The old man felt it a fraction of a second too late, that sudden, unnatural plunge in temperature. In a single breath the air turned sharp as glass, and every inhale started burning his lungs from the inside. Before, it had been cold. Now it was glacial in a way that had nothing to do with weather or seasons.
Only raw, brutal magic.
He saw the girl's heels flare with an intense blue light, so bright it briefly flashed his vision white. Natalia smiled, calm and faintly satisfied, then slamd her right heel into the ground.
There was no boom.
There was an eruption.
A wave of cold detonated around her, blasting outward in every direction at a speed the old man couldn't even judge, let alone stop. Before his body could react, before his muscles could even receive the command to move, the entire area within two hundred ters froze solid.
The asphalt beneath his feet iced over in an instant, a thin layer thickening imdiately, cracking and swelling as it crawled up curbs, cars, streetlights, and building walls. A normal city street beca a single, gleaming mass of ice, everything arrested in one dead fra.
His legs locked.
Ice clamped around them from the ankles up, crushing tight, forcing itself into every seam of his boots, biting into fabric. The cold was so intense that numbness turned into pain, and pain turned into sothing worse, like the temperature itself was trying to rip the life out of him.
His breath beca clouds of vapor that froze midair and fell as tiny crystals. Around them, everything was white and blue and still, coated in ice so clean and smooth it looked less like a battlefield and more like a sculpture.
The street was gone.
In its place stretched an icy wasteland, silent, motionless, so dead even echoes seed to freeze before they could travel. And the only thing moving was Natalia, standing at the center of it all, calm and unbothered, as if freezing an entire city block was the most natural thing in the world.
The temperature dropped again.
So far that even the zombie corpses lying in the street began to crack, frozen tissue crumbling softly under the pressure of the deepening frost. The old man stared down, eyes wide, trapped up to the knees.
He looked at his cane, just monts ago a worn piece of wood, and now it was completely crusted in ice, more like a crude frozen club than the tool he'd leaned on for days. He clenched his teeth as the cold started pushing into his body in a way that had nothing to do with discomfort.
This was danger.
His core temperature was falling fast. Every breath beca shallower. Heavier.
He bit his lip until he tasted blood and made a decision on instinct, because standing still ant only one thing. He raised the cane, about to smash down with everything he had, to break the ice and free his legs…
A cold voice cut in.
"I wouldn't do that," Natalia said, walking toward him. Each step made a dry, brittle click as her ice stilettos t the frozen surface. "Unless you want your legs to turn into ice dust."
The old man froze, this ti not just physically.
She stopped just a few steps away, looking down at him without emotion, like she was explaining sothing obvious.
"This isn't normal ice," she added calmly. "It's reinforced with mana. If you try to break it with brute force, go ahead… but you'd better be ready for your legs to go with it."
It took a mont for the words to land.
And when they did, his eyes widened, because he suddenly realized he'd been cornered into a trap with no good exits. For the first ti in a long ti, he felt what it was like to be checked.
He didn't know what to do.
He didn't even fully understand what he was facing.
He stared at the frozen wasteland around them, trying to comprehend what kind of ability could lock down two hundred ters into a solid block of ice in a single stomp, and what kind of mana cost sothing like that would take.
And that was the problem.
It wasn't her ability.
It was a Magic-class artifact.
Items with ridiculous, battle-warping abilities that could override raw stats and flip a fight instantly. Worse, so of them didn't require mana or resources at all to activate, which was practically the system cheating. It ant a powerful evolver with high stats could still lose to soone weaker if the weaker one had the right gear.
And Natalia had the right gear.
She stepped closer. In the next mont, a weapon began forming in her hand, ice thickening, shaping, sharpening into a long, narrow sword. Frost radiated from its edge so intensely the air around the blade crackled softly.
She pressed the ice sword against his throat.
"So," she asked lightly, leaning in just a little, a faint smile on her lips. "Are you more willing to talk now?"
He felt his hair stiffening as frost caught on it, strands clumping together under ice. His clothes turned white in seconds, crusted in glittering crystals that creaked with even the slightest movent. His jaw started trembling in a way he couldn't fully control anymore.
The cold was so deep it didn't just get under his skin.
It felt like it was drilling straight into bone.
If he'd been an ordinary man, soone from before the apocalypse, soone without stats, without mana, without Essence Record, he would've frozen to death in under ten seconds in an area like this. He would've dropped before he even understood what was happening.
But he was still standing, barely, because his Vitality had long since passed seventy points, seven tis higher than an average human's.
Even though each second made it harder.
He looked at the girl in front of him, at the ice sword held to his throat, feeling the cold slowly creep from the blade into his skin like it wanted to claim him whole. Finally, he twisted his mouth into a crooked smile, more helpless than amused.
"Maybe…" he rasped.
Natalia nodded with a small, almost polite smile.
The old man let out a breath of relief, thinking for a mont it ant the torture would end…
But the ice didn't loosen. It didn't fade. It didn't retreat.
As the seconds passed, he realized she had no intention of turning it off.
"Since we're talking," Natalia said calmly, "answer one thing. What happened that made you co at from the start, screaming that I stole sothing from you?"
Despite how intense the fight had been, Natalia had noticed his intent from the beginning. For all his rage, he hadn't tried to kill her. Even his first strike proved it, he'd hit her torso instead of aiming for her neck or head.
So even now, she wanted to hear it. She wanted to understand what could've pushed him into this kind of fury.
Inside, the old man cursed. Irritation surged, because she wasn't only keeping him frozen, she was still acting like she had no idea what he ant.
But he had no choice.
He swallowed and started speaking, and with every sentence the anger in his voice sharpened.
"I killed a mutated mole. Level twenty-three," he said, eyes flaring with that old fire. "A nasty bastard. It wasn't a normal fight, it was life or death. I barely put it down."
His teeth clenched, like he was back there again.
"And as if that wasn't enough, right after that I had to finish off a few smaller ones, because they jumped when I could barely stand."
He glared at Natalia with growing hatred.
"And while I was dealing with that filth, soone was waiting. Hiding. And while I was fighting, you took my loot. Two Brown Boxes. And a skill scroll that dropped from that mole."
His voice rose.
"I didn't even notice you right away. Near the end, I saw a blue-haired girl running over the buildings out of the corner of my eye. And now you want to tell that was a coincidence?"
He spat onto the ice, his saliva freezing almost instantly.
"That was a damn life-or-death fight. I even had to sacrifice my favorite cane," he added, lifting the ice-crusted wood. "It snapped. And now I'm stuck fighting with this garbage."
The more he talked, the more the hatred built, because he could feel it again: how close he'd been to dying, how much he'd bled for that victory, and how soone who hadn't fought at all could just take the reward he'd earned with his life.
Natalia listened to the end without interrupting once. Her face stayed calm, almost indifferent, but sothing like understanding flickered in her eyes.
Now she had a rough picture of what had happened.
She looked at him for a long mont. Then the ice sword in her hand began to break apart, first hairline cracks running along the blade, then hundreds of glittering fragnts scattering into the air and falling onto the frozen ground like powdered glass.
Only cold and silence remained.
The old man stared at her with open, naked hatred, still reliving the fight, the loss, the fury, the injustice…
Natalia took a step closer, looking down at him.
"I think you've got sothing wrong," she said flatly, a clear note of contempt slipping into her voice.
She tilted her head, studying him like he wasn't an opponent so much as sothing lower, sothing that had wandered into her path by mistake.
"You really think soone like would have to sneak around and steal like so pathetic rat," she continued, "just to get a miserable Brown Box or a skill scroll?"
Her lips lifted into a cold, mocking smile.
"If I wanted that loot, I'd take it," she said without a shred of doubt.
She leaned in slightly, and the cold around them seed to thicken again.
"Soone like doesn't have to stoop that low," she said slowly, emphasizing every word. "I don't steal scraps after soone else's fight. I don't live off crumbs. I don't pick up what falls out of soone's pocket when they're weak."
She straightened, absolute confidence in her gaze.
"If I want sothing," Natalia said, "the world adjusts itself to that."
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