Chapter : 1693

  Rock and soil exploded from the rooftop garden. The stones of the building itself ripped loose, swirling around him like a protective hurricane. Layers of stone slammed onto his body, fusing with his skin. Then came the metal. The iron from the nearby structures, the steel from the reinforced beams—it all flew toward him, coating the stone in a gleaming, organic steel skin.

  He grew. He expanded. He transformed.

  Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet.

  The roof collapsed under his new weight, but he didn't fall. He stood amidst the wreckage, a titan of steel and stone.

  The Steel Titan.

  It was a form he rarely used. It was slow. It was clumsy. But it was virtually indestructible.

  The Titan roared. It wasn't a human sound. It was the sound of grinding metal, of tectonic plates shifting. It rivaled the sound of Rosa’s wind.

  "ROAAAAAR!"

  Rosa stopped screaming. She looked at the giant standing in the ruins of the building. She didn't look afraid. A twisted, ecstatic smile spread across her face.

  "Finally," she whispered. "There you are."

  This was what she wanted. No more tricks. No more speed. Just a monster to match her monster.

  She raised both hands high above her head.

  The black blizzard swirled around her, condensing. It stopped attacking the town. All the ice, all the snow, all the hate—it was sucked inward. It compressed into a single, massive sphere of dark ice above her head.

  It grew larger and larger. It was the size of a carriage. Then the size of a house. It hovered there, a black sun of frozen death.

  "Let's see if you break," she hissed. "Let's see if you are as hard as you pretend to be."

  She hurled the sphere.

  The massive projectile flew through the air with a low, thrumming sound. It tore up the air pressure, creating a vacuum in its wake.

  Lloyd braced himself.

  Inside the Titan armor, his human body was sweating, straining against the magic. He couldn't dodge this. If he dodged, the sphere would hit the workers' district behind him. He had to tank it.

  He stepped forward, the ground shaking with his footfall. He raised a massive steel fist, pulling it back for a haymaker.

  He was done running. He was done talking. He was going to punch through the storm and grab his wife, even if he had to break every bone in his hand to do it.

  But as she flew at him, trailing darkness, he saw her eyes.

  Behind the black void of the corruption, for just a fraction of a second, he saw the terrified girl who had lost her mother years ago. He saw the loneliness. He saw the desperation.

  And he realized, with a sinking heart, that the madness fueling her speed wasn't just hate. It wasn't just jealousy.

  It was heartbreak.

  She was destroying the world because her world had already been destroyed.

  The sphere was inches away. The cold was biting through his steel armor.

  Lloyd punched.

  BOOM.

  The collision was blinding. White light swallowed the square. The sound of metal meeting absolute zero screamed across the north, a song of destruction that marked the end of their marriage and the beginning of the end of the battle.

  The town of Serrum had ceased to be a center of industry; it was now an arena carved from the frozen hell of a Sovereign’s broken heart. The black blizzard Rosa had summoned wasn't just weather; it was a weaponized atmosphere, a swirling vortex of razor-sharp obsidian ice shards that sought to flay anything with a pulse.

  The collision between the Titan’s steel fist and Rosa’s dark ice sphere resulted in a shockwave that leveled the surrounding block. The Titan form groaned under the strain, frost rapidly eating through the thirty feet of stone and magical steel. Lloyd realized instantly that being a giant target was a death sentence against concentrated Sovereign power; he was a mountain, but she was the weather eroding it.

  'Dismiss,' he commanded internally.

  The massive construct shattered into particles of light, leaving Lloyd in his human form, freefalling through the debris cloud.

  Lloyd Ferrum stood amidst the chaos, his breath misting in the sudden, absolute zero temperature. The massive sphere of dark ice Rosa had hurled at him had been deflected, but the effort had cost him. He had shifted his stance at the last microsecond, using a kinetic pulse from his Void power to redirect the projectile into a row of empty warehouses. The resulting crash sounded like a mountain collapsing, followed by the groan of steel beams shearing under the weight of magical ice.

  Chapter : 1694

  He looked up at his wife. She was hovering ten feet off the ground, buoyed by a cyclone of corrupted mana. Her skin was cracked like porcelain, black veins pulsing beneath the surface. Her eyes were voids. This wasn't a duel; it was a containment breach.

  "Lloyd," she hissed, the name carrying the weight of a curse. She raised a hand, and the ambient moisture in the air solidified instantly into a thousand jagged lances, all pointed at his heart. "Why do you not bleed? Why do you not break?"

  Lloyd didn't waste breath on words. He activated [Void Steps].

  The world fractured into blue-white glitches. He vanished from his position a split second before the lances struck, the ground where he had been standing erupting into a crater of frozen shrapnel. He reappeared twenty feet to the left, atop a sloped roof, his boots finding purchase on the slick tiles.

  He wasn't trying to win. If he wanted to win, he would have summoned Iffrit and turned the town into a thermal bomb, vaporizing the ice and likely half the district. Or he would have merged with Fang Fairy and ended it with a decapitation strike before her synapses could fire. But he couldn't do that. Despite his hatred, despite the divorce, despite the absolute mess she had made of his life, she was still Rosa. Killing her would be a political catastrophe and, deeper down in a place he hated to acknowledge, a waste of a valuable asset.

  He needed to incapacitate her. He needed to knock her out cold.

  "Stop running!" Rosa screamed. She swept her arm horizontally. A wave of black ice rippled through the air, slicing the top floor off the building Lloyd was standing on.

  Lloyd dropped through the collapsing roof, landing in a crouch on the floor below. He didn't pause. He sprinted toward the window, crashing through the shutters just as the entire structure groaned and imploded under the crushing pressure of her spiritual weight.

  He landed in an alleyway, rolling to disperse the momentum. His tactical mind was running a mile a minute, analyzing the data.

  Target: Rosa Siddik. Status: Mental Deviation/Mana Corruption. Threat Level: Sovereign-High. Defensive capabilities: Absolute Zero Aura. Offensive capabilities: Omnidirectional Construct Generation.

  She was stronger than she had been on Mount Monu. Heartbreak, it seemed, was a more potent fuel than duty. The corruption of her mana had removed the safety limiters on her output. She was burning her own life force to sustain this level of violence. If he didn't stop her soon, she would burn herself out and die from spiritual exhaustion.

  "You cannot hide from winter, Lloyd!" Her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, carried by the wind.

  Lloyd flattened himself against a brick wall as a localized hailstorm shredded the cobblestones in the main street. He needed to close the distance. Her ranged attacks were overwhelming, but if he could get inside her guard, he could use a physical strike to disrupt her mana flow.

  He took a breath, centering his core. He reached into the unified reservoir of his power. He didn't summon a spirit; the atmospheric interference from her chaotic mana made maintaining a summon difficult and draining. He would rely on his own bloodline.

  Steel Blood: Chain Shackles.

  He thrust his hands forward. From the empty air, four thick, gleaming chains of Ferrum steel erupted, shooting upward like striking cobras. They weren't aimed at her body; they were aimed at her limbs, designed to wrap and bind.

  The chains soared through the blizzard, seeking their target with unerring precision. They closed in on the hovering figure of the Ice Queen.

  Rosa didn't even dodge. She simply looked at the incoming metal.

  "Fragile," she whispered.

  She clenched her fist.

  The air around the chains flashed white. The temperature dropped so low, so fast, that the physics of the metal changed instantly. The steel lost all ductility. It became as brittle as sugar glass. The momentum of the chains caused them to shatter under their own weight, disintegrating into a shower of frozen metal dust before they could even touch her.

  Lloyd cursed silently. He had underestimated the density of her cold aura. Conventional steel wouldn't work. He needed something she couldn't freeze. Or he needed to be faster than the cold.

  He moved again, abandoning the alley as ice spikes erupted from the walls, trying to skewer him. He was being herded. She wasn't just lashing out blindly; there was a terrifying, instinctive tactical mind beneath the madness. She was driving him toward the town center, toward the old Clock Tower.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  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.