The Sovereign-V2: C38: The Road to Ninety Seven Heart Beats

The Sovereign-V2: C38: The Road to Ninety Seven Heart Beats

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.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, the violation.
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.
Ninety Seven.
The ninety seven heartbeats have begun. The killing floor awaits. The next step could trigger annihilation or be their salvation.

.
!
V2: C38: The Road to Ninety Seven Heart Beats