The sky cracked.
It didn’t break; it only cracked like a mirror hit with a hamr, jagged lines spreading through the heavens as if even the sky couldn’t bear witness to what was happening below.
The core on Malik’s chest scread.
Not a sound anyone could hear with their ears—no, it shrieked in light. White blinding light. Flaring like the birth of a star and tearing across the battlefield, waking the dying, silencing the panicked, and forcing everyone into further stillness.
Then the pressure shifted.
And it wasn’t subtle.
It was like soone flipped the world upside down.
The snow around Malik began to swim upwards.
The camp’s air got thick—thicker than before.
Malik’s body began to pulse with Aether.
And this pulse was not just a flash.
It was a long, dragging thump.
A heartbeat that spread in every direction, splitting the ground beneath him.
His long hair lifted slowly, weightless. His skin glowed faintly—not with his usual warmth, but with absolute cold.
Lines of frost blood across his body. Carved into his skin. Sharp paths snaking over his arms, across his chest, his back, and up his neck—veins of crystal ice.
His eyes were dim no longer.
But they didn’t return to their usual glow.
No, they went beyond that; they burned.
One was blue, the other gold.
They clashed once more.
Instantly, his body jerked—like sothing inside him scread in protest.
His Divine Essence, Jahannam, kicked back, clawing at his insides.
It didn’t want this.
It shouldn’t want this.
It despised the ice. Rejected it.
His core that he’d cultivated with sweat, pain, and madness, thrashed.
All the cold that ca into its ho was pushed away.
But still, Malik... didn’t stop.
He never even clenched his jaw.
His focus was so singular that the world no longer existed for him.
More. More. More. He pulled more Aether in. And more.
His body tightened, muscles seizing, joints locking up.
His warmth fled entirely, replaced with sothing colder than death.
It was like his soul had cracked in half.
More of his skin started to shimr and split.
No blood left him, only steam, frost, gold, and blue Aether.
It leaked from everywhere.
It felt like too much.
It was too much.
Even a body like his was too small for the thing he was trying to beco.
But, but, but... BUT! He didn’t let go.
Couldn’t.
He needed to do this.
The Aether continued to flood him, and his mind cracked like the sky above.
He was beyond exhaustion now. Far, far, astronomically beyond that. He didn’t know where pain ended and numbness began anymore. His mind felt like it had been ground down to sothing smaller than even a Goddamn atom.
His thoughts weren’t even thoughts anymore—just instincts trapped in silence.
But, of course, and always, he pushed.
More. More. More. More. More. More.
Because this wasn’t about strength.
This wasn’t about courage.
No.
He returned to what he knew best.
Sothing that he learned early on.
Pure, weaponized insanity.
A kind of madness that forgot what pain and fear even were.
A madness that ca from dying an unfathomable number of tis and surviving anyway.
This was the kind of insanity that made him shove a flaming monkey’s core into his body when he was barely of age.
Malik used what he learned from that day, the day of his "victory," now.
He rembered the rhythm, the intervals, and the flow of it.
But, obviously, this was different.
This was bigger.
A lot bigger.
This Aether core and that red one were entirely different ranks.
So he adjusted.
He started absorbing in even tighter incrents.
Four at each pull of Aether didn’t work. It was too crude.
So he went deeper. Smaller bursts. Faster releases.
He didn’t count.
He couldn’t count.
It wasn’t numbers anymore, at least none that he could understand.
Perhaps because it was more of a feeling than a thought.
Sothing more primal, like the rhythm of a storm.
He kept at it.
Kept drawing it in.
And...
"..."
Silence.
No whine resounded.
No sign of an Aether Core implosion.
Just raw, elental chaos echoing through his bones.
Malik had succeeded; he didn’t enter a death loop.
At least not yet.
That was the first part done.
Now ca the harder part... as incomprehensible as that was.
Because his core, emptied of its original fire, was a frozen battlefield now.
And he was losing.
The cold invaded everything.
His blood, his breath, his thoughts.
The warmth inside him was no more.
Yet, instead of fighting that cold, attempting to reclaim himself, Malik did sothing no sane person would do.
He let it in.
Let it claim him.
Let his body die.
His being went ice cold—beyond death.
He stopped breathing.
His heart stopped.
Ti slowed.
The camp gasped—so fell to their knees, thinking he was gone.
But then—
THUMP.
It reversed.
Suddenly, just before the cold took everything, a fire sparked.
Not a simple fla, a ’furnace,’ no, it was more, a piece of Jahannam.
The last bit of his Aether—the heat that once lived in him—snapped back.
Alongside it ca his heartbeat, louder than ever.
And when it did?
It didn’t fight the cold.
It trapped it, seized it like a vice.
The heat surrounded the cold, crushed it down, and compressed it tighter and tighter and tighter—until it beca a speck.
A frozen star in the middle of Hell.
And slowly...
Ever so slowly...
He began to let it out.
Bit by bit.
Letting the cold breathe. Letting it stretch. Letting it adjust to its new prison.
Not to destroy it.
To rge it.
Ice and fire.
Chaos and control.
Pain and purpose.
Thump...
Thump...
Thump...
...It worked.
The clashing stopped.
It stabilized. Synced with cold.
There was no more resistance.
No more screaming Aether.
Just silence and a flow—steady, clean, pure.
A flow of Aether that filled his core to the brim.
Malik’s eyes opened, and they widened—just a little.
Not from surprise, but from the simple, quiet knowing...
’I did it.’
It was done.
He had done it.
He had done the impossible once more.
It further reinforced a truth only spoken about him.
The word impossible had lost its aning entirely.
Malik could feel it—power surging through him, the cold of the Ṭāghiya’s very Cursed Essence rged with his own.
The power that surged through him now wasn’t his old fire or the raw cold of the ice core.
It was sothing new.
A stillness that hurt but thrilled.
It was a calm that promised violence.
The camp around him felt it too.
Ten days of death, blood, and fear—
Now they stood before a monster.
A real one...
A GREAT DEMON.
Taking a breath, Malik stood up.
And the world could do nothing but watch.
Watch as he walked without saying a word.
Without raising his hand, calling for the cohort, giving a speech, or even nodding as he usually did.
He just kept walking.
Past his people.
Out of the camp.
Toward the enemy tide.
Toward the thousand tis their number.
Toward the fools who dared to think he was soone they could stand up against.
And the rest?
The ones that could move, at least?
They watched.
The whole world kept watching.
For now ca the slaughter.
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