The road south of Orleaf felt like it had been carved by ghosts.
The moment the last of the city's rooftops vanished behind the trees, the column fell into a strange, dreamlike silence—not the peaceful kind, but the kind born when people can't decide whether to breathe or scream. Snow drifted from the canopy above like ash falling in slow motion. Branches cracked under the weight of frost. The world had that uncanny, suffocating stillness of a graveyard after the funeral.
The refugees moved anyway.
Feet dragging. Bodies leaning. Spirits hollow.
Even the strongest looked half-submerged in exhaustion. Mikage Reiken walked with his hands clasped together, as if holding his own soul in place. Kaisei Aoi, normally sharp-eyed and alert, looked down more than he looked forward. Yaguro Aka muttered earth-channeling spells under her breath—not to fight, but simply to keep herself upright. The forest path swallowed their footsteps, turning the line of survivors into a wavering trail of silhouettes.
Seiko Nakahara kept glancing back at the smoke blooming beyond the treetops. Every time she did, her water magic shivered, dripping from her sleeves in frantic bursts. "It's spreading fast," she whispered, almost to herself. "Too fast."
Hokuto, walking beside her, sighed through chapped lips. "Everything's spreading fast."
The understatement hung between them like a dead branch about to snap.
The cold worsened as they advanced, even though north was behind them. The enemy's magic contaminated the wind itself. Strange pulses drifted across the forest—brief flashes of blue frost, crackling in the distance like muffled lightning. Monsters ran from it too.
The first one emerged before the sun had climbed halfway up the sky.
A horned beast, twice the size of a horse, crashed through the underbrush, eyes white with panic. It didn't notice the column until it was almost on top of them. Hana Hyakui's bowstring snapped like a whip. Sekaku Entenki shot beside her, his arrow slicing the creature's spine with impossible precision. Kenji Katsuragi unleashed an overcharged shot that smashed the beast to the ground, its limbs twitching in a frenzied spasm.
The kill was clean, but the silence afterward was worse.
"Even they're running," Chiriyana Chihoko murmured, voice trembling. The druid laid a tentative hand on the creature's cooling fur. "This isn't how monsters move. This is… fear."
Fear had a shape now.
It had a sound too—the distant groaning of glaciers shifting where no glaciers should exist.
The march continued.
Hours blended into each other. The column thinned. People fell behind. One mother collapsed beside the path, baby frozen in her arms. Kiroko Kosha knelt and tried to heal her, hands glowing dimly, but his magic sputtered and died. Yoshiya joined him, kneeling on trembling knees. Together they poured mana into the woman's chest, desperately pushing warmth into her lungs.
But the cold had reached her first.
Yoshiya bowed his head. He didn't say a word. He just rose and kept moving, face pale, shoulders tight. Omina slid beside him, offering her arm for support. Her steps wavered. Twice she drifted sideways, eyes drooping as if sleep were dragging her deeper than gravity ever could.
"Yoshiya…" she muttered, voice soft as crumpling paper. "Is it normal… for the air to feel heavy?"
"It's frost saturation," he whispered, breath ragged. "Mana density. My body is… rejecting it."
She steadied him. "Then don't breathe so much."
He huffed a laugh so weak it nearly broke.
Behind them, Jyurei Miyata helped Juweru Kasumura reset traps along the trail—thin wires glistening with enchantment, buried blades waiting for whatever might follow the column. Jose walked with Hokuto, axe dragging behind him until it left a faint groove in the frozen soil.
Nishi Sayuri tried to keep Mireina Katsumi awake with quiet chatter, both alchemists clutching their dwindling bags of ingredients like lifelines.
Akihiro Kongo checked the wounded every few minutes. He kept telling them, "Hold on, hold on, we're getting close," but even he wasn't sure what "close" meant anymore.
Yami Kurikage walked alone.
Black magic curled around her fingertips in fractured wisps. Her eyes looked like burnt holes in her face. She stared ahead with an emptiness so sharp it cut through the cold.
Eventually, the trees thinned enough for sunlight to break through—but it didn't feel warm. It felt like the sky was trying to pretend life still existed.
The ridge appeared soon after.
A steep, rocky incline jutting above the forest, overlooking the entire northern horizon.
Lia paused. Then she gestured for everyone to climb.
One by one, they ascended—the wounded carried, the weak pulled up by stronger hands, children hoisted on shoulders. The moment they reached the top, breath after breath froze in the air.
The world behind them was dying.
Frozen plains stretched to the horizon, glowing faintly blue as if they were lit from underneath. Shapes of cities appeared only as dark scars—Reflynne buried under a sheet of frost that shimmered like a frozen ocean. Korvath was half-entombed, the great forge chimneys silent and iced over. Orleaf was gone completely, swallowed by a storm still raging like a screaming hole in reality.
Fire pillars rose in slow motion, bending as if time had grown tired. Smoke collapsed in spirals, twisting with streaks of cold-blue lightning.
Even the sky looked wounded—cracked by flickering fractures of magical energy.
And there, far in the distance, Frostholm glowed like a beating heart.
The heart of the disaster.
The heart of Winter's Kiss.
A low sound rippled through the ridge.
Someone sobbed.
Then another.
Soon it was a quiet symphony of grief—no wailing, no shouting. Just the trembling of human beings trying to understand the shape of their own loss.
Omina collapsed to her knees.
Mireina covered her mouth, shoulders shaking violently.
Hokuto lowered his head, hands clenched so tightly his knuckles bled.
Seiko Nakahara sank down beside a rock, staring at Reflynne's frozen ruins, lips trembling as she whispered, "I should've… I should've been there."
Yoshiya didn't speak. He simply stood in place, breath shuddering, eyes fixed on the horizon as if trying to memorize a home that no longer existed.
Anzuyi stood behind him, silent as the shadows she came from. Her hands shook too—but she hid them well. Assassins knew how to hide every weakness except the kind that crushes the heart.
Chiriyana clutched her staff. Winter curled around its wooden head, killing the faint green leaves she'd tied there days earlier.
Even the air felt like mourning.
Finally, Lia spoke. Only a whisper, but it carried the way a last prayer does.
"Ostoria is gone."
The words hung in the cold like a gravestone.
No arguments.
No denial.
No false hope.
Just truth.
The truth they needed in order to move.
Slowly, painfully, the column descended the ridge. No one talked. No one looked back again. Every step forward felt like walking out of a burial site they weren't allowed to grieve properly.
The march resumed.
The world ahead shifted gradually—the frost weakening, the forest breathing. Birds returned in tiny flutters of life. Sunlight broke through the clouds without the blue tint of death. The smell of pine replaced the metallic taste of destruction.
They crossed an old, moss-covered road—a road that had once connected trade routes and caravans. Now it felt like the last thread tying them to a past era.
A stream appeared. Then wild berries. Then the laughter of distant animals.
Life.
Real life.
Not the dying kind.
The further they walked, the clearer it became.
South was untouched.
South was alive.
They pushed through the final line of trees. And suddenly, the forest opened into a valley buzzing with sound:
Voices.
Children.
Merchants.
Guards chatting casually at their posts.
Eldoria stood before them—warm stone walls, open gates, unbroken banners waving in the wind.
It didn't look like a fortress.
It looked like a world that had no idea the apocalypse was happening just a few days' march away.
The refugees froze, stunned by the contrast.
And there—leaning casually by the gate—stood six figures.
The Suicidal Division.
Relaxed.
Breathing easily.
Alive.
Masaboru folded his arms like he'd been waiting for hours.
Zentake kicked a pebble.
Nogare waved lazily, too casual for the moment.
Gaikotsu sat cross-legged, skull mask tilted toward the sun.
Kaito grinned, as if he knew the punchline that hadn't been spoken yet.
Shinjitsu simply nodded once, acknowledging their arrival.
The refugees approached as if stepping into a different world entirely.
Yoshiya stood at the front, shaking, exhausted, bleeding mana from every pore, frost still clinging to his robe.
He walked through Eldoria's gates.
The last light of the north entered the south.
And a future, still unwritten, opened its first page.