04:43 A.M. — Tromsø, Norway
-24°C.
No winds. No sounds. Time completely fractured.
Snow crunched after every step beneath Lucien's snow boots as Division 5 advanced further into the core of the city's heart. Silent and empty buildings loomed on either side like tombstones from a forgotten world in the past, their windows darkened. Nothing you could see inside, their insides were as hollow as it can get. The air was thick and it was cold and quiet, it felt so unnatural that Lucien could almost hear his own heartbeat echo back at him in the frozen stillness he was walking in.
Yet beneath it all — deeper than the frost itself, heavier than the air that he was breathing — there was the constant pressure.
Voices were constantly whispering at the edge of his perception. Not speech, not thought. Just a presence. The Council. The same voices from his lonely dreams, now here, watching. Judging. Waiting patiently.
"You are nearing the end.""Vessel of Vengeance.""Choice.""Judgment day approaches."
Lucien clenched his fist with anger, activating his purgeflame to keep himself warn. The world turned to a spectrum of ice-blue and black — dead cold, no heat sources for miles. No life. No movement.
"Chronal distortions are increasing more and more ," Emiluna's soft voice crackled over comms. "I am reading backward energy spikes 500 feet ahead."
"And what does that mean?" Jason rumbled with a hungry belly and his heavy footfalls leaving deep indents in the snow.
"It means something's playing with time itself," she said. "Reversing flow, inverting memory layers… We're slowlymoving into the source of this problem."
Lucien scanned the street ahead — and then froze.
At the far end of the avenue, they saw a weird structure jutted out from the frozen ground. It hadn't been there five minutes ago when they first walked here. Tall, crystalline, it almost looked like a japenese temple — formed entirely from compacted ice and fire. There were small trails of orange flame flickered at its foundation, but instead of melting the ice surrounding it, the fire burned inside it. Coiled and controlled.
Lucien muttered, "That's new i guess."
Rylen narrowed his eyes to take a closer look. "I don't like it. I don ´ t like it at all actually. That thing wasn't on the satellite recon either, wasn't in the old city blueprint if i remember correctly."
"Your right Rylen it wasn´t on the old city ´ s blueprint. Because it wasn't built. It manifested," Emiluna answered. "I think it's not a building. It's a symptom."
Lucien nodded with a smile. "He's here."
"Who, what?" Jason asked.
"The King of Hell Jason" Lucien whispered. "This—this is his signature. He's not attacking us directly, but he's warping the rules of our earth. Like he did in Asagiri. Cities erased from time and then offered it back to us, broken."
Nobody dared to argue with that. They all knew Lucien was right again.
Rylen twirled one of his venom-coated blades and hovered upward, his boots lifting inches off the ground. "Let's scout the inside. I'll go to the first floor, you guys scan the rooftop geometry and the ground floor."
Jason cracked his knuckles in excitement, each single motion that he did was releasing tiny shockwaves of kinetic energy. "If something's in there, I'll punch it so hard it'll wish it never existed in the first place."
Emiluna adjusted her chrono-crystals and deployed a medic drone. "Time wards set. I'll monitor any shifts in field patterns."
Lucien, voice firm, said, "Div 5. Formation 2. We will move now."
They entered the temple-like structure like stepping into another world.
Inside the chamber, gravity felt inconsistent and non-existent at the same time. Their footsteps echoed for so much longer than they should. Time looped in the corner of Lucien's vision.
Then came the whisper.
"Not yet Lucien."
"Your not ready yet."
"But close enough to test."
Lucien punched his temple with his left fist. The voice was inside his head now, not just around him.
Rylen was on the first floor, scanning with his visor. "Guys. We're not alone as expected. Something's aware of us."
Jason slammed a gauntlet into the wall. It didn't even leave a single crack. "This ice and fire definitely has inner reinforcement. Like… forged glass over plasma. Natural ice doesn't behave like this, it breaks as soon as i slam it."
Emiluna's crystals pulsed in warning.
Then — the lights dimmed.
And it arrived.
From the far corner of the chamber emerged the Waker of Frost-Tide.
The monster stood around 13 feet tall, hunched and had reinforced plates in flames crusted over with frost. Its face was a jagged furnace with 8 eyes and it its face was made of bone and glowing blue fire.
Its body radiated ice and blue fire simultaneously — left half burning with volatile embers, right half crusted in sharp, glacial armor. Every step it took froze and burned the ground at once and creating temperature shocks. Time skipped around its limbs — movements coming a second before the foot fell, heat following the frost, and frost retaking the heat.
They didn´t know for sure but it looked like a high level 3 or a low level 2 monster.
Its presence twisted reality itself. As it turned to come face to face with Lucien, Jason and Emiluna, Lucien felt the Council's voice grow stronger inside his head.
"This is your prelude that the King of Hell had set for you here, not us.""This is the gatekeeper for your real trial.""Defeat it, or you do not ascend."
The monster roared.
And all hell broke loose in less then a second.
Lucien moved first on instinct.
In a burst of telekinesis and near light-speed acceleration, he vanished and reappeared mid-air, landing a punch enhanced with gravitational distortion to the creature's flaming shoulder.
BOOM.
The impact destroyed the whole wall behind the Waker, but the beast barely flinched. It turned its frost-arm and struck back at Lucien.
Lucien saw it coming with his X-ray vision — but too late. The creature wasn't just attacking — it was predicting Lucien his movements.
"Lucien your too slow, he predicted it!" Rylen shouted from above, launching both his venom blades downward in a cross-slash to try and save Lucien from getting hit. The edges of his weapons shimmered with reality-breaking energy, slicing through both physical and metaphysical resistance.
The blades hit — and bounced back.
"What the hell happened?" Rylen hissed, flipping backwards midair.
"The frost armor is not a physical armor," Emiluna shouted. "In simple terms it's frozen time. Blades won't pierce through it unless you disrupt its temporal layering!"
Jason was already charging. "Then I'll hit it so hard time itself will forget it exists in the first place!"
He slammed both kinetic gauntlets together, detonating a shockwave so large it cracked the temple open.
The Waker stumbled backwards for a second. Confused with what just happened. It opened its mouth in anger and exhaled a beam of reverse-fire — a spiral of burning frost that aged and decayed anything it touched. Jason tanked the beam head-on, his kinetic shields absorbing 75% of the blast.
"Still standing guys!" Jason growled, gritting his teeth together.
But the Waker wasn't done just yet.
It leapt through time— impossibly fast — into the air and twisted. Fire spiraled from one claw, ice from the other. The fusion formed a wheel of dual elements spinning with chaotic temporal energy. It threw it.
"DOWN DOWN DOWN!" Rylen screamed.
The disc collided with the ground. Time ruptured. A crater of reversed gravity formed, sucking everything toward its core.
Lucien planted his feet with telekinetic force, grabbing Jason and Emiluna in his mind-grip. "Got you guys, wish that Ayumu was here now. Where is that girl when you need here the most. Her gravitational powers would be for good use here—!"
His brain throbbed from the strain of multitasking and overthinking the situation: force-hold, kinetic dampening, and near-light reflex correction.
"Lucien!" Emiluna shouted, throwing a healing anchor crystal his way. It hit his shoulder and activated immediately. It instantly reduced internal strain.
"Thanks Emiluna," he panted.
Above them, Rylen blurred — suit magic fully activated now. Ready to fight. Trails of glowing sigils followed him through the air. His movements counter predicted the Waker's next swing by just milliseconds — but it was just enough to avoid a claw of burning cold fire.
"I see it now!" he called. "Its core's shifting constantly! It has two — a fire core and an ice core. We need to strike both simultaneously, just the same as Forstjaw!"
Lucien's eyes narrowed. "Then let's sync up again."
They coordinated.
Jason baited the Waker with slow, wide kinetic swings, absorbing its fury with his shield. Emiluna set up chrono-barriers and mended damage in real time. Rylen blurred in and out of reality, slicing tendons in its legs, aiming for its soft spots.
Lucien waited.
Waited.
Then moved.
With everything he had — Soulfire and cosmic light flaring inside him — he punched through the reverse-gravity field, his speed tearing through spacetime itself.
His fist lit with something new. Soulfire Pulse, a blazing, paradoxical mix of vengeance, hope, and cosmic authority.
He struck the fire-core.
At the same time Lucien his the fire core, Rylen — his blades charged with magic, poison, and time disruption — cut the frost-core from above.
Explosion.
Time shattered around them.
Light twisted.
The Waker screamed — a sound older than language.
"I won't become what they want. I'll become what I must."
Something rippled through the broken temple as a weird distant groaning echoed from deep below the marble of ice,fire and silence. An immense aura of heat and frost pulsed outward, knocking Emiluna off her feet on to the ground. Jason just managed to save her from falling just before impact. And then—it rose again.
From a jagged tear in the sanctum's floor, the monster emerged.
The Waker of Frost-Tide. Between a High level 3 and a Low level 2 abomination forged of ancient fire and eternal resting ice, born in the bleeding edges of broken time and reality. Its body was a paradox: one half sculpted from acient magma, the other a cathedral of resting ice spires wrapped in storming snow. Blue-white fire flickered in one socket, red frost in the other. Each breath of the creature warped the air, boiling and freezing reality simultaneously.
Lucien's voice dropped to a growl."It's him. This… is the King's smallest puppet."
The temperature dropped and rose thirty degrees instantly over and over again. They all vomited instantly when that happened.Their bodies didn´t know how to react. But they needed to fight. Snow and flames coiled around the King ´ s puppet. The monster extended its claw—fire laced with liquid ice—and released a concussive burst that shattered time itself.
Lucien moved first—a blur at near light-speed. He launched forward with a shockwave, his telekinesis shielding Rylen and Emiluna both at the sams time. Jason activated his gauntlets, which roared with kinetic surges, and stood ready to tank the first blow.
But then… time split.
The creature howled and invoked its domain:"ChronoPyre: Spiral Freeze."
Reality distorted as the team was separated into individual timelines. Jason found himself suspended in a battlefield where each of his punches occurred five to six seconds after he made them. Rylen was thrown into a loop of his own death—stabbed, revived, getting eaten alive, revived again. Lucien? He stood face-to-face with a phantom version of himself: cold, divine, unforgiving.
But Rylen's suit flared in divine light.
Reality anchor engaged.
His eyes narrowed. "You lose."A shimmer pulsed around him, warping space. Rylen bent physics and magic together and made something new, he was reversing the loop with a mixture of abjuration magic and his suit's predictive algorithms. He leapt out of the echo and slashed with both venom-tipped blades—carving through an ice-construct the monster had left behind. The poison sizzled as it made contact.
Jason broke free as the second one. He threw one of his most thunderous kinetic punches has yet shattered the delay between his actions and reality. His armor absorbed the lingering time-burns that hit him while his kinetic shield neutralized 75% of the residual damage. He let out a bellow and tackled the monster, slamming both gauntlets into its blue magma-arm and causing a localized collapse of the entire southern wall.
The monster screamed in pain for the first time, frost and flame spiraling violently—but Lucien didn't move an inch.
He was still staring at his other versions of himself.
The phantom spoke:"You are already all of them. You have already gone too far Lucien."
Lucien's heart thundered. His power stirred, ancient and awake. Soulfire, kindled by pain and forged in rebellion, began to spark in his chest.
"Not yet, im not done just yet," he whispered.
He exploded into action as soon as he broke free—X-ray vision locating the monster's twin cores, one trying to take cover inside of his liver and the other one was coiled beneath its skull. He blinked once and covered 70 feet. A strike with super strength and simultaneously using his X-ray lasers to confuse him. Lucien used a telekinetic blast to pin the creature in place, and then…
"Soulfire Pulse."
He opened both of his palms and released the attack—not a beam, not a flame, but a radiant explosion of searing truth. Time unraveled where the blast touched. The frost ignited. The fire froze. The very essence of the Waker was burned from this timeline—not destroyed, but un-existed.
The creature wailed as it unraveled into nothing—its scream not heard by the world, but felt across all possible realities.
Then silence hit.
The temple was destroyed. The walls melted like it never existed, not from heat but from the restoration of real time. Tromsø was breathing again.
Five Days Remain.
The snow outside had begun to fall again—finallt it was normal this time.
The remaining people trapped in ice and time were waking up now. Confused. Free. Lucien stood at the top of the hill with Rylen Jason and Emiluna near the temple ruins, his coat gone, eyes glowing dimly with a purple aura. Jason stood beside him with a smile, gauntlets smoking, and Rylen hovered just above the ground, breathing hard but steady.
"It's finally over, we saved a city," Emiluna said.
Lucien didn't respond.
He looked toward the sky. Something wasn't right.
The clouds twisted, not in weather—but in pattern. Something ancient wrote itself into the sky in golden symbols that only he could read.
A voice from everywhere and nowhere echoed inside of his head:"You are not chosen remember that. You are made. Five days remain."
And then…
A snowflake landed on his glove.
It should have stayed frozen.
But it melted on inpact—despite the temperature, despite his aura.
The laws of reality were bending.
The King of Hell and the Crucible were calling.