The blizzard howled, not like a beast, but like a legion of screaming ghosts. And within that deafening, blinding wall of white, chaos reigned.
Zander twisted, his body horizontal in midair, as a six-meter-tall Cryolophosaurus lunged upward. Its jaws, lined with serrated, frost-caked teeth, snapped shut with the force of a hydraulic press, precisely where his heart had been a heartbeat before. The creature's breath was a plume of acrid mist so cold it glittered in the pale, diffuse light, instantly freezing the air around it.
He didn't see the attack; he had felt it. His new senses, the Force Echo, had registered the ripple of tensing muscle, the spike of predatory intent from the monster through the blinding snow, giving him the crucial picosecond he needed to react.
He hit the ground already running, his boots carving lines of melted frost as a low-level current of Force pulsed through his veins. He didn't just run; he flowed over the treacherous, unseen ice.
To his left, Aethros roared, a sound of pure, joyous fury that tore through the blizzard's shriek. He was a streak of gold and black against the endless white. He met the charge of another predator head-on. As his claws, now the color of volcanic glass, tore through the creature's flank, he channeled his Primal Force. It wasn't just a kinetic strike. A wave of intense, focused cold—an echo of the glacier itself—followed the blow. The impact cracked bone, and the spray of blood froze mid-air, shattering on the ice like red crystals. The beast shrieked, a high-pitched, gargling sound, as its own internal fluids crystallized. It collapsed, its final, dying breath fading into a cloud of vapor.
The ground trembled beneath the weight of the three remaining Cryolophosaurus and a literal sea of smaller scavenger beasts. They were sleek, pale-scaled, reptilian hounds, chittering and snapping, their red eyes glowing in the storm. They were a tide of serrated teeth and hunger, circling like sharks that could smell the frozen blood.
Zander didn't wait for them to come. This wasn't a defense. This was practice.
He moved first.
A blur of silver and blue Force exploded from his center. Flashburst ignited so violently that the snow beneath his feet didn't just melt, it vaporized, exploding outward in concentric, pressurized rings. He became lightning incarnate, a phantom weaving through the attackers. He didn't bother with the Alphas; he went for the pack, testing his new, multi-sensory awareness.
Heaven's Eclipse flashed, twin arcs of black light. His movements were not the desperate, ragged motions of a brawl. They were controlled, efficient, lethally beautiful. He didn't just see the scavengers; he felt their echoes. A lunge from the right was met by a precise, reverse-grip spin that severed a scaled throat. A snap from behind was answered by a blind, backward thrust that pierced a skull. He was a scalpel, not a cleaver, and his blades, humming with his own tempered Force, cut through frozen hide and bone with an unnatural, sizzling ease.
Aethros wasn't far behind. He gathered himself, his massive haunches coiling. He leapt, a twenty-ton explosion of muscle, spinning midair. He was not testing precision; he was testing scale. Force, raw and primal, gathered at his claws until they shimmered with a deep, pulsating, golden aura.
"Rendstorm!" he bellowed, a challenge to the storm itself.
He didnD't just swipe. He slammed his paws down onto the ice. The impact split the battlefield open. It wasn't a cyclone of wind; it was a focused, conical detonation of raw kinetic energy. The technique was more refined than the one he'd used in the volcano. It didn't just scatter; it annihilated. Dozens of scavengers were hurled away like ragdolls, their bodies torn apart by the focused shockwave. They collided with distant, unseen icy ridges, breaking apart in sprays of frost and dark blood, their chittering screams instantly silenced.
But even as the echo of the Rendstorm faded, new roars answered.
The largest of the Cryolophosaurus, the Alpha, ignored the fate of the scavengers. It locked its cold, intelligent eyes on Zander. Its ice-plates, thick as armor along its neck, flared outward like the hood of a cobra. It charged. Its tail, a ten-meter-long wrecking ball of muscle and ice, swung in a low, terrifyingly fast blur.
Zander didn't dodge. Test the vessel.
He planted his feet, sinking his heels into the permafrost, and brought Heaven's Eclipse up in a defensive 'X'. The tail collided with his guard, and the sound was not a clang, but a deafening BOOM, like a cannonball hitting a steel wall.
A shockwave of pulverized ice and frozen shards exploded from the impact, blasting outward for fifty meters. Zander's arms screamed, the Force within him flaring to prevent his bones from shattering. He was sent skidding back across the ice, not just sliding, but plowing through the frozen earth for a dozen meters before he finally flipped, absorbing the momentum into a crouch.
His breath came in visible, heavy clouds. But they were calm. Steady.
He raised his swords, Force now crackling visibly around them, a spiraling, silvery halo of contained power. The Alpha roared in triumph and lunged, sensing a moment of weakness.
But there was none.
Zander vanished.
This wasn't just Flashburst. This was his new theory. Flashburst Level Two. He didn't just move. He used the Force to fold the space between two points.
He was a ghost among monsters.
In the literal blink of an eye, as the Alpha's jaws snapped shut on empty, super-cooled air, Zander reappeared. He was not to the side. He was not behind. He was above, fifteen meters in the air, suspended for a perfect, impossible instant at the apex of his "flash," his dark cloak hanging motionlessly in the chaotic wind. He had felt the echo of the beast's lunge, the commitment of its full weight, the half-second of total vulnerability at the back of its neural crest.
His blades, held in a reverse grip, plunged downward. He fell like a meteor, his own weight amplified by a sheath of Force. He struck the creature's head, his twin blades sinking to their hilts through its thickest, armored crest. The beast howled, a strangled, gargling sound, its entire nervous system severed. It collapsed in a thunderous crash, its own momentum causing it to skid across the ice, a multi-ton catastrophe.
Aethros laughed, a deep, rumbling sound, as he cleaved through another Cryolophosaurus's leg, his claws leaving burning, molten-gold trails of Force in the air. "You're getting faster again, little one!"
"And you're getting louder," Zander called back. He landed beside his companion, pulling his blades free in a spray of steaming, dark blood. "Try not to bring the whole tundra down on us."
Aethros grinned, his black, tempered fangs glinting in the aurora. "No promises."
The two stood side-by-side, back-to-back, in the eye of their own created storm. They were surrounded by a field of broken, steaming bodies and dark blood, a stark, violent painting on a canvas of ice. The aurora above pulsed, painting them in hues of violet, blood-red, and gold. They were two figures forged by war, unbothered by the cold, united by the fierce, primal thrill of battle.
Then the ground rumbled.
It was a new sound. Not the thump of the remaining beast, nor the shriek of the wind. It was a deep, structural groan that vibrated up through the soles of their boots.
Aethros's head turned sharply, his grin vanishing. His fur stood on end. "That… was not me."
Zander frowned, his own Force Echo, which had been focused on the life around him, now shifting, plunging down. He felt it: a vast, cold emptiness beneath the ice. "Wait—"
Cracks, luminous and blue, raced across the battlefield. They spread like a spider's web, not from one point, but from all the impact zones. The icy sheet beneath them, the entire frozen plain, began to tremble, the vibrations building, like a growl from the very earth itself.
Aethros's Rendstorm had shattered the foundation. The weight of the Cryolophosaurus pack, both living and dead, was pushing it past the breaking point.
The last of the Alphas, wounded and roaring in confusion, took another heavy step forward.
The ice screamed. A high-pitched, tearing, geological sound.
"Move!" Zander shouted, grabbing for Aethros's fur.
But it was too late.
The world gave way.
The sound was cataclysmic, a deafening, definitive CRACK that swallowed their shouts, the blizzard, and the roars of the dying beasts. The entire field of battle collapsed inward. The ice did not just break; it disintegrated, splitting like a sheet of glass struck by a thousand hammers. Beasts, bodies, and tons of snow, ice, and permafrost plummeted into the dark below.
Zander felt a moment of pure, stomach-dropping weightlessness. The wind wasn't howling at him; it was roaring past his ears in a vertical drop. Shards of ice, sharp as razors, sliced at his face. He twisted midair, catching a single, terrifying glimpse of Aethros above him, the beast's massive claws digging desperately into a collapsing ledge.
The ledge held for a second, and then it, too, gave way with a sound like snapping bone.
They fell.
For one, eternal moment, the world was a chaotic, disorienting blur of white snow, blue ice, and the red-green pulse of the aurora high above.
Then everything turned black as they plunged into the shadow of the true, hidden abyss beneath the Frost Frontier.
The last thing Zander saw before the darkness consumed him was the faint, cold glint of his own blades—Heaven's Eclipse—reflecting the fading, distant light of the world above, like two dying stars disappearing forever.