The air in the rubble choked tunnel was thick enough to choke on, a frigid sludge tasting of powdered stone, ancient, wet rot, and the sharp, metallic tang of Kuro's blood drying on frozen lips. Above them, the relentless scrape scrape CRUNCH THUD of Shadow Hound claws gouging through the collapsed ceiling was a monstrous drumbeat. Each impact vibrated through the packed earth walls and floor, resonating up Shiro's legs and exploding like shattered glass within the exposed nerves of his wrists. Fine grit rained down incessantly, a gritty snow that stung eyes, coated tongues with the taste of tomb dust, and found its way into every crevice of their torn clothing, abrading raw skin.
Kuro was a dead weight suspended between Juro and Haruto, a broken puppet with its strings cut. His breaths were liquid, bubbling gasps, each inhalation a rattling battle against ribs ground into splinters. His corrupted right arm was a nightmare made flesh. From fingertips to shoulder, the skin was a translucent, corpse grey parchment stretched over a lattice of throbbing, blue white frost veins. These veins didn't just pulse; they writhed visibly beneath the surface, like fat, parasitic worms feasting. The static buzz emanating from it was beyond sound; it was a physical assault. It vibrated deep within the marrow of every nearby bone, setting teeth on edge with a sickening grind, churning stomachs, and making the very air feel charged with impending seizure. Kuro's head lolled, chin resting on his chest. Sweat beaded and froze instantly on his brow and temples, forming a brittle, crystalline mask that cracked with his slightest tremor. A thin line of bloody saliva froze solid on his chin.
"F-feels like..." Kuro choked, a fresh bubble of blood bursting on his cracked lips, freezing instantly into a tiny crimson gem. "...ice needles... driven directly into my DNA... carving... fuck knows what..." His voice was a ruined whisper, torn apart by pain and the invasive cold seizing his lungs. "...into my fucking bones... for the frost… for her…" A violent spasm wracked him, bending him double. His corrupted leg buckled like rotten timber, completely unresponsive, dragging Juro and Haruto down into a stumbling heap. Juro cursed savagely, his boots skidding wildly on frozen mud slick with their own blood, muscles corded and trembling under the impossible strain. Haruto's usually impeccable posture was bent double, his aristocratic face a mask of strain and grim determination, knuckles bone white where he gripped Kuro's less affected side. The frost wasn't spreading; it was ossifying, turning muscle, tendon, and sinew into brittle, unfeeling ice. The smell clinging to him wasn't just ozone and frozen blood; it was the sterile, metallic reek of deep space vacuum given scent.
Shiro stumbled after them, his world telescoped down to two white hot furnaces of agony: his wrists. The thorn manacles hadn't merely torn flesh; they had meticulously flayed it down to gleaming bone in ragged, pulsing strips. Every throb of his heart wasn't a beat; it was a hydraulic press slamming down on the exposed nerve endings, sending waves of white hot, glass shard pain screaming up his arms into his shoulders, threatening to unhinge his jaw. He could feel the exposed ulna in his left wrist scrape against the inside of the blood sodden, frozen bandage with every jarring step, a dry, grating agony that vibrated up his arm. The cold air wasn't just biting; it was like liquid nitrogen poured directly into the wounds, stealing his breath in ragged, involuntary sobs that tore at his throat. He kept his right hand clamped uselessly around his left forearm, a feeble, instinctive barrier against the screaming nerves threatening to unravel completely. The coppery reek of his own blood mixed with the tunnel's damp decay and Kuro's void ozone stench, creating a nauseating perfume of utter despair. Focus. Kuro's back. Left foot. Drag. Right foot. Drag. Don't fall. Fall and the Hounds... rip... tear... freeze... The thought was a jagged icicle of terror piercing the fog of his pain.
The Cloaked Figure moved like oil spreading on dark water, silent and unnervingly sure footed on the treacherous ground beside Mira. Within the hood's abyssal shadow, the faint swirl of the Corvus constellation pulsed with a slow, predatory rhythm, its unwavering focus locked on Kuro's shuddering form, drinking in his suffering. The distorted voice, like continents grinding against each other deep within the earth, cut through Kuro's gasps and the relentless digging above: "Deeper. The Blight's heart bleeds weakness into the stone. It murmurs paths through the roots of despair. Follow the cold song." A gloved hand, bearing the dark stone ring that seemed to devour the scant light, gestured down the sloping tunnel. Shiro's exhausted mind, frayed to breaking by pain and fear, snagged violently on the figure's earlier words: 'Shiro Aratani.'
Shiro Aratani. The name was a ghost clawing its way out of a shallow grave, a relic buried under years of gutter filth and survival instincts. Only his mother Yuki had ever spoken it with warmth, in stolen moments before ice and chains stole everything. Before Ryo stole her. How? HOW does this walking shadow know that name? Is it Ryo's cruel game? A phantom spun from the Blight's whispers to shatter my focus? Or… something older, colder? A keeper of forgotten graves, dredging up ghosts to torment me? Fuck, the pain… it's a living thing chewing on my bones! Focus, damn you! But why drop that name here? In this frozen throat of hell? To unbalance me? To see if I flinch? Or… , a deeper, colder dread seeped in like glacial meltwater… does it know what Haruto suspects? What we are? Not warriors. Fuel. Living batteries. Kindling for the Sovereign's awakening fire. Is that why its shadowed gaze never leaves Kuro? Watching the fuel gauge drop?
They stumbled out of the oppressive tunnel mouth like shipwreck survivors washing onto a stranger, darker shore. The air shifted abruptly, colder, damper, heavier, pressing down with the weight of buried epochs. It carried a thick, cloying sweetness like overripe fruit left to rot in a tomb, laced with the eye watering sting of ammonia, undercut by the deep, immutable mineral chill of stone that had never seen the sun, and the pervasive, electric stench of decay emanating from Kuro's corruption. Then, the light bloomed, a sickly, mesmerizing phosphorescence.
Bioluminescent fungi colonized every conceivable surface, weeping from fissures in the vaulted ceiling, cascading down in thick, rope like strands like luminous internal organs, crusting the walls in intricate, diseased patterns. They pulsed with an unholy internal radiance: gangrenous greens that hinted at necrosis, drowned man blues that spoke of suffocating depths, and bruised, necrotic violets that throbbed like infected wounds. Thick, shelf like growths glowed with feathered, frost rimed edges, resembling the exposed ribs of some petrified leviathan. The light pulsed gently, rhythmically, like the slow, faltering heartbeat of a god entombed in ice. It illuminated jagged, cathedral scale rents in the ceiling where unimaginable tonnes of earth and the palace's very foundations had crashed down in some cataclysm, sealing passages with the finality of a sarcophagus lid. Water seeped endlessly down moss slicked walls, glistening like frozen tears in the fungal glow, pooling in icy, mirror smooth puddles that doubled the eerie, shifting illumination, creating a disorienting infinity of decay. The silence here was profound, a physical pressure on the eardrums, broken only by the eternal, maddening drip… drip… drip… of water and the ragged, wet symphony of their breathing. It smelled overwhelmingly of wet rot, ancient stone, and that pervasive, alien sweetness that coated the tongue and clawed at the back of the throat. This wasn't a cellar; it was the fossilized, glowing belly of a cosmic beast slain by frost, its luminous veins pulsing with captured corruption.
Kuro collapsed onto a large, flat chunk of masonry, his body convulsing violently. A wet, racking cough tore from him, spraying flecks of crimson onto the glowing fungal dust at his feet, where they sizzled faintly. The corrupted arm pulsed like a diseased heart, the blue white veins flaring with malevolent light under his grey translucent skin, casting grotesque, leaping shadows that danced a macabre jig on the cavern walls. The static buzz intensified, a physical vibration Shiro could feel in the fillings of his teeth and the base of his skull. Kuro's constellation scar on his arm the mark he'd carved in defiance, flickered erratically, its brave ember bright light feeble, guttering against the suffocating cold tide threatening to drown it.
Then, FIRE.
It detonated in Shiro's own left forearm. Not warmth. A searing brand, as if a white hot iron shaped like shattered chains had been pressed directly into the bone. He cried out, a raw, animal sound ripped from his core, tearing savagely at the bandage with his good hand. The stiff, frozen fabric tore away. The intricate scar, shattered chains dissolving into nebulous stardust, blazed with incandescent crimson light. It wasn't a glow; it was a contained supernova erupting under his skin, casting stark, monstrous shadows of broken links that writhed across the luminous fungi beside him like tormented spirits. The heat was intense, searing, almost unbearable against the icy agony consuming his wrists, making the surrounding frost sizzle and steam. The smell of ozone spiked violently, mixed with the terrifying, unmistakable scent of his own flesh scorching.
Across the cavern, Kuro gasped, a sound of pure, shocked agony. He clutched his left forearm as if stung. His matching constellation scar erupted in the same violent crimson fire, a perfect, horrifying mirror held up to their damned fate. The light pulsed in absolute unison, humming with a deep, resonant frequency that vibrated the loose rubble beneath them and set their teeth on edge. The air crackled with unseen energy, raising the hair on their arms and necks. The static buzz in Kuro's corrupted arm faltered, momentarily drowned by the overwhelming, terrifying crimson resonance. The chamber itself seemed to recoil, the fungal pulse stuttering, skipping beats, plunging sections into deeper gloom before flaring back in panicked brilliance.
Haruto froze mid stride, scanning the rubble. All colour drained from his face, leaving him ashen, parchment pale in the ghastly, shifting light. His sharp, analytical eyes, usually windows to a calculating mind, widened with primal, unvarnished horror, the look of a man witnessing the unravelling of reality. He abandoned his examination, crossing the treacherous chamber in quick, jerky strides that betrayed his terror, boots slipping on slimy fungus, his gaze magnetically locked on the blazing scars. He dropped heavily to one knee before Kuro, then swivelled on his heel to stare, transfixed, at Shiro's arm, his aristocratic composure utterly shattered, replaced by the visage of a condemned man. Recognition dawned, cold and absolute, etching deep trenches of dread around his eyes and mouth, aging him decades in seconds.
"No," he breathed, the word a fragile thing instantly crushed by the cavern's oppressive silence. "It... it cannot be..." His hand, usually a model of steady precision, trembled violently as he hovered it inches above Kuro's crimson scarred forearm. His fingers traced the air above the intricate lines of shattered chains, his lips moving soundlessly, forming the syllables of ancient, forbidden dread. Then, his gaze snapped to Shiro's identical, blazing mark. The horror solidified into icy, absolute certainty.
"'When Twin Stars bleed,'" Haruto murmured, his voice thin, reedy, haunted, the voice of a scholar reciting his own death sentence from a profane text. "'One to sow, the other to reap. In Sovereign's frost, their power sleeps.'" He paused, swallowing convulsively, a bead of sweat tracing a glacial path down his temple despite the subterranean chill. His eyes, filled with a terrible pity and revulsion, darted between their blazing arms as if witnessing the ultimate blasphemy given flesh. "'Forged in ice, bound by chains unseen, vessels of the Blight, where despair grows keen.'"
He looked up, his face a mask of ashen terror reflecting the hellish crimson glow. "The Codex Gelidus," he whispered, the name itself seeming to leech the meagre warmth from the air, dropping the temperature perceptibly. "A forbidden Temple scroll. Condemned, erased, burned by decree... but House Isamu archives... we preserve the poison alongside the antidote, the heresy alongside the scripture." His voice gained a sliver of brittle strength, edged with bitter, scholarly despair. "They called it prophecy. Madness. The raving of frost touched heretics whispering from their ice tombs." He gestured sharply, accusingly, at their arms, his finger trembling. "But this... this is the sigil. Unmistakable. The Sovereign's Scars."
He leaned closer, his whisper cutting through the resonant hum like an assassin's blade honed on ice, sharp and cold. "You misunderstand your purpose. You are not beacons, merely attracting the storm you fight." His gaze, filled with a terrible, almost unbearable pity, locked onto Kuro's pain glazed eyes, then Shiro's horrified stare. "You are batteries. Living conduits woven into the Blight's design. The 'bleeding' isn't just blood; it's the release of power, the opening of the conduit. One Star," his finger stabbed towards Kuro, trembling slightly, "absorbs the Blight, sows the despair it feeds upon, becomes the fertile ground for the frost. The other," his finger swung with dreadful finality to Shiro, "holds the potential, the raw, untamed energy... reaping what is sown, focusing it, channelling the despair and the cold into usable force. 'In frost they sleep'... your power is dormant, intertwined with the Blight itself, awakened only by proximity, by trauma, by the very frost that seeks to devour you both." He swayed slightly, looking physically ill, the weight of his knowledge a crushing burden. "Nyxara doesn't just want to freeze you into her gallery. She needs to harvest you. Your defiance, your pain, your terror, your very life force... amplified by this cursed bond... it's the purest, most potent fuel for the Sovereign's awakening. You aren't fighting fate. You are its engine. You were forged to be consumed."
Kuro stared at Haruto, then down at his own blazing scar, then at Shiro's identical mark. The cosmic irony, vast and suffocatingly cruel, landed like a mountain dropped onto his shattered chest. A sound escaped him, not a laugh, but the death rattle of hope itself, wet and bubbling with the blood filling his damaged lungs. "Cosmic... fucking... batteries," he rasped, each word a shard of glass scraped raw from his throat. "Forged in frost. Fuel for the void." He looked at Shiro, his single eye reflecting the infernal crimson light, filled with a shared, soul crushing understanding that transcended words. Their scars weren't symbols of freedom wrested from tyranny; they were brands of predestined consumption, etched into their souls by powers they couldn't comprehend. Their defiance was part of the fuel.
Then, the crushing weight of this revelation, the utter hopelessness of their designed doom, hit Kuro like a physical tsunami. His scar flared violently crimson, a supernova of despair. The static buzz in his corrupted arm ERUPTED into a deafening, skull splitting roar that drowned all other sound. Ice laced agony, sharper and colder than any conceivable blade, DETONATED along every nerve pathway. It felt like his skeleton was being systematically shattered from within by frozen sledgehammers, each blow meticulously calibrated for maximum torment. He screamed, a raw, guttural sound ripped from the depths of his being, echoing horribly in the cavern. He doubled over, vomiting a thin stream of bile and blood onto the glowing fungus. His frost touched hand spasmed uncontrollably, fingers clawing like dying insects on the stone, tendons standing out like frozen cables. The invasive cold wasn't spreading; it was lurching forward. Grey translucence surged past his elbow like spilled ink on parchment, racing with predatory speed towards his shoulder and chest, aiming for the heart. The fungal light around him visibly dimmed and stretched, the luminescence physically drawn towards the vortex of his suffering, plunging their immediate space into a pocket of absolute, suffocating cold and darkness. The cloying scent of decaying lilies, thick and sweet as death, suddenly overpowered the fungal rot, a signature of Nyxara's proximity.
Battery. Reaper. Forged to be consumed. The words were ice shards driven into Shiro's brain with glacial force. He's turning. NOW. The trap is springing. Last Resort. Haruto's warning screamed in his mind, you feed her! You fulfil the design! But the alternative was immediate: Kuro becoming Nyxara's frozen puppet, his eternal scream added to her collection, his body a monument to their failure.
It's the trap! Springing it feeds HER! Igniting this pours oil on the Sovereign's pyre! But… look at him! That grey tide… it's reaching for his heart! Letting him turn is surrender. Letting Ryo win. Letting her win. Letting this fucking design play out! NO! Even if it burns us to ash… even if it wakes the bitch we're meant to feed… even if it makes the trap snap shut… REAP THIS, YOU FROZEN BITCH! RIP THE WIRES OUT!
He lunged. Agony, white hot and blinding, shrieked through his wrists as bone grated on naked bone, a sound like grinding stones deep inside his arms. He embraced it. With a roar torn from the core of his defiance, a sound of pure, furious negation, he seized Kuro's left wrist, not the corrupted arm, but the one bearing the blazing polaris scar, the focal point of their cursed bond. His own scarred hand clamped down with desperate, bone crushing force, heedless of the fresh blood welling from his wounds. Palm met palm. Scar fused against scar in a crucible of shared agony.
CONTACT.
Cataclysm.
A silent THUNDERCLAP of pure, incandescent crimson energy detonated from their joined hands. It wasn't light; it was PRESSURE, a visible shockwave of force that ripped outwards, distorting the air like heat haze over a desert. It slammed into Haruto, throwing him back like a discarded doll against a massive, glowing fungal shelf with a sickening crunch of impact and a choked, agonized gasp. It washed over Ryota, making the mountain of a knight stagger violently, boots skidding, his Polaris eyes flaring into blinding supernovas of icy blue light that momentarily bleached the cavern. Juro cried out, throwing his arms up instinctively as the wave hit, the force lifting him off his feet and slamming him hard onto unforgiving rubble, driving the breath from his lungs. Mira shrieked, stumbling back, shielding her fractured lens as it refracted the crimson energy into blinding, stabbing shards of light that painted the cavern walls in bloody streaks. The bioluminescent fungi reacted violently, their sickly hues bleaching into searing, painful white as if screaming, before snapping back into erratic, panicked pulses of colour.
For Shiro, it wasn't empowerment. It was cosmic violation. A tsunami of Kuro's icy despair, the grinding, nauseating agony of his shattered ribs, the gnawing, sentient hunger of the frost burrowing into his marrow, and the soul crushing weight of their revealed purpose as fuel FLOODED his mind. It merged with his own wrist agony, the exposed nerves, the grinding bone, Into a single, overwhelming, shrieking chorus of pain that threatened to crack his skull open. He felt his bones vibrate at a fundamental frequency, threatening to shatter into dust. His blood felt like molten lead injected into his veins, boiling, scorching him from within. He tasted copper, frost, ozone, and the bitter ashes of despair. The sheer volume of Kuro's suffering was a physical weight, suffocating, threatening to extinguish his own consciousness.
For Kuro: Purifying heat, fiercer than the heart of any stellar forge, SCOURED his veins. It incinerated the static buzz, vaporized the creeping frost tendrils. He watched, stunned, as the grey translucence receded like a foul, repelled tide from his chest, shoulder, elbow, chased back by the rush of healthy, living pink flush returning to his flesh, a sensation so alien after hours of encroaching cold it felt like rebirth. The relief was instantaneous, profound, ecstatic… a warmth that felt like life itself flooding back into frozen limbs. Frost crusting his eyelashes, the frozen blood on his jaw, it all sublimated instantly into acrid steam that stung his nostrils. The deep, marrow deep chill that had been his constant companion since the Frostway was blasted away, replaced by a comforting, almost drowsy heat.
Then came the INEVITABLE COST. The wild, untamed energy, ripped through their connection like high voltage cables grounding out through their fragile bodies. Shiro's wrists ERUPTED in WHITE HOT FUSION. The shredded flesh didn't merely seal; it fused instantly under the brutal influx of power, a savage, agonizing cauterization that felt like rivers of molten iron poured directly into the wounds, welding bone fragments, shredded tendon, and screaming nerve endings into a single, searing mass of permanent scar tissue. The pain didn't vanish; it TRANSFORMED, congealing from a raw scream into a deep, permanent, fiery ache locked deep within the bone itself, a brand of the power they'd unleashed, a constant, throbbing reminder of the trap they inhabited. A wave of profound exhaustion, deeper than any mere sleep deprivation, deeper than the void itself, slammed into him, hollowing him out, leaving him feeling scraped empty, drained of vitality, nothing left but the lingering, bone deep agony and the echo of Kuro's despair.
Kuro gasped, not in pain this time, but in profound shock and fleeting, terrifying relief. He stared at their joined hands, at the retreating frost in his arm, at the impossible warmth flooding his broken body, momentarily banishing even the grinding agony in his ribs. The crushing despair in his eye was eclipsed by raw, stunned awe, quickly shadowed by the dawning horror of what they'd tapped into. "What... what the fuck was that?" he breathed, his voice miraculously clearer, stronger, yet laced with terror at the monstrous power they'd unleashed and the emptiness that followed its retreat.
Shiro felt it too, the terrifying, addictive potential thrumming through their linked scars, the horrifying bond laid bare, the crushing exhaustion, and the new, permanent furnace blazing in his wrists. He met Kuro's gaze, the fading crimson light reflecting like dying embers in his own amber eyes. "Reaping…" Shiro groaned, the word thick with the taste of his own scorched flesh and the ashes of their hope, "...the fucking crop we never planted."
A ghost of Kuro's old smirk touched his lips, weak but undeniably genuine amidst the lingering horror and hollow exhaustion. "Good one, slum rat," he rasped, the effort making his newly warmed ribs protest. "For once... not completely terrible."
Before Shiro could muster a retort, the Cloaked Figure glided forward. They had been standing apart, a deeper shadow against the luminous wall, unnaturally still. As the crimson energy wave had washed over them, the dark stone in their ring had actively drunk the light, leaving an even deeper, colder patch of shadow swirling around it. Now, they moved with unnerving silence, stopping mere feet from the joined pair. The hood tilted, the swirling Corvus constellation within seeming to spin faster, almost frenzied, utterly fixated on their blazing, now fading arms. A gloved hand rose, not threateningly, but with a strange, almost reverent gesture, palm open towards the dissipating energy nimbus. The air around their hand crackled and hissed, emitting visible sparks of counter static that snapped against the dying Twin Star hum.
As Ryota hauled a dazed, groaning Haruto upright, his own Polaris light flickering erratically, and Juro scrambled to his feet, wincing and clutching his side as he moved to check on Kuro, a minor tremor shook the cavern, loose rubble shifting, dust sifting down in thick curtains. Likely the Hounds, enraged by the surge of power, renewing their assault above with redoubled fury. The Cloaked Figure instinctively braced a hand against a massive, glowing fungal column for balance. Their sleeve, heavy with damp tunnel grime and luminous spores, pulled back slightly, exposing the inner wrist.
Kuro's eyes, still wide with the aftermath of power, pain, and the terrifying emptiness, snapped to it. Shiro, following his gaze, felt ice water flood his veins, colder than the deepest Frostway current.
On the figure's inner wrist, starkly visible in the combined, fading crimson ember of the Twin Star scars and the panicked, pulsing light of the disturbed fungi, was a mark. Not a scar or a tattoo. A sigil, etched into the very substance of the skin, or perhaps frozen into it with cosmic permanence. The lines were sharp, precise, geometrically perfect yet radiating an unnatural sense of absolute, devouring cold: An 8 Pointed Star. Each point was dagger sharp, converging on a central void deeper and blacker than the hood's shadow. As they watched, the sigil seemed to pulse faintly with its own inner, icy light, a heartbeat of pure negation. The sigil whispered of in the darkest, most forbidden Temple catacombs. The undeniable herald of the Sovereign's Blight, worn on the flesh.
The Cloaked Figure lowered their arm almost immediately, sleeve falling back into place with deliberate finality, seemingly oblivious to the revelation, or perhaps indifferent. The distorted voice rasped out, resonating with chilling certainty that cut through the settling dust: "Ignition." The hood tilted fractionally towards Kuro, the Corvus constellation swirling violently within. "The harvest begins. The frost learns quickly, Prince. It hungers for your fire now. It tastes... its own reflection."