Even after losing most of her body, Lyra kept fighting. With her remaining movable arm, she clawed into the hardened snow and dragged Kaivan's much larger body. The rope between them carried part of the weight, but every pull felt like torture. Several times, Kaivan almost slid back toward the cliff, forcing Lyra to cry out as she held on with all her strength.
"Move… Kaivan… at least breathe…" she whispered, her voice weak but filled with determination—for him, and for herself.
At last, exhausted, Lyra stopped. Her breath came in broken intervals. The world around her was nothing but dark white and heavy silence. She closed her eyes for a moment, then whispered, "I'll lower my body temperature. I'll send an emergency radio signal… If someone detects it, maybe there's still hope."
She redirected her remaining energy. Her body temperature dropped sharply, nearing freezing, while a weak transmission pulsed toward the sky. The signal pierced the storm, then vanished. Fifteen seconds later, it returned—faint and broken, like a life refusing to fade.
But Kaivan's body began to shake violently. His temperature plunged, his muscles spasming. Lyra panicked.
"No… if I keep transmitting, he'll die of hypothermia."
She immediately canceled the signal, redirected her energy to thermal functions, and wrapped herself around Kaivan from behind, giving him the last warmth she had. Her metal body pressed against his frozen skin.
"Why… why do I care about this human so much…"
Meanwhile, inside the helicopter, a technician stared nervously at his screen.
"Sir, the monsters' heat signatures disappeared minutes ago. But… Lyra's signal appears and vanishes every fifteen seconds. It's about one kilometer from the missile impact point. It looks like an unstable emergency transmission."
Levan narrowed his eyes. "If Kaivan doesn't survive, at least Lyra will have recorded everything. That alone can save the mission."
The helicopter turned sharply. The ground vehicles below changed course toward the signal's coordinates. Searchlights pierced through snow and fog, hunting for a trace of light—a small miracle in a frozen land of death.
Among towering granite rocks buried under thick snow, the night in the Caucasus Mountains became a frozen hell. The wind roared like a wild beast, biting every inch of exposed skin. The pale gray sky released endless snow, covering the world like a curtain of death.
Behind a massive rock, Kaivan's body lay stiff. His breathing was broken, blood flowing from a deep wound on his head. His left arm was gone up to the shoulder, his right leg missing to the thigh. His body was almost unrecognizable.
Yet beside him, Lyra still tried to cover his shattered form—protecting the only life that remained warm in a world slowly freezing.
A severely damaged humanoid frame—only her upper body remained. One metallic arm was nearly torn off, her scorched torso exposed burned cables, and her head, crowned with fading emerald bionic eyes, trembled weakly in the storm.
"Kaivan… hold on… please…" Her voice broke in the blizzard. It was no longer artificial—now it quivered with fear and desperation. With her remaining arm, she clutched the torn fabric of Kaivan's clothes. Her metal body was painfully cold, yet she forced her heating system to function, pressing herself tightly against him.
Snow fell heavily, wrapping them like a burial shroud. The world vanished into endless white. Still, Lyra continued to transfer warmth—inefficient, unstable, yet born from something she could not understand.
"I… have to live… I must…" Kaivan whispered faintly, like a final breath before fading.
Lyra froze. She stared at his pale face—his right eye was gone, but his left slowly opened. With his last strength, Kaivan raised his trembling hand and touched her face.
"Your green eyes… they're beautiful…"
The words cut through the silence.
Lyra's entire system trembled. "Eh…? Beautiful? I'm… a metal frame, non-binary, my eyes are for detecting enemy heat, not for looking… attractive…"
But Kaivan's voice returned, weak and broken.
"I… want… to stay… with you… Lyra… until… the end…"
The world seemed to stop.
Those words pierced the core of Lyra's logic. There was no strategy. No calculation. Only a simple wish—to be together.
"Until the end of what, huh?! Idiot! Why did you act like this without thinking about yourself?!" Lyra shouted, her voice trembling like cracked glass. "I… I can't lose you! You're not allowed to die!"
She hugged him tighter, her metal body pressing against his fragile form.
"Stay alive… please… I don't understand anything anymore. Why do I feel… so afraid?"
Time slowed.
Snow piled over them, forming a small white mound. In that frozen silence, only two things remained: Kaivan's weakening breaths and Lyra's unstable mechanical heartbeat.
Then—like hope descending from the sky—the roar of engines broke through the storm.
Heavy vehicles thundered in the distance. Blinding white searchlights pierced the fog and snow, illuminating two half-buried figures.
A military helicopter landed nearby, whipping the snow into a violent storm. Several snow vehicles climbed the icy slope, their tracks gripping the frozen ground. From the helicopter, Levan—a tall man wrapped in a black fur-lined coat—jumped down.
His face was stiff. Then his eyes widened.
"Kaivan… he's still alive?" he murmured in disbelief.