The knight raised his sword to the sky.
The dark blue blade caught the faint light that pierced through the storm clouds, gleaming like a star torn from the heavens. It hung there for a moment, suspended, terrible, inevitable.
A meteor waiting to fall.
A judgment waiting to be delivered.
Yuuta closed his eyes.
He had died once today. He did not want to die again. But there was no running from this. No hiding. No escape. The sword was descending, and he was too frozen, too weak, too human to move.
The sword struck the ground.
The ice cracked beneath the impact, fissures spreading outward like lightning, like rivers, like the roots of an ancient tree. The sound was deafening, a crack of thunder that echoed across the port, that shook the shipping containers, that made the very earth tremble. Yuuta felt the vibration in his bones, in his teeth, in the very core of his being.
But Yuuta felt nothing. No pain. No cold. No death.
He opened his eyes.
The knight was kneeling.
