Episode-848
Chapter : 1695
He burst into the open square beneath the tower. It was a kill box. The visibility was near zero, the whiteout conditions blinding.
"Found you," a voice whispered right next to his ear.
Lloyd spun around, his hand forming a blade of reinforced steel. He slashed, but his hand passed through empty mist. An ice clone.
He looked around. Mirrors of ice were rising from the ground, dozens of them, forming a circle around him. In every reflection, he saw Rosa. But not the broken woman. He saw the monster. The black-haired, pale-skinned avatar of death.
"You wanted distance," the reflections spoke in unison, a chorus of despair. "You wanted me to leave. Now, you will never leave."
The mirrors shifted, creating a labyrinth. Lloyd was trapped. He tried to calculate the angles, the exit vectors, but the geometry of the ice was shifting constantly.
He was in her domain now. A pocket dimension of white and cold, cut off from the rest of the world. The temperature was dropping rapidly. His breath was freezing in his lungs. His movements were slowing down.
He had to engage. Defensive maneuvering was no longer an option. He had to break the mirror, break the cage, and break the queen.
"Fine," Lloyd growled, his eyes glowing with the golden light of his merged power. "You want me? Come and get me."
The labyrinth of ice mirrors was a psychological torture chamber designed by a genius strategist who had lost her mind. Lloyd stood in the center, turning slowly. Everywhere he looked, he saw Rosa. Hundreds of Rosas. Some were weeping black tears. Some were screaming in silent rage. Some were laughing, a sound that grated against his soul like a file on bone.
He knew this tactic. It was an assassination technique—disorient the target, overload their sensory input, and strike from the blind spot. But Rosa wasn't an assassin anymore. She was a force of nature.
He activated his [All-Seeing Eye]. The world shifted into a schematic of energy. The mirrors blazed with cold blue mana, blindingly bright. But amidst the glare, he looked for the core. The source.
The real Rosa wasn't in the mirrors. She was above them.
He looked up just as the ceiling of the labyrinth—a sheet of black ice—descended like a hydraulic press.
Lloyd didn't try to catch it. He targeted the ground.
Void Power: Kinetic Pulse.
He stomped his foot, releasing a concentrated shockwave directly downward. The cobblestones shattered, and the ground gave way, dropping him into the sewer system below just as the ice ceiling slammed down, crushing the space he had occupied a microsecond before.
He landed in the dark, damp tunnel, splashing into ankle-deep water. The smell was foul, but it was warmer than the surface. He didn't stop. He began to run, splashing through the muck, using his mental map of the town to navigate. He needed to get to the Clock Tower. It was the highest point. If he could get there, he could force a confrontation on his terms.
Above him, the ground shook. She knew where he was. She could sense his heat signature through the earth.
Massive spikes of ice punched through the street above, piercing the sewer tunnel like spears of god. Lloyd dodged left, right, sliding under a pipe, vaulting over a pile of debris. It was a gauntlet. She was hunting him like a rat in a maze.
He saw a maintenance ladder ahead leading up to the Clock Tower's base. He grabbed the rungs and scrambled up, bursting through the manhole cover into the service room of the tower.
He didn't stop climbing. He ran up the spiral stairs, his lungs burning. He needed height. He needed to force her to come to him in a confined space where her area-of-effect attacks were limited by the structure.
He kicked open the door to the bell chamber, emerging onto the open-air platform, hundreds of feet above the frozen town. The wind here was a hurricane.
Rosa was already there.
She was floating outside the arches of the bell tower, waiting for him. She looked almost serene now, suspended in the eye of her own storm.
"You run well," she said, her voice barely audible over the wind. "Like a coward."
"Tactics, Rosa," Lloyd replied, stepping out onto the ledge, the massive bronze bell tolling mournfully behind him as the wind hit it. "I don't fight battles I don't have to."
"You don't fight for anything," she spat. "You don't fight for me. You don't fight for us. You just... exist. You calculate. You endure."
Chapter : 1696
She drifted closer, her feet touching the stone ledge. The gargoyles froze and cracked at her proximity.
"I am done calculating," she whispered.
She raised both hands. The blizzard swirling around the tower condensed. The whiteout conditions intensified until Lloyd could see nothing but her. The world outside the tower vanished. It was just the two of them, suspended in a white void.
She didn't use magic this time. She materialized a sword of black ice in her hand—a jagged, cruel replica of the rapier she used to wield.
She lunged.
Lloyd drew his own weapon—a simple, reinforced steel sword he kept in his spatial inventory. He parried her strike. The impact sent a shockwave through his arm that nearly dislocated his shoulder. Her physical strength, augmented by her Sovereign mana, was monstrous.
They fought. It wasn't the elegant dance of their time on Mount Monu. It was a brawl. Steel clashed against ice that was harder than diamond. Sparks flew, instantly extinguished by the cold.
Lloyd gave ground. He had to. Every time their blades met, frost crept up his weapon, threatening to shatter it. He used [Void Steps] to dodge her lethal thrusts, appearing behind her, to her side, above her. But she was fast. Too fast. Her madness had given her a feral reaction time. She anticipated his teleports, swinging her blade to intercept him before he fully materialized.
He managed to land a kick to her midsection, reinforced with Steel Blood. It was like kicking a glacier. She didn't even flinch. She grabbed his ankle with her free hand, her grip freezing the leather of his boot instantly.
She swung him around and slammed him into the stone wall of the tower. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Before he could recover, she pinned him.
Ice daggers erupted from the stone wall, catching his clothes, pinning his sleeves and pant legs to the masonry. He was trapped, crucified against the Clock Tower.
Rosa floated closer, until her face was inches from his. Her eyes were swirling vortices of darkness. Her breath was a mist of death.
She raised her ice sword, the tip pointed directly at his heart.
"You said I have no jurisdiction," she murmured, a tear of black sludge tracking down her pale cheek. "But I hold the gavel now, Lloyd. I hold the sentence."
Lloyd looked at her. He tested his bonds. The ice was absolute. He couldn't break it without using a massive discharge of Iffrit's fire, which would kill them both at this range.
He was checkmated.
"Do it," he said softly. "If this is what you need. Do it."
He didn't plead. He didn't apologize. He looked at her with that same maddening, calm acceptance.
Rosa’s hand trembled. The sword tip wavered.
"Why won't you fight for me?" she screamed, the anguish breaking through the rage. "Why won't you hate me? Why won't you love me? Why are you so empty?"
She dropped the sword. It shattered on the floor.
She reached out with both hands, grabbing his throat. Her fingers were colder than the grave. She squeezed.
"Feel something!" she begged, tightening her grip. "Feel fear! Feel pain! Just feel something for me!"
The world went white. The blizzard consumed them both, sealing them in a tomb of ice and silence atop the world.
The blizzard had swallowed the world.
There was no Serrum Town anymore. There was no sky, no ground, no distant mountains. There was only the white void, a sphere of isolation carved out of the universe by a Sovereign’s rage. Inside this sphere, the wind didn't just blow; it screamed. It was a high-pitched, tearing sound, like fabric being ripped apart next to your ear.
At the center of this white hell, atop the open-air platform of the Clock Tower, the final act of a tragedy was playing out.
Rosa Siddik stood with her hands wrapped around her husband’s throat.
She wasn't standing on the ground; she was floating inches above the stone floor, her body buoyed by the chaotic, swirling currents of her corrupted mana. Her hair, usually a pristine silver, was now a flowing mane of absolute blackness. It moved with a life of its own, pulsing with the rhythm of her erratic, thundering heartbeat.
She looked into Lloyd’s face. She was close enough to count his eyelashes. She was close enough to see the pores on his skin.
"Look at me!" she sobbed.
The sound was wretched. It wasn't the command of a Queen. It was the plea of a beggar.