Chapter 298: The Silence
The explosion of the stasis pods didn’t result in fire. It resulted in winter.
A shockwave of absolute cold expanded from the epicenter, freezing the swirling debris of glass and tal in mid-air. For a second, the dical bay looked like a diorama of a disaster, suspended in ti by a layer of ri ice.
Then, gravity returned.
Tinkle.
The frozen debris fell to the floor, shattering into millions of glittering dust motes.
I lay pressed against the floor tiles, my breath misting in front of my face. The cold was biting, far more intense than the ambient blizzard outside. This wasn’t weather. This was the exhalation of a god.
"Leon," I whispered, my teeth chattering. "Get up."
Leon pushed himself up from where he had tackled . His armor was coated in a layer of white frost.
"Did... did it work?" Leon stamred, looking toward the center of the room.
The mist cleared slowly.
Standing amidst the wreckage of the dical equipnt were two figures.
On the right, Selena was crouched low, her form obscured by a thicket of pulsating crimson vines that had erupted from the floor plates. She was growling low in her throat, a sound that vibrated through the tal hull.
On the left stood Maria.
She wasn’t crouching. She wasn’t shaking. She stood perfectly upright, her posture rigid, her arms hanging loosely by her sides.
The Life Dew had done its work. The necrotic grey of the frostbite was gone. Her skin was now a pale, flawless alabaster, seemingly lit from within by a faint, blue luminescence. Her hair, once a warm honey-blonde, had been bleached by the mana overload into a stark, snowy white.
But it was the silence that terrified .
She wasn’t breathing. Her chest didn’t rise and fall. There was no puff of steam from her lips.
"Maria?" Leon took a tentative step forward, lowering his shield. "Maria, can you hear ?"
She turned her head slowly. The movent was smooth, hydraulic, lacking the micro-jitters of human muscle.
She looked at Leon.
I gasped.
Her eyes.
They used to be a sparkling, emotional blue. Now, they were matte. Flat. Like two discs of blue slate painted onto a statue. There was no shine, no reflection of the light, no fear.
There was only calculation.
[System Scan]
[Target: Maria Frostheart]
[Race: Human ]
[Rank: B (Pseudo-Spirit)]
[State: Absolute Zero]
"Vitals..." Maria spoke. Her voice was crystal clear, devoid of inflection. It sounded like wind chis made of ice. "Stable. Core temperature optimized. Mana capacity expanded by 300%."
She looked down at her hands. The veins beneath her skin weren’t blue with blood; they were glowing with liquid gold—the tabolized Life Dew.
"The Curse is... integrated," she stated.
"Maria!" Leon rushed forward, tears welling in his eyes. He reached out to grab her shoulders. "You’re alive! We thought we lost you! We went to the Roots, and—"
"Leon. Stop."
I tried to warn him, but he was too relieved to listen. His gauntleted hands touched her shoulders.
HISSS.
Steam erupted instantly.
"Gah!" Leon recoiled, dropping his shield. He looked at his gloves. The thick leather palms had frozen instantly and shattered, leaving his fingers red and blistered.
"Do not touch," Maria said calmly. "Thermal regulation is currently manual. I will burn you."
She didn’t apologize. She didn’t look concerned. She simply stated a fact.
Leon stared at his hands, then at her face. The joy in his expression curdled into confusion. "Maria... what’s wrong? You’re acting... weird."
Maria ignored him. She turned her head toward the ceiling.
Above us, the hull breach caused by General Vargr’s earlier attack was still open. The blizzard was howling through the three massive claw marks, dumping snow into the carriage.
WOOOOOSH.
The wind scread.
Maria tilted her head. She looked at the hole.
She didn’t raise her hand. She didn’t chant a spell. She didn’t channel mana through a staff.
She just looked.
SNAP.
The sound was singular and deafening, like a gunshot.
The air inside the claw marks didn’t just freeze; it crystallized. In a microsecond, the howling wind was silenced. A thick, transparent plug of diamond-hard ice ford perfectly within the breach, sealing the hull. It wasn’t rough ice. It was smooth, faceted, and harder than the steel surrounding it.
The carriage beca dead silent again.
I pulled myself into a sitting position, clutching my ribs.
"Zero cast ti," I whispered to myself. "No somatic components. She’s not casting ice magic anymore. She is ice."
The Life Dew hadn’t just cured her. It had fused her soul with her affinity. She was no longer a Mage. She was an Elental in human skin.
Maria turned back to us. Her matte blue eyes swept over my battered form, then Leon’s burns.
"Situation report, Michael," she commanded.
"We are under siege," I said, forcing my voice to be as clinical as hers. "General Vargr. A-Rank Beastmaster. He has an army of approximately three hundred Frost Wolves and Armored Ursas surrounding the train. We have zero mana engine power. We are stranded."
Maria processed this. She didn’t blink.
"A-Rank," she repeated. "Acceptable target."
She walked past Leon, her boots making no sound on the tal floor. She stopped at the frosted window and placed a hand against the glass.
Outside, the ice on the window cleared instantly, rearranging itself to give her a perfect view.
"He is waiting," Maria observed.
"He’s playing with his food," I corrected. "He thinks we’re helpless."
"Incorrect assessnt," Maria said.
Suddenly, a low growl echoed from the other side of the room.
We all turned.
Selena was still crouching on the floor, hidden within the cage of crimson vines. But now, the vines were moving. They were retracting, slithering back into her skin.
She stood up slowly. Her movents were jerky, feral. Unlike Maria’s icy perfection, Selena looked wild. Her hair was a tangled ss of brown and red. Her fingernails had elongated into three-inch talons that dripped with a dark, viscous fluid.
She sniffed the air.
"Mate..." Selena hissed. Her voice was guttural, unrecognizable.
She looked at Leon. Her eyes were wide, the pupils vertical slits.
"Mate... hurt?"
She saw the burns on Leon’s fingers.
A low, vibrating snarl built in her chest. The air around her turned red, slling of iron and wet earth.
"Selena?" Leon asked, his voice trembling. "Are you... are you okay too?"
Selena didn’t answer. She looked up at the ceiling, at the ice plug Maria had created. She looked through it, sensing the presence above.
"Wolf," Selena spat. "Bad wolf."
I struggled to my feet, leaning against a dical cabinet.
"We have a problem," I muttered. "One is a robot, the other is a beast. The cure worked too well."
"Michael!" Eric’s voice ca from the hallway door. He poked his head in, his face pale. "What is happening? The temperature gauge is going crazy! And the monsters outside... they stopped howling."
"They didn’t stop," I said, drawing the silver dagger I had retrieved. "They’re bracing."
As if on cue, a massive weight slamd onto the roof of the train.
The entire carriage groaned. The steel fra buckled.
General Vargr had jumped down from the ridge. He was standing directly on top of us.
"OPEN UP."
His voice bood through the tal, vibrating in our teeth.
Maria looked up. Her expression didn’t change.
"Hostile entity detected on hull," she stated. "Initiating defense protocol."
"Wait!" I shouted. "Don’t engage alone! He’s A-Rank!"
Maria didn’t listen. She raised her hand toward the ceiling.
But Vargr was faster. And he was tired of waiting.
SCREEEEEEECH.
The sound of tearing tal was agonizing.
Huge, red-glowing claws—manifestations of Vargr’s aura—punched through the roof of the carriage, bypassing Maria’s ice seal entirely. He didn’t just poke a hole this ti.
He grabbed the edges of the breach and pulled.
The roof of the dical bay peeled back like the skin of an orange.
Daylight—grey and snowy—flooded the room.
And looking down at us, frad by the torn steel and the swirling blizzard, was the Beastmaster. He grinned, his yellow eyes locking onto the two awakened girls.
"Fresh at," Vargr laughed.
He leaped down.
(To be Continued)
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