The warmth drained from the air so suddenly that Serenkhand's breath came out in faint white plumes. The sound of cicadas fell silent; even the marmots scattered back into their burrows. Riley's instincts sharpened like a blade. He crouched, brushing his fingers against the grass—it was slick, half-frozen, glistening with an unnatural sheen.
"Someone used Ice Mantra here," he muttered, scanning the horizon. His tone dropped low, soldier-flat. "That's not weather; that's deliberate."
He straightened, eyes narrowing toward the north, where the wind carried a faint metallic tang. "Did the Soviets send someone here? Are we intercepted?"
Serenkhand blinked, confused by the sudden shift in him. "I—I don't know," she said quickly, clutching her shawl tighter. "There are patrols, yes… but they do not come this far. Only sometimes a few men, for supplies or to check the border posts. Nothing more."
Riley didn't look convinced. He stepped ahead, his boots crunching the thin frost spreading over the grass. "Routine?" he pressed. "When's the last time they came through?"
"Two weeks ago," she answered softly. "They left toward the western ridge. But… they were frightened. They spoke of a creature—something they found frozen but still alive."
Riley froze. His jaw clenched as the frost thickened underfoot. "Shit," he whispered.
He turned to her, his usual playful edge gone completely. "Get back to the village, Serenkhand. Now."
The air crystallized around them, every breath turning to shards of fog. Riley felt the temperature plummet straight through his bones—the grass beneath his boots glazed white, creeping up his ankles until he realized, too late, he couldn't move. Ice had swallowed his legs clean to the knees. Serenkhand gasped beside him, her fingers trembling as she tried to pull free, the frost biting into her skin.
Then came the sound—soft, lilting, distinctly feminine—echoing like laughter through a frozen cavern.
Out from behind a curtain of frost-steam stepped a woman no older than Serenkhand, her beauty sharp as a blade and twice as cold. She wore black leather pants that caught the pale light, a loose belt slung low around her hips, and high-heeled boots that clicked against the frozen ground like punctuation marks. Her top was barely there—just a dark bra beneath a thin scarf that hung loosely around her throat, fluttering in the cold wind like a banner of arrogance.
Her skin had that porcelain pallor that only belonged to the dead or the divine, and her hair—white as powdered snow—fell in glossy, uneven strands down her shoulders.
"Смотри, что я поймала," she said in old, accented Russian—"Look what I've caught."
Riley couldn't understand the words, but the tone was unmistakable: triumphant, predatory, almost teasing.
The ice crackled upward, kissing Riley's knees as his breath steamed in the air. Serenkhand's voice shook, half from cold, half from the sudden gravity of what was unfolding.
"She's… speaking a pre-Revolution dialect," she whispered again, disbelief tinting her words. "That's—no one talks like that anymore."
Riley, still wrestling against the creeping frost, shot her a baffled look. "Yeah, well—whoever she is… wait—how the hell do you even know that?"
Before Serenkhand could answer, the woman's lips curved into a smirk sharp enough to cut glass. She tilted her head, pale hair spilling over one shoulder, and switched tongues mid-sentence, her English archaic but eerily precise.
"Well, I was sent to capture a Dark Young here," she purred, her words coiling in the air like smoke, "but look what I caught instead… a rat from Handpump."
Riley froze—not from the ice, but from recognition. His pulse thudded once, hard. "...What did you just call me?"
The woman's frost-blue eyes slid past him to Serenkhand, studying her like a specimen. "And this one…" she murmured, voice dripping disdain. "Never seen her on the registry."
Serenkhand's brow furrowed. "A Dark Young?" she echoed softly, almost to herself.
Riley's throat went dry. "Offspring of Shub-Niggurath," he said under his breath, eyes never leaving the woman's.
The ice-witch smiled wider, pleased. "Oh… so you are well informed," she said, her tone bright and cruel, "which means you're far too dangerous to leave alive."
She raised her right hand, and the air hissed—vapor condensing into a perfect dagger of ice, its edge gleaming like frozen light.
Riley muttered, "...Every damn time it's the pretty ones," as Serenkhand's terrified whisper filled the silence—
"Run."
The name rolled off her tongue like a ghost from an imperial tomb. "Nicole Romanov," she said with a smirk, brushing a lock of platinum hair off her shoulder. "But since you've got, oh, five minutes left to breathe—just call me Nikki." Her voice was silk layered over frostbite.
Riley tilted his head, unimpressed even as the ice groaned underfoot. "I was seriously expecting you to be named Olga, considering the naming pattern here," he said dryly.
She blinked—just enough of a pause to give him an opening.
A sharp crack! followed by the sound of metal against skull as the butt of Riley's hunting rifle met the back of her head. Nikki staggered forward, hissing through her teeth as a few white strands fell loose from her bun.
Her eyes widened when she realized how he'd freed himself—the faint orange glow of a lighter in his back pocket had melted the ice just enough for him to slip a hand loose, reach back, and call his weapon. In that brief moment of distraction, her concentration broke, the frost web splintering outward like shattered glass.
The ice imprisoning them gave a shriek before exploding into mist.
"Get back, Serenkhand!" Riley barked.
And then the air cracked.
Lightning—thick, molten orange—erupted around him, swirling into a cyclone of static heat. The very scent of ozone overtook the cold. His coat and hat flickered into existence like mirage fire, a kangaroo-leather duster and cowboy brim catching the stormlight as his boots slammed into the ground. The look was somewhere between bushranger and gunslinger, an echo of the Outback fused with divine fury.
Nicole blinked through the haze, one hand clutching her head as she grinned despite the pain. "Now that's interesting…" she said, her voice slipping between awe and hunger. "Guess I'll have to keep you a little longer, cowboy."
Nicole's smile curved like an icicle in moonlight, sharp and cruel. She stepped closer, her heels clicking over the brittle frost as though the ground itself feared to crack beneath her. "I was told there are two hunters sent here from Handpump," she said, the accent thick and aristocratic, as if she'd stepped out of a czar's ballroom and into a battlefield. "One of them—stage two. That's when a hunter manifests a uniform, isn't it? A reflection of their soul that amplifies their essence." Her glacial eyes traced the lightning still licking across Riley's shoulders. "That must be you."
Riley said nothing, just squared his jaw as the heat shimmered around him, his orange aura pulsing faintly against the frozen landscape.
Nicole tilted her head, watching him like a cat watches a trapped bird. "But there's another hunter," she went on, her tone almost playful now. "Still stage one, yet they say he's the strongest this generation has ever seen. Perhaps any generation."
Riley froze mid-step. The orange lightning around him hiccuped, dimming for a heartbeat as if his nerve had been cut.
"She's talking about Red," Serenkhand breathed, eyes slipping to where Rudra had disappeared toward the tent earlier.
Nicole's smile sharpened, a predator pleased by a newly cornered prize. "Ah… so you do know him. The Fallen Angel," she purred, savoring the words like spice. "I was wondering if I'd get to play with both of you—or just the warm-up act."
"I was told he is close to reaching stage two," she added, voice cool as ice water. "Perhaps I should take him out too."
Riley's hands clenched white around the rifle. For all his jokes and all his bluster, something raw and loyal had grown for Rudra—an ugly, stubborn fondness that tightened his gut. He would not let some frost-witch carve that name into their skins without answering for it.
The earth sighed and split in thin, glittering veins at Nicole's heel. She drew her dagger of ice, the metal singing as the blade took form. "Now," she said, lifting it with languid ceremony, "let's see what stage two really means."