Here is the translation:
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Lorena stood at the heart of the cave like an immovable mountain that no wind could shake, yet her eyes told a completely different story — they blazed with a deep fire, the kind that is born not from anger alone, but from fear disguised as resolve. Narvik, on the other hand, was the opposite side of the scene entirely; tension ran through every line of his face like an electric current beneath the skin, and his eyes carried a heavy awareness of what was coming — the awareness of one who stands at the edge of an abyss, knows it, and does not step back.
What lay between them was no passing dispute between two warriors quarreling over spoils or a road. It ran deeper than that, and was far more dangerous. Narvik was approaching the Connected World at the Mythic rank, unlike Lorena, who was at the Advanced rank and had already entered the Connected World — which made her a guest before those who entered it at the Mythic rank.
*He must die. Now. Before that becomes impossible forever.*
The thought passed through her mind in a single second — a second sufficient to seal the decision — and then she could hold back no longer. She drew her sword in a sharp motion like a flash of lightning and launched herself toward him like a storm that asks no permission.
And Narvik did not hesitate. He drew his sword in turn, for those who hesitate in moments like these do not live to tell what happened.
**Claaang!**
The ring of metal filled the cave's space and echoed back from its deaf stone walls. The two blades collided in the air between them, and Narvik was grinding his teeth so hard it was almost audible, his features drawn tight as a bowstring on the verge of snapping, his eyes focused with a concentration that saw nothing but his opponent. As for Lorena, her smile remained on her face — that cold, calm smile that every person who had ever fought her knew was more dangerous than any sword in her hand.
She gripped her sword hilt with both hands in a calculated motion, pulled downward while driving the blade forward with force —
**"Grrgh!"**
Narvik was forced back two steps, his feet heavy for a moment, and before he could recover his shaken balance, Lorena had attacked again without granting him a single breath. But this time, Narvik's hand began to tremble on the sword hilt — not from weakness, but from something rising within his depths. Then, suddenly, a blue energy erupted from him, blazing like flame beneath water, rising and condensing as if it had been waiting for permission.
**Boooom!**
The energy exploded at the collision of the two swords, an explosion that sent Lorena flying backward, and by the time she touched the ground she had recalculated everything. But the blue energy did not subside — it raged and grew and multiplied, and Narvik launched himself after it like a missile toward her — his face carrying, for the first time, something that resembled controlled madness.
**Clang! Clang! Clang!**
They exchanged blows at a speed unbelievable to any who had not witnessed it, the swords clashing again and again in a dialogue of steel understood only by hands scorched by training. And Lorena was retreating step by step — not in flight, but like one who gives a storm its path in order to learn how to stop it. Narvik in that moment resembled a beast released from its chain.
**Boooom!**
Both of them recoiled simultaneously, as if an invisible force had pushed them both backward. The air between them was burning, and their breath rose in ragged wisps in the cold of the cave.
*This bastard is too strong… I have no other choice.*
Lorena decided in silence what she did not say aloud, and returned her sword to its sheath with deliberate calm — the calm of one who knows exactly what they are doing.
Narvik's eyes widened for a moment. His mind stopped processing everything else.
*What? Why did she sheathe her sword? Is she trying to trick me?… No, maybe… maybe this is my only chance.*
The blue energy surged through his body again as if responding to his decision before he could announce it. He gripped his sword hilt and launched himself toward her with everything he had left.
**"Hahahaha!"**
Lorena laughed — a genuine laugh this time, with something of a gentle madness in it that had no clear origin — and tightened her grip and drove a direct punch straight into the flowing air rushing toward her.
**Boooom!**
Narvik flew through the air like a stone hurled from a catapult and crashed into a massive stone gate. Blood trickled slowly from the corner of his mouth, and his grip on the sword went slack. Lorena looked at him lying sprawled among the rubble, appearing — at first glance — incapable of movement, and she walked toward him with unhurried steps like someone walking to an appointment.
Then she felt it.
An immense pressure rising from the floor, from the walls, from the very air — as if the entire cave was holding its breath.
She left the room at exactly the right moment.
And one second later — **ice**.
It erupted from every direction as if it had been waiting behind the walls all along; shattering stone, breaking the ground, swallowing everything its cold white fingers could reach. The entire room transformed in moments into something resembling a frozen hell. Only the six gates survived, standing firm in the middle of the chaos, as if they had been deliberately forgotten, or as if the ice itself knew its limits.
Narvik emerged from the midst of the ice slowly — the slowness of one who knows that time is now on his side. His blood was flowing, but his smile was fixed on his face as if carved in stone.
**"It seems I'll be using my full power this time,"** he said in a tone that never raised his voice, which was what made it heavier. **"Don't worry — I'll bury you here and make this cave your tomb of ice. A fitting tomb, I promise you."**
Lorena raised a single eyebrow, carrying enough contempt to provoke an army.
**"Ohhh, you speak as though the world is yours and you've come to do me a favor."** Then her voice changed — less mocking and sharper: **"In any case — what brings you here? And who do you work for?"**
Narvik did not reply. He was not ignoring her — his mind was somewhere else entirely, dismantling what he had seen and reassembling it.
*She fights primarily with her fists — that much is clear. So why does she carry a sword? A mere pretense? A distraction? She is powerful in a way that makes no sense… I should have listened to Suleiman. We should never have separated in the first place. I should never have trusted my judgment alone.*
He let out a long breath that left him with astonishing composure, and gripped his sword hilt in an inverted grip — a strange, unconventional way — the blue energy rising around him like columns of invisible smoke. He planted his feet on the frozen ground, and then —
**Fwooo!**
He hurled the sword toward her with everything his arms had, the blue energy pouring through it like a soul he had sent ahead of himself.
Lorena watched the sword coming toward her with profound calm and sidestepped it with a simple lateral step — the step of someone who sees no danger worth the effort. Then she was struck.
Because Narvik was coming directly at her face — the sword had been nothing but bait.
She spun with sharp speed and avoided his punch in the last fraction of a second that barely sufficed.
**"Oh!"** she said, with something resembling suppressed admiration. **"It seems you've finally started using your head — but it's not enough. It never was."**
And before she finished the last sentence, ice suddenly pierced the ground beneath her feet like the teeth of a beast. Lorena leapt upward with sudden agility and drove a punch toward the ground rather than the air.
**Boooom!**
Ground and ice shattered together as if something from within had exploded. And before she could steady herself on her feet, Narvik's fist was coming in a calculated arc toward her temple.
Lorena caught his hand in midair — caught it the way one catches the hand of a child about to hurt itself.
She let out a sigh of genuine, deep disappointment, as if she had been hoping for something else:
**"This is pitiful. You've truly let me down — I expected more from you."**
She frowned heavily, and began striking his face with her free hand.
**Smack. Smack. Smack.**
Blood fell onto the frozen ground and froze before it could spread. And gradually, blow by blow, Lorena's expression began to transform in a way even she did not notice — from one of sincere sadness and genuine disappointment, to something else with no clear name. A savage smile slid onto her face as if it had been waiting behind the mask all along, and in it was a pleasure she made no attempt to conceal.
At the fourth blow — she was struck.
Not by the blow itself. By something else.
And in a reflexive moment she had not calculated, she pushed her body with her foot planted in the ground toward the cave wall — but forgot, in that fraction of a second, to release his hand.
---
**"Aaaaah!"**
Lorena screamed as he drove his sword into her arm — a scream that came not from pain alone, but from the surprise she could not forgive herself for. She responded instantly with a powerful strike from her other hand without thinking, and the wounded Narvik staggered backward.
Lorena looked at the sword that had flown away from the impact and was struck.
**"What? Two?"**
She understood at once — he had thrown his first sword away and created a copy of it for himself to hold, while the original had been waiting for her from another angle. How? When?
*It doesn't matter now.*
She smiled despite the blazing anger in her chest like fire beneath ash, and drew her sword from its sheath. Narvik was shaken by her composure in the face of pain — a composure that was not natural. Then the sword began to crumble in her hand — shattering into small, curved pieces that orbited her slowly, as if they knew their place and were waiting for her orders. She tossed the hilt away without interest, and before it could touch the frozen ground, Narvik's sword had flown from his hand and caught the hilt in midair.
*This is not good. She is powerful even without resorting to the power of the Manuscript — and she hasn't used it yet. Damn it. I have to run. I have to find a way out.*
**Fwooo!**
The small pieces flew toward him like a swarm of living metal — then ice suddenly appeared, colliding with them and deflecting them.
**Boooom!**
The pieces flew back toward Lorena, and she read their trajectories before they reached her.
**"This ice is very annoying — but don't worry,"** she said in the tone of one performing a routine obligation. **"I know how to break it."**
The pieces gathered around her hands as if seeking refuge in her rather than obeying her, and in one strange instant the bleeding suddenly stopped — as if the body itself had decided this was not its moment. Then, before either of them had a chance to speak, Lorena drove a punch into the empty air before her.
She touched nothing visible.
But the ground cracked across two meters, and the ice scattered like broken glass, and the wave launched toward Narvik like an invisible wall.
**"Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!"**
He barely fell back and deflected the attack with his sword in a desperate motion that pushed the wave away but did not erase it.
*That strike… was not her full power. If she hits with her full power…*
The collision of the attack extinguished the last remaining flames in the cave. Only two weak flames were left, swaying in the thickening dark like ones clinging to life with weary fingers.
---
Then the ice began forming around Narvik again — but this time with a different slowness, a different care. As if he was not making a weapon but making something he believed in. Two massive elephants of pure, transparent ice emerged from him, carrying in their structure something of vague majesty, and seven hawks spreading their wings in the darkness as if newly born. The elephants shook the cave with every step they took, the ground trembling beneath them, and the hawks filled the frozen air with a chaotic noise that was deafening.
**"Good heavens…!"**
Lorena stopped speaking as the ground shook beneath her feet. She looked with sharp analytical eyes at what lay before her, then drove two consecutive strikes from her hands without moving a single foot.
**Boooom!**
Both elephants shattered before the strike even reached them — the force of the wave alone was sufficient.
She sent the sword fragments toward the seven hawks like a counter-swarm.
**Boom. Boom. Boom.**
They fell one after another to the ground. Then — as if something refused to let them die — they rose again and circled around her once more.
Lorena let out a sigh carrying something that resembled boredom.
**"Is this all you have?"** she said, looking at him with unwavering eyes. **"It seems I'll actually kill you this time — without breaking a sweat."**
But when she looked, she saw what he was doing.
Narvik was holding a small ball between his palms — small, white, almost ordinary. And the snow was gathering around it with unsettling slowness, wrapping around it layer upon layer, completing itself, becoming something she could not yet name.
**"We'll see who kills whom."**
He smiled a smile of complete certainty, and released the ball. It flew through the air in a curved arc — then suddenly stopped, suspended in the void as if time had seized it — then vanished.
As if it had never been there at all.
Narvik exhaled in the darkness that now filled the cave almost completely, his thoughts accelerating with the logic of necessity rather than fear.
*The place is utterly destroyed now. Darkness is nearly total. My energy is on the verge of running out — I feel it in my bones before I feel it in my arms. But Baran and Suleiman — they must have heard the cave collapse. I hope they arrive soon. I hope the wish is enough.*
And then — without any preamble, without any warning —
The air changed.
A sharp cold pierced everything at once, as if it had broken in rather than descended. Snow began falling heavily inside the sealed cave — snow that had no sky to come from — and fierce winds erupted from nowhere, lifting frozen dust and filling the lungs with tiny needles.
**"This… is a blizzard?!"**
The surprise in Narvik's words was not in his voice. It was in his eyes — the eyes of someone who sees something they had not accounted for.
Lorena's heart began beating with a sound audible to her alone in that strange new silence.
*This is impossible. This should not be possible here. I feel my power dropping — slowly, by a tiny fraction every second, like a leak rather than a collapse. It's not dangerous now… not yet…*
She looked at Narvik through the falling snow and the almost complete darkness, and saw in his face something she had not seen before this moment.
*…But if this continues, if I don't end it soon…*
*…It will become a catastrophe.*
---
The darkness and snow obscured vision almost entirely, and Lorena was staring into the white moving void around her, searching for a shape, a movement, anything to tell her his location — when his voice reached her from everywhere at once, as if the storm itself was speaking.
**"Well, well."**
Narvik's voice was calm in an unsettling way — the calm of one who has finished thinking and begun speaking. **"The Manuscript you are training in — it makes sharp iron a weapon for you. Any object that is iron and sharp, you can break into small pieces that obey you."**
He paused for a moment, as if letting the words settle before adding:
**"And there are two forms for using those pieces. The first: they gather in your hand until they become an enormous striking force. The second: they fly around you while you maintain complete control over them."** Then came what followed in the tone of one revealing a winning card: **"But each form has a weakness. The flying pieces cannot be sent to a distant place — their range is limited. And when they gather in your arm, they will drain tremendous energy from you with each attack."**
Lorena was not shaken. Not an eyelid flickered.
But she noticed — noticed that this young man had gathered information about her abilities with a precision that deserved acknowledgment, whether she wanted to give it or not.
**"You are truly intelligent,"** she said in a tone carrying neither praise nor condemnation, the tone of a dry report. **"And I have some things to say in turn."** She continued staring into the falling snow as she spoke: **"All your power lies in your sword — and in yourself. And since you barely have enough energy to continue fighting…"** then she paused as if solving a problem aloud: **"What is the use of creating a blizzard?"**
But Narvik was not there.
He had vanished.
Her gaze swept every direction — snow and darkness and silence.
Then his voice came again, from a completely different place.
**"Yes, you are right."**
He said it with disarming simplicity.
**"But this is no ordinary blizzard."**
A new creeping cold that had not existed seconds before. **"Perhaps you have noticed that your power has begun to weaken — slowly, by a small amount every second. That is because of the atomic ice entering your body with every breath you take."** And the final sentence came in a tone of complete calm, like a scientific fact rather than a threat: **"And I grow stronger with every second that passes."**
**"What?"** Lorena could not conceal the sharpness in her voice this time as she stared into the white void. **"Are you stealing people's energy?"**
**"No, no."** And in him something resembling genuine indignation at the characterization. **"I don't steal. I am genuinely stronger — without limits, without ceiling. If you don't destroy the blizzard and remain within it…"** he paused, then completed with absolute calm: **"I may become stronger than kings."**
Lorena was struck.
Not by the words — but by the truth that he was not exaggerating.
And before a decision could form in her mind, before a single foot could move —
Eyes appeared behind her.
Green eyes gleaming in the darkness and snow like two cold embers, carrying in them no warmth but a heavy, undeniable presence.
**Boooom!**
Lorena flew backward with the force of the blow, pierced the edge of the storm and burst out of it all at once — and found herself inside one of the side caves where fire burned in torches on the walls, and the sudden warmth after that cold was like a slap. The blizzard remained behind her a few steps away, swirling and roaring but not reaching.
Lorena regained her balance and readied herself.
Then she saw.
Narvik stood inside the blizzard at its edge, looking at her through the falling snow between them — the look of one for whom the round had ended as he had wanted. And beside him stood someone else.
His hair was somewhat short, his posture calm like someone accustomed to standing beside storms without being troubled by them. And his eyes — green, gleaming with the same brilliance Lorena had seen behind her just seconds ago.
Narvik exhaled as he looked at her, and in his exhalation was something resembling relief purchased at a high price.
**"Let me introduce you to my friend."**
He said it simply.
**"His name is Suleiman."**