The pipes hissed with pressure as Eiríkur led Akira through a collapsed ventilation shaft beneath Ash Root. Thin frost laced each pipe, trailing from his fingertips — not enough to alert sensors, but enough to mark the way back.
Behind him, Akira moved low, gun in hand, heartbeat steady but sharp.
"Emergency doors just locked down Level B," she whispered.
Eiríkur didn't break stride. "We don't need Level B."
"Then where—?"
He stopped cold.
His breath slowed. Shoulders tightened. The wyrd inside him, that ancestral whisper guiding his undead blood, didn't speak.
It twisted.
Squirmed.
Panicked.
"What is it?" Akira asked.
"…A god," Eiríkur whispered.
Steel groaned ahead — then folded inward, like wet paper.
A shape stepped through the collapsed barrier.
Pale. Calm. Precise.
Kishou Arima.
Dressed in flawless white, hair gleaming silver under emergency lights, IXA resting in one hand like a scalpel.
"You're the frost-ghoul," Arima said. "The Draugr."
Not a question.
Not an accusation.
An observation.
Eiríkur instinctively moved in front of Akira, frost curling from his boots.
Arima's gaze never moved.
"I didn't come for her."
The Challenge
"Leave," Eiríkur said. "I don't want to kill today."
Arima blinked once.
"You won't."
Then he struck.
Arima moved like lightning — every step a killing blow in the making.IXA flashed like prophecy, its blade splitting air and metal alike.
Eiríkur countered with speed and instinct — Runesteel plates blooming across his forearms, his frost-kagune flaring in arcs of spectral blue.
But Arima was built for this.
He adapted.
Every strike disrupted Eiríkur's RC flow. Every step exploited a hesitation.The walls cracked. The ceiling dropped fragments of steel and wire.Each clash was death rehearsed.
Behind a ventilation shaft, Akira crouched in cover — stunned, breath caught between fear and awe.
And in the thick of it—
"He will kill her.""Kill him first.""Open the seal. Let us in.""She is weakness. She is leash. Burn her. Win."
"Shut. Up," Eiríkur snarled, voice raw.
But the wyrd boiled in him.The blood screamed for release.
He triggered Fimbulbrand.
The air dropped thirty degrees in an instant.
Frost exploded outward, slowing Arima's footwork — just for a heartbeat.
Eiríkur lunged.
Too slow.
IXA slashed across his ribs. Shallow, clean, precise.
Designed not to kill.
Designed to paralyze.
Arima didn't even pant.
"You're conflicted," he said mid-strike. "Your body wants war. Your mind wants peace. You'll have neither."
Eiríkur slammed his palm against the ground. Frost burst downward — freezing the hallway behind him into a solid wall of jagged ice.
A trap. A retreat. A delay.
Arima paused, eyes narrowing. Watching. Judging.
"This is not your time," he said calmly.
Then…
He turned.
And vanished.
Gone not in fear.
Gone because he was satisfied.
Eiríkur dropped to one knee, blood pooling beneath his coat.
Akira sprinted to his side, pressing gauze to his side, trembling but focused.
"You stopped him."
He exhaled. "No. He stopped himself."
She froze, hands still over his wound.
"What did the voices say?"
He looked away.
"…That I should've left you behind."
Her hands faltered — only for a second.
"And what did you say?"
He turned to her, eyes glowing dim with rune-light, pale and haunted.
"I told them to burn."