The world didn't roar. It shattered.
Lady Elara Veyne's Sky Hearth Barracks ceased to be sanctuary. The ancient, warded door didn't just explode inward; it disintegrated under the focused, gnawing hunger of the void. The detonation was less sound and more a sickening implosion of reality, a pressure wave of soul numbing cold and the cloying stench of decaying lilies mixed with the sterile, metallic reek of the abyss. Stone shards, compacted frost millennia old, and the fragmented echoes of protective wards became lethal shrapnel propelled by the invading darkness. This darkness wasn't mere absence; it was a presence, a hungry void that actively devoured Ryota's Polaris light and dimmed the frantic crimson pulse of the Twin Star scars to guttering embers. Through the gaping maw flowed the entity ,a shifting, multi limbed silhouette woven from jagged shards of absolute zero ice and solidified shadow, its form a liquid nightmare of coalescence and dissolution. Dozens of crystalline claws scrape scrape scraped the stone floor with a sound like fingernails dragged slowly, deliberately, across a frozen coffin lid. Deep within its amorphous mass, voids pulsed with a sickly blue white light ,not eyes, but focal points of predatory intelligence. The air itself crackled, frosting instantly, stealing breath and freezing sweat into brittle scales on exposed skin.
Shiro didn't flinch. He bared his teeth. The hours of brutal, agonizing training under Ryota's unforgiving gaze, the shared humiliation etched in sweat and suppressed screams, ignited not fear, but a fierce, brittle confidence. The white hot grind in his fused wrists, the constant reminder of his fragility, was momentarily drowned by the surging tide of adrenaline and the treacherous thrum of power in his scarred palm. We endured Juro, Haruto, Mira and Corvin. We bled for this. We're ready. He hefted the crude, thin polaris sword scavenged from Elara's stores, its weight a grounding anchor against the encroaching unreality. "Took your sweet time, frostbite!" he bellowed, his voice raw but vibrating with hard won defiance. "Looking for trouble?" The taunt was a weapon, honed in the Warrens, aimed to provoke, to draw focus, to prove he wasn't prey.
Beside him, Kuro mirrored the stance Haruto used, a prince forged anew in the crucible of shared suffering. Pain was his constant companion ,the invasive cold chewing like glacial termites deep in his marrow, the relentless static buzz scraping raw against every nerve ending, the dead, icy drag of his corrupted arm threatening his balance ,but it was subsumed beneath a desperate, burning need. A need to prove Corvin's damning verdict wrong, to prove the agonizing hours weren't wasted, to prove they weren't the liabilities everyone saw. He raised the heavy, single edged duelling sword in his left hand, the unfamiliar weight now a symbol of adaptation, the crimson scar on his forearm flaring like a defiant beacon. "Indeed, void spawn!" Kuro's voice dripped with princely sarcasm, a polished shield over the tremor of effort beneath. "Consider this eviction notice served! Hope your digestion handles shattered ice!" We stood against the Juro's fury. We can weather this storm. His storm grey eyes blazed, fixed on the pulsing voids. We have to.
The entity flowed forward, a spill of frozen ink given sentience and malice. Shiro didn't wait for it to dictate the terms. He exploded forward, a guttural roar tearing from his throat ,not a scream of terror, but the battle cry of someone who'd carved defiance from despair. He consciously ignored the sharp jolt of protest screaming from his wrists, channelling Juro's brutal forms. He swung the sword in a savage, two handed downward slicing motion, sacrificing finesse for devastating momentum born of sheer, desperate belief.
CRACKKK SHATTER!
The impact wasn't clean steel biting flesh. It was rusted iron meeting glacier forged obsidian. The sword connected squarely with a rapidly coalescing limb of solid, void touched ice. Jagged shards exploded outwards like frozen shrapnel, glittering malignantly in the dim light. The entity visibly recoiled, the limb collapsing into shadowy sludge before reforming, slower this time. A low, subsonic growl vibrated the air, resonating in their chests like a dying engine "FUCK YES!" Shiro barked, staggering back from the recoil, the grind in his wrists flaring into white hot agony that threatened to buckle his knees. But the hit landed. He'd made the void spawn flinch. Triumph surged, hot and bright, momentarily eclipsing the pain. See? Steel and grit. We don't need the cursed light! Yet, beneath the bravado, a cold serpent of dread uncoiled. The phantom sensation of fused bone fragments vibrating like shards of glass dust within his flesh, the terrifying memory of the superheated crystal searing his palm from the inside out during the warren shield's backlash, slithered through his mind. It was a visceral echo, a brand burned onto his soul. Using the scar power felt like grasping a live grenade with shattered hands. Not now. Not uncontrolled. Not unless there's no other choice. He shoved the treacherous impulse deep, burying it under a fresh wave of defiance. "That all you got?" he goaded, spitting blood tinged phlegm. The taunt was loud, but the shadow of hesitation had stolen a fraction of his follow through speed.
Emboldened by their initial success, they pressed the attack. They became a whirlwind of rusted steel, desperate taunts, and the flaring, unstable light of the Twin Star bond. Shiro ducked under a whip like tendril of shadow frost that sliced the air where his head had been, the unnatural cold biting his exposed cheek like acid. He retaliated instantly, pivoting on his heel with a speed born of Ryota's drills, launching a vicious sideways chop aimed not at shadow, but at a cluster of those sickly pulsing voids. "Staring contest's over, bastard! EAT THIS!" The sword bit deep into the coalescing darkness around the voids. Another shriek, higher pitched, more furious, tore through the barracks. But the cost was immediate and brutal. The agony in his wrists escalated exponentially, each impact sending jagged bolts of nerve flaying pain shooting up his forearms into his shoulders. The phantom thorns of the manacles tore viciously at his scars, a ghostly echo of his torture. Beneath it all, a terrifying new sensation bloomed: the fused bone fragments grinding like shards of broken glass within his flesh, the microscopic fissures the others had warned of weeping stress, sending sharp, internal stabs of warning with every jarring movement. He felt fragile, like overstressed ice about to calve.
Kuro saw Shiro's opening, the ripple in the entity's form after the sword blow. He moved with him, leveraging their painful synchronicity. Compensating for the dead drag of his corrupted arm with a twist of his core, he lunged. The heavy chopper slammed down. THUD SCREEECH CRUNCH! Black ice fractured. The entity shuddered.
Exhilaration warred with the static agony lancing up his corrupted arm. We fucking can do this! You see that Haruto, Juro and especially you Corvin. We can fucking fight. Seizing the disruption, he focused past the ravenous static chewing his thoughts. He scraped the surface of the corruption, gathering a wave of the biting, unnatural cold radiating from his own arm, Haruto's insane gambit. But as he gathered the cold, a horrifyingly distinct memory slammed into him: the Blight entity in the warren, not just repelled, but feasting. He felt it again, the corruption surging hungrily, digesting the volatile energy they unleashed, mapping his nerves with predatory glee. It wasn't just pain; it was violation, the enemy growing stronger inside him with every flare. No! Don't feed it! This is a fucking tumour don't you remember the last time! The terror was instantaneous, paralyzing. For a critical heartbeat, he froze, the gathered cold writhing in his grasp like a trapped viper. The opening Shiro created began to close. Fuck but that opening Shiro made we could end this with one blow fuck it no choice! The thought was a scream. With a guttural snarl pushing past the terror of empowering the enemy within, he shoved the cold down the bond, the action feeling less like weaponizing and more like betrayal. Please, Shiro, make it fucking count… otherwise we are fucked and it'll all count for nothing.
Shiro felt it surge into him, not energy, but pure, violating entropy. A wave of invasive, soul numbing cold carrying Kuro's amplified pain and defiance ripped through his nervous system, threatening to lock his joints, freeze his breath solid. The instinct to reject it, to violently sever the bond before it crippled them both, was overwhelming, primal. The memory of the warren wasn't abstract; it was cellular: the mutually destructive seizure, the terrifying sensation of his fused wrist bones vibrating at a frequency threatening to shatter them into dust, the molten brand in his palm searing his life force, the nerve flaying agony that had stolen his vision. It's happening again! It'll fucking tear us apart! Panic, cold and sharp, threatened to unravel his focus entirely. But beneath the shock and terror was the white hot forge of his fury, fury at the entity, at Akuma, at Ryo, at the frost killing Kuro, at their own damned weakness. He couldn't let Kuro's sacrifice, his own violation, be for nothing. Fucking Control it! The command was a roar in his mind, born of desperation. He didn't just catch the cold; he grabbed it with his will, a vise of pure rage. Funnelling the invasive cold into the crystal felt like forcing liquid nitrogen into a fragile glass vessel. He poured his own sonic potential, his desperate need to shatter, into the conduit, using it to compress the cold, focus it, ignoring the internal scream warning of imminent self immolation. Every microsecond holding it was agony, a dance on the razor's edge between weapon and suicide bomb. Break it! NOW! With a raw, wordless roar torn from the depths of his being, he thrust his palm forward…
The entity didn't pause. It flowed towards Kuro, drawn to the flare of corruption and agony like a moth to a lethal flame. Multiple limbs coalesced, claws aimed to impale the vulnerable prince. Panic, cold and sharp, cut through Kuro's battle fury. He instinctively reached inwards, towards the volatile core of the Twin Star power, the crimson scar flaring weakly on his forearm. He felt the connection snag, power gathering like a storm in his chest, tinged with the invasive cold. Blast it back! But the memory wasn't just of pain; it was of loss of control. The warren shield hadn't just hurt; it had turned him into a puppet, his body wracked by seizures while the Blight feasted inside him. He saw Shiro convulsing, heard his own choked scream echoing in his memory. If I use it now… uncontrolled… in this state… will I even hit it? Or will I just… explode? Feed it? Kill Shiro with the backlash? The terror was absolute, a cold fist closing around his heart, tighter than Nyxara's frost. The gathered power sputtered, collapsing inwards like a dying star before it could form. He flinched, physically recoiling from the very power that could save him, a fatal paralysis born of traumatic certainty. His good hand came up in a useless, instinctive ward. The claws descended.
Panic, cold and sharp, cut through Shiro's battle fury like the void whip itself. He saw Kuro frozen, exposed, the claws descending. NO! The crystal in his palm ignited, a supernova trapped under scar tissue, screaming for release. Burn it! Blast it to ash! The power surged, molten and terrifying, promising annihilation, of the entity, maybe, but also of himself, of Kuro, of everyone near. The backlash memory was visceral, immediate: the phantom thorns tearing his scars open anew, the fused bone fragments grinding like glass dust, the terrifying sensation of the crystal superheating, threatening to detonate his hand, the microscopic fissures screaming under the strain. If I unleash this… uncontrolled… in panic… it won't save him. It'll kill us all. The certainty was a bucket of ice water. The desperate, arrogant belief that they could control the wildfire evaporated. They couldn't. Not like this. Not under this pressure. The power was truly a tumour, volatile and self consuming. Using it now wasn't courage; it was suicide with collateral damage. Protect him! The thought was primal, overriding the allure of destructive power. He choked down the nascent inferno within his palm, the energy dissipating in a wave of searing heat that scorched his nerves but remained contained. The light died. He had no weapon but the sword. He charged, not with the focused fury of controlled power, but with the desperate, sacrificial abandon of a man with only his body left to offer. "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM HIM!" He swung the sword wildly, a clumsy, off balance arc fuelled by terror, sacrifice, and the utter rejection of their most dangerous tool. The movement left him wide open, a testament to his fatal choice: death by the enemy was preferable to death by their own uncontrollable power.
Juro materialized like a vengeful ghost beside Kuro, his scavenged dagger a blur as he thwacked hard against a crystalline claw aiming for Kuro's spine, deflecting it with a spray of frozen shards. "Control it or die, Princeling!" he snarled, his voice tight with fury and fear. "Your rot paints a target on us all!" His movement was pure, desperate necessity, a stark contrast to their faltering strength.
Mira's voice, high and frayed to breaking, pierced the din, directed at Shiro: "The pain! Your pain echoes his! It resonates with the void cold! It's using you! Feeding the hunger! Amplifying the beacon!"
Corvin's distorted voice, colder and more final than the deepest void, cut through from near the shattered entrance. He wasn't just manipulating rubble anymore; he was subtly pulling at the entity's edges, trying to unravel its cohesion, but his focus was split. "The bond is a conduit. It amplifies everything." His words were shards of ice driven into their minds. "Weakness. Pain. Despair. Your uncontrolled agony is its beacon. Your volatile power is its feast." A pause, heavy with the weight of absolute truth. "You are NOT READY."
The words didn't just land; they detonated within Shiro and Kuro. NOT READY. It wasn't just Corvin's voice. It was the grinding shriek threatening to reduce Shiro's wrists to dust. It was the ravenous, icy fire consuming Kuro from within, inch by agonizing inch. It was Juro's disgust, Mira's raw terror, the horrifying ease with which the entity flowed around their increasingly sluggish, pain riddled attacks, exploiting weaknesses they couldn't hide. They weren't warriors holding the line; they were wounded animals, lures, drawing the predator deeper. Their desperate training, their hard won synchronicity, hadn't forged weapons; it had merely polished the handles of their own coffins. The arrogance, the brittle confidence born of suffering, evaporated like mist under a noon sun, leaving only the cold, hard, crushing, undeniable truth: They were weak. Pathetic. Burdens. The Twin Star power wasn't salvation; it was a cancerous tumour, metastasizing with every uncontrolled flare, making them beacons of vulnerability that endangered everyone. The realization was a physical blow, a sucker punch to the soul, leaving them gasping on the frozen floor, not just broken in body, but shattered in spirit.
The void entity, sensing the collapse of their will as clearly as it sensed the flare of Kuro's corruption, seemed to swell with malevolent satisfaction. The subsonic growl deepened into a predatory, vibrating hum that resonated in their bones, promising dissolution. Multiple limbs, tipped with needle sharp crystalline claws gleaming with void light, coalesced above the fallen Twin Stars. The sickly blue white voids focused, pulsing with cold, calculating intelligence, drinking in their despair. The air thickened to syrup, the cold intensifying to a point where lungs burned and thoughts froze. The cloying scent of decaying lilies and the sterile void reek became suffocating, a physical weight pressing down. The susurration of the million frozen voices coalesced into a single, silent scream of oblivion aimed directly at their souls.
Shiro's Descent
Shiro lay sprawled on the freezing stone, the impact point on his chest a nova of agony that stole his breath and painted his vision with crimson static. He struggled to push himself up onto elbows that felt like they'd been shattered and reassembled with shards of glass. Every micro movement sent jagged bolts of white hot fire screaming up his forearms from his wrists, the fused bone fragments grinding like glass dust deep within the marrow, a sickening internal scrape that echoed the scrape scrape scrape of the void claws. He tasted blood, metallic and warm, mingling with the bitter tang of frost deep in his throat. His gaze, blurred with pain and the cold crystallizing his lashes, swept past the crude sword, lying uselessly yards away, its edge already rimed with void frost. It landed instead on the scar etched into his palm.
The Polaris scar in his palm throbbed dully, a trapped star pulsating with impotent light. No salvation. Only the searing, visceral memory of self destructive backlash: the phantom thorns of the manacles tearing his scar tissue open anew, the superheated crystal threatening to detonate his hand from within, the terrifying sensation of his fused wrist bones vibrating at a frequency that promised to reduce them to dust, the nerve flaying agony that had stolen his sight and voice in the cavern, the academy. It hadn't been power. It had been a mutually assured seizure. A tumour they'd foolishly tried to wield.
Then, cutting through the physical torment with sharper agony, came the image: Aki. Not as she was now, hidden and frail, but as she'd been that last night in their shack. Humming softly over her small forge, the scent of hot metal and bitter herbs clinging to her worn tunic, her fingers, already weakening, tracing the grooves of Cassiopeia on the sun bleached plank. His hand guiding hers. "Tilted west, see? Defiant, like us." Her smile, fragile but bright. Then, the image shattered, replaced by Akuma's star pupiled eyes, cold and reptilian, holding that same plank aloft like a grotesque trophy. The gleam of the flaying knives, not butcher's tools, but instruments of meticulous desecration. Lowering towards the wood, towards Orion's belt, towards the stars he'd carved with her, splinter by precious splinter. Her defiance. Her soul. Being peeled away because he wasn't there. Because he was here. Failing.
Is this it? The thought wasn't a whisper; it was a cold stone, slick with despair, sinking through his gut, heavy with the absolute finality of a tombstone slamming shut. All that rage… the blood oath sworn over Kaya's ashes… the promises screamed into Akuma's smug face… the desperate hours of agony they'd endured, thinking it was forging them… ends here? Not on the Plaza under an open sky, facing down the bastard who took everything. Not saving her. Not even dying well. He looked up, past the trembling, useless shield of his own ruined hands, into the descending forest of crystalline claws. Just… frozen scraps. Meat for a void spawn. Another nameless exhibit in Nyxara's gallery of despair, lost in Elara's tomb. Because we were too fucking arrogant. Because we thought the pain we endured was strength. Because we believed… we were ready. The humiliation was absolute, colder than Nyxara's heart, deeper than the Frostway's chill. It wasn't just defeat; it was erasure. Their story, their defiance, ending not with a roar, but a whimper swallowed by the hungry dark. Weak. Pathetic. A burden to the end. Corvin's distorted voice echoed in the hollow space where his courage had been: "You are NOT READY." It wasn't a judgment anymore; it was their epitaph.
Kuro's Abyss
Kuro knelt nearby, not in supplication, but in the ruin of his own body. He wasn't on his hands and knees; he was pinned by agony. The glacial termite wasn't just biting towards his heart; it was dissolving him from the inside. The invasive cold felt like liquid nitrogen flooding his veins, needles of absolute zero burrowing into the joint socket, scraping raw nerve endings with every pulse. The static buzz wasn't just noise; it was a physical violation, a million icy insectile legs scrabbling inside his skull, chewing his thoughts into incoherent fragments. Vomit, thick and metallic, burned his throat, a physical manifestation of the corruption feasting within him. He couldn't lift his head. He could only stare down at the frost rimed stone, seeing not rock, but the grey translucence pulsing past his elbow, the skin stretched taut and brittle like ancient, frozen parchment. It wasn't an arm anymore. It was a beacon. A fucking dinner bell as his father called it for the void.
He forced his gaze upward, a monumental effort against the crushing weight of cold and despair. The pulsing voids of the entity loomed above, not eyes, but windows into an infinite, patient hunger. There was no malice there, no rage. Only the vast, indifferent appetite of the void. Prince Kuro, the thought formed, not with pride, but with the bitter, metallic taste of ash coating his tongue. Kuro the Unforged Star. Heir to Ash. Son to Butcher King. The titles he'd worn, sometimes with defiance, sometimes with secret shame, felt like grotesque jokes. This is the legacy? Not reclaiming a broken kingdom. Not forging a new dawn from my mothers ashes. Not even a warrior's death worthy of a song. His breath hitched, a ragged, wet sound. Dying on his knees. In the dark. Weak. Corrupted. Rotting from the inside out before the claws even strike. A liability who got his only friend killed. The ultimate failure. The absurdity of their arrogance crashed over him then, a wave of icy despair so profound it felt like drowning. We stood in this tomb of heroes and thought we belonged. We faced Juro's fury and thought we'd won. We channelled the corruption and thought we'd mastered it. We looked into the abyss and thought… we were ready. A choked, soundless laugh escaped him, more a sob than anything. Ready for what? To be consumed? To prove Corvin fucking right?
He saw Shiro sprawled nearby, broken, exposed. He saw the others, Ryota's light, Juro's knives, Haruto's focus, fighting around them, despite them. Drawn into this tomb, endangered, because the Twin Stars had been too proud, too desperate to prove they weren't burdens, to retreat. Fucking Pathetic. The words weren't just self loathing; they were the final, crushing verdict. His corrupted hand spasmed against the stone, a useless claw. The crimson light of his scar was a dying ember, guttering against the all consuming void darkness. Is this the grand finale the bards won't sing? The thought was bleakly hysterical. 'Prince and Ghost Perish Pointlessly: Eaten by Hungry Dark After Arrogantly Ignoring Warnings'? The claws descended, filling his vision, the scrape scrape scrape the only sound in the universe. Yes, the void seemed to whisper. This is the fitting end. Not heroes. Not legends. Just… fuel. Corvin's words weren't an echo now; they were the void's own voice, resonating in the frozen core of his being: "You are NOT READY." He closed his eye, not in peace, but in utter, shamed surrender. This is how my story ends.
The claws descended, a forest of frozen death aimed to impale, to shatter bone, to consume flesh and spirit. Time stretched, thin and brittle. The scrape scrape scrape was the only sound, loud as doom. The cold was the absolute zero of oblivion. The whispers were a silent roar. This was the end. Corvin's verdict, Ryota's warning, Haruto's cold analysis, Juro's disgust, Mira's terror, they all coalesced into the void's final truth: You are NOT READY.