The silence that followed Joric's maneuver was more profound than any explosion.
On Ryu's sensory map, Charon's energy signature, once a beacon of cold, disciplined power, simply... stopped.
It didn't vanish.
It became static, frozen, a fixed point in the flow of the spire's energies.
"Is he... dead?" Ryu asked, the question hanging in the tense air.
"Unlikely," Joric replied, his face grim as he monitored the environmental readouts.
"A man like Charon will have redundant biological support systems. But he is incapacitated. Trapped in a state of cryogenic suspension. We have him." He looked at Kiera.
"But the clock is ticking. The spire's main systems will register the catastrophic coolant leak and attempt to re-route. We have minutes, maybe less, before this entire level is flooded with security and repair drones." Kiera's mind was already racing.
They had their prize, but he was trapped inside a vertical shaft that had just become the coldest place on the planet.
"We can't get to him from here," she stated, her tactical brain processing the new, impossible variables.
"The shaft is a death trap. We need to access it from above. Jin," she snapped into her comm, "I need a route. From our position to the service corridor directly above Charon's location. Avoid all patrols. And do it now." Jin's response was a new schematic, projected onto Kiera's wrist-mounted display.
It was a risky, almost suicidal path, weaving through high-traffic areas and past the barracks of the Elder's Guard.
It was a path they could only take if they moved with the speed and certainty of ghosts. They had no other choice.
Their sprint through the heart of the Azure Dragon stronghold was a blur of calculated risks. Ryu was their compass, his senses stretched to their absolute limit, feeling the movements of the guards, the sweep of the security sensors.
He would call out a warning—"Patrol, two corridors down, moving left!"—and Kiera would react instantly, pulling them into a maintenance alcove or a darkened doorway, holding their breath as the footsteps of her former comrades passed by, oblivious.
They reached the upper corridor, a place of polished floors and holographic art displays that felt a world away from the grimy service tunnels below.
They found the access grate to the ventilation shaft. It was covered in a thick layer of frost, the metal cold enough to burn.
Joric quickly interfaced his datapad, overriding the magnetic lock. With a groan of protest, Kiera and Ryu pulled the heavy, frost-covered grate open.
Below them, suspended in the impossibly cold, shimmering air, was Charon. He was a statue of ice, his body locked in the position of his last, surprised movement, his face a mask of frozen shock.
He was alive—a faint, thready energy signature pulsed from him—but he was helpless. Now came the hardest part: retrieving him.
They had no equipment, no time, and were standing in the middle of a high-security corridor.
"The emergency winch," Joric said, pointing to a nearby panel.
"Every vertical shaft has one for maintenance." As Joric worked to hotwire the winch, Kiera looked at Ryu.
"This is on you," she said, her voice low and serious.
"The moment we pull him out, the temperature will begin to normalize. He will start to thaw. You have to keep him frozen. Not with a blast. With a constant, focused application of cold. Can you do it?" Ryu nodded, his expression grim.
He had tamed fire. Now he had to command ice.