Very faint, but rhythmic：

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Like a heartbeat. Or… a plea for help.

X turned her head.

She saw.

In the very center of the warehouse, in the heart of the tank forest, a "person" in one tank had opened their eyes.

Not her replica.

Someone else.

A woman. Black hair, East Asian features, looking to be in her thirties. Her eyes were calm, watching X serenely through the glass and the chaos.

Then, she raised her hand and drew a symbol on the inside of the tank wall.

A symbol X knew well.

【_??...】

One of the cipher symbols the Whites had taught her. It meant: "Escape. Now."

In the main laboratory, Santali was dying.

Or so it appeared.

He lay in a pool of his own blood, breathing so shallow it barely stirred the air. His body temperature had plunged past critical, pupils fixed and dilated. To any observer, the verdict was clear: he was beyond saving. Three minutes left, at most.

Only he knew that every parameter was calculated.

Blood loss: 1800 ml. With pressure hemostasis and hypothermic conditions, this places me on the precipice of fatality, but not immediate death. Body temperature: 31.2°C. Moderate hypothermia. Consciousness blurred, but not lost. The wound: the Ice filament's extraction avoided all major vessels and vital organs. Visually dramatic, but the actual damage is controllable.

Most importantly, the pain.

The agony was real, but also… useful.

Extreme pain could mask a great many things. For instance, how he had secretly used a wisp of aerokinesis to seal the deepest bleeding points around the wound. For instance, how he was using the dregs of his Arcana to perceive the base's entire structure and its vibrations through the air.

The self-destruct sequence had been initiated. Explosions rippled upward from the lower levels. The Failures had been released. He could sense the Sentinel beginning their counter-attack—a mass of biological heat signatures gathering and moving across the ice sheet above…

Triggering an avalanche.

The immense weight pressing down on the ice, combined with the concussive blasts, was more than enough to fracture the entire ice shelf in this sector. The base would be buried. Everyone. Everything.

Including him.

A perfect stage for a "death."

Santali lay motionless, but his finger traced faint patterns in the blood. Not a spasm—a calculation: Time to avalanche. The structural weak points of the base. X's current position…

She should be in the warehouse sector. The fake Matsuki would have led her there. That place held her "Origin specimen," the whole truth, and also… the final trap.

But it didn't matter.

His plan didn't require her cooperation. In fact, the more she hated him, the more perfect the outcome.

Santali closed his eyes, concentrating.

He unleashed his aerokinesis to its absolute limit.

Not to manipulate the air, but to… perceive. The atmosphere was the perfect medium for information—vibrations, temperature, humidity, pressure changes… Everything narrated the base's final moments:

The lower levels have completely collapsed. Fire is spreading upward. Mid-level warehouse sector: intense life-sign chaos. One particularly strong cryokinetic signature is moving—X. She's alive. Fighting.

Upper-level ventilation system: six exits. Five are sealed by ice collapses. Only one remains. Above the warehouse sector. Diameter: 1.2 meters. Leads to the ice plain's surface.

Distance from X's current position: forty-seven meters, direct. Obstacles: three layers of alloy walls, at least thirty Failures.

Santali began his final calculation.

Pushing his aerokinesis to its limit could generate a sustained, three-second air cannon blast, powerful enough to pierce those three walls. It required absolute precision in angle; any error could cause collateral damage or a secondary collapse.

It also required… using himself as part of the projectile.

He drew a sharp breath—a lance of pain in his lungs, which he ignored—and began channeling his remaining Arcana.

Compress. He focused the dispersed air currents around his wound, forming a high-pressure air sac. This would temporarily counteract the hypotension from blood loss, maintaining oxygen to his brain.

Simultaneously, he calculated the trajectory.

X's movement pattern: she was moving deeper into the warehouse, fast, but without clear direction. Surrounded by Failures. Her Arcana fluctuations showed successive use of ice walls and spikes. Energy depleting rapidly.

Timing was critical.

It had to be when her energy was nearly exhausted, but before she lost control completely.

Santali waited.

In the warehouse, X was killing.

Ice spikes shot out like a torrent, each strike precisely piercing a Failure's skull or heart. Walls of ice erupted and shattered around her in a relentless cycle, blocking wave after wave of attacks. The ground was a gruesome carpet of twisted corpses and debris, blood and nutrient fluid mixing into a viscous mire, slowly freezing into a single grotesque mosaic of black-red ice sheet.

But they kept coming … endless tides of malformed hunger.

And she was tiring—not in muscle, but a deep, neural-fatigue, as if every nerve was seizing up. The bloodlust from the Arcana backlash eroded her reason like a poison; She could feel it—the urge to shred, to bathe in the hot spill of them, to draw out screams until the air was raw with sound…

No.

Teeth gritted, she drove an ice spike clean through her own left palm.

The sharp pain cleared her mind for a second. She looked toward the cultivation tank deep in the warehouse—the black-haired woman was still there, still watching her, fingers tracing symbols rapidly on the glass.

"Down… thirty meters… safe room… oxygen… food…"

It was the Whites cipher. This woman knew it.

X's heart hammered. She stopped fighting blindly and charged in that direction. Layers of ice walls rose behind her, blocking the pursuers.

She was almost there—her fingers nearly grazing the cold glass of the cultivation tank—when the ceiling gave way.

Not a collapse. An unmaking.

The structure screamed first—a metallic groan that shuddered in the teeth—before the support beams bowed like the ribs of a dying giant and snapped. Then everything came down: concrete slabs, twisted piping, layers of insulation, and mountains of ancient ice, all merging into a single, roaring cascade of ruin.

Below, the Failures vanished. Their shrieks were swallowed mid-how by the crushing tide, a final, discordant chorus snuffed out beneath the avalanche.

She looked up.

Through the jagged, widening maw of the ceiling… light.

Not artificial light. True light—the pale, predawn wash of the Arctic, dispelling a patch of swirling dust, cutting a faint but distinct path through the churning debris.

An exit.

A rush of air, mixed with icy cold and a hint of raw vitality, flooded in, scouring her burning lungs.

But it was at least forty meters away, across a landscape of collapsed ruins and still-falling wreckage.

Without a second thought, she surged toward it. An icy ramp formed under her feet, allowing her to scramble over the rubble. But halfway there, a second, even greater collapse occurred.

The warehouse's load-bearing structure finally gave way completely.

The ceiling tore open as if ripped apart by a giant's hand, tons of ice and metal crashing down. X was thrown back by the shockwave, landing amidst a pile of shattered cultivation tank fragments.

The light was snuffed out abruptly by the falling mass, leaving only a few stray beams outlining the edges of the overwhelming darkness.

It was too late.

She would be buried here. With these Failures. With the black-haired woman. With the entire truth. Forever entombed beneath the Arctic ice.

Despair flooded her heart like freezing.

But in that instant—

It wasn't sound that reached her first. It was touch.

The air itself turned viscous, agitated. Every mote of dust, every fragment of debris, hung suspended in a grotesque, weightless pause.

Then, the wind rose.

Not a natural gust, but a conscious, raging will bent on annihilation. It began as a tightly compressed, visible shockwave of pale force, scouring the ground beneath it, grinding every fragment of debris into dust. Then—

It expanded, unfurling, like an invisible leviathan with the roar of shattering mountains. It drove forward, a colossal, relentless force, and slammed straight into the heart of the collapsed ruins.

BOOM.

Ice, metal, concrete—all of it drilled through, carved away by the violent current of pure atmospheric fury. It tunneled a passage two meters wide, straight and true as a spear's flight, pointing directly at the exit, at the light.

X stood frozen, her ears ringing.

She turned, looking back into the gloom from whence the current had come.

Deep within the warehouse, out of the bloodstain's very heart, rose the figure—a man who should have been a corpse, standing.

Santali.

Around where he stood, the air formed a calm eye of the storm. He was drenched in blood, his face ghostly pale. Yet he stood perfectly erect, his right arm raised, palm thrust forward—that terrifying power pouring from his splayed fingers.

His eyes were closed.

Not from weakness. From… concentration. A near-inhuman focus.

X saw his lips move. Forming words.

The distance was too great, the roar of settling ruins too loud. But she read his lips.

Two syllables.

"Goodbye."

Then, Santali withdrew his right hand, snapped it into a fist.

And all that raging, directed fury reversed. In the span of a thousandth of a second, it converged, compressed into an irresistible, invisible hand.

X felt an unstoppable force seize her, ‘lift’ her from the spot, and ‘hurl’ her towards the tunnel. She was launched like a cannonball, flying along the freshly torn, shockwave-echoing passage—

Light, pale and cold, rushed towards her, rapidly enlarging—

She shot out of the exit.

The light was blinding.

She crashed onto the ice, tumbling, snow and ice filling her mouth and nose. Behind her, the base’s entrance—the domed structure—sank into the hungry ice. Massive fissures spread across the ice field, avalanches surged from the surrounding slopes.

Pure white.

—Gently, cruelly, it covered everything.

X scrambled up, turned back.

The exit, the last trace of anything man-made, flickered once, then vanished completely.

Then came the low, tectonic groans. The ice sheet was shifting, healing itself. Moments later, the surface was smooth, unbroken, as if no entrance, no base, had ever been.

Only an endless, dead, pure white remained.

He was inside.

Using the last of his strength to send her out, then burying himself.

X stood in the snow, watching the gradually calming, featureless white expanse. The explosions stopped, the collapses ceased, everything fell into silence.

Only the wind howled, whipping up snow, a satisfied sigh, as if conducting a funeral.

She looked down at her left hand.

The ice spike was still embedded in her palm, the blood around it frozen black. She gripped it, pulled it out, then dropped it onto the snow. Fresh blood welled, beaded, and quickly froze.

Then she saw it.

When she’d been thrown, something had fallen from her pocket.

The glass vial. The one containing Yuri’s chip.

It lay shattered on the ice.

But the chip itself was intact, resting in a small bed of snow, its surface still glistening with a single drop of preservation fluid.

X bent down, picked up the chip. Her fingers were stiff with cold, but she gripped it tightly.

In the distance, the Arctic sun finally rose. Pale light pierced the clouds, shining on the boundless ice field, on her face, on the surface of the chip.

It also fell upon her wrist—where the cufflink was gone, leaving only a faint indent and a few minute, glittering fragments of platinum.

The tracker was destroyed.

The comms link was dead.

He was gone.

X stood there for a long, long time. Then, she turned and walked into the heart of the ice field.

She did not look back.

Her red hair flew in the wind, a blood-stained banner against the white, gradually fading into the relentless, pale curtain of snow.

---

Three hundred meters below, in the crushed, lightless tomb of the base…

Santali opened his eyes.

His violet pupils glowed like burning phosphorus in the absolute darkness.

He lay inside a temporary air pocket he’d prepared beforehand, constructed from ice and metal fragments—fashioned with the last of his aerokinesis, creating a survival space for himself even as he hurled Nyxl to safety.

The air was thin, strictly measured. Enough for three hours.

The cold was lethal, a deep, bone-eating chill. He was slowing his metabolism to a crawl, entering a state of forced torpor.

The pain was immense, a universe of sharp and dull agony. He acknowledged it, then set it aside.

Most importantly…

The plan had succeeded.

No one could possibly ‘survive’ under these conditions. Nyxl believed him dead. The Nightwatchers’ sensors would confirm a catastrophic structural annihilation with no life signs. The world would record that the ace operative codenamed "S," Santali, had perished in the self-destruction of the Arctic base.

Now, he was free.

Free to step from the light into the shadows.

Free to investigate the truths she must never learn.

Free… to prepare the board for the next game.

In the perfect dark, Santali allowed himself a smile. It was faint, but utterly genuine.

"Goodbye, Nyxl," he whispered, the sound echoing in the tiny space. "Live well. Don't you dare die… before I return."

Then, he closed his eyes and began to calculate.

Three numbers surfaced in his mind, cold and precise:

Oxygen: 172 minutes.

Core Temperature: 6 hours at minimal metabolic rate.

Trauma: Estimated functional mobility in 4-5 hours.

It was enough.

Santali regulated his breathing and sank into a state of deep hibernation.

On the ice plain above, X had walked a great distance. She stopped, pulled the shattered glass tube from her coat, and extracted the chip.

Then, from a hidden inner lining, she retrieved a miniature reader—a device she had always carried, one she had told no one about.

She inserted the chip.

The screen flickered to life. Data began to scroll.

The screen’s glow illuminated her bloodless face. Lines of text flowed past——

[Activation Protocol], [Emotional Anchor], [Stimulus: Death].

The final entry was a single name: [Santali].

A bitter wind scoured the ice, whipping up snow. She opened her hand. The reader fell into the deep snow with a soft, muffled thump. The chip snapped between her fingers. In two. Then four. Until it was a handful of meaningless fragments. She opened her palm. The wind took the glittering dust, scattering it toward the grey-white horizon.

The sun rose. Pallid. Its light held no warmth.

And she stood between earth and sky. Alone.

So utterly alone it seemed the world held no other living thing.

She stood there. The ice stretched beneath her, endless and flat—a vast, unmarked headstone waiting for its inscription. The wind clawed at her hair, rushed down her collar, but she felt no cold. Something deeper had frozen her from within. Not an emotion, but a knowing. The knowledge that she was a line of code. A variable. A probability calculated to the last decimal.

She looked down at her own open palm. The lines were clear. It was still warm. This body breathed. It bled. It could be stung by programmed "emotions." A marvel of engineering.

Then, gently, she closed her fingers.

Not a fist. A slow, deliberate press of fingertips into her own palm, until her nails carved crescent moons into the flesh. Deeper, until the skin broke. The pain was sharp, specific—a needle piercing the dense numbness.

A bead of blood welled up, a shocking red against the stark white. She watched it. For a long time. Then, with her thumb, she smeared it slowly. The red bloomed into a faint, rust-colored stain.

Her gaze lifted, finding the horizon once more. The wind turned sharp and needling, hurling ice-dust against her skin—a thousand minute fractures of cold.

Then, she walked.

Her boots carved prints into the snow’s silence, clear and deepening. No glance backward. No fixed point ahead. Only the wind, filling her jacket, beating the fabric into snap and crackle behind her like a restless, dark flag.

Volume I · O [THE END].