The Sovereign-V2: C7: Cosmic Batteries

The Sovereign-V2: C7: Cosmic Batteries

The words hung in the frigid air, more solid and suffocating than the tomb dust around them.
Sovereign’s Scars.
The name was a final nail hammered into the coffin of their defiance. Haruto’s ashen face, etched with a scholar’s terrified certainty, was a more devastating blow than any Hound’s claw. In the terrible, pulsing silence that followed, the only sound was the wet, ragged struggle of Kuro’s breathing and the high, thin whine of static screaming from his corrupted arm, an arm that was no longer just a curse, but a designated component in a cosmic engine of despair. The blazing crimson light from their scars, which moments before had felt like a defiant fire, now seemed to illuminate the bars of a cage they were born inside.
Haruto 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.
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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."

V2: C7: Cosmic Batteries