The cold mist in the warehouse was screaming.
It wasn't a sound; it was a sensory hallucination caused by atmospheric pressure slamming against Evan's eardrums.
Rose hovered in the air, her dark crimson hemline looking like a clot of dried blood. She didn't throw more petals. She opened her arms. Beyond his five-meter radius, countless tiny ice crystals began to flow upward, spinning and grinding against one another until they transformed into ten thousand transparent needles.
"You're shaking, Evan." Rose's voice cut through the mist, carrying a near-pathological tenderness. "Your 'circle' is leaking. I can feel it—the rules that were supposed to be dead are coming back to life on your skin."
Evan said nothing. He didn't have the breath for it.
His heart felt like it had been shoved into an out-of-control centrifuge. With every beat, a blotch of black-red light burst across his retinas.
Three meters.
That was his current limit.
The chill that should have been erased seeped through his hoodie, burrowing into his pores like a nest of vipers. Cold. Not a physical chill, but a supernatural frost that was freezing his joints from the inside out.
Contract, he ordered himself.
Not to maintain the five meters, but to abandon defense entirely.
He forced the shivering circle inward. Three meters... two... one.
It felt like trying to hold a live grenade down with his bare hands. As the radius shrank, the counter-force generated by the extreme compression caused a warm liquid to seep from his nose.
Drip.
The blood turned to ice before it even hit the floor.
"Giving up?" Rose smirked, flicking a finger.
The storm of needles shrieked downward.
At this distance, a single second of error would leave Evan pinned like an insect in a display case.
Evan moved.
He didn't dodge. He lunged into the rain of ice. An inch before the needles could pierce his eyes, his radius collapsed violently onto the tip of his blade.
It was no longer a circle. It was a point.
An absolute "Singularity" of void—one that could sever light and causality alike.
BOOM.
There was no explosion, only a stomach-turning sound of a vacuum tearing open.
The unstoppable rain of ice didn't shatter when it hit the blade's tip; it simply "ceased to exist." Erasure on a fundamental physical level.
The elegance on Rose's face finally cracked.
"What is this..."
She could no longer feel the feedback of her ability. Normally, even if a power was blocked, she could feel where the energy went. But now, every attack she launched fell into an eternal abyss. There wasn't even an echo.
Evan was beneath her.
He vaulted off a heavy cryo-chest. In that moment, due to the extreme compression of the radius, a brief visual ghosting appeared in the space around him.
The tip of his blade was at Rose's throat.
No supernatural hum. Only the bite of manganese steel and Evan's ragged, copper-tasting breath.
"You..." Rose looked down at the boy.
She realized that within this absolute distance of ten centimeters, she hadn't just lost her power. She felt a primal, "mortal" shudder. It was the fear written into the genetic code when facing a predator at the top of the food chain.
"The drug," Evan said. A single word.
Blood leaked from the corner of his eye. The hand gripping the blade was as steady as stone, but the muscles in his forearm were twitching uncontrollably.
"On... on the table," Rose rasped.
Evan didn't waste breath. He grabbed Rose by the throat, slamming her down onto the cold metal table, and his left hand snatched the vial of "Zero-Negative."
He didn't use a syringe. He bit the cap off and swallowed the bitter, viscous liquid.
A flash of absolute zero exploded down his esophagus.
His boiling blood cooled instantly. The space warped by over-compression smoothed out.
Five meters.
Absolute. Stable.
The silence of the void returned to his side like an obedient hound.
He let go of Rose.
The woman slumped on the lab table, chest heaving, the red rose in her hand long since crushed into dust. She watched as Evan pulled his hood low, reverting once more into an unremarkable grey shadow.
"You just compressed 'nothingness' to its limit," Rose whispered to herself, a flicker of fanaticism in her eyes. "That's a key to another world. Hephaestus won't let you go, Evan. Not for the bounty. But for the 'Point' you just created."
Evan didn't look back.
He pushed the warehouse doors open and walked into the gale.
He didn't need a key. He was the lock.