battle between fire and ice raged.
It was from the heart of it all.
The Source.
The Tree of Life.
The group looked at each other. No words were necessary. The silence between them was laden with monstrous questions no one dared to voice aloud. What was that? Who or what caused it? Is it a sign? An attack? The end?
— That came from there… — Amara's voice cut the silence, low but clear as the toll of a bell. Her blue eyes, the color of the deep sky, were fixed on the horizon, in the direction of that flash now dissipating, leaving only a spiritual hum in the air.
Dan was the first to break the state of shock with his usual brutal pragmatism.
— That sudden explosion… It was different. Not a collateral attack, not a barrier bursting. — He looked at each of them. — What are the real odds it was provoked? Someone did something there. Someone awakened something.
All eyes, as a conditioned reflex, turned to Tekio. The group's sensory beacon. The soul-reader in a world of shadows.
He took a deep breath, closing his eyes. The external cold was a nuisance, but the internal cold—the one that came from that blue pulse—was worse. It was like trying to see someone's silhouette in a spiritual blizzard. The ice princess's signature was clear: an active, aggressive coldness. But that… that was like the ocean. Vast. Deep. Dormant for ages, but now stirred.
— I do not have perfect clarity — he admitted, opening his eyes, his expression serious. — The interference is too much. The cold, the distance, the residual chaos… — He paused, swallowing hard. — But I can confirm one thing. There is someone in that direction. More than a presence… it is a concentration. As if many things… or one very large thing… are focusing there.
Amara watched him, her analytical gaze scanning his face. She knew Tekio. He was not given to grand statements or hasty readings. If he said there was a concentration, a focal presence, it was because his sensitivity, however blurred, had captured something real.
— So that is it — Stella finished, her tone concluding the matter. — We have a heading. An objective. It is not just about surviving or reacting. It is about discovering what is happening at the source.
The group fell silent for long seconds, a silence filled only by the distant, surreal echo of the colossal battle. The sound of cracking ice and the muffled thud of thermal explosions arrived like memories from another world, but that new blue flash weighed heavier. It was more urgent. More central.
Dan adjusted his posture, shoulders back, his controlled breath forming small, regular clouds.
— We need to move. Now. Every second we stand still is one more second for whoever is out there to finish what they started.
And so, between the growing cold that was a distant battle and the echo of an abyssal pulse that was a present threat, the group rediscovered its purpose. Their spiritual compass pointed toward the heart of the storm.
Tekio took a step forward, determined. But his feet stopped, as if rooted by an invisible force.
The icy wind cut his face, bringing with it not just the cold, but the sound. The distant, muffled thunder of fire fighting ice. And his gaze, treacherous, strayed. To the south. To where, on the horizon, a golden and crimson stain resisted against a sea of freezing blue.
Mei.
The memory did not come as a thought. It came as a visceral flashback. He saw her, not as the imposing Empress, but fallen. The uniform torn, blood—so much blood—flowing to form a dark red pool around her. The light in her eyes, fading. The sensation of absolute emptiness, of the ground vanishing, of the world losing all meaning. The last time. When he thought he had lost her.
He knew, rationally, that she was a force of nature. Stronger than all of them combined. More resilient than the mountain itself. But trauma was not rational. It was a wound in the soul that throbbed whenever she was in danger. The image of that fall, of that impossible vulnerability, burned in his retina more than any flash.
What if, this time, it happened again?
What if, by turning his back on her once more, he was just repeating the same fatal mistake? Abandoning her at the crucial moment? Letting her fall?
His breathing failed. The icy air entered his lungs and stayed there, motionless, painful.
— Tekio! — Stella's voice yanked him from the mental precipice, sharp and urgent.
He blinked, gasping. The group was formed, expectant. Amara stared at him, her blue eyes reflecting silent concern. Dan called him with a firm wave of his hand. They all waited. The destiny of something greater demanded their action.
He looked back to the south. To that point of warm light in the cold. Her fire resisted. It always resisted. Mei was not someone who needed guardians. She was the sun. And the sun did not ask permission to shine, nor protection to avoid being extinguished. She trusted them. Trusted him. To do what needed to be done, on another front. To not stand still watching her, but to act.
"I am not her guardian,"the thought echoed in his mind, clear and cold as the air around him. "I never was. But she trusts me. Trusts us. To be her extension where she cannot be. To make a difference where she cannot fight."
The weight in his chest—the fear, the trauma, the guilt—did not disappear. But it transformed. Like coal under extreme pressure, it became something denser, stronger. Determination.
He turned his back on the flaming horizon. Slowly, deliberately. And fixed his eyes firmly on the north. On the direction of the Tree of Life. On the direction of the blue pulse. On the direction of the next battle.
— Let's go — his voice emerged, firmer and more laden with certainty than he himself felt. It was an order to himself as much as to the others.
And as he departed, his steps joining those of the group advancing through the freezing ruins, the trauma was still there. But now it was no longer a chain. It was fuel. Not to hold his steps in hesitation…
…but to ensure that, this time, he would not hesitate. That he would advance. That he would fight. And that, no matter what he found, he would not fail.
To be continued…