The path groaned beneath their feet as they advanced.
It wasn't stable ice—it was shifting, alive in a way that defied reason. Plates slid over one another with grinding resistance, rising and falling just enough to threaten balance with every step. The storm narrowed around them, no longer wild and chaotic but focused, like a funnel drawing them forward.
"Definitely herding," Ti muttered, her eyes scanning the walls of jagged frost rising on either side. "It's shaping the battlefield into a corridor."
Neo didn't slow. "Then we use it. Fewer angles for it to hit us from."
"Or fewer ways to escape," Ast countered quietly.
"Same thing," he replied.
Ahead, the Shard Warden loomed larger with every step. What had once been a distant giant was now an overwhelming presence, its towering frame blotting out the stormlight. The glow within it pulsed rhythmically, like a slow, frozen heartbeat.
And then—
The ground beneath Neo's foot didn't just shift.
It vanished.
