The jump from ten to fifteen was not measured in years, but in the thickness of the frost on the windows and the complexity of the "modern" machinery Leona had dismantled to build her sanctuary.
The Frozen Wastes were supposed to be a death sentence. To the "civilized" world of Orestes, the northern tundra was a void where mana froze in the air and steam-engines cracked from the sheer thermal shock.
But for Leona Argen, it was a fortress.
At fifteen, Leona had grown tall and lean, her movements possessed of a lethal, fluid grace that made her look less like a girl and more like a predator made of snow. Her hair, once a simple brown, was now streaked with shocks of white—a physical manifestation of the absolute-zero core she had cultivated.
She stood on the observation deck of The Bastion, a fortress carved directly into a massive, slow-moving glacier. Below her, the "Scrappers" and refugees from Orestes worked in a thriving underground city powered by a revolutionary blend of Bram's smithing and Leona's "Super-Cooled" mana-turbines.
"The perimeter sensors just tripped, Mistress," a voice crackled through the brass intercom. It was Kaelen, his voice sounding older, raspier.
Leona didn't look away from the white horizon. "A scout?"
"Single rider. Mana-bike of an unknown model. High-altitude gear. He's flying a white flag, but his signature... it's heavy, Leona. Like a lead weight in the snow."
Leona flexed her right wrist. The Mithril Weave had evolved. It no longer looked like a simple tattoo; it was an intricate, shimmering sleeve of silver filigree that reached up to her elbow. When she willed it, the threads didn't just emerge—they pulsed, humming at a frequency that could shatter glass.
"Let him in," Leona said. "But keep the frost-cannons primed."
Ten minutes later, the traveler was brought into the Great Hall. He was a young man, barely older than Leona, dressed in the charcoal-grey uniform of the Imperial Academy—the very institution that trained the Duke's elite Technomancers. He was shivering violently, his face blistered by windburn.
"I... I seek the Weaver," he gasped, collapsing onto the furs.
Leona stepped out of the shadows, her eyes glowing with a faint, predatory light. "You've found her. Why has a dog of the Academy wandered so far from his kennel?"
The boy looked up, his eyes wide with a mixture of terror and awe. He reached into his coat and pulled out a small, hexagonal storage crystal. It was pulsing with a sickly, rhythmic red light.
"The Duke... he didn't die in the purge," the boy whispered. "The King spared him because he found something in the 'Old Archive' ruins. Something Silas Argen left behind."
Leona's heart went still. "My father left nothing but a book and a broken bow."
"He left a Harmonic Blueprint," the boy corrected, coughing up a spray of frozen blood. "A way to resonate mithril at a frequency that turns it into a liquid. The Duke has built a weapon, Leona. He calls it the Void-Needle. It's designed to find your signature, bypass your ice, and... and unweave you from the inside out."
Leona walked over and picked up the crystal. The moment her fingers touched it, the Mithril Weave on her arm shrieked. It wasn't a pulse of power—it was a pulse of fear. The silver threads beneath her skin began to vibrate painfully, trying to pull away from the crystal's proximity.
"He's testing it," Leona realized, her voice a low hiss. "This crystal isn't just a message. It's a beacon."
"Leona! Look at the sky!" Bram's voice boomed as he burst into the hall, his mechanical leg clanking on the stone.
Leona ran to the window.
Tearing through the perpetual blizzard of the Wastes was a ship unlike any she had seen in Orestes. It was sleek, black, and silent. It didn't use steam or loud mana-turbines. It drifted on a cloud of dark energy, its prow shaped like a giant, pointed needle.
From the ship's hull, a single beam of red light shot out, striking the glacier a mile away.
The ice didn't melt. It didn't shatter. It dissolved. The molecular bonds of the ancient glacier were simply being undone.
"He didn't come to arrest me," Leona said, her white eyes narrowing as the silver threads on her arm began to glow with a desperate, violet intensity. "He came to delete me."
"We can't fight that, kid," Kaelen said, drawing his daggers. "Our cannons won't even scratch that hull if it's using void-tech."
Leona looked at the dying boy on the floor, then at the black ship. She felt the weight of the five years she'd spent building this sanctuary. She thought of her mother, Elena, currently teaching children in the lower levels how to read.
"Bram," Leona said, her voice dropping to that absolute-zero calm. "Get everyone to the Iron-Crawler. We're going deeper. Into the crust."
"And you?"
Leona held up her hand. The Mithril Weave began to extend, spinning into a massive, translucent blade of frozen silver.
"I'm a librarian," she said, a cold, sharp smile touching her lips. "And I just found a book I haven't finished yet. I'm going to see how the Duke likes it when I rewrite his ending."
She didn't wait for an answer. She leaped from the observation deck, her threads catching the wind, a single white speck flying toward the heart of the black storm.