The ruined city dimension trembled under the weight of hundreds of Sylvanyr students. Shattered towers leaned like jagged fangs, mana-storms groaned above in violet spirals, and the fractured streets glimmered with half-buried crystal veins.
Rose stood alone in the plaza, blade resting against her shoulder. Her breath didn't quicken, her eyes didn't waver. She simply waited.
The swarm closed in.
Speed-users blurred, shadows writhed, fire and lightning crackled across broken rooftops. Shouts rose, battle-cries tearing the silence into ribbons. The city became a chorus of gifts unleashed.
And still Rose didn't move.
A gravity user snarled and slammed both palms down. The world tried to multiply weight times ten. Pavement groaned. Streetlamps bent.
Rose planted, and the ground froze under her in a perfect white ring. The pressure pressed; the ring held; she simply made more ground—thin, transparent platforms forming under each footfall as she stepped, breaking the vector into ruin.
Ranged casters laced the street with spears and beams. She did not bother to conjure walls. She curved their attacks with small gestures, bending trajectories mid-flight until their own allies aged out of the round in showers of white.
A shadow troupe finally made the play that almost mattered.
Black hands surged up from her footprints. A web of umbra ropes coiled her wrists. The street went dark edge to edge; nadirs bloomed in corners; even her breath seemed to thicken.
Then a sound-hijacker with an iron throat stepped into view and spat a word that bruised the air itself.
"Stop."
It wasn't magic like humans tell it. It was geometry ripped into sound and forced into the body. For a second—the smallest, cruelest instant—Rose's muscles honored the command the way a body honors the reflex to blink.
Gravity hit that blink like a drunk god.
Weight multiplied. The ring under her footing cracked. Chains of ice erupted from the ground and snapped around her ankles, knees, waist, shoulders—layer on layer, old-fashioned, heavy, desperate. A net of shadow stitched itself inside the chain links, tightening as if eager to impress.
The crowd in the arena lifted as one. They could taste the first blood that would ever leave her.
Then it happened.
A ripple cut the air behind her. A portal bloomed open, dark and rimmed with violet sparks. A boy stepped through, face gleaming with triumph, dagger already thrust forward. He had bypassed her stance, her sword, her eyes. His blade kissed the pale skin at her throat.
"Got you," he whispered.
For an instant the entire battlefield erupted in cheers. Shouts, roars, fists lifted to the sky. The impossible had been done. Rose Sylvanyr—the untouchable princess—caught off guard, steel at her neck.
The dagger pressed down.
And stopped.
The boy blinked. Confusion melted to horror as he realized the truth: the tip of his dagger scraped harmlessly against a thin, invisible layer of ice. Not glittering armor. Not a wall of frost. Her skin itself had hardened, colder than steel, impossible to pierce.
Panic crawled under his skin; he frosted the blade, braided his lineage into the metal, screamed with effort, and drove it for her eye.
The dagger squealed. Her iris didn't dent.
Rose turned her head slightly, her crimson hair brushing the frozen blade. Her eyes slid to his, calm and merciless.
The plaza fell silent.
"Was that your best?" she asked softly.
The boy's dagger trembled in his grip. He staggered back through his portal—too slow.
Chains shattered. Shadow burned out like old film. The weight of the world decided it would rather rest elsewhere.
He had time to understand that the grin rising in his friends' throats would be the last joy they'd make today.
Rose caught his wrist, turned it up so he saw his own hand, and froze the air around it into a perfect cylinder that climbed his forearm like a curious animal. Frost hissed as it reached the elbow. He vanished in a white flare—ejected him out of the dimension before his scream finished leaving his throat. It would have been merciful if she'd had any interest in mercy.
The silence held one heartbeat longer. Then it broke.
Not in cheers this time. In dread.
They realized it all at once: if piercing her throat at point-blank range wasn't enough, then nothing they had was.
And in that moment, when their guard dropped, when their courage cracked—Rose moved.
"What an ugly trick," she said, not angry—disappointed.
They ran.
She did not.
She took a step onto the street and cold roared outward like the exhale of a god.
The frost didn't film the ground; it entered and became it. Rebar sang in foundations. Basements turned to lungs of ice. A wave climbed buildings—not coating them, but becoming them. Fire-glyphs snuffed out like bad arguments as the very air they needed changed phase.
Campers screamed from rooftops as their vantage points became tombs. Archers found their bowstrings welded to their fingers. Speedsters discovered that the wind must be free to move for bodies to be fast.
Fifty went white in a single breath.
The survivors tried art. Gravity layered with gravity—one user, then a second, then a third—folding their wells until the street should have been a pit. Rose stepped up onto a rung of ice that formed itself under her foot, then another, then another, until she was walking an invisible stairway through a city that had stopped being theirs.
A sound-bender dragged the marrow out of the air and fired it at her as a beam. She palmed it aside and sent it back; he disappeared with a strangled little yelp.
Shadows wrote cages. She stepped through them and let their makers feel what a cage felt like from the inside, just once, before their world blinked to white.
A conjurer dumped a cloud of razors. She opened her hand and all the razors sublimed to vapor in a soft sigh, like apologies from a thousand knives.
She stopped pretending, then.
Her forearms gleamed—the ice didn't show, but the density did. She moved and the city re-labeled itself wherever her feet passed: street to shrine, ruin to reliquary. Every punch landed with the certainty of winter deciding a leaf is done. Every elbow erased a plan. Every palm-stroke turned a person into a statue for the barest flicker between hits, long enough for their armor to surrender their place in this world.
The kill counter somewhere in the arena tried to keep pace and failed. Numbers blur, audience breathes in little animal sounds, and still the screen showed her walking in that same measured gait, almost bored, as if violence for her was housekeeping.
One more knot of braves made their play—the last clever ones left. Four shadows stitched her silhouette to the street while a gravity spike tried to fold her in half; ice chains fired up in concert with sound—Stop—Stop—Stop—
Her clone took all of it and died beautifully.
The real Rose stood three paces behind the sound-user and spoke into his ear so softly it could have been kindness. "Cute trick."
He turned to white before the words reached his friends.
She didn't escalate after that. She simplified. She became subtraction.
When she had gone twenty paces more and twenty more bodies had vanished, nothing moved in the ruined city but falling frost.
She paused at the center of what had been a plaza and looked up. Far above, the last campers who had trusted height more than skill peered over parapets and prayed to statistics.
Rose raised her hand, and the horizon turned white.
Frost raced outward in a circle so clean the camera had to widen three times to keep it in frame. Towers crystalized up their spines and out across their faces, glass stopping mid-shatter with snowlights caught inside. The city went frozen still—utterly, perfectly still—as if someone had pressed pause on a world that remembered motion only as a rumor.
Health-bars winked out across the map as all the names except Rose Sylvanyr vanished from the leaderboard. The spectator hall stood, and then stood some more, because applause felt like the wrong verb.
In the silence after the wave, Rose breathed once, let her shoulders soften by a degree, and spoke to no one but herself.
"I'll take my nap now."
She made a chair out of the air and sat on it, crossing one knee over the other, eyes half-lidded. The main screen stayed with her, because the other nineteen had the decency to be less interesting.
Somewhere in the palace tiers, the Queen's mouth curved like a crescent she hadn't seen in a century. Somewhere else, the World Tree spirit laughed, delighted, and accused the wind of being too polite.
And down on the ice where the last of the frost settled like confetti, Rose closed her eyes the way a storm closes—a decision, not a retreat.
Codex Record — "When Royals Get Annoyed"
There's a reason even the proudest nobles whisper before a Sylvanyr royal.
Their patience is long, their mercy shorter, and their wrath… cold.
When a dozen bright minds thought they'd found the formula — gravity to pin her, shadows to bind her, and a blade aimed straight for the throat — they mistook cooperation for power. For one heartbeat, the arena held its breath. They believed they'd struck true.
Then the dagger met something older than arrogance. It didn't pierce. It didn't even scratch. Her automatic defense simply denied the concept of harm, and in that quiet refusal, every soul who'd raised a hand realized the truth.
They hadn't caught a princess.
They'd cornered a storm.
What followed wasn't cruelty, but balance restored — frost sweeping the field, freezing air and arrogance alike. One blink, and their courage turned brittle; one step, and every boast shattered into silence.
So if you ever see a Sylvanyr royal sigh mid-battle, take the hint.
It's not fatigue.
It's the sound of restraint breaking.
Her automatic defense is just what she teaching rin but with more mastery.