The Sovereign-V2: C36: Show Them the Climb
Internally Shiro was in a battle field but a battlefield within the confines of his own mind
Ninety seven heartbeats.
The number wasn't abstract anymore. It was a cage closing. It was the number of times his heart might beat while crossing the killing floor. The number of breaths Aki might have left if they were late. The number of times Akuma’s knife might rise and fall.
Can I do it?
The doubt was a cold serpent coiling around his spine. Not just the physical act, the pain was a constant he could push through, the brace a temporary dam. But the
control
. Could he hold the Polaris fire focused? Could he unleash it with Haruto’s demanded precision, not Shiro’s old, destructive rage? Could he see Akuma standing over Aki and
not
immolate everything in a blind supernova, her included?
Failure isn't an option.
Ryota’s voice, like bedrock, resonated in his memory.
"Then we burn the sky trying."
Burning wasn't enough. They needed surgical annihilation. They needed a scalpel of starfire, not a hammer.
He thought of Kuro, the static hum of his corruption, the terrifying focus in his storm grey eyes.
We fall, we drag them with us.
That was the pact. The only comfort left.
He lifted his head from the stone. His eyes, burning with contained stellar fire and unshed tears of rage and fear, fixed on the quivering knife. He wrapped his scarred hand around the hilt again, the fresh cut on his thumb smearing a new, bright crimson streak over the cleaned bone, mingling with the ghosts of the old.
This blade failed her once.
He pulled it free from the stone.
It won’t fail her again.
He sheathed it at his hip, the leather braces creaking as he forced his trembling arms to steady.
Akuma wants a dirge?
The Polaris scar pulsed, a final, defiant flare against the dimming violet light.
I’ll give him a fucking requiem. In ninety seven heartbeats.
The vow was silent, etched in fire and pain onto his soul. He closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in final preparation, syncing his breathing with the dying star's thrum, counting the breaths until dawn.
Kuro stood apart, a silhouette carved from the mountain’s deepest shadow, pressed against the weeping obsidian of the sealed archway. The violet light pulsed overhead, a dying star’s lament, but it dared not touch him fully. It recoiled from the profound darkness gathering like a shroud around his corrupted arm, a living void that swallowed photons and hope alike. He pressed the grey, translucent flesh directly against the slick, freezing stone. Condensation beaded and froze instantly where corruption met rock, forming intricate, fractal patterns of rime. The stone itself wept slow, viscous tears of ice water that hissed faintly as they touched his unnatural skin, steaming before freezing again. The corruption had crawled further, past his elbow now, a necrotic tide spreading under his skin. It pulsed with its own sickly rhythm, a slow, deep thrum like a diseased heart buried deep within the mountain, resonating perfectly with the obsidian’s ancient, bone deep chill. The cold fire within the corruption flared in response, a trapped star burning in glacial ice.
His storm grey eyes weren’t just distant; they were
elsewhere
. Focused inward on a battlefield buried beneath layers of trauma and ice. Static crackled softly around the corrupted limb, a continuous, private conversation with the void, not a dialogue, but a desperate attempt at decryption, listening for patterns in the white noise of entropy.
“Volrag”
The name was a shard of ice lodged deep in his throat, threatening to pierce his resolve. It triggered a sensory onslaught, vivid and brutal:
The deafening, soul tearing
roar
of the Razorwind Blizzard during the Kaelen Pass Ambush. Not wind, but the scream of a planet being flayed. Beneath it, a sound that still froze his blood: a low, melodic
hum
, almost mechanical, emanating from the dark armour of the figure advancing through the whiteout.
Swirling snow so thick it was less a storm and more a solid wall of white agony. Flashes of dark obsidian armour, not Frostguard issue, sleeker, more predatory, glimpsed through the maelstrom. A figure turning with unnatural grace, untouched by the wind’s fury. Eyes like frozen mercury locking onto his through the chaos, not hostile, not even cruel.
Amused.
As if Kuro was a fascinating insect struggling in amber. Then the explosion of a void charge, the screams of his squad being torn apart…
Ozone from failing energy shields, the copper iron tang of fresh blood instantly freezing, and beneath it… a scent like cold, sterile metal and something vaguely floral, utterly alien and wrong, clinging to the memory of Volrag.
The jarring impact of the void shockwave that had thrown him into the crevasse, the burning cold as the ice closed over him, and the phantom sensation of those mercury eyes watching him fall, the amusement lingering like a brand.
“I’ve seen them before,”
he whispered, the static layering his voice like grinding. The memory wasn't just visual; it was a psychic scar, a cold knife twisted in his soul. Volrag wasn't just a name; it was the embodiment of the void’s indifferent cruelty, a hunter who savoured the chase.
The corruption pulsed stronger, responding to the surge of remembered terror and rage. The grey translucence seemed to
flow
under his skin, creeping towards his shoulder. The cold fire within it burned brighter, hotter, resonating with the obsidian’s chill until the stone beneath his palm grew almost painfully cold, leaching warmth from the air around it. Frost spread rapidly across the archway, intricate patterns blooming like deadly flowers.
This story has been stolen from NovelFire. If you read it on Amazon, please it
From the deeper shadows pooling near the crypt doorway, a single, deep pulse of dark energy resonated, Corvin’s void stone ring. But it wasn't just a pulse; it was a localized distortion. The violet light
bent
towards the shadowed figure, warping around him before being swallowed. Corvin’s distorted voice flowed out, colder than the void between stars, carrying the weight of absolute zero knowledge:
“Volrag is not a name. It is a resonance. A signature carved into the void’s fabric by a blade older than this mountain’s grief.”
A pause, heavy with implication.
“They hunt not for Nyxara’s frost, but for echoes of defiance. For anomalies… like a Star Breaker’s mark refusing to consume its host. Your struggle amuses them. Your corruption… interests them.”
The void stone pulsed again, a deep, unsettling thrum that vibrated in Kuro’s bones, making the cold fire in his arm flare in uncomfortable sympathy.
“They remember the one who fell… and crawled back out. They will be waiting.”
Kuro’s Internal battlefield
The Mark’s Whisper:
The corruption surged, the cold fire flaring as if excited by Corvin’s words. Images flashed behind Kuro’s eye: Volrag’s mercury gaze, not in the academy, but
here
, in the barracks shadows. The grey translucence offered a seductive thought:
Embrace the cold fire. Let it burn through the fear. Become the predator, not the prey. Volrag would not smile then.
The power whispered of oblivion, of freezing his terror solid, of meeting void with void.
Defiance’s Anchor:
He saw Shiro, kneeling by the hearth, polishing the bone knife, his face etched with pain and furious resolve. He felt the echo of their vow,
drag them down with us
. The contained heat of his own crimson furnace scar pulsed faintly beneath the grey translucence near his wrist, a counterpoint to the void’s chill.
Not predator. Weapon. Controlled. Precise. For Aki. For Kaya. For Elara
The Cost:
He felt the corruption’s advance, the creeping numbness past his elbow, the way the cold fire burned
through
his nerves, not just around them. How much longer before "Kuro" was just a memory riding a wave of hungry void? Would he even recognize Shiro when the grey reached his heart? The static rose in pitch, a scream of feedback in his mind.
Haruto, beside the map, kept his gaze on the parchment yet missed nothing: the grey rot crawling farther up Kuro’s arm, the air around him growing knife cold, the hush that followed every mention of the spire. In the margins of his mind he tallied, corruption quickens, cold deepens, memory stings. Thirty eight chances in a hundred the flaw bursts mid stroke. His hand settled on the Polaris dagger’s hilt; stillness was his verdict, hard as steel.
Mira, still recovering from her vision, gasped softly. Her fractured lens pulsed erratically as she looked towards Kuro and the archway.
“The shadow… it
breathes
,”
she whispered, clutching her crow.
“It breathes out cold… and breathes in…
recognition
.”
She shuddered, seeing not just Kuro, but the echo of Volrag’s predatory amusement superimposed over his struggling form.
Kuro slammed his corrupted palm flat against the obsidian.
CRACK.
A spiderweb of frost exploded outwards from the point of impact. The cold fire within flared violently, sending jagged shadows leaping up the archway, momentarily overwhelming the violet light. The static peaked in a deafening shriek inside his skull, then abruptly cut off, replaced by a terrifying, focused silence. He wrenched his gaze away from the stone, away from the memory of mercury eyes. His storm grey eye, when it lifted, held no fear, no amusement, only the absolute, glacial certainty of a man who has embraced the abyss and decided to spit in its face.
“Let them watch,”
Kuro stated, his voice stripped of static, colder than the void itself, carrying clearly through the barracks.
“Let them remember the fall.”
He pushed himself away from the archway, leaving a perfect, frost etched handprint on the weeping stone, the grey translucence within it still pulsing with captured cold fire.
“Tomorrow, we show them the climb.”
He turned, his movements precise, deliberate, turning his back on the void whispering from the archway and Corvin’s shadow. His corrupted arm hung heavy, a visible weapon, a contained threat. His gaze swept past the map, past Shiro, past Ryota, and locked onto the centre of the barracks floor.
Haruto had moved. While Kuro communed with the void at the archway, the fallen noble had cleared a section of frost rimed obsidian, transforming it into a grim altar. Upon it, resting in a cradle of non reflective metal that seemed to drink the violet light, sat the
void ice sphere
.
Kuro’s storm grey eyes fixed on it. The sphere wasn't just dark; it was an
absence
. A puncture in reality. It devoured the light, the hope, the very air around it, creating a miniature event horizon of pure negation. As Kuro looked at it, the cold fire deep within his corrupted arm
ERUPTED
. Not in pain, but in terrifying, resonant
recognition
. It flared blindingly bright beneath the grey translucence, casting the bones and veins within his arm into stark, horrifying relief for a split second. The sphere itself seemed to
react
. The swirling grey translucence within its depths pulsed, a dark, answering heartbeat.
A wave of pure, instinctual revulsion washed over Kuro, followed by a surge of dark, icy understanding that bypassed thought.
It’s the same. The sphere… it’s a seed of the void. Like the Star Breaker’s touch. Like… me.
The realization was a shock of liquid nitrogen to his soul.
Before he could process it, Juro stepped forward, his flint chip eyes narrowed not at Kuro, but at the sphere. He held his dagger loosely. With a grunt born of morbid necessity, not curiosity, he tapped the very tip of the blade against the swirling surface.
There was no
clink
, no resistance.
The dagger’s tip simply…
VANISHED
.
Sucked into the absolute shadow with an almost imperceptible, yet soul chilling
schlorpppp
sound.
Juro jerked his hand back, staring at the blunted end of his dagger, now gleaming with a layer of instant, unnatural frost that crawled up the steel like hungry mold. He looked up, his gaze finding Kuro’s across the makeshift altar, his voice a gravel grind of brutal truth in the sudden, absolute silence:
“Touch it wrong,”
Juro growled, holding up the maimed blade, frost dripping from its end,
“and it eats your fucking soul before you feel the frost.”
His eyes, hard as the mountain itself, locked onto Kuro’s, seeing the fading echo of the cold fire flare.
“Touch it right… and Volrag’s frost will remember the void’s kiss.”
A grim, almost feral twist touched his lips.
“Permanently. Think you can dance with that, Princeling?”
V2: C36: Show Them the Climb
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