Erza flew toward Antarctica.
The wind screamed past her ears, a deafening roar that would have shattered the eardrums of any mortal being. But Erza was not mortal. She was a dragon—the most powerful being in existence—and the wind was her servant, not her master. It parted before her, wrapped around her wings, carried her forward with a speed that defied comprehension.
Below her, the world blurred into streaks of color, the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean, the green-brown of coastlines, the white caps of waves frozen mid-crash by her passage. She was heading toward the southern ice, toward the frozen continent that reminded her of home. Not her kingdom in Atlantis—not the Frost Death continent where her palace stood—but something older. Something deeper. The place where ice was born.
Libus Country lay far behind her now. She had left it within seconds, crossing thousands of kilometers in less than a minute. Libus was near South America and South Africa, a small nation nestled in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, its borders marked by nothing but water and the will of its people. But Erza was not headed there. She was headed south. Further south. To the end of the world.
Her face was hidden behind her silver hair, the strands whipped back by the force of her flight. Her violet eyes, usually sharp and focused, were distant—lost in memories that she could not escape. The laboratory. The Death Well. The arena. The Dreadvex Ape's fists falling. Yuuta's small body being crushed and healed and crushed again. His screams. His tears. His voice calling out for Sophia in the darkness.
She clenched her jaw.
Her wings beat once, twice, and she accelerated.
In less than a minute, she crossed thousands of kilometers. Her body cut through the sky at over a hundred kilometers per second—a streak of silver and white that left a trail of frozen air in its wake. The laws of physics, the boundaries of motion, the limits that bound every other creature on this planet—they did not apply to her. She was a dragon. She was Erza Vely Dragomir, the Blade of Atlantis, the most powerful being in existence.
And she was running away.
Below her, the ocean began to change. The deep blue of the open sea gave way to a paler, colder color—the first sign of the ice that waited at the edge of the world. Icebergs drifted below her, massive white shapes that looked like frozen mountains floating on the water. Some were small, no larger than a house. Others were enormous, the size of cities, their jagged peaks reaching toward the sky.
Erza did not slow.
Her power radiated from her body like heat from a furnace, invisible but immense. The air pressure around her shifted. The ocean below her parted.
The waters split.
Not gently—not the slow, graceful parting of waves around a ship's bow. This was violent. Forceful. The ocean itself bent to her will, the surface cracking open along a line that stretched for kilometers behind her. The water rose on either side of her passage, forming walls of blue and white that reached dozens of meters into the air. Fish and whales and creatures of the deep scattered before her, their ancient instincts screaming at them to flee.
She was not trying to do this. She was not flexing her power or showing off her strength. She was simply flying—and her presence alone, her speed alone, her sheer existence was enough to tear the world apart.
The walls of water collapsed behind her, crashing together with a sound like thunder, sending waves racing toward distant shores that would feel the echo of her passage for hours.
She reached Antarctica.
The continent appeared on the horizon—a vast expanse of white and blue, stretching from one edge of the world to the other. Mountains of ice rose from the frozen ground, their peaks lost in clouds. Glaciers crept toward the sea, slow and ancient, carving valleys that had existed since before humans had learned to walk.
Erza did not slow.
She targeted one of the largest ice mountains—a massive peak that had stood for millennia, its slopes carved by wind and time, its summit hidden in the clouds. It was a monument to the power of nature, a testament to the slow, patient force of ice and cold.
She crashed into it.
The impact was cataclysmic.
Her body hit the mountain at over a hundred kilometers per second, and the ice—the ancient, dense, impossibly hard ice that had taken thousands of years to form—shattered like glass. Cracks spread outward from the point of impact, racing across the mountain's surface, splitting the peak in two.
Chunks of ice the size of buildings fell away, tumbling down the slopes, crashing into the frozen ground below.
Erza landed.
Her feet hit the ice, and the whole surface cracked. Not just the mountain—the ground beneath her.
The frozen earth, which had been solid for millennia, split open along a web of fractures that stretched for hundreds of meters in every direction.
The ice groaned beneath her, protesting the weight of her presence, the force of her landing, the sheer impossibility of a being so powerful standing on its surface.
She stood at the center of the destruction, her silver hair blowing in the frozen wind, her white wings still spread wide behind her. Her chest heaved with each breath. Her hands, hanging at her sides, were clenched into fists.
She was barely holding.
The memories came flooding back—not Yuuta's memories, but her own. The ones she had witnessed in his mind. The laboratory. The needles. The burns. The scientists who had laughed while he screamed. The Death Well. The bones. The darkness. The arena. The Dreadvex Ape. The queen's smile.
And she had been unable to do anything.
She had watched like a pathetic worm, unable to reach through time and pull him to safety. Unable to wrap her wings around his small body and shield him from the pain. Unable to stand between him and the monster and roar, No more. You will not touch him. You will never touch him again.
Her power—the power that made her the most feared being in existence—had been useless against the past.
She could freeze armies. She could shatter mountains. She could summon the Legion of Eternal Frost and drown the world in ice. But she could not change what had already happened. She could not undo the needles. She could not un-break his bones. She could not un-seal his memories or un-witness his suffering.
She was a dragon.
And she was powerless.
Her body began to tremble.
Not from cold—the cold was her element, her home, her birthright. The frozen wind that would kill any human in minutes wrapped around her like a blanket. The ice beneath her feet welcomed her, recognized her, called her daughter. But she trembled anyway.
Rage.
Grief.
Despair.
She had flown to Antarctica to clear her mind, to ease the burning in her chest, to find some peace in the ice and snow. She was an ice dragon—the cold was supposed to calm her, to center her, to remind her of who she was and what she could do.
But the rage would not leave.
She stood on the shattered ice, her breath fogging in the air, her wings slowly folding against her back. Behind her, the ice mountain she had destroyed continued to crumble, chunks of frozen stone sliding down the slopes, settling into new shapes that would take millennia to form.
She did not notice.
She did not care.
The polar bear found her first.
It had been hunting along the edge of the ice, following the scent of seals, when it smelled something else. Something strange. Something that did not belong. The scent was unfamiliar—not seal, not fish, not any creature the bear had encountered in its years of roaming the frozen waste.
The bear was massive.
One of the largest of its kind, a male in the peak of his strength, his fur thick and white. His paws were the size of dinner plates, each one tipped with claws that could shred flesh and crack bone. His jaws could crush a seal's skull with a single bite. His shoulders were broad, his chest deep, his body a machine of muscle and hunger.
His territory stretched for kilometers in every direction. He had never seen a human here—so far from any settlement, so deep in the frozen waste, in a place where even the most hardened explorers feared to venture. But his instincts did not care what he saw or did not see. His instincts told him one thing: food.
The warnings were clear. The stories were old. Every Human knew—once you saw a Polar Bear, that human was dead. There was no escape. The bear would hunt. The bear would chase. The bear would kill. That was the way of the frozen north, the law of the ice, the rule that had been written in blood long before the first human set foot on this continent.
But today, the polar bear was prey.
The bear charged.
Its massive paws pounded against the ice, claws digging into the frozen surface for traction, sending chips of ice flying in every direction. Its body—nearly three meters long, weighing over half a ton—moved with a speed that seemed impossible for something so large. Its muscles bunched and relaxed, bunched and relaxed, propelling it forward in a loping, ground-eating run.
Its jaws were open. Its teeth were bared. Its breath clouded in the cold air.
It covered the distance between them in seconds.
Erza did not move.
She stood with her face hidden behind her silver hair, her hands hanging at her sides, her body still trembling. She did not look up. She did not raise her hands. She did not spread her wings. She did not acknowledge the massive predator bearing down on her.
She simply stood there lost in her memories, lost in her grief, lost in a rage that had nowhere to go.
The polar bear lunged.
Its jaws closed around Erza's head.
The teeth—each one as long as a finger, each one sharp enough to pierce steel, each one honed by years of crushing bone and tearing flesh—sank into her skin.
And shattered.
The sound was like glass breaking, like ice cracking, like bones snapping under a hammer. The polar bear's teeth exploded into fragments—splintering, fracturing, turning to dust against Erza's skin as if she were made of diamond, as if she were the mountain itself, as if she were something that could not be bitten, could not be hurt, could not be touched.
Blood poured from the bear's mouth—bright red, hot and thick, steaming in the cold air. It dripped onto the ice, pooling beneath the bear's paws, staining the white snow a deep, dark crimson.
The polar bear screamed.
It was a sound of agony, of confusion, of primal terror—a sound that had never come from this bear before, that had never needed to come from this bear before. The bear released its grip, stumbling backward, its paws slipping on the blood-slick ice, its massive body crashing to the ground.
Its mouth hung open, revealing the ruin of its teeth—broken stumps, exposed nerves, bleeding gums. It had never felt pain like this. It had never encountered prey that could not be bitten. It had never faced a creature that did not bleed when he bit.
It looked at Erza.
And Erza looked at it.
Her violet eyes—cold as the void between stars, sharp as the edge of a blade, deep as the ocean she had crossed—met the bear's gaze. There was no anger in her eyes. No hatred. No cruelty. There was only the cold, absolute certainty of a predator facing prey.
The bear's instincts screamed at it. Every nerve, every fiber, every ancient memory buried in its DNA told it to run. This was not prey. This was not food. This was something else—something older, something stronger, something that did not belong in the natural order of the frozen north.
The bear tried to run.
But it was too late.
Erza's dragon claws extended.
The claws were not the small, blunt nails of a human hand. They were weapons—curved blades of white bone, each one longer than a dagger, each one sharp enough to cut through dragon scale. They gleamed in the pale light of the Antarctic sun, reflecting the ice and snow and blood.
The polar bear had no chance.
She slashed.
The movement was casual—almost lazy, almost dismissive. A flick of her wrist. A wave of her hand. She did not put her full strength into the blow. She did not need to. The bear was nothing. Less than nothing. A gnat buzzing at the ear of a god.
Three slashes appeared on the polar bear's body.
The first started at its lower belly, just above the hind legs where the fur was thinnest and the skin was soft. It traveled upward—across the stomach, across the chest, across the throat—ending at the base of the neck.
The cut was deep, so deep that the bear's spine was visible through the wound.
The second started at the left shoulder and slashed diagonally across the torso, intersecting the first. It cut through muscle and bone and organ, creating a flap of flesh that hung open, exposing the bear's interior.
The third started at the right hip and rose to meet the others, creating a pattern of intersecting lines that covered the bear's entire body.
The wounds were not clean. They were not surgical. They were brutal.
The bear's intestines spilled out first—long, pale coils steaming in the cold air, sliding across the ice, unraveling like snakes from a basket.
Then came the stomach, sliced open, its contents spilling onto the frozen ground—half-digested seal meat, chunks of blubber, bile and acid that hissed against the ice.
Then the heart.
It was crushed. Torn. Ruptured. The muscle that had pumped blood through the bear's body for years lay in pieces, still trying to beat, still trying to push blood through arteries that no longer existed. Blood poured from the wound—thick and dark and endless—pooling around the bear's body, freezing as it spread.
The polar bear fell.
Its body collapsed onto the ice—a mountain of fur and flesh reduced to rubble. Its legs kicked once, twice, three times, claws scraping against the frozen ground. Its jaws opened and closed, searching for air that would not come, for breath that could not be drawn. Its eyes—brown and wide and filled with a terror that no bear should ever have to feel—stared at the sky.
Then it was still.
Dead.
Killed in less than a second.
Erza stood over the body, her claws dripping with blood, her face still hidden behind her hair. The blood of the bear had splattered across her—her face, her chest, her arms, her wings. It was red. Bright red. Human red.
The same red as Yuuta's blood.
The same red as his eyes.
The same red that had stained the arena floor, that had poured from his wounds, that had covered his small body as he lay broken in the crater beneath the Dreadvex Ape's fists.
She remembered.
She remembered the way his blood had looked when the monster's fists had fallen—the way it had sprayed across the dirt, across Sophia's bandages, across the queen's smiling face. The way it had pooled beneath his small body, dark and thick and endless.
She remembered the way his eyes—those red, lifeless, terrible eyes—had stared at nothing.
Erza looked at the blood on her claws.
And she screamed.
The roar tore from her throat without warning.
It was not the sound of a woman crying. It was not the sound of a queen grieving. It was not the sound of a dragon furious.
It was all of them at once—a sound of pure, unfiltered, absolute fury that echoed across the frozen continent, that shattered the stillness of the Antarctic night, that carried for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.
The ice beneath her feet cracked further. The web of fractures that had spread from her landing spread wider, deeper, farther. The ground trembled beneath her rage.
The mountains around her shook—their peaks shedding snow, their slopes crumbling, their ancient faces cracking under the force of her voice. Avalanches began in the distance, white rivers of snow and ice rushing down the slopes, burying valleys that had been exposed for millennia.
The roar was not a cry for help.
It was not a plea.
It was a declaration.
The dragon had seen too much. The dragon had been asked to sit and watch while the man she loved was torn apart, and she could not, would not, accept that there was nothing she could do to change it.
She roared until her throat was raw—until the sound faded from a scream to a shriek to a rasp. She roared until the ice stopped shaking, until the mountains stopped crumbling, until the last echo died away, lost in the endless white expanse.
Then she punched the mountain.
The mountain she had already cracked—the one she had crashed into when she landed, the one that had stood for millennia, the one that had survived ice ages and meteor impacts and the slow, patient march of time—exploded.
Chunks of ice the size of houses flew in every direction, tumbling through the air, crashing into the frozen ground. Each impact sent tremors through the earth, created new craters, carved new scars in the ancient landscape. The peak collapsed inward, falling into itself, creating an avalanche that buried the slopes in white.
Erza did not stop.
She punched the ground. The ice shattered beneath her fist, creating a crater deep enough to bury a building, wide enough to swallow a ship. She punched again, and the crater deepened. Again, and the ice cracked further, revealing the dark water beneath—water that had not seen the sky in millennia, water that was colder than death, water that steamed in the frozen air.
She punched everything.
Every mountain within reach. Every ice formation that stood taller than her. Every glacier, every ridge, every frozen wave that had been carved by wind and time. She punched them all. She shattered them all. She reduced them to rubble and dust and fragments that scattered across the ice like the pieces of her own shattered heart.
She was angry.
Not the cold, controlled anger of a queen delivering justice—the anger that she wore like armor, that she wielded like a weapon, that she had perfected over centuries of rule.
Something deeper.
Something older.
Something that had no name and no purpose except destruction.
She had thought that watching Yuuta's past would give her clarity.
She had thought that understanding his suffering would help her heal him.
She had thought that she could bring him to Atlantis, wrap him in her protection, keep him safe forever.
But everything had failed.
The Goddess's warning echoed in her mind. Isvarn's words cut through her thoughts like blades. The truth—the cold, hard, unescapable truth—pressed against her chest like a weight.
Yuuta could not come to Nova.
The mana would break his seal.
The memories would return—not slowly, not gently, but all at once. The laboratory. The Death Well. The arena. Every needle. Every burn. Every broken bone. Every moment of his short, terrible life.
And he would shatter.
His mind would break.
And there would be nothing—nothing—that anyone could do to put him back together.
Erza punched the ice again.
And again.
And again.
An hour passed.
Maybe more.
Erza did not know. She had lost track of time—lost track of herself, of the world, of everything except the rage and the grief and the cold, endless weight of a decision she could not make.
The sky above her had darkened. The sun, which had been hanging low on the horizon, had dipped below the edge of the world, leaving the continent in a twilight that seemed to stretch forever. The stars emerged—one by one, then all at once, scattered across the darkness like diamonds on black velvet.
Finally, her fists stopped moving.
Her arms fell to her sides. Her wings folded against her back. Her chest heaved with each breath, fogging in the frozen air.
She stood in the center of the destruction she had created.
A landscape of shattered ice, broken mountains, and blood-stained snow stretched in every direction. The polar bear's body lay nearby, half-buried in the rubble, its blood already freezing into dark red crystals that sparkled in the starlight.
Erza did not look at it.
She walked to a flat stretch of ice—one of the few that had survived her rage—and sat down.
The cold seeped through her clothes, through her skin, through her bones. But she did not feel it. She was an ice dragon. The cold was her mother, her home. It did not bite her skin or chill her blood or make her shiver. It welcomed her.
She sat on the ice, her legs crossed beneath her, her hands resting on her knees. Her silver hair hung around her face, hiding her expression. Her violet eyes stared at the ground—at the cracks in the ice, at the patterns of frost that formed and reformed with each breath, at the small, perfect crystals of frozen blood scattered across the white surface.
The ice made her feel better.
Not happy. Not peaceful. Better.
She stayed still on the ice, thinking.
For hours, she sat—her body motionless, her breath slow and steady, her mind turning over the same questions again and again.
Was there any way to help him?
Any way to bring him to Nova without breaking his seal?
Any way to protect him without destroying him?
Any magic she had not considered? Any power she had not yet unleashed? Any secret hidden in the ancient texts, in the forgotten libraries, in the memories of beings older than the stars?
Or was she going to have to leave him?
Leave him on Earth.
Leave him in that small apartment with its cheap furniture and its photographs of Elena and its calendar marked with ordinary days.
Leave him to live a normal life—a human life—a life without her.
She would not be able to see him every day. She would not be able to hold him at night. She would not be able to wrap her wings around him and keep him safe.
She would have to visit.
Sneak through the barriers between worlds. Steal moments of time. Hold him when she could and leave when she must.
But was that enough?
Was that fair to him?
Could she give him a happy life from a distance? Could she watch him grow old while she remained young? Could she stand by as he lived and laughed and loved—and then, one day, as he died?
She was a dragon. She would live for millennia.
He was human. He would live for decades.
The math was simple. The truth was cruel.
And there was nothing she could do to change it.
The night was long in Antarctica.
Longer than anywhere else on Earth.
The sun would not rise again for months. The darkness would stretch on, unbroken, unending, a blanket of shadow that covered the continent from edge to edge.
But the stars were beautiful.
Brighter than she had ever seen them. Closer than they had ever seemed. Scattered across the sky like diamonds on black velvet, scattered across the sky like hope scattered across despair.
Erza looked up at the stars.
She thought of Yuuta.
Of his smile—the way it lit up his face, the way it made his red eyes warm and soft, the way it never failed to make her heart beat faster.
Of his cooking—the way he moved in the kitchen, confident and calm, the way he tasted everything twice, the way he always made sure Elena's plate was full before his own.
Of the way he held Elena—careful and gentle, as if he was afraid she might break, as if he still could not believe she was real, as if he was holding something precious and fragile and irreplaceable.
Of the way he looked at her—across the dinner table, in the quiet hours of the night, in the moments between words and breaths and heartbeats. His red eyes warm and soft and full of a love she had never expected to find.
She had read countless books in his apartment.
Sitting on his couch, waiting for him to wake from his nightmares, filling the long hours with words and ideas and knowledge. She had learned how this world worked. How humans lived. How they loved. How they survived.
And she knew how to make Yuuta's life easy.
Not perfect. Not without struggle. Easy. Comfortable. Safe.
She would give him everything he needed—money, security, a home, a future. She would watch over him from the shadows, protecting him from threats he would never know existed. She would visit him when she could, hold him when he needed her, love him even when they were worlds apart.
She would not take him to Nova.
She could not.
But she would make sure he never suffered again.
Erza rose from the ice.
Her body, which had been still for hours, moved with the grace of a predator waking from a long rest. Her joints cracked. Her muscles stretched. Her wings unfurled behind her, catching the starlight, gleaming like polished silver.
Her violet eyes, which had been distant and lost, sharpened with purpose.
She looked up at the sky—at the stars, at the darkness, at the vast, beautiful expanse of a world that did not know her name.
"I will make your life easy," she said.
Her voice was soft—barely a whisper, carried away by the frozen wind. But the words were absolute. Certain. A vow spoken to the universe, witnessed by the stars, sealed by the ice beneath her feet.
"My Idoit mortal."
She smiled.
It was a small smile. Fragile and sad. The smile of a woman who had made a difficult choice, who had accepted a painful truth, who had decided to love from a distance because loving up close was not possible.
The smile of a dragon who had finally stopped fighting.
She spread her wings.
The wind caught them—lifted her, carried her upward. The ice fell away beneath her, the shattered mountains shrinking to dots, the blood-stained snow fading into the twilight.
She rose into the sky—higher and higher, toward the stars, toward the darkness, toward the future that waited for her.
Behind her, the polar bear's body lay frozen in the ice—a monument to the rage that had brought her here and the peace she had finally found.
The night was long.
But the dawn would come.
To Be Contiuned.....