Chapter : 1701

  She looked down at her hands. They were trembling uncontrollably, vibrating with the aftershocks of her magical outburst. She could still feel the phantom sensation of his neck under her fingers. She could feel the fragility of his life. She could feel the ease with which she had snuffed it out.

  She had trained her whole life to be a weapon. She had sharpened herself to protect her House. But a weapon has no loyalty when it breaks. It just cuts whatever is closest.

  And she had cut the heart out of her own life.

  Far below, Serrum Town was a portrait of ruin.

  The wind had died down, but the silence that remained was heavy and suffocating. The town square looked like it had been hit by a meteor made of glass. Buildings were sheared in half, their interiors exposed to the elements like open wounds. Furniture hung precariously from ruined floors. The cobblestones were pulverized into fine dust.

  A layer of black frost coated everything. It wasn't melting, even as the sun tried to break through the clouds. It clung to the wood and the stone, a lingering curse that sucked the heat out of the air.

  Slowly, tentatively, the civilians began to emerge.

  A cellar door creaked open. A shutter was pushed back. Faces, pale and terrified, peered out into the gloom. They looked around with wide eyes, expecting to see the monster still hovering above them.

  They saw the destruction. They saw the craters. They saw the impossible spikes of black ice that pierced the earth.

  But the sky was empty. The white contrail of Rosa’s flight was slowly dissipating, a fading line that pointed north.

  She was gone. The threat was gone.

  But the fear remained.

  "Is it over?" a woman whispered, holding her child tight to her chest.

  "I think so," a man replied, his voice shaking. "The witch has left."

  They stepped out into the streets, crunching over the frozen debris. They didn't look for their Lord. The devastation was so absolute in the center of the square that they assumed the worst. They assumed that whatever had happened between the Lord and the Queen had ended in tragedy.

  The town of Serrum had been built on industry, on the loud, confident noise of progress. Now, it was silent. It was a graveyard of ambition. The people moved like ghosts, too afraid to speak, too afraid to touch anything, lest the black ice wake up and finish what it started.

  They looked north, watching the sky. They didn't know the details. They didn't know about the affair or the baby. They only knew that the Winter Queen had come, she had screamed, and she had left a scar on their world that would never fully heal.

  Rosa crossed the invisible border that separated the Kingdom from the Dead Zones.

  The air here changed. It wasn't just colder; it was thinner. It lacked the rich, vibrant mana of the south. This was the domain of the wild, untamed magic of the glaciers.

  Below her, the green forests and brown fields gave way to endless white. The trees disappeared, replaced by jagged rocks and vast plains of snow that had not melted in a thousand years. The wind here was ferocious. It didn't blow; it bit. It carried tiny particles of ice that scoured everything they touched.

  Usually, this landscape would have required Rosa to raise a shield. It would have been a hostile environment. But today, she didn't feel the hostility.

  She felt welcomed.

  The cold outside matched the cold inside. The desolation of the landscape was a perfect mirror of her soul.

  She began to descend. She didn't aim for a cave or a valley. She aimed for the highest, most desolate peak on the horizon. It was a jagged spire of black rock and blue ice that pierced the clouds like a broken spear, standing alone against the sky.

  She slowed her flight, the ice platform beneath her feet dissolving into mist as she touched down.

  Her boots crunched on the snow. The wind howled around the peak, tearing at her dress, whipping her hair across her face. It was a physical assault, a gale that would have flayed the skin of a normal human in minutes.

  Rosa stood still. She let the wind hit her. She let the cold seep into her bones. She wanted it to hurt. She wanted the elements to punish her.

  She walked to the edge of the precipice and looked south.

  Chapter : 1702

  From this height, the world was just a map. She could see the clouds covering the lands she used to rule. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, was the capital. Somewhere was her family estate. Somewhere was the grave where they would bury Lloyd.

  She imagined the funeral.

  It would be a state affair. The King would be there. The Guild Masters would be there. They would bury him next to Jasmin. Two victims of the war.

  But Lloyd wasn't killed by a Devil. He wasn't killed by a monster. He was killed by his wife.

  The thought made her knees buckle. She sank into the snow, burying her hands in the white powder. The cold bit at her fingers, but she didn't pull them out.

  "I loved you," she whispered into the gale. The wind snatched the words away before she could even hear them. "I loved you more than I knew how to say. I loved you enough to break the world."

  She closed her eyes.

  She reached into her core. She could feel the immense reservoir of her Sovereign power. It was still there, buzzing and potent, swirling with the endless energy of the winter.

  It sickened her.

  This power had killed him. This power, which she had sought so desperately, which she had tortured herself to obtain, was the weapon that had ended his life. It felt dirty. It felt like holding a blood-soaked knife.

  She considered ending it.

  It would be easy. So terribly easy.

  She could pull all that mana into her heart. She could compress it, denser and denser, until it reached critical mass. She could detonate her own Spirit Core. It would be a flash of light, a moment of heat, and then... nothing.

  No more pain. No more guilt. No more memories of his empty eyes.

  She could join him. Maybe, in the afterlife, he would forgive her. Maybe they could start over.

  She gathered the mana. She felt the hum of potential suicide building in her chest. It was a seductive feeling. It was the promise of sleep after a long, nightmare-filled day.

  But then, a cruel voice in her head stopped her.

  That is too easy.

  It was the voice of her training. It was the voice of the spy she used to be.

  Suicide is an escape. You don't get to escape. You broke it; you bought it. You killed the hero; you don't get to die like a martyr.

  If she died, she would leave Mina alone to deal with the mess. If she died, the north would be left unguarded. The monsters that lived in these glaciers—the wendigos, the ice drakes, the ancient horrors—would eventually wander south. They would attack the kingdom Lloyd had built.

  "I have to live," she realized, the thought tasting like ash in her mouth. "I have to live with this."

  She had to live as a monument to her sin. She would stay here, in this frozen wasteland. She would guard the north. She would be the ghost in the snow, the unseen shield that kept the monsters at bay.

  She would protect his kingdom, even if she could never set foot in it again.

  It was a penance. A purgatory of her own making. She would sentence herself to a lifetime of solitude, serving a world that would hate her memory.

  She stood up. The snow fell from her dress. She wiped her face, her expression hardening into something brittle and cold. The weeping woman was gone. The monster was gone. All that was left was the husk of a Queen.

  She raised her hands.

  The ice around the peak responded to her call. It didn't crack or explode this time. It moved with a slow, mournful elegance.

  Walls of crystalline ice rose from the bedrock. They were thick, transparent, and harder than steel. They rose up around her, blocking out the wind, blocking out the noise.

  She wasn't building a castle. She wasn't building a fortress.

  She was building a tomb.

  A roof of glacial glass formed overhead, sealing her in. The space was small—just a single room, bare and empty. There was no furniture. No bed. No fire. Just the rock floor and the ice walls.

  The wind outside battered against her new home, but inside, it was silent. Dead silent.

  Rosa walked to the center of the room and sat down on the hard stone. She arranged her dress around her. She placed her hands in her lap.

  She looked through the transparent wall, gazing south one last time. The clouds were thickening, hiding the world of the living from her view.

  "Goodbye, Lloyd," she whispered.

  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."

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  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.