The central elevator of the Volkov Citadel was a cathedral of glass and steel, suspended over a chasm that breathed out air so cold it felt like liquid nitrogen. Standing before the doors was Lyra Volkov. Unlike her father, who radiated the raw power of a blizzard, Lyra was unnervingly still. Her skin was a translucent, porcelain white, and her eyes were the color of a frozen lake at twilight.
[TARGET: LYRA VOLKOV]
[RANK: 7 (ELITE) - NEURAL CRYOMANCER]
[DANGER LEVEL: CRITICAL]
"You always were the sentimental one, Elara," Lyra said, her voice a soft, melodic chime that seemed to resonate directly inside Kenji's skull. "Bringing a Scrapsmith into our sanctum? Father is furious, but I… I am merely disappointed."
"Step aside, Lyra," Elara said, her hand tightening on Kenji's arm. The tether between them pulsed a warning blue. "You know what the Central Authority is doing. They aren't just policing the world; they're petrifying it."
"Order is a form of beauty, little sister," Lyra replied. She raised a slender hand, and the air didn't freeze it stilled.
Kenji felt a sudden, terrifying lethargy. His thoughts, usually a roaring engine of scrap-logic and tactical calculation, began to slow. It felt like his brain was being wrapped in wet, freezing silk.
[WARNING: NEURAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED]
[COGNITIVE PROCESSING SPEED: -40%]
"She's not attacking our bodies," Mateo gasped, clutching his head. "She's freezing our synapses!"
"Close your eyes!" Kenji ordered, his voice sluggish. He tapped into the Abyssal Heart, trying to use the Void to "eat" the neural interference. But the Void was a hunger, not a shield; it only made him more susceptible to the cold emptiness Lyra was projecting.
Lyra smiled, a thin, cruel expression. "The Scrapsmith tries to consume the Void? How ambitious. But your mind is still human, Kenji Tanaka. And humans are made of electrical impulses. What happens when those impulses lose their heat?"
She flicked her fingers, and a wave of invisible energy washed over the group.
Bjorn fell to one knee, his eyes glazing over. Zola's gauntlets clattered to the floor as her grip failed. Even Elara staggered, her Frost Weaver core unable to counteract a magic that targeted the nerves rather than the atmosphere.
Kenji felt the "Neural Frost" reaching for his core the center of his being. It was looking for the sparks of his memories, the heat of his ambition, to extinguish them.
No.
Kenji didn't fight the cold. He used the Absolute Defense scrap in a way he had never tried. He didn't project it outward. He projected it inward, coating his own nervous system in a micro-thin layer of repulsion scrap.
[Scrapsmith: Synaptic Shielding]
The world snapped back into focus. The silk around his brain shattered.
"Mateo! Wide-frequency noise! Now!" Kenji roared.
Mateo, shaking off the lethargy, unleashed a [Sonic Burst: Neural Overload]. It wasn't a sound, but a chaotic vibration that disrupted the delicate frequencies of Lyra's Neural Frost.
Lyra flinched, her concentration breaking. The invisible weight on the team lifted.
"You've improved, Scrapsmith," Lyra hissed, her lake-colored eyes darkening. "But you're still tethered to her."
She lunged, not at Kenji, but at Elara. She knew that if she broke the tethering Frost Weaver, Kenji's core would be exposed to the Citadel's Rank 8 scanners, and Viktor would be upon them in seconds.
Kenji engaged [Void Step].
He appeared between them, his hand glowing with the violet-black energy of the Abyssal Heart. He caught Lyra's wrist. The moment they touched, the Neural Frost surged through his arm like a million needles of ice.
"You want to freeze a mind?" Kenji whispered, his violet eyes locking onto hers. "Try freezing the Void."
He didn't attack her body. He used the Abyssal Heart to pull her consciousness into the "hollow" of his core. For a split second, Lyra Volkov didn't see the elevator or her sister. She saw the infinite, starving emptiness of the Sunken Citadel. She felt the crushing pressure of a thousand years of forgotten silence.
Lyra let out a strangled scream and recoiled, her porcelain skin cracking with fine lines of violet energy. She collapsed, her eyes wide with a terror that her neural magic couldn't numb.
"The elevator! Move!" Kenji shouted.
They scrambled into the glass lift. Elara slammed the override key, a Volkov master code she had kept secret for years. The doors hissed shut, and the elevator plummeted.
As the lift descended, the temperature readings on the display began to drop at a terrifying rate.
[-100°C... -150°C... -220°C...]
"We're entering the Glacial Eye," Elara said, her breath coming in ragged gasps. She was leaning heavily on the wall, her face pale. The duel with Lyra had drained her. "The Stasis Scrap is at the absolute bottom. It's where the thermal energy of the planet itself is being sucked away."
"Why does this place exist?" Zola asked, rubbing her arms. "It's unnatural."
"It's a failed experiment," Elara explained. "The ancient Rankers tried to create a 'Perfect Zero'. A state where time itself stops. They succeeded, but they couldn't control the leakage. The Glacial Eye is the result. A hole in thermodynamics."
The elevator slowed to a halt. The doors didn't slide open; they shattered, the metal having become so brittle from the cold that the internal pressure of the lift caused it to explode.
Kenji stepped out first.
The Glacial Eye was a cavern of impossible scale, filled with pillars of "Solid Light" photons that had been frozen in mid-flight by the stasis field. The floor was a smooth, translucent blue that revealed ancient, gargantuan creatures trapped deep within the ice, their expressions frozen in a moment of eternal surprise.
In the center of the cavern, suspended within a sphere of absolute stillness, was the Scrap of Eternal Stasis. It looked like a jagged diamond that emitted a soft, pulsing white light. Around it, the very air seemed to be made of glass.
[OBJECTIVE: INTEGRATE THE SCRAP OF ETERNAL STASIS]
[WARNING: MOLECULAR MOTION NEAR TARGET IS 0.001%.]
"If we walk in there, we stop," Mateo said, his voice hushed. "Like the light. We just… stop."
"Not with the Heart," Kenji said. He looked at the Abyssal Heart in his core. The Void was the absence of everything, while the Stasis was the preservation of everything. They were opposites, yet they shared the same silence.
"I'll go," Kenji said. "Elara, I need you to boost the tether. Give me every ounce of thermal residue you have left. I need a heat-buffer just to reach the center."
Elara nodded, her eyes shining with tears she couldn't let fall they would freeze her eyelids shut. She placed her hands on Kenji's chest. "Don't stay in the silence too long, Kenji. Please."
She unleashed [Frost Weaver: Final Ember]. It was a forbidden move converting her own core's stability into a brief, intense burst of heat. A golden-blue flame erupted around Kenji, a cloak of thermal energy that defied the absolute zero of the Eye.
Kenji stepped into the stasis field.
Immediately, the world slowed down. Each footstep took what felt like an hour. He could see the individual molecules of air hanging like dust motes in the light. His heartbeat, amplified by the Absolute Defense scrap, sounded like a slow, rhythmic drum in a tomb.
Thump...
Thump...
He reached the center. The Scrap of Eternal Stasis was inches away.
But as he reached for it, the ice floor beneath him erupted.
Emerging from the frozen depths was a Cryo-Colossus a thirty-foot titan made of the same Solid Light and ancient ice as the cavern. It didn't move with the sluggishness of the stasis field; it was the stasis field.
[BOSS: THE SENTINEL OF STILLNESS]
[RANK: S (INFANT)]
The Colossus raised a massive fist of frozen light. Because of the stasis, the punch didn't travel through the air; it simply arrived at Kenji's location.
Kenji's thermal cloak shattered instantly.
"Kenji!" Elara's scream reached him, distorted and slow, sounding like it was coming from miles away.
Kenji felt the cold rushing in. His blood began to crystallize. His core started to dim.
Is this it? The perfect order Alaric wanted?
In the moment before his heart stopped, Kenji felt a surge of defiance from the Abyssal Heart. The Void didn't want to be frozen. It didn't want to be preserved. It wanted to consume.
Kenji didn't use [Void Step]. He used a new, desperate evolution.
[Scrapsmith: Abyssal Consumption]
He didn't dodge the Colossus. He opened his core and let the absolute zero of the Glacial Eye rush in. He used the Abyssal Heart to swallow the stasis magic.
The Colossus froze mid-strike not because of its own power, but because Kenji was stripping the energy from its very form. The titan of ice began to crack, its "Solid Light" turning back into flickering, disorganized photons as its power was siphoned into Kenji's core.
[STASIS ENERGY ABSORBED: 40,000 UNITS]
[CORE OVERLOAD: 98% - WARNING!]
With a roar of agony and triumph, Kenji grabbed the Scrap of Eternal Stasis.
The white light of the diamond met the violet light of the Heart. For a second, the entire Glacial Eye was engulfed in a gray, neutral explosion that leveled the pillars of frozen light and sent the team flying back toward the elevator.
When the light cleared, Kenji was standing in the center of a crater. His hair had turned a shock of stark white, and his eyes were now a terrifying, iridescent gray, the color of a storm that had been frozen in time.
[EPIC SCRAP: ETERNAL STASIS INTEGRATED]
[RANK UP PROGRESSION: 95% - VETERAN (PEAK)]
[NEW PERMANENT SKILL UNLOCKED: [Stasis Field: Zero Point]]
He turned to look at his team. They were alive, but the elevator was gone, and the cavern ceiling was beginning to groan.
Above them, the Rank 8 presence of Viktor Volkov was no longer a distant threat. He was descending through the chasm, a god of winter coming to reclaim his domain.
"He's here," Kenji said, his voice echoing with the authority of two Fallen Stars. He looked at Elara, who was unconscious in Zola's arms, her core dangerously dim.
"Bjorn, Zola, get her out of here," Kenji commanded. He raised his hand, and the air around him solidified into a shimmering, gray barrier that even the Rank S environment couldn't touch.
"What about you?" Mateo asked, his voice trembling.
"I'm going to show a Grand Master what happens when the scraps stop being quiet," Kenji said.
He looked up at the descending white light of Viktor Volkov. He felt the Stasis and the Void working in a terrifying, perfect harmony. He could stop time, or he could erase it.
The battle of the Glacial Eye was over. The war against the Volkovs had just reached its absolute zero.