Episode-852
Chapter : 1703
She closed her eyes.
"I hope, in the next life, we are strangers. I hope I never meet you. I hope you find a girl who is warm and kind and simple. I hope you find someone who doesn't destroy everything she touches."
She began to meditate. She slowed her heart rate. She lowered her body temperature until it matched the ice around her. She pulled her mana in tight, wrapping it around her soul like a blanket.
She wasn't going to sleep. She was going to wait.
She would wait for the monsters to come so she could kill them. She would wait for the years to pass. She would wait for her name to be forgotten.
The Ice Queen was gone. Rosa Siddik was gone.
Only the Winter remained.
And on the peak of the world, in a glass box at the edge of existence, she sat alone, guarding a dead man’s dream.
The blizzard that had consumed the world atop the Clock Tower finally began to fade. The screaming wind, which had sounded like a thousand dying ghosts, dropped to a mournful whistle. The supernatural darkness Rosa had summoned lifted, revealing the grey, indifferent sky of a winter afternoon.
The silence that followed was heavy. It was the kind of silence that hurts the ears, a vacuum left behind after too much noise.
Lying on the freezing stone floor of the bell chamber was the body of Lloyd Ferrum.
It lay exactly where Rosa had left it. It was a tragic sight. His limbs were sprawled in the unnatural angles of the dead. His skin was pale, draining of color with every passing second. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the clouds, stripped of the golden intelligence that usually defined them. His neck was bruised a deep, violent purple, the distinct marks of Rosa’s fingers forever etched into the flesh.
It was a perfect tableau of death. It was the ending of a tragedy.
One minute passed. Then two. The only movement was the snow settling on his unblinking eyelashes.
Then, the air shimmered.
It started at the edges of the body. The outline of Lloyd’s shoulder began to waver, like heat haze rising from a road on a hot day. The solidity of his form trembled.
A low hum, like a vibrating tuning fork, filled the air.
The "body" didn't rot. It didn't stiffen with rigor mortis. Instead, it began to evaporate.
The pale skin turned translucent, revealing not muscle and bone, but swirling currents of grey mist. The clothes—the torn shirt, the leather boots—lost their texture, becoming smooth and featureless like smoke.
Fzzzt.
The sound was like a dying magical lamp.
The chest collapsed inward, dissolving into particles of pure, spent spiritual energy. The face, with its vacant stare, lost its definition. The nose, the mouth, the bruised neck—they all blurred together into a cloud of generic grey mana.
Within ten seconds, there was no corpse. There was no blood. There was only a dissipating mist that swirled in the cold wind, drifting over the edge of the tower and vanishing into the thin air.
The spot where Lloyd Ferrum had died was empty.
The wind whistled through the shattered gargoyles. The heavy bronze bell creaked on its mount.
Then, from the deep shadows of the stairwell door—a heavy oak door that had been blasted off its hinges during the fight and was propped against the wall—a figure emerged.
A boot crunched on the broken ice.
Lloyd Ferrum stepped out into the light.
He looked terrible.
He was not dead, but he looked like a man who had walked through hell to get back to the land of the living. His white shirt was shredded, hanging off him in rags, stiff with frozen blood and mud. He was favoring his left leg heavily, dragging it slightly with each step. He cradled his right arm against his chest, nursing a shoulder dislocation he had hastily popped back in moments ago.
His face was gaunt, his skin as pale as the snow from the extreme cold and the massive, reckless expenditure of Void energy. His lips were blue.
But he was breathing. His chest rose and fell in ragged, painful hitches. Vapor plumed from his mouth.
He was alive.
He walked slowly to the edge of the tower, his boots crushing the remnants of the ice daggers Rosa had used to pin the "body" to the wall. He reached the parapet and leaned heavily against the cold stone, his legs shaking so badly they could barely support his weight.
Chapter : 1704
He squinted against the wind, looking north. He scanned the horizon, searching for the silver streak of his wife.
There was nothing. Just clouds and the endless white of the distant glaciers.
Lloyd let out a long, shuddering breath that turned into a wet cough. He bent over, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the stones.
"That..." he rasped, his voice sounding like gravel, "...went poorly."
He slid down the wall, sitting on the cold floor of the tower. He closed his eyes, tilting his head back against the stone. The adrenaline that had kept him moving during the fight was crashing, leaving him with the raw, throbbing pain of his injuries. His ribs felt like they were cracked. His mana channels burned as if he had pumped acid through them.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the heavy, sinking feeling in his gut.
He had survived.
From a strategic standpoint, it was a victory. He had faced a Sovereign-level threat—a threat magnified by insanity and heartbreak—and he had neutralized it. He hadn't killed her. He hadn't died himself. He had protected the town from total annihilation. It was a tactical masterpiece.
But it felt like a catastrophic defeat.
He replayed the final moments of the fight in his mind. The memory was vivid, playing in high definition behind his closed eyelids.
He remembered the labyrinth of mirrors. He remembered being pinned to the wall. He remembered looking into Rosa’s eyes and realizing that words were useless. She was too far gone. Her mana corruption had driven her into a psychotic break where logic could not reach.
At that moment, the General in his head had run the simulations.
Option A: Kill her.
He could have done it. He could have summoned Iffrit inside her guard and detonated a thermal blast. It would have vaporized her instantly. But he couldn't do it. Even as she strangled him, he couldn't bring himself to kill Rosa. She was a victim of his choices. Killing her would be a sin he couldn't live with.
Option B: Die.
He could have let her kill him. It would have ended the conflict. But it would have left Mina alone, pregnant, and vulnerable. It would have left his empire leaderless in the middle of a war against the Devils. Dying was not an option.
So he had chosen the third option. The deception.
He had summoned Echo.
Usually, Echo was a versatile tool he used for farming or distractions, a mimic capable of copying forms. But Lloyd had pushed the spirit to its absolute limit. He had poured nearly all of his remaining Void reserves into it, overcharging the Doppelganger Spirit to force a transformation of unprecedented detail.
Echo didn't just look like him. It became him.
It copied every cell, every scar, every drop of blood. It replicated the texture of his skin, the warmth of his breath, even the unique, subtle vibration of his mana signature. It was a perfect, biological duplicate, indistinguishable from the original even to a Sovereign's senses.
He had programmed it with a simple, suicidal directive: Play the victim. Do not resist. Die.
Then, in the split second when Rosa’s blizzard blinded the world, he had used his [Void Steps] to swap places with the Doppelganger. He had teleported into the shadows of the stairwell, suppressing his aura to the point of near-death stillness.
He had hidden in the dark like a coward.
He had watched.
He had intended to wait for her to be distracted by the "corpse," then strike from behind—a precise, knockout blow to the base of the skull. It was a sound plan. It was the smart play.
But he hadn't struck.
He had watched her break. He had heard her screams. He had seen the absolute, soul-crushing grief that washed over her when she thought he was dead. He saw the black corruption fade from her hair, washed away by the purity of her sorrow. He saw the monster dissolve, leaving only the broken woman who loved him.
He realized then that the madness wasn't hate. It was love. Twisted, broken, dangerous love, but love nonetheless.
And he froze. He couldn't hit her. He couldn't punish her more than she was already punishing herself.
So he let her go. He watched her fly away, believing she was a murderer, because he knew it was the only way to end the fight without one of them actually dying.
"I am a coward," Lloyd whispered to the empty air.
He looked at his hands. They were shaking. Not from the cold, but from the shame.