The Sovereign-V2: C6: Inevitable Cost

The Sovereign-V2: C6: Inevitable Cost

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.
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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.
"

.
!
V2: C6: Inevitable Cost