The bed was warm. The room was not.
Levi opened his eyes to a window full of grey sky and the specific cold that lived in buildings that had made a philosophical accommodation with the climate rather than fighting it. He was under three blankets and could feel the cold through all of them.
He got up anyway. Movement was the only answer to this kind of cold — he'd learned that in approximately the first eight hours of being in Blizzaria.
Winters was in the kitchen with an iced coffee.
Levi stopped in the doorway. "That's iced coffee."
"Yes," said Winters.
"It is very cold in this building."
"Yes."
"And you're drinking iced coffee."
"Adaptation," said Winters. "The body learns to generate warmth when you consistently give it cold. If you always drink hot drinks in cold weather, you never adapt — you just depend." He looked at Levi. "Do you want one?"
Levi considered this. "I don't think that's how it works," he said.
"It's not entirely how it works," Winters agreed. "But it's not entirely wrong either. Sit down."
Levi sat down. Winters produced a second iced coffee. It was very cold and Levi drank it anyway because he was beginning to understand that Winters operated on a specific internal logic and that engaging with it rather than resisting it was more interesting.
"Where is everyone?" Levi asked.
"Twins are meditating. Ross is in the lounge. Curwyn is out — I don't ask. Zoe is at the hospital, she works there most mornings." Winters looked at his coffee. "This is the first quiet morning we've had in a while."
"What's it usually like?"
"Ask Curwyn. There's always something." Winters stood. "I have to go train the princess. Come if you want. You'll be useful."
"Train the princess," Levi said.
"You heard me. Thirty minutes."
He left. Levi finished the iced coffee, which was not as terrible as he'd expected, and went to get ready.
✦ ✦ ✦
The walk to the palace took them through the city's morning — the streets quiet, the snow settled from the night, the sky the same flat grey it had been when Levi woke up. He was starting to understand that this was just Frostilia's sky. It wasn't overcast. It wasn't waiting to clear. It was simply grey, the way some places were simply themselves.
"What's your dream?" Winters asked, after they'd been walking in comfortable silence for a while.
Levi looked at him. Winters was looking straight ahead, hands in his pockets, the question delivered in the same tone he used for everything — not casual exactly, but unhurried.
"To end the war," Levi said.
Winters was quiet for a moment. "Between myths and humans."
"Yes."
"That's an enormous ambition."
"I know."
"Do you have a plan?"
"I have a direction," Levi said. "The approach I had before — waiting for the attacks to come and responding — isn't working. I need to go on the offensive. Find their base. Take the fight to them." He paused. "The problem is I don't know where to start. I need information I don't have yet."
Winters considered this for the length of half a block. "I may know of a place," he said.
"A place?"
"A source. Knowledge that doesn't exist anywhere else." He glanced at Levi. "But that's a conversation for after the training session."
"You're deliberately building suspense," said Levi.
"I'm managing the agenda," said Winters. "There's a difference."
Levi almost smiled. "Sure there is."
✦ ✦ ✦
Aquafina was already in the throne room when they arrived — a young woman about their age with the specific energy of someone who was perpetually in motion even when standing still, water vapour trailing from her hands in light wisps the way steam trailed from a cup.
"Winters!" She saw him and then saw Levi. "Who's your friend?"
"New squad member. Levi Baron." Winters set his bag down. "Levi, Aquafina. She's the princess of Blizzaria and she has water magic and more energy than anyone in this kingdom has any right to."
"That's almost a compliment," said Aquafina, with the tone of someone who had learned to extract compliments from Winters' phrasing through careful excavation. She looked at Levi. "What brings you to training? Winters usually doesn't let people watch."
"He said I'd be useful," said Levi.
Aquafina looked at Winters with mild suspicion. "Why would he be useful?"
"You'll figure it out," said Winters. "Go warm up."
She went. Levi watched her move through water exercises — forms that moved large volumes of liquid with precise directional control, the water responding to her with the fluency of something trained into the body rather than consciously applied. She was good. Better than her age suggested.
"Let me guess," said Levi quietly, to Winters. "You're training her to maintain her ability in sub-zero temperatures."
Winters looked at him. "How did you arrive at that?"
"Water magic. Sub-zero environment. This room is colder than the rest of the palace." He paused. "In temperatures this low, water doesn't want to stay liquid. If her ability depends on liquid water and the ambient temperature keeps trying to freeze it, she burns energy just maintaining the state rather than using it. Train her to work efficiently in cold and she spends less energy fighting the environment."
Winters regarded him for a moment with the expression of someone revising a number upward. "That is exactly correct. Her current limit is negative ten degrees. The goal is negative fifty."
"How do you get her there?"
"Gradually. Drop the temperature a few degrees at a time, hold it there until her control is natural at that level, then drop it further. Right now we're working on precision control at negative ten — making the use of her ability effortless at this temperature before we make it harder." Winters looked at Aquafina. "The principle is that efficiency at one level becomes the foundation for the next. You don't fight the environment, you incorporate it."
"Good logic," said Levi.
"It's the only logic," said Winters.
✦ ✦ ✦
The training began with the pass drill — Aquafina creating a large volume of water and sending it to Winters, who received it and sent it back. Back and forth, the water moving between them in arcs that stayed stable rather than dispersing.
Levi watched and noticed something. "The water is different now than when she started," he said. "It's thicker. Slower."
"Slush," said Winters. "The temperature at this level puts water in a transitional state — not fully liquid, not fully frozen. Both of us can influence it. If it were pure liquid it would be hers alone. If it were solid ice it would be mine. In the intermediate state, the elements overlap." He sent the water back to Aquafina with a slight adjustment that slowed its surface slightly. "It teaches her to maintain the liquid state under pressure and teaches her to work with material that isn't fully responding to her."
"That's a genuinely elegant training design," said Levi.
"Thank you," said Winters, without false modesty.
After the pass drill, Winters turned to Levi. "Your part."
"Which is?"
"Dodge," said Winters. He looked at Aquafina. "Try to hit him."
Aquafina looked at Levi with the expression of someone who had just been given permission for something and was deciding how seriously to take it. "How hard?"
"Hard enough to be useful," said Winters.
She activated her water sensory — Levi felt the shift in the room's humidity as her awareness extended through the moisture in the air, mapping his position through the water particles around him. She created a volley of water bullets and fired.
He telestrided.
She tracked the relocation — the sensory was good, better than he'd expected, the water in the air giving her a spatial picture that didn't depend on sight. But tracking and keeping up were different problems. He moved again before she'd redirected the next volley, and the bullets hit the wall behind where he'd been.
She switched to a jet stream — wide, sweeping, designed to cover the telestride's exit vectors rather than its origin point. He went acrobatic, using the ceiling fixtures as platforms, and the stream went through the space he'd occupied a moment before.
*She's adapting,* he thought, with genuine respect. *Each attack is a response to the previous dodge rather than a repetition.*
The jet stream became a wave — the full volume of water in the room converging into a single forward mass, the kind of attack that didn't leave telestride vectors so much as it removed the concept of safe locations entirely. Levi looked at the wave, looked at the room's geometry, and made a decision.
He teleported behind Winters.
Winters had a snowflake barrier up. The wave hit it and he converted it to ice on contact, then shattered it into snow that settled across the training room floor.
"Using me as a shield," Winters said. "Cunning."
"I prefer the word 'resourceful,'" said Levi.
Aquafina looked at the snow where her wave had been. "I was sure that one would land."
"It was your best attempt," said Winters. "Which is why we're going to do it again in the next session. Your homework is precision and speed — not volume. Volume you have. Precision is what will close the gap." He looked at her. "Dismissed."
"Yessir." She looked at Levi. "You're fast."
"You're good at tracking," he said. "A few more sessions and you'll be leading me in directions rather than following me. That's when it gets interesting."
She grinned and left.
✦ ✦ ✦
Winters waited until her footsteps had faded from the corridor. Then he looked at Levi.
"Now," he said. "The knowledge source."
Levi turned to face him properly. "Tell me."
"There is a place in the northern region of Blizzaria called the Vault of Echoes," Winters said. "It's not on standard maps — the kingdom knows it exists but it's not publicly documented. It's a repository. Ancient, pre-war. It was built before the kingdoms as we know them existed, by people who understood both sides of this conflict in ways that have since been lost."
"Both sides meaning—"
"Myths and humans. Why the war started. What the myths actually are. What the mystery behind the comet and the Arcana Flux was, beyond the official account." Winters paused. "If you want to end this war, you need to understand it. Not from the outside — from its actual root. The Vault has that."
Levi was very still in the way he got still when something significant arrived.
"Why haven't you used it?" he asked.
"I went once," said Winters. "Two years ago. The Vault requires the person who enters it to be capable of receiving what it holds. At that time, I wasn't." He paused. "I've been waiting for the right circumstances to go back."
"And now?"
"Now I have three people from Olympia who killed a Code Yellow legendary class myth, survived an attempt on the Blazing Beast's life — even if they couldn't prevent it — and were given wonder designations at seventeen." He looked at Levi. "Now seems right."
Levi looked at him for a long moment.
"We need to talk to the King," he said.
"Yes," said Winters. "We do."
They walked toward the throne room together, and the grey Frostilian sky outside the palace windows was the same as it always was, and Levi thought: this feels like a step in the right direction.