The snow wasn't falling that night — it was attacking.
The storm howled like a starving beast through the stone cave's recesses, hurling its cold breath into every corner, until the very rocks seemed to shiver. And in the heart of that white madness, **Suleiman** emerged.
He came out of the storm's core the way a shadow emerges from night — with deliberate slowness that betrayed neither fear nor urgency. Snowflakes swirled around his body without touching him, his dark eyes fixed on the figure standing at the far end of the cave.
**Lorina.**
She stood there like a sculpture carved from the ice itself, her body straight as a sword's blade, and in her open palm lay small gleaming pieces of a metal no one had ever given a name. She didn't smile when she saw him. She showed no surprise. She only narrowed her eyes slightly, as if weighing something on a scale only she could see.
Suleiman stopped a few meters away from her, then spoke in a calm tone laced with quiet bitterness:
"I didn't expect us to meet this quickly."
Lorina answered without turning her gaze from him, though for a moment her eyes moved toward **Narvik**, who stood beside Suleiman, before returning to him as she said in a voice like hard stone:
"So it's you, you wretch."
There was no hatred in her voice. It was something stronger than hatred. It was certainty.
---
Suleiman took a deep breath and spread his palms before him with controlled calm.
"Art of Light…"
He whispered the name like someone waking a sleeping creature.
"…Skill: Light Blades."
In that very instant, the air around him began to change. A pure white light appeared in the space beside him — nothing like sunlight or fire, but closer to moonlight on a cloudless night: clean, cold, and sharp. The light took shape slowly, thickening and expanding, until **four glowing blades** emerged from it, rotating gently in the air as though choosing their own paths.
Then he released them.
The four blades shot forward like silent lightning, slicing through the snowy air and hurtling toward Lorina in fractions of a second.
---
Lorina didn't budge.
She didn't run, didn't jump. She simply drew a devilish smile across her lips — the smile of someone who sees a winning card in their opponent's hand and knows it won't save them.
In the moment the blades nearly reached her, the small metal pieces in her palm began to move. They moved with breathtaking speed, striking one another, interlocking and fusing, until a **complete shield** took form before her — made of metal shards, with neither weld nor nail, held together by something invisible.
**BOOM.**
The blades struck the shield, and light shattered in every direction like the fragments of a broken moon.
---
Suleiman narrowed his eyes and studied the strange shield assembled from shards.
*"Interesting…"* he murmured to himself, a gleam in his eyes that no one who knew him well could mistake — the gleam of someone who sees a puzzle worth solving.
"You don't look surprised."
Lorina's voice reached him, cold as the snow packed beneath their feet.
"It will be the last thing you see."
She pointed a single finger at him — one finger only — and in that gesture was a confidence enough to silence an army.
Then the shield exploded.
It didn't break apart slowly, didn't crumble — it **exploded** all at once into hundreds of tiny shards, launching in every direction like a miniature metal storm, each piece seeking its target with unerring precision.
---
"Art of Light… **Flash Wall!**"
In a fraction of a second, a barrier of dense light erupted before Suleiman — a thick white wall resembling frozen lightning. The shards struck it and clattered to the ground, producing delicate metallic sounds like the music of a tiny war.
But some got through.
Suleiman felt a sharp sting in his left shoulder and glanced at it to find a thin scratch drawing a fine thread of blood across his white shirt. He showed no pain. He simply fixed his gaze back on Lorina.
---
Lorina laughed. A loud laugh that echoed.
"Hahahaha! That snow boy was stronger than you! Hahahaha!"
She gestured toward someone unseen, drawing a comparison designed to shatter whatever remained of Suleiman's confidence.
But Suleiman smiled.
A quiet smile. The smile of someone holding a card they're not ready to show yet.
He raised his hand slowly and held two fingers up in the air.
"Art of Light…"
Light began gathering at the tips of his two fingers, but this time it was different. It didn't spread or expand — it **compressed**, thickening and folding into itself, like a point of light devouring itself over and over, impossibly small yet pulsing with tremendous energy, like a star taking shape in the palm of a hand.
*"Hmm…"* Lorina thought to herself, watching him with a calculating eye. *"He's building up a charged attack… but the process takes time. This is my chance."*
She began to move — one step forward.
Then she stopped.
She felt something behind her.
Not a sound. Not movement. Just a **feeling** — that sensation when someone stares at the back of your neck without speaking.
She spun around quickly.
**Narvik** was standing behind her, one step away, his hand on his sword's hilt.
---
Narvik let out a curse under his breath.
"Damn… she sensed me before I even moved."
He didn't hesitate. He swept his sword in a wide arc toward Lorina.
She evaded it with insulting ease — a small sidestep was all it took for the sword to pass through nothing but air.
Lorina looked at him with a voice dripping with cold contempt:
"Oh… looks like you crawled out of that storm too." She paused. "Just say you want to die and spare me the trouble."
And before the echo of her words had faded, all the scattered metal shards around her gathered at once into her cupped hand, forming a dense, compressed mass like a hammer.
She aimed a full-force punch at Narvik.
"Art of Ice… **Ice Cut Skill!**"
Narvik cried out as a thin thread of icy blue light appeared before Lorina's fist to intercept it.
**BOOOOOOOO—**
---
The entire cave remembered that moment.
The explosion was not merely a sound. It was an **event** in every sense of the word. The force of the metal-reinforced punch met Narvik's skill thread, and the colliding energy detonated all at once — tore through the silence, shook the walls, and split in the rocky floor a **crack** that had been sealed before, an opening leading into utter darkness below, into the **prison**.
Stones began falling from the ceiling with heavy crashes.
Narvik staggered back. His legs carried him but trembled. Dark drops of blood fell from his mouth onto the white ground.
"Damn…" he rasped in a hoarse voice. "She's genuinely powerful."
Lorina smiled as she studied him.
"Well, well…" She advanced toward him with slow, unhurried steps. "You are strong, truly. But that's not enough to kill me."
She kept moving. She knew it was simple: if Narvik died, the battle ended. And if the battle ended, nothing stood between her and her goal.
But she didn't finish her first step.
---
"That is **more** than enough."
Suleiman's voice. Calm. Certain. Like a rock that does not shake.
Lorina raised her eyes to him.
The point of light he had been compressing between his fingers was complete. It now pulsed like a living heart — dense and warm and throbbing, smaller than a fist yet making the air around it ripple like air above burning sand.
Suleiman fixed his gaze on Lorina.
And in that gaze was a silence that said everything words could not.
"Art of Light… **Moonflower Burst!**"
The point was released.
It launched small and deceptive, barely visible through the thick rocky dust. But it grew as it closed the distance, unfurling like a rose in a fire.
And for the first time, Suleiman saw something in Lorina's eyes he had never seen before.
Alarm.
"Art of Ice… **Eternal Ice Shield!**"
Narvik. He had risen to his feet despite his wounds and raised behind him a thick wall of ice for protection — slow to build but solid as old history.
Lorina stood, her eyes tracking the incoming point of light as it grew and grew and grew.
**BOOOOOOOOM.**
---
It was not an explosion in the ordinary sense.
It was a **rearrangement of reality**.
The cave shook from its depths, from its primordial stone roots — one long tremor, as though the mountain itself drew a breath. The sound reached the city.
---
In one of the city's squares, a man stood before a crowd, holding a map drawn on heavy paper, explaining lines and symbols and routes to those around him.
When the tremor struck, he stopped mid-sentence. The people looked at one another.
"That…" the man spoke, and his voice had changed. "That comes from the prison's location."
He said nothing more. He simply folded the map and walked away.
---
Elsewhere in the city, **Diasu** sat deep in thought. Lorina's offer still echoed in his mind, turning between acceptance and rejection like a stone in a river. When he felt the tremor, he froze his thoughts and stood up.
"Damn… the prison."
And he was gone without hesitation.
---
And in the palace, a man ran through the corridors shouting:
"Elder! Elder!"
But the **Elder** had already passed through the palace's great door before the man could reach him. The caller halted when he saw him walking toward the outside with slow, steady steps.
"Don't worry." The Elder said without turning. "I'll go myself."
Dust spread through the cave like the fog of battle.
Suleiman stood, sweeping his gaze in every direction.
*Where is Narvik?*
"Damn…" he said to himself as he began to move. "Did something happen to him? That would be a real problem."
He scanned the rocky chaos. Piled stones. Thick dust. Heavy silence.
Then he spotted the **ice**.
Blue ice gleamed between the rubble, and beneath it… a hand. A human hand.
He started running.
---
But before he reached it, the rocks moved.
They shifted from within — slowly at first, then faster — and **Narvik** burst out from beneath them, coughing, gasping, covered head to toe in blood and gray dust.
"Cough… cough… damn." He wiped his face with his sleeve. "What happened? Is she dead or not?"
Suleiman opened his mouth to answer.
But he didn't answer.
Because the lightning appeared.
---
Not ordinary lightning.
**Black lightning.**
It appeared everywhere at once, splitting the cave walls and seeping through cracks in the stone, erasing the dark with its own darkness. It filled the air with a scent no tongue could describe.
Narvik recoiled.
"Baran…" he screamed, his voice a blend of warning and despair. "Baran, **stop**! Don't do anything!"
But the cry dissolved into nothing.
It was too late.
---
Suleiman saw it in the same instant.
He saw the punch a fraction of a second before it connected — an uppercut rising from the void directly before him, wrapped in a halo of black lightning coiling like furious serpents.
There was no time for barriers. There was no time for anything.
**BOOM.**
Suleiman flew backward like a leaf in a storm, tore through the thick dust, and slammed into the stone wall with a sharp crack. Small rocks crumbled around him as he hit the stone.
"Cough… cough…"
He sank slowly to the ground, leaning on his palm, staring into the space before him, seeing the blood on the ground in front of him.
His blood.
He raised his head slowly.
---
He was standing there.
A man holding a **spear** — a spear of stillness, with no air moving around it. And around the spear, black lightning coiled like an animal guarding its master.
His eyes were on Suleiman.
Cold eyes with the wrong kind of gleam.
"Anyone…"
He spoke in a low voice. A voice that needed no raising to be heard.
"Anyone who learns the manuscript of Light…"
He paused. Then finished with absolute clarity that permitted no argument.
"…means they must die by my hand."
---
Suleiman remained seated on the rocky ground, breathing with difficulty, staring at **Baran** who stood before him with his spear and black lightning.
And in that moment, Suleiman's mind held no thoughts of escape, and no thoughts of victory.
He was thinking of one question only.
How he was going to make Baran kneel.