Footsteps approached through the half-melted snow. Careful. A crunch, then a pause. Another step. Then silence.

Akiko didn't lift her head.

Her breath fogged faintly in the air. Not from exertion now, just from whatever still simmered inside her. Her fingers flexed weakly in the frozen grit. Frost-limned claws long since faded. She didn't know how long she'd lain there.

Raya's voice came first. Soft. "Akiko?"

A shape crouched beside her. A gloved hand hovered just shy of her shoulder, unsure if it should touch.

"You okay?" Skadi asked, from somewhere behind.

Akiko stared upward. The pale sky above Zephara was blank. Featureless. Her tongue was dry. Her throat felt full of iron.

"Fine," she said.

Raya didn't look like she believed it. She didn't say so, but Akiko felt it in the way her hand finally settled, warm and grounding on the shoulder of a suit that no longer felt like armor.

"You stopped moving," Raya said. "I thought—"

"I didn't lose," Akiko whispered. Then, quieter: "Not really."

Raya looked at her sideways. "That doesn't sound like a win either."

Akiko sat up slowly. Her body moved like it belonged to someone else. Her spine ached. Her fingers ached. Everything ached. And beneath it, deeper than muscle or bone, something hummed. Distant. Not entirely hers.

She didn't meet their eyes.

Takuto's voice threaded through her mind.

Analysis ongoing.

Foreign mana: unstable presence within host core.

Origin signature: serpentine apex threat, ice-aligned.

Cognitive firewall deployment: 61% complete.

Preliminary assessment: containment possible.

Long-term integration risk: high.

Akiko swallowed hard.

"What happened to you?" Skadi asked. "You were—"

"I don't want to talk about it."

The silence that followed stretched. Taut, like something was being held together with brittle wire and frayed nerves.

Raya sat beside her. Close. Not touching, but just waiting.

Akiko didn't move.

Somewhere deep within, Takuto finished erecting another layer of his invisible wall. She felt it like a breath she hadn't taken. Pressure behind her eyes, coiling tight around the core of her being.

Another line of data slid into place.

Identity cohesion: marginal.

Recommend limiting future exposure to unshielded apex cores.

No kidding.

She didn't need a readout to know that. She could feel it. Her name, her selfhood. Like a shard of warmth buried beneath someone else's instincts.

Akiko closed her eyes and let the chill seep in again. Let the frost bite the edges of her thoughts.

No one rushed her. Not Skadi. Not Raya. They just waited, and that patience felt like grace.

She tried to sit up and hissed through her teeth as pain lanced through her leg.

Looking down, she saw the jagged remains of the ice-spike still embedded in her shin, a sheen of frost crusted around the wound.

"Guess that wasn't just a scratch," she muttered.

Raya was already reaching for it, her expression tightening. "Hold still."

A golden glow shimmered in her palm as she pressed it gently to the injury, the frost sizzling away. Warmth flooded Akiko's leg, and the pain ebbed, dulled first by magic and then by the soft press of Raya's hand as she guided the healing deeper.

"You shouldn't have been walking on that," Raya murmured, voice caught somewhere between reprimand and relief. "Gods, Akiko, you didn't even flinch."

"Guess I'm just built different," Akiko whispered, eyes fluttering. "But… I'm glad you're here."

Eventually, she pushed herself upright.

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The snow crunched beneath her knees. Her joints didn't protest the way they should have. She wasn't sure if that comfort frightened her more than the fight itself.

She stood. And then, slowly, they began to walk.

The wind picked up by the time they reached the ridgeline.

Akiko climbed in silence, each step crunching through shallow snow crusted over fractured stone. Her legs didn't shake, though they should have. Her arms didn't ache, though the claws, those shards of ice that had replaced her fire, had only just faded.

She shouldn't feel strong. Not with her core dimmed. Not with her mana reserves scraping bottom.

And yet, her body moved like it remembered something she hadn't learned. Her balance was sharper. Her stride longer. The cold didn't bite quite as deep.

There was strength behind her limbs that hadn't been there before.

Unasked for. Untrusted.

Takuto was working on the problem, but it would take time.

Ahead, the mining rig loomed. What once had been a worksite etched into the ice, now repurposed into something darker. Karn's sanctum. No longer industrial. No longer pragmatic.

A fortress of purpose.

Angular supports rose like frozen ribs from the slope. Fractured domes and melted comms towers jutted from its back, bent into spires. Orange work-lights blinked around the exterior. Remnants of its old function. But now they pulsed in unsettling rhythms, a heartbeat in metal and frost.

Akiko stopped halfway up the slope and rested a hand against the frozen rail of an old cable track. Her glove stuck for a second before releasing.

She stared down at her palm. No glow. No fire. No light. And yet her fingers clenched effortlessly.

A hand brushed her elbow.

Raya didn't say anything. Just touched her gently, with that familiar steadiness that cut through the white noise buzzing in Akiko's skull. A warmth that didn't ask for explanations.

Akiko exhaled and leaned slightly toward her. Just enough. Just so she could feel it. Someone real, someone solid.

"I'm with you," Raya murmured. "Wherever this goes."

Akiko nodded. She didn't say thank you. She didn't need to.

The fortress waited, rimed in ice, humming with power.

Akiko stepped forward, and didn't flinch when her footsteps echoed heavier than they should have. She didn't let herself look at her hand again.

Raya was beside her. That was enough.

The air changed the moment they crossed the threshold.

Mana clung to the walls like mist, coiling in thin currents along the steel supports and flickering hazard lights. It buzzed faintly against Akiko's skin, a static hum she felt in her teeth more than her ears.

Raya slowed beside her. "I don't like this," she murmured. Her eyes darted to the walls, to the faint gleam of script-work etched into old industrial panels. "The mana here… it's wrong."

Skadi shivered. "My father used to work this rig. I remember visiting once. It didn't feel like this, like something hollowed it out."

They passed through a series of steel corridors, lit only by the spill of blue-white emergency lighting and the pulse of distant machinery.

What had once been a mining rig was something else now. Less facility, more sanctum. Metal veins crisscrossed the walls, pulsing faintly like capillaries. The hiss of hydraulics had a rhythm to it. Like breath.

Then they reached the inner chamber.

The door slid open with a reluctant groan. The room beyond was circular, vaulted, like the heart of a cathedral. Heavy cables and arcane rigging descended from the ceiling, feeding into consoles that blinked with outdated Haven interfaces, half-subsumed by crusted ice and spiraling runes.

At the center of the room stood a tank.

It was tall, cylindrical, its glass surface rimed with frost and covered in condensation trails. Pale blue light glowed from within, casting soft ripples across the walls.

And floating inside, was Yrsa. Or what was left of her.

Akiko stopped cold. Skadi made a sound behind her, a ragged breath that wasn't quite a scream.

Yrsa's body was suspended, her limbs drifting, hair unfurled like ink in water. Her eyes were closed. Her expression peaceful. Too peaceful.

And her form…

It wasn't holding together.

Flakes of her skin peeled away like ash, dissolving into the fluid in soft trails of icy mana. Her limbs were thinner than they should have been, blurring at the edges. Dissolving. Bit by bit, she was becoming the water around her. Or the mana within it. Or both.

A dream turning back into ether.

"She's still alive," Skadi whispered. Her voice cracked on the words. "She has to be."

She lurched forward, but Akiko's arm shot out, catching her hard across the chest.

"Wait," Akiko hissed, eyes snapping toward the raised platform across the chamber.

Karn stood there. Poised. Calculated. His robes hung loose but clean. His hands moved with surgical precision as he gestured toward the tank, like an artist admiring his final stroke.

Fenrik stood opposite him, jaw tight, eyes red-rimmed. His fists trembled at his sides.

"I did what you asked," he said, voice raw. "I gave you what you needed. You said you could fix her."

Skadi's voice was ice cutting through the air. "You said you'd bring her back. You told me to stay behind so you could save her. And now you're just standing there. With him."

Fenrik's shoulders hunched as if the words physically struck him. He didn't meet her gaze.

"I tried," he said. "But look at her, it's already too late. I thought if I worked with him, gave him time, resources, he could undo it. He promised—"

Akiko's eyes narrowed. "And you believed that?"

"I had to believe something!" Fenrik snapped, the edge of his fury cracking beneath something deeper. Guilt, perhaps. "He's done things no one else can. If anyone could bring her back…"

"She's not coming back," Skadi said, stepping forward, her voice brittle and fierce. "You just couldn't face it."

Karn's voice slid into the silence like the edge of a scalpel.

"She is not gone," he said, spreading his arms as if unveiling a masterpiece. "Not entirely. Her resonance persists. Dispersed, but intact."

He approached the tank, gaze clinical, unmoved.

"Her body is failing, yes. That much is regrettable. But the experiment is far from lost."

He turned toward Skadi.

"A more stable frame might preserve the effect. With a proper host: young, genetically proximate, there's a real possibility of successful transfer."

The implication hung in the air.

Skadi recoiled a half-step.

Akiko stepped in front of her, claws coalescing with foxfire flickering unsteadily.

Fenrik's expression curdled.

"You said you could save her," he said, voice low. Dangerous. "That's why I backed off. Why I let you—"

"I never said she would return as she was," Karn said, gaze still locked on Skadi. "Only that her contribution would be meaningful."

"That's my mother," Fenrik snarled.

"No," Karn said calmly. "That's your failure to accept change."

Fenrik moved. His sidearm cleared its holster in a breath, but Karn's hand moved faster. A flicker of pressure lashed out like a ripple through the air, and Fenrik was flung backwards across the chamber.

He hit the wall with a sickening crunch and collapsed, motionless. His pistol clattered and spun on the ground.

Skadi gasped, her whole frame locking tight.

Akiko shifted, planting herself between them.

"Stay back," she hissed.

Karn's expression flickered from mild annoyance to something sharper. Amusement. Curiosity.

"Well," he mused, voice smooth as glass. "The anomaly herself, the one who cracked the sky open and sparked the system to life. There is still time. Perhaps we could make an accommodation, for the mother's life. One life to preserve another. It is a simple trade."

Akiko's claws flexed. Cold bit her skin from within.

"You want a trade?" she said. "Try me."

Karn smiled faintly. "So be it."

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