Chapter 232: Frost and Fury

Chapter 232: Chapter 232: Frost and Fury

Chapter 232: Frost and Fury

The blue holographic projection of Gunther Stillbane flickered in the center of the underground arena.

Reina Frost stood on the sparring mat with her massive Ice Core Axe resting against her shoulder.

"Aight, hit that pillar," Gunther ordered, pointing at a thick granite training column.

Reina moved instantly.

CRASH!

The heavy axe smashed into the granite. A violent explosion of blue frost erupted across the arena. The temperature plummeted twenty degrees in a single second. The massive pillar shattered into a thousand frozen fragments that scattered across the polished floor.

Reina stepped back, breathing hard. Her silver-blue hair was covered in a thin layer of ice crystals.

Gunther crossed his heavily scarred arms.

"Yeah, that is exactly what I thought," Gunther rumbled. "You just killed a rock with enough juice to level a city block."

Reina frowned. "I destroyed the target."

"You destroyed the whole room, kid."

Gunther walked around the projection field, studying the frozen debris.

"Bram got the opposite problem," Gunther said. "Big man got no relationship with the ground at all. He only knows his own body. You?"

He pointed a thick finger at her chest.

"You got too much relationship with everything. Every time you swing, you dump your entire core into it. There ain’t no small setting on you. There is only the big one."

Reina tightened her grip on the axe handle.

"It works," she stated coldly.

"Yeah," Gunther agreed. "It worked when you froze that Cult Fire Mage in Bastion Six. I read the report. You burned your own blood into the ice to freeze black flame."

His voice dropped.

"You almost died doing it. And you been proud of that ever since."

Reina did not answer. Her jaw tightened.

Gunther gestured toward a small wooden table at the edge of the mat. A single ceramic cup sat on it, filled with clear water.

"Freeze it," Gunther ordered.

Reina blinked. "That is it?"

"Freeze the water. Do not crack the cup."

Reina snorted. She walked over and casually placed her palm above the cup.

CRACK!

The ceramic exploded violently. Water and shattered pottery sprayed across the table.

Reina stared at the mess.

"Again," Gunther said calmly.

A servant brought a fresh cup. Reina focused harder. She narrowed the flow of her mana, carefully aiming a thin needle of frost.

CRACK!

The second cup shattered.

"Again."

CRACK!

The third cup exploded. Then the fourth. Then the fifth.

Reina’s face flushed with frustration. She was the Vice-Commander of Strike Team Zero. She had frozen an entire river during the Bastion Six invasion. She could not freeze a cup of water without destroying the container.

Eleven cups lay shattered on the table.

"You do not know how to be gentle," Gunther observed.

"I am a Cryo-Berserker," Reina snapped. "Gentle is not the job."

"Nah." Gunther shook his head. "Gentle is the whole job. Anybody can break a thing. You know how hard it is to stop somebody bleeding out with ice without killing the tissue? You know how hard it is to freeze a bridge so your own people can cross it and not shatter it under their boots?"

He stepped closer to the edge of the projection.

"You spent your whole life learning to make things stop. You ain’t never once learned to make something stop soft."

Reina glared at the twelfth cup.

"You fight like somebody who wasn’t enough one time," Gunther said. "Everything you do is too big. Somewhere back there a small try failed on you and you ain’t never let it go."

Reina went completely still.

"That is not your business," she said quietly.

"It ain’t," Gunther agreed easily. "But I been starving my own city for a week to feed yours, so I figure I earned about five minutes of minding somebody else’s business."

Reina did not have a response for that.

She turned back to the table.

Two hours passed.

Reina stopped trying to force the frost. She stopped aiming needles and cutting flows. She simply stood with her palm hovering over the water and let the cold seep out of her skin at the slowest rate she could manage.

TSSS.

A thin, delicate skin of white ice spread across the surface of the water.

The ceramic did not crack.

Reina stared at it.

It was pathetic. It was a film of frost thinner than paper on a cup of drinking water. It could not stop a blade or kill a monster.

It was also the first controlled thing she had ever done in her life, and she was furious about how small it felt.

Gunther nodded once.

"There it is," he said. "Session over."

---

Reina found her mother in the empty medical bay two levels up.

Seraphina Vance was cataloging vials of alchemical reagents. She looked up as her daughter entered.

Reina did not sit down. She did not build up to it.

"Who was he?"

Seraphina’s hands stopped moving.

She set the vial down on the counter very carefully.

"Lucien told you," Seraphina said.

"Lucien told me nothing. You said it in front of nine people in a training bunker four days ago." Reina’s voice was flat. "I have a father. I did not know that."

Seraphina closed her eyes.

"You were four."

Reina waited.

"He died when you were four years old," Seraphina said quietly. "You do not remember him because there is nothing in you to remember. You had barely started forming permanent memories."

"You never told me."

"No."

"Why?"

Seraphina turned around. For the first time in Reina’s life, the Guildmaster of the Silver Aegis looked genuinely old.

"Because there was never a version of that conversation that did not also require me to explain how he died," Seraphina said. "And I could not do that. Not once in thirteen years."

Reina swallowed hard.

"My name," she said. "Frost. It is not his."

"No. It is mine." Seraphina’s voice was barely audible. "It was my name before I married. I put it on you afterward."

"Why?"

"Because I could not look at his name on a child every morning." Seraphina’s hands were shaking. "That is the truth. It is not a noble reason. I was twenty-nine years old and I was a coward about one very small thing, and by the time I was not a coward anymore, you were nine and you already had a name."

Reina stood there in the humming light of the medical bay.

"Lucien asked you a question in the arena," she said finally.

Seraphina looked up.

"He asked why a Valor born from being too slow made you the most patient fighter in the Bastion. And you told him to run the drill from the top."

Reina met her mother’s eyes.

"I want the answer."

The silence stretched out for a long time.

"Because I was not too slow," Seraphina said.

Her voice broke completely.

"That is what I tell students. It is easier. It sounds like a lesson about speed and it makes them train harder and nobody asks a second question."

She pressed her palm flat against the counter to steady herself.

"I was in the room, Reina. I was three feet away from him."

Reina did not move.

"There were two things I could have done in that half second," Seraphina whispered. "I could have put a barrier between him and the thing that was coming. Or I could have taken the killing strike."

She looked at her daughter.

"I took the strike. I was the best duelist in this city and I saw an opening and I took it, because that is what I had trained for forty years to do. I killed it."

A pause.

"He was already bleeding out when I turned around."

The medical bay was completely silent.

"The Silver Garden is patience," Seraphina said, "because impatience is what killed your father. It did not bloom out of grief. It bloomed out of the exact second I understood what I had chosen."

Reina walked back down to the arena alone.

The shattered ceramic was still scattered across the wooden table. The twelfth cup sat in the middle of it with its thin skin of white ice slowly melting under the arena lights.

She sat down on the bench and looked at it for a long time.

’I could have put up a barrier,’ her mother had said. ’Or I could have taken the strike. I took the strike.’

Reina thought about the granite pillar she had shattered that morning.

She thought about the Cult Fire Mage in Bastion Six, and the black flame, and the moment she had decided that the only way to stop it was to pour every drop of her own vitality into an avalanche and let it take her too.

She had not considered a barrier. It had not even occurred to her.

She had seen the opening and she had taken the strike, and she had nearly bled out on a bridge for it, and she had been proud of that scar for months.

Reina put her face in her hands.

’I fight exactly like her,’ she thought.

’I have fought like her my entire life and nobody ever told me who she was.’

She sat in the empty arena for a long time. She did not tell anyone.

---

In Bastion Six, the quartermaster came to the war room for the third time that week.

He did not bring a face this time. He brought a ledger.

"Sir," the man said quietly. "We are past it."

Gunther looked up from the desk.

"Past what?"

"The emergency threshold. We crossed it yesterday afternoon." The quartermaster set the ledger down. "Everything we send now comes out of the reserve we are legally required to hold for a siege."

Gunther stared at the numbers.

His city was half rebuilt. The central plaza was still scorched black. His garrison was down to two thirds and most of that was walking wounded.

He picked up the iron pen.

He signed the authorization for another heavy crawler transport.

"Sir," the quartermaster said.

"I heard you."

The man hesitated, then bowed and left.

Gunther pulled a communication slate toward him. He opened a secure line to Bastion Seven and began typing.

[Goldmane. You need to know where the grain is coming from. My people are...]

He stopped.

He looked at the words for almost a full minute.

Then he deleted the entire message and shut the slate off.