One step. Two steps. Three.

Dama kept coming.

Each footfall was a small war against the wind—a stubborn press forward through the storm that wanted nothing more than to sweep him away.

The child Oni's fury bent the world into a living gale: snow roaring in sheets, loose scarves & cloaks snapped like sails, and the very air seemed to try to wrench limbs from their sockets.

For everyone watching, it was as if the world had been reduced to a single, continuous, and violent breath. For Dama, it felt like trying to walk through a wall of air.

Around him the others crumpled beneath the blast. Miuson's spear cracked and he was thrown backwards, limbs scrabbling before he landed hard in the snow. Domitius dug heels into the ground and fought the wind like a man bracing against a bear. Okun went down to his hands and knees, brow furrowed with the effort of staying on the ground. Koul shouted Dama's name and was ripped away on a tumble, coughing.

But Dama did not fall surprisingly, impossibly. Every step forward was a small victory in themselves. He leaned into the blast, arm up to shield his face, teeth set against the stinging grit that the wind flung at him.

Snow ripped at him like a living thing — a scream of shards and sharp cold that threw grit into his teeth and made his eyes water. Each foot felt like it had to be wrestled free of the frozen ground, each breath came as a razor that bit his throat.

The world had narrowed to the wind and a white roar, to the bright small blue eyes of the child Oni and the impossible weight of the storm it commanded. Around Dama, the sky was a spinning, blurring hiss. Inside him, everything turned hard and hot with a single, simple decision: he would not turn back.

The storm clawed at his clothes, the green sweater clung with a wet, freezing bite, the threads crusting with rime where stray flurries struck and froze. The wind carried a weird taste he couldn't quite name that bit the back of his throat and made his lungs ache with each inhale.

Yet still he pushed.

Every step became a negotiation between will and the elements. Where the storm hit him hardest, ice began to gather.

At first it was only a fine, glittering dust along the shoulders of his sweater—a cold film like breath turned to mucus.

Then it thickened in neat lines across the fabric, soaking into the wool and stitching like tiny, uninvited hands. The wetness of his clothing went from merely cold to painfully frigid: a slow, numbing pressure that climbed from fabric to skin. Where the wind found the slighter seams — the collar, the cuffs, the gap where the sweater met the bandage over his ribs — the cold worked faster, seizing at him with the sharp insistence of pinpricks.

Ice laced across his hair first, little filigrees that made each strand heavy and stiff. Then his eyelashes freckled with frost, each blink a brief scraping of glass. Tiny crystals formed on the exposed knuckles of his left hand, catching on his skin as if to pry him open.

The sensation was paradoxical: burning and numbing at once—a white-hot yet cold ache that pulsed underneath a spreading numbness. It felt like being pressed against a block of winter itself, the cold crawled inward, a slow, invasive pressure that made his fingers tingle and then go sluggish.

Breathing had turned from an effort to an impossible challenge: each inhalation came out as a thin scream of vapor that instantly crystallized on the hairs at the edge of his mouth. The skin around his lips and nose stung painfully, as if the wind were sanding away the warmth with thousands of tiny blades.

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

Whenever he tried to clench his hand or shift his weight, metallic pins pricked deep along his joints, and the muscles complained with a dull ache.

He could still barely feel the throb of his heartbeat against his palm, but the edges softened, colors dulled, faces and sounds receding as if behind glass.

Yet beneath it all—beneath the sting, the numbness, the weight of the accumulating cold—something fiercer still kept him upright: the heat of resolve—the heat of his soulura. It pressed at the cold from the inside, a core of feeling that refused to be frozen.

For a breath, that inner warmth hummed against the winter's teeth; then the next gust swept over him and more ice crawled up his clothes, spreading its crystalline web across his chest and ribs.

One step. Two steps. Three.

Seeing Dama's advancement, the child Oni pulled back its arms, then shot them out again. The blizzard answered with more teeth.

The air hammered Dama from all sides; his hair whipped into his face, lashes iced over, and his one free hand—the hand he had raised for protection and for calling out to Giona, to everyone—began to sting as if pinpricks were alive inside the skin.

It was worse when the ice moved from clothing to skin. The first crystal that grew on his forearm glittered like a jewel, then another, and another, knitting themselves into lattices that broke skin as they spread.

They felt at once delicate and merciless: each one a cool needle that sank into flesh a fraction. The cold crawled inward, a slow, unwelcome tide that made his muscles clench and his teeth chatter against his will. Fingers that had been warm and alive a heartbeat before went strangely heavy, as if stuffed with cotton. The fine movements—the small flexes that let him steady a step—began to fail.

When he inhaled, the air scraped his lungs. When he exhaled, his cheeks stung.

The world around the child Oni blurred and doubled, then thinned to a single, bright point at the little face seen furrowed with fury.

Dama could feel the Oni's emotion like a tide in his bones, it pried at his resolve and threatened to pull him under. Still he pushed. For Giona. For the promise he had made. For the small, stubborn ember of being more than a man when it mattered.

Cold crept into joints next. His ankle stiffened so that rolling it became a risk. His knee, which had complained to his ribs, locked and unlocked like a hinge full of ice. The snow clung to his lashes and crusted his eyebrows. Little bells of frost chimed on his hair. His chest began to feel heavy, as if each atom inside him had been leeched of warmth and replaced with glass.

When the ice reached his skin, it was a violent, bright sensation that was almost a sound—a crackle against bone. At first it was painful in that sharp, yelling way, then it dissolved into a cold so absolute that pain itself seemed to recede.

His fingers blurred into stumps of blue, the fine lines on his palm vanished under a sheen that caught the storm's light. The icy web stitched along his arm, glittering and growing, the cold so precise it felt…clean. His steps slowed.

One last step, and it took everything. The blizzard threw a final, furious shove that sucked the warmth from his lips and made his teeth chitter in a way that had nothing to do with shivering and everything to do with freezing. His arm reached, a white, trembling branch now.

The world tilted.

His boots dug for stability, but found only snow and glass.

For an instant—a pure, crystalline instant—Dama thought of Giona's face again, bright and trusting, and of Mumu's big stitched grin, and of Nini waggling her tail. The thought was a flare in his chest that burned away the screaming cold just long enough for his hand to hover an inch from the child Oni.

Then, motion stopped.

The chill folded over him like a second skin; muscles seized mid-step. Color bled from his cheeks in a wash of blue that spread into the frozen pattern that first crossed his face, then his entire body. Even his hair froze in place, each strand glittering a blue silver.

Dama's hand—outstretched, brave, and nearly touching—hung suspended, encased in a statue of ice. It was as if the world itself sealed him with a gentle, inexorable hand.

The storm's breath dulled to a distant roar. Around him, flakes continued to whip and spin.

The child Oni's eyes shone with a cold, bewildered light—a light the began to dim as his fury subsided in favor of exhaustion.

Now unblinded from rage and fear, the child Oni looked on at the sight he created: Dama stood preserved in a single, terrible sculpture of ice, his frozen hand an inch from the child Oni's own trembling fingers.

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Next: (Chapter 103) Decisive Shot

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