Night passed in the Hearths barracks after, Haruto's admission, "Touch it right… and Volrag's frost will remember the void's kiss. Permanently. Think you can dance with that, Princeling?" the admission hung in the air long after.
The violet heartbeat of Cassiopeia's star wasn't just fading; it was drowning. Its light, thick and cloying as congealed blood, seeped through the high, narrow windows of the Sky Hearth Barracks, painting the obsidian walls in sickly, rhythmic pulses. Frost dripped from the rafters with the agonizing slowness of a gut wound, each drop landing with a soft, final plink on the stone floor below, like slow, frozen blood hitting a coffin lid. The air wasn't just cold; it was solid, tasting of iron filings, ozone, and the despair of a siege tightening its fist. Every breath scraped Shiro's throat raw. 4:17 AM. The dying star's throb echoed the frantic hammering against the cage of his ribs.
Shiro's Dream;
He was barefoot on black ice. Not smooth, but fractured, jagged as broken teeth, biting into his soles with every step. A wind howled, not with the mountain's voice, but with the thin, terrified screams of children. Ahead, a figure waited, impossibly tall, cloaked not in shadow, but in tattered, bleeding starlight that dripped viscous darkness onto the ice. When it lifted its face, Shiro's breath froze solid in his lungs. No features, just void pits where eyes should be. And within each swirling abyss, a single, cracked Polaris star wept molten amber tears. The amber dripped… not down, but towards him. Each drop struck his exposed wrists, sizzle hiss, not just burning, but fusing. Bone welded to phantom iron with a spike of agony so profound it was soundless, a white noise of pure torment. The figure raised one skeletal finger, impossibly long, to where lips should be. Its mouth yawned open, a silent chasm. The word formed, unfinished, a blade drawn across the fabric of the world itself, etching fire into his soul:
Eclipse... vi...
Shiro bolted upright, a choked gasp tearing from his throat like a sob. Reality slammed back, the oppressive violet gloom, the biting cold, the grinding, ceaseless agony in his fused wrists. His leather braces, tightened to near breaking during the night, bit into his forearms, the numbing cold now a dull ache against the deeper, bone deep scream. Above the obsidian hearthstone, the violet star pulsed once, violently, its light flaring crimson at the edges for a split second before settling back into its sickly rhythm. As if it saw. As if it fucking flinched.
Kuro's Dream;
He walked a corridor of bone white trees, their branches skeletal fingers clawing at a sky the colour of a bruise. Translucent grey slime dripped from the branches, cold as grave soil where it landed on his corrupted arm. The same figure materialized from between two twisted trunks, its starlight cloak shimmering with unnatural decay. Amber bled from its fractured star eyes, thick and slow, drawn like iron filings towards the grey translucence crawling past Kuro's elbow. The amber touched the corruption, a jolt of recognition, cold fire meeting frozen grief. It crawled up his arm, not burning, but freezing him from the inside out, turning veins to ice, muscle to brittle glass. Then the trees began to sing. Not leaves rustling, but a low, mournful dirge sung in a child's thin, terrified voice. The figure's void mouth opened wide, wider than possible, a silent scream that vibrated in Kuro's marrow. The word formed, echoing the dirge, promising annihilation:
Eclipse... vi...
Kuro's eyes snapped open. Static crackled across his grey skin, visible blue white sparks dancing over the translucence like malevolent fireflies. The air around him reeked suddenly, not just frost and stone, but of winter graves freshly disturbed, of earth frozen hard over decay. Dawn wasn't approaching; it was a razor's edge balanced against their throats.
The barracks wasn't silent. It was a tomb holding its breath. Shiro pressed his forehead back against the cold obsidian hearthstone he'd slumped against, the stone's chill a feeble anchor against the phantom pain still echoing in his wrists and the raw terror of the dream. The image of those weeping void eyes, the sound of that unfinished word –Eclipse... vi... , it clung like frost to his soul. He flexed his scarred hand, the Polaris mark beneath the skin pulsing erratically, a caged beast mirroring his panic. What the fuck was that? Not Akuma. Something… older. Hungrier. Something that knew the taste of dying stars.
Across the gloom shrouded space, near the sealed, weeping archway, Kuro pushed himself up from the floor. The static discharge faded, leaving behind the ozone stink and a deeper chill radiating from him. He cradled his corrupted arm, the grey translucence past his elbow seeming darker, more active, pulsing with the slow, deep thrum of the obsidian wall he'd leaned against. His storm grey eyes scanned the shadows, sharp, hunted. He met Shiro's gaze across the distance. No words. Just the shared, gut deep understanding of having been visited. Touched by something that shouldn't fucking exist.
"Fuck me," Juro's gravel grind voice shattered the fragile silence. He was hunched over a crate near the central map table, meticulously honing a brutal looking hand axe. He didn't look up. "Heard you two whimpering like pups caught in a snare. Bad dreams, or just finally realizing what a shitstorm we're walking into?" He spat a glob of something dark onto the frost rimed floor. It sizzled faintly.
Shiro snarled, pushing himself fully upright. The movement sent fresh shards of pain lancing up his arms. "Shut your hole, Juro. Or I'll use that axe to give you a second smile." His voice was rough, sleep and fury tangling in his throat.
"Promises, promises, Firecracker," Juro chuckled, a dry, humourless sound. He tested the axe's edge with his thumb, drawing a bead of blood he casually wiped on his furs. "Just making sure you're awake. Ninety seven fucking heartbeats starts real soon. Don't need you sleepwalking into Volrag's welcoming committee."
Mira stirred from her nest of blankets near the dead central hearth. Obsidian, perched on the hearthstone above her, let out a soft, distressed "kraa…" that echoed in the stillness. Mira's visible eye was wide, bloodshot, fixed not on Shiro or Kuro, but on the space between them, where the violet light seemed thickest. Her fractured lens pulsed erratically, casting jagged shards of prismatic light on the floor. "The… the cracks…" she whispered, her voice thin, frayed. "They… dreamed too. The whispers… louder now. Hungry." She shuddered violently, pulling her thin cloak tighter. A fresh trickle of blood, startlingly bright, escaped her nostril, tracing a path down to her lip. "Echoes… vi…"
The unfinished word hung in the air like poison gas. Haruto, standing immobile beside the vellum map pinned to the obsidian wall, didn't visibly react. But his knuckles, resting lightly on the pommel of the scavenged Polaris dagger driven deep beside the arterial red 'X', whitened fractionally. His obsidian eyes, colder than the Razorwind Peaks, flicked from Mira to Shiro to Kuro, assessing, calculating. The cost was mounting. Mira's sight bleeding, Shiro vibrating with contained rage and pain, Kuro radiating void chill, Juro's brutal pragmatism a necessary counterweight. And the dreams… a new variable. An unknown predator circling their already suicidal plan.
"Whispers don't freeze your balls off," Juro grunted, standing up. He stretched, bones cracking like dry kindling. "Focus on what does. Frostguard glaives. Void Hound teeth. Pressure plates under the fucking ice." He stomped towards a pile of gear near the crypt doorway. "Suit up. Now. While you still got balls to freeze."
Shiro forced himself to move. Every step sent jolts through his braced wrists. He ignored Juro, focusing on his gear laid out near the hearthstone: the bone handled knife, freshly cleaned but forever stained in his mind; thick, fur lined vambraces to go over the biting leather braces; layers of dark, stiffened hide over padded under layers. He picked up the knife. The weight was still wrong. Heavy with the dream, heavy with failure. He slid it into the sheath at his hip, the leather creaking with the tension in his arms. Ninety seven fucking heartbeats.
Kuro moved with silent precision towards his own gear. His corrupted arm seemed heavier, the grey translucence swirling sluggishly under his skin like oil on ice. He pulled on layers with his good hand, the movements economical, avoiding direct contact with the corrupted limb whenever possible. He picked up a short, heavy bladed sword, its edge nicked and scarred. His storm grey eyes met Shiro's again. No dream talk. Not here. Not now. Just a single, fractional nod. We fall, we drag them with us. The only pact that mattered.
Haruto finally moved. He pulled the Polaris dagger free from the obsidian with a grating screech that set teeth on edge. He didn't look at the blade, but at the faint smear of… something… dark and iridescent left on the stone where the tip had been embedded. Not frost. Not blood. Something else. He wiped the dagger's blade meticulously on a scrap of dark cloth before sheathing it. His voice, when it came, was flat, devoid of inflection, colder than the void between stars.
"Dawn approaches. The star's penultimate pulse just passed." He turned his obsidian gaze on them all. "Final checks. Weapons. Braces. Focus. The cracks Mira sees are not just paths. They are jaws. The Void Hounds are not just beasts. They are famine given teeth. Volrag…" He paused, the name itself seeming to lower the temperature in the room. "…is not just a commander. He is the embodiment of the Frostguard's void touched cruelty. He will be waiting. He will be smiling." Haruto's eyes locked onto Shiro, then Kuro. "Your nightmares are irrelevant. Your pain is irrelevant. Your fear is irrelevant. Only the ninety seven heartbeats matter. Only reaching Aki matters. Fail in control," his gaze pinned Shiro, "and you kill her as surely as Akuma's knife. Fail in focus," his gaze shifted to Kuro, "and the void inside you will feast before Volrag's glaives even strike. Understood?"
Shiro met the cold stare, the Polaris scar in his palm flaring hot in response to the challenge, a tiny, defiant sun against the encroaching frost. "Haruto. I know the fucking stakes." He slammed his good fist against his vambrace. "Just get us to the fucking door."
Kuro didn't speak. He just stared back, the cold fire deep within his corruption flaring once, briefly, casting his bones in sharp, horrifying relief beneath the grey skin before subsiding. An answer. A threat. A promise.
Ryota emerged from the deeper shadows near the crypt doorway. He hadn't slept. His Polaris eyes burned with banked stellar fire, reflecting the dying violet light like captured stars. He carried no visible weapons. He was the weapon. His presence was a shockwave of contained power, a bedrock against which the frantic energy of the others crashed and steadied. He looked at each of them, Haruto's icy command, Shiro's burning fury, Kuro's glacial void, Mira's bleeding fragility, Juro's grim readiness. His voice, when it rumbled, was the sound of continents grinding, deep and inevitable.
"Ninety seven heartbeats," he stated. Not a countdown. A fact. A boundary. "Aki's life measured in breaths stolen from the frost." His gaze swept over them, lingering on Shiro and Kuro. "The dreams are shadows. The enemy is real. The path is written in blood and ice. Kaya gambled. Elara shattered. This," he nodded towards the map, towards the void ice sphere resting on its dark altar nearby, "is our defiance. Sharpened. Focused. Lethal." He didn't offer hope. He forged resolve in the furnace of his presence. "We play the hand we stole. We walk the cracks. We break the fucking siege. Dawn is here."
As if summoned by his words, the violet star overhead gave a final, shuddering pulse. Its light didn't just dim; it guttered, like a candle drowning in its own wax. For a terrifying second, absolute darkness plunged the barracks into an abyss colder than the void. Then, the first, thin, razor sharp sliver of true dawn light, pale and pitiless, cut through a high window.
The ninety seven heartbeats had begun.
The violet star's final, shuddering gasp plunged the Sky Hearth Barracks into a darkness deeper than any cellar, colder than the void between stars. It wasn't just an absence of light; it was a suffocation. Breath caught in throats, the oppressive silence broken only by the frantic hammering of hearts against ribs and the brittle snap of frost fracturing under sudden, absolute cold. Shiro felt the Polaris scar in his palm flare, a trapped ember against the drowning dark, its heat a mocking counterpoint to the ice flooding his veins.
Then, dawn cut.
Not a gentle lightening, but a razor slash. Thin, pitiless grey light speared through ancient fissures in the obsidian walls, catching the swirling motes of their frozen breath hanging thick in the air. It wasn't mist; it was butcher's smoke, the exhalation of condemned men walking their last mile. The light revealed the grim tableau: Ryota, a mountain sculpted from shadow and resolve, hefting the massive, rune etched Starbreaker across his broad back. Even in the dimness, frost already feathered its brutal edge, leeched from the barracks' dying breath. Juro, face like quarried stone, meticulously checked the edges of two heavy hand axes and a long, wicked dirk strapped to his thigh. His lips moved silently, shaping numbers with brutal precision. One… two… three… A profane prayer counting down the ninety seven heartbeats ticking like a bomb in their skulls.
Mira, a wraith wrapped in layers of threadbare wool, secured the tiny hood over Obsidian's head. The crow was unnervingly silent, its usual nervous clicks and shuffles absent. Its beady eyes, reflecting the grey light, held a terrible stillness, as if it were already listening to the Plaza's distant, future screams, carried on the frigid air currents snaking through the cracks. Haruto stood by the sealed crypt door, a silhouette sharp as the Polaris dagger now sheathed at his hip. His obsidian eyes scanned the fissures where the grey light bled in, calculating angles, depths, the enemy's possible sightlines. Kuro hovered near the rear, his corrupted arm held slightly away from his body. The grey translucence seemed denser in the dawn light, pulsing with a slow, deep rhythm that resonated with the ancient stone beneath their boots. Static whispered around it, a private conversation with the void.
"Move," Haruto's command sliced through the frozen air, colder than the stone. "Single file. Silence is your fucking shield now. Break it, and Volrag's hounds will tear out your throat before you hear them bark."
They filed out of the barracks crypt not through the main entrance, choked with frost and likely watched, but through a jagged fissure Haruto had silently indicated, a forgotten wound in the mountain's flesh, hidden behind a collapsed rack of rusting weaponry. It led not up, but down, into the choked, frozen arteries beneath Elara's fallen estate.
The descent was immediate and brutal. Stairs, carved millennia ago, plunged into darkness, their surfaces treacherously slick. Not with water, but with centuries of blood ice, a vile amalgam of ancient gore, spilled ichor, and relentless frost, polished by time into a black, glassy sheen that defied purchase. Boots crunched and skidded, the sound obscenely loud in the confined space, echoing back like mocking laughter. Shiro's braced wrists screamed with every jarring step, the leather biting deeper. He tasted iron, blood from where he'd bitten his lip raw to stifle a grunt. Ahead, Juro cursed under his breath, a constant, guttural stream: "…fucking ice…bastard steps…watch the fucking drop, Firecracker…" His heartbeat count continued beneath the curses, a grim metronome: "…twenty eight…twenty nine…like walking on greased fucking glass…"
The stairs opened into a corridor so low Ryota had to hunch, his massive shoulders scraping the weeping obsidian ceiling. The walls here didn't just sweat condensation; they wept thick, viscous black water that smelled of deep earth and decayed metal. It dripped with agonizing slowness from jagged points overhead. Plink… plink… plink… Each drop echoed like the deliberate strike of a hammer on a coffin nail, counting down the dwindling heartbeats. Plink… forty five… Plink… forty six… The sound wormed into Shiro's skull, syncing with the phantom agony in his wrists, with Juro's relentless count. Every drop felt like a second stolen from Aki.
The air grew thicker, colder, saturated with the ghosts of old wealth and older violence. Dust, undisturbed for centuries, lay thick as grey snow, muffling their steps but coating throats, making every breath a gritty rasp. Mira stumbled, a soft gasp escaping before she clamped a hand over her mouth. Obsidian shifted silently beneath her cloak. Haruto, ahead of her, didn't turn, but his hand tightened on the dagger's hilt. Kuro's corrupted arm pulsed, the cold fire within it seeming to flicker brighter in response to the oppressive, ancient despair radiating from the stones.
Halfway through the suffocating corridor, they passed a niche carved into the obsidian wall. It wasn't empty.
Crammed within the shallow space, like macabre dolls shoved onto a shelf, stood a cluster of petrified figures. Noblewomen. Their once fine silks and velvets were now brittle shrouds, encased in clear, dirty ice that preserved them in horrifying detail. Faces, forever young and beautiful in a ghastly parody, were frozen mid curtsy, expressions locked in pure, unadulterated terror. Eyes wide, mouths agape in silent screams they would never outrun. Frost feathered their eyelashes and hair, sparkling dully in the grey light leaking from a crack above.
One statue leaned precariously forward from the niche, as if caught mid fall. Her lips were parted wider than the others, a perfect 'O' of frozen horror. From the corner of one wide, terrified eye, a single, perfect tear hung suspended. It wasn't ice; it looked like glass, clear and heavy, catching the faint light, a distilled droplet of absolute despair. It dangled, impossibly, from her alabaster cheek.
Shiro, passing close behind Juro, felt a pull, a morbid fascination mixed with a surge of raw, personal dread. Without conscious thought, his good hand, encased in stiff leather, brushed against the fragile droplet.
It shattered.
Not with a loud crack, but with a tiny, crystalline tink, like the breaking of a minuscule bell. The sound was instantly, utterly swallowed. Not by the corridor's muffling dust, but by a sudden, fierce gust of wind that roared down the passageway from ahead. It was a knife wind, stealing breath, carrying with it the distant, unmistakable sound of metal clashing on metal, a faint, rhythmic thump that might have been a drum… or a giant's footsteps. And beneath it, woven into the wind's icy howl, the ghost of a child's thin, terrified sob.
The sound of the breaking tear vanished, but the silence it left behind was worse. Juro stopped counting. He turned, his flint chip eyes boring into Shiro, filled with a fury colder than the void. "You fucking idiot!" he snarled, his voice a harsh whisper that carried like a shout in the sudden quiet. "Touch nothing! Nothing! That wind wasn't here before! You think Volrag's deaf? You think his fucking hounds need an engraved invitation?"
Shiro met his glare, the Polaris scar flaring hot in his palm, shame warring with fury. "It was a fucking tear, Juro! A drop of ice!"
"It was a trigger, you reckless shit stain!" Juro hissed, stepping closer, the menace radiating off him palpable. "This whole fucking mountain's rigged! Every drip, every crack, every goddamn frozen scream! You just rang the fucking dinner bell!"
Haruto materialized beside them, silent as a shadow. His obsidian gaze flicked from the shattered remnants of the tear on the floor to Shiro's face, then to the niche, lingering on the leaning statue's frozen scream. His voice, when it came, was dangerously soft. "The past is a minefield, Shiro. Step carefully. Or next time, it won't be just wind that answers." He turned, his gaze sweeping the corridor ahead, listening to the wind's new, ominous song. "The cracks are breathing louder. Move. Faster."
He didn't wait. He flowed forward, a spectre in the gloom. Juro shot Shiro one last, venomous look, spat onto the frost near the shattered tear, the spittle froze instantly, and followed, resuming his count with renewed, furious intensity: "…Fifty one…fifty two…fucking move, you useless sack of star shit…"
Shiro stared at the spot where the tear had fallen. The frozen sob still echoed in his mind, mingling with Aki's imagined cries. The phantom grip of fused bone and iron tightened around his wrists. He forced his legs to move, the wind biting at his face, carrying the sounds of the Plaza, the killing ground, ever closer. The ninety seven heartbeats thundered in his ears, each one a hammer blow on the anvil of his dread. He'd shattered more than ice. He'd shattered their fragile cloak of silence. And dawn's first cut, he realized with a fresh wave of icy terror, was drawing blood. Theirs,
The wind wasn't just keening; it was screeching. The sound that had swallowed Shiro's shattered tear now ripped down the final, cramped tunnel like a physical force, laden with the metallic tang of frostbitten steel and the distant, rhythmic thump thump thump of massive siege drums. It stole breath, clawed at exposed skin, and carried the unmistakable, greasy stench of Void Hound musk, a mix of wet fur, ozone, and rotting meat. Haruto, a wraith at the front, halted them with a raised fist, silhouetted against a jagged rectangle of pre dawn grey. The last gate.
It wasn't wood or iron, but a slab of fused rubble and ancient ice, partially collapsed by time or violence. Through the breach, the world opened into a yawning, suffocating expanse of absolute dread.
The Plaza of Screams.
It hit Shiro like a physical blow, driving the wind from his lungs. Vast. Impossibly vast. A perfect circle of damnation paved not in stone, but in black ice. It wasn't merely frozen water; it was obsidian made liquid and refrozen into a mirror of pure despair. It reflected the bruised, pre dawn sky overhead with cruel clarity, a swirling vortex of bruised purple and sickly grey, stained crimson along the eastern horizon like a fresh, infected wound. Dawn's first light wasn't hope; it was a blade slicing open the night to reveal the festering truth beneath. The ice didn't just reflect the sky; it amplified its hopelessness, making the vastness above feel like a crushing weight pressing down.
Frostguard banners hung limp from towering obsidian pylons spaced around the plaza's circumference. Heavy with rime, they looked less like symbols of power and more like funeral shrouds for giants. Sentry braziers, positioned every twenty paces along the inner perimeter, burned with unnatural, pale blue flames. They cast long, dancing shadows that writhed like tormented spirits across the black ice, but radiated negative warmth. Standing near one felt like standing next to an open grave in deep winter, the air grew perceptibly colder, stealing body heat with vampiric greed. Every torch mounted on the distant, monolithic walls of the surrounding structures sputtered violently, their flames starving, guttering in the plaza's atmosphere of profound, soul sucking cold. The air itself felt thin, eaten by the void touched frost.
At the dead centre of this frozen hell, two structures dominated. The Frostforged Skiff. It wasn't a vessel; it was a predatory insect sculpted from jagged iron and hatred. Its iron runners, taller than a man, were crusted not just with frost, but with layers of blood ice, a grisly amalgam of frozen gore built up over months, maybe years, of grim purpose. Dark stains, deep crimson and almost black, marred its brutal flanks. It looked less like transport and more like an altar to suffering, radiating a palpable aura of violation and pain. Shiro's gut clenched. Aki was brought here in that.
Beside the Skiff, yawning open like the maw of some colossal, petrified beast, stood the Spire door. It was set into the sheer, obsidian base of the towering Spire of Silence itself. The door wasn't wood or metal, but seemingly carved from the same black ice as the plaza, yet impossibly thick and dense. Its edges were lined with overlapping, jagged plates of dark iron, teeth. And from the points of these teeth, slow, viscous drops of congealed starlight dripped. Not molten metal, but thick, iridescent slime the colour of corrupted amethysts, falling with agonizing slowness onto the black ice below, where they sizzled and hardened instantly into fist sized lumps of dark, malevolent crystal. Plink… sizzle… crackle. The sound was obscene, a perverse counterpoint to the wind's mournful wail.
"Fucking hell's frozen fuck," Juro breathed, the words ripped away by the wind but his revulsion clear on his face. He instinctively shifted his grip on his axes, knuckles white. "Place stinks worse than a Void Hound's arse after ration beans. And look at that bastard door... pissing corrupted starlight. Akuma's got a real flair for the dramatic fuckery, hasn't he?"
Mira whimpered, pressing herself against the rough tunnel wall beside Shiro. Obsidian, hidden beneath her hood, let out a muffled, terrified "krrrk..." Mira's visible eye was wide, unblinking, fixed on the plaza. Blood streamed freely now from both nostrils, painting crimson trails down her chin onto her ragged scarf. Her fractured lens pulsed erratically, casting strobing, kaleidoscopic shards of light onto the ice near her feet. "They're... listening," she choked out, her voice barely audible over the wind. "The screams... not past... present... frozen in the ice... under our feet... waiting... to be... stepped on..." She gagged, doubling over, retching dryly. The cost of maintaining her sight, of perceiving the psychic minefield Haruto had warned of, was bleeding her dry.
Kuro stood slightly apart, his corrupted arm held rigid. The grey translucence pulsed visibly, a sickly rhythm syncing with the slow drip of the congealed starlight from the Spire door. The cold fire within it flared brighter, casting the bones and dark veins beneath his skin into stark, horrifying relief for a fleeting second. Static crackled fiercely around the limb, louder than before, a scream of feedback only he could hear. He didn't speak, but his storm grey eye narrowed, scanning the perimeter, the braziers, the high, shadowed galleries overlooking the plaza. Hunting patterns. Hunting the hunters he knew were there, waiting. Volrag's mercury gaze felt like a physical pressure on his skin.
Ryota moved past them all, stepping fully into the mouth of the breach. The sheer scale of his presence seemed to momentarily defy the plaza's crushing despair. Starbreaker, strapped across his back, hummed with a low, subsonic thrum that Shiro felt in his teeth. Frost actively recoiled from the weapon's edge where it touched Ryota's massive shoulders. His Polaris eyes scanned the killing floor, the Skiff, the Spire door, not with fear, but with the terrifying calculation of a force of nature assessing a target. "The door is the lock," he rumbled, his voice cutting through the wind like a landslide. "Ninety seven heartbeats is the key." He turned his burning gaze back to them. "Forge the key. Or break on the lock."
Haruto flowed to Ryota's side, a shadow to the mountain. His obsidian eyes were chips of flint, already dissecting the plaza. "Perimeter: Triple cordon. Glaives at the inner ring, twelve paces apart, lowered. See the frost patterns? Pressure plates under the ice between braziers three and seven. Roof hawks." He pointed with a subtle jerk of his chin towards high, shadowed arches on the Spire's flank. "Bone bows. Notched. Waiting for the first fool to stumble." His gaze flicked to the dripping Spire door. "Ward stone above the door. It flares on the thirtieth beat. One heartbeat of light. Then darkness deeper than the void." He looked at Shiro, then Kuro, his expression colder than the black ice. "The Skiff is bait. The door is death. Ninety seven heartbeats is the only path. Waste one, and we all feed the frost. Understood?"
Shiro forced air into his frozen lungs. The Spire door seemed miles away across the reflective, treacherous ice. He could see the faint, arterial red glow pulsing from a rune carved stone set above the dripping maw, the ward stone Haruto mentioned. Every instinct screamed run, but Haruto's plan was a knife edge walk, not a sprint. Precision over power. Control over rage. He flexed his braced hands, the leather biting, the fused bones grinding. The phantom amber tears from the dream sizzled on his wrists. Aki's behind that door. Humming louder than the dark.
Juro spat onto the black ice at his feet. The spittle froze before it hit, shattering like glass. "Pressure plates. Roof hawks. Fucking Volrag's ice picked welcome committee. Just another Tuesday in the Frostguard's tender fucking embrace." He hefted his axes. "Point me at the first bastard who twitches."
Mira straightened with a visible, shuddering effort, wiping blood from her nose with a trembling sleeve. Her visible eye was desperate, terrified, but fixed on the shimmering, heat haze lines only she could see snaking across the ice, the cracks, the paths. "West... conduit grate... breathes... cold... North shaft... whispers... teeth..." she gasped. "Follow... the silence... between... heartbeats..."
Kuro took a single, deliberate step forward, his boot crunching on the frozen ground just before the black ice began. The static around his arm intensified, then abruptly silenced, replaced by a terrifyingly focused stillness. His storm grey eyes locked onto the shadowed archways where Haruto had indicated the roof hawks. "The spark slips between the beats," he stated, his voice devoid of inflection, colder than the void behind Corvin's words. "Five heartbeats. To crack the heel." He was counting the overlap Haruto had identified, the gap in the patrols. Five stolen moments of vulnerability.
Haruto didn't nod. He simply turned his head, his obsidian gaze sweeping across the Plaza of Screams one final time. He saw the Frostguard wedge forming near the Skiff, glaives like winter's teeth glinting dully in the pale brazier light. He saw the subtle shift in the roof hawk shadows. He felt the pressure plates waiting beneath the ice like buried landmines of frost. He saw the Spire door, weeping its corrupted starlight, the ward stone pulsing with a slow, hungry rhythm. He saw the ninety seven heartbeats stretching before them, a tightrope over an abyss lined with fangs.
His hand rested lightly on the Polaris dagger's hilt. His voice, when it came, was a whisper that carried absolute, chilling command over the keening wind:
"Now."
He stepped onto the black ice.
The wind's mournful keen seemed to hitch. The sputtering torch flames guttered violently. High above, a bone bow creaked faintly in the sudden, charged silence.
One.
The ninety seven heartbeats have begun. The killing floor awaits. The next step could trigger annihilation or be their salvation.