Chapter Text
Player was exhausted.
Not the clean, fleeting kind of tired that vanishes with sleep, but the heavy exhaustion that settled into the bones and refused to leave. Since arriving in this fractured time, rest had become a rumor, something other people talked about in safer worlds. Even passing through the nearby village had offered no true pause. Only wary glances, whispered fears, and the sense that time itself was pressing him forward, urging him not to stop.
Still, he understood Shedletsky’s desperation.
The Admin was gone. The world was unraveling. And somehow, impossibly, Player had been chosen to collect the swords in his place. The thought gnawed at him as he walked. Why him? What had Shedletsky seen? Potential? Necessity? Or was it simply panic, the act of a drowning man grabbing the nearest hand?
The corridor stretched ahead in a perfect, merciless line. Straight. Unyielding. Every step echoed, sharp and lonely, the sound swallowed by towering black stone. The air grew colder with each meter, as if the castle itself were exhaling frost into his lungs. His breath fogged before his face. His fingers stiffened around his weapon, numbness creeping in despite his grip.
The walls changed as he advanced. Smooth rock gave way to jagged crystal veins, dark and glassy, pulsing faintly with a cold blue light. It felt like being watched, not by eyes, but by memory. By a kingdom that remembered better days and resented him for arriving too late.
At the end of the corridor, the space opened suddenly.
A vast throne room unfolded before him, cathedral-like in scale. Pillars of black stone rose toward a ceiling lost in shadow, their surfaces coated in rime. At the far end, elevated on a wide dais, stood the throne. It was carved from a single mass of obsidian-like rock, cracked through the center and filled with frozen light, as if ice itself had been sealed inside.
Seated upon it was the ruler of this place.
The Cruel King did not rise. He did not need to.
He sat perfectly still, posture regal and rigid, his crown sharp and angular, like a weapon resting upon his brow. His eyes glowed with a pale, glacial hue, fixed on Player long before he had crossed the halfway point of the room.
The silence stretched, heavy and deliberate.
Then the king spoke.
“So,” the Cruel King said, his voice echoing across the stone like ice cracking on a frozen lake. “This is the one I have heard so much about.”
His gaze sharpened, cutting.
“You.”
Player stopped a few steps from the dais, instinctively bracing himself.
“Invading my domain,” the king continued. “Dismantling my guards. Shattering the order I built with my own hands. Was this what you wanted?”
He leaned forward slightly, resting one gauntleted hand against the arm of the throne.
“Do you believe yourself the hero of this story?”
A faint, humorless smile touched his lips.
“Because I assure you, in the end, you are as contemptible as all the others who came before you.”
The temperature in the room dropped further, frost crawling across the floor in delicate, lethal patterns.
“I have heard whispers of the future,” the Cruel King said, his voice lowering. “I have seen fragments of what is to come. I was not meant to know, yet I was shown.”
His hand clenched.
“I was… contaminated.”
The word lingered, heavy with bitterness.
“A voice found me. A voice that would not stop speaking. It showed me certainty. Not possibility. Not chance. Certainty.”
He rose slowly from the throne. Ice cracked beneath his boots as he descended one step of the dais.
“That the Blackrock Kingdom will not exist in your future.”
Player felt his chest tighten.
“Tell me,” the Cruel King went on, his eyes burning brighter, “how do you think that feels?”
Another step.
“To rule a people who laugh, who love, who dream, while knowing their happiness is temporary. Their homes. Their families. Their entire world.”
He gestured sharply around the throne room.
“Gone. Erased. Reduced to nothing more than a forgotten chapter.”
His voice trembled, not with fear, but with rage barely contained.
“I carried that knowledge alone,” he said. “I smiled for them. I promised safety. I let them believe in tomorrow.”
He stopped at the base of the dais.
“Should I surrender to a future already written for me?” he demanded. “Should I kneel to prophecy and allow my kingdom to die quietly, just because time itself decided it so?”
Player shook his head.
The motion was small, instinctive. A refusal born not of certainty, but of empathy.
But the Cruel King did not allow him to speak.
“No,” the king said, his tone suddenly sharp, decisive. “You finally understand.”
His hand moved, slow and deliberate, reaching behind him.
“It is the only way.”
A blade of pure ice formed in his grasp, its surface etched with glowing runes. Cold radiated from it in waves, forcing Player to shield his eyes for a moment.
“With the Ice Dagger,” the Cruel King declared, lifting the weapon high, “I will rewrite our future.”
The runes flared brighter.
“No matter what it takes.”
The throne room seemed to respond, frost surging outward as if the castle itself had chosen a side. Cracks spread across the floor, ice erupting in jagged spires between them.
Player tightened his grip, exhaustion screaming in his muscles, fear whispering in his mind.
But he stood his ground.
Two figures faced each other beneath the frozen pillars. One clinging to a future stolen by prophecy. The other burdened with a fate he never asked for.
The air shattered with tension.
And then, without another word, the battle began.
The battle began without ceremony.
No trumpet. No declaration. Just motion.
Player moved first, driven by instinct more than strategy. His red ball snapped into his hand, warm against the numbing cold, and he hurled it forward in a sharp arc. It struck the stone near the Cruel King’s feet and rebounded exactly as intended, forcing the king to shift his stance. In that instant, Player rushed in, wooden sword raised.
The blade should not have mattered. It was simple, worn, chipped at the edges.
Yet it landed.
Once. Twice.
The wood cracked against frozen armor, sparks of pale light scattering where the strikes connected. Player ducked low, rolled beneath a sweeping slash of ice, and came up behind the king, driving the pommel of his sword into the back of the monarch’s knee.
The Cruel King staggered half a step.
The throne room seemed to inhale.
Player did not stop. He could not. Every movement felt like borrowed time. He leapt back as a spear of ice erupted from the floor where he had stood a heartbeat earlier. His boots skidded across frost-slick stone, but he kept his balance, breath ragged, eyes locked forward.
Despite everything, despite the exhaustion weighing on him like iron chains, he was doing well.
Too well.
The Cruel King’s attacks were precise, controlled, almost restrained. He tested Player with measured swings, walls of ice, blades formed and shattered in midair. And Player answered each challenge with motion. A roll here. A deflection there. The red ball ricocheted off pillars, striking from impossible angles, disrupting spells before they could fully form.
A clean hit landed against the king’s shoulder.
Another across his chest.
A faint crack appeared in the ice coating his armor.
Silence followed.
Then the Cruel King straightened.
The air shifted.
Enough.
“You persist,” the king said, his voice low, stripped of patience. “Like a splinter that refuses to be removed.”
The temperature plummeted.
The Ice Dagger flared in his hand, its runes blazing with violent light. He vanished in a blur of frost.
Pain exploded through Player’s body.
The dagger drove into his thigh, burying itself deep. Ice spread instantly from the wound, racing through muscle and bone. Player cried out, teeth sinking into his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. The cold was wrong, invasive, as if it were trying to erase him from the inside.
He stumbled back, nearly falling.
The Cruel King did not give him time.
A strike from the side caught Player across the ribs, hurling him into a pillar. Stone cracked on impact. The red ball slipped from his numb fingers and rolled uselessly across the floor.
Player tried to move.
His leg did not respond.
Ice had already claimed it.
He swung his sword anyway, desperate, wild. The blade met nothing but air. Another blow slammed into his arm, sending his wooden sword skidding across the frozen floor, snapping in half as it struck a pillar.
“Run,” a part of him screamed.
He tried.
His feet froze solid where he stood, ice creeping up his boots, anchoring him in place like roots of crystal. Panic surged. He clawed at the ice, fingers burning, breath coming in sharp, uneven gasps.
The Cruel King advanced slowly now.
Each step left frost blooming outward.
Strike after strike followed.
A blow to the shoulder. Another to the chest. Ice and force combined, battering him down. Player’s vision blurred, the world tilting violently. He felt himself fall, knees slamming into stone he could no longer feel.
One final hit sent him sprawling fully onto the floor.
He could not get up.
His limbs refused him. Strength bled away, seeping into the cracks of the frozen ground. His breath came shallow, white clouds barely forming in the frigid air.
The Cruel King stood over him.
The voices returned.
Louder now. Insistent. Demanding.
End him.
Erase him.
Seal the future.
The Ice Dagger rose.
Player looked impossibly small from here. Clothes torn. Blood dark against ice. Barely more than a boy, really. Too young to carry the weight of timelines and endings. Too young to be standing in this room at all.
The king hesitated.
Up close, there was no legend here. No chosen savior. Just a trembling figure, eyes half-lidded, fighting to stay conscious in a world determined to crush him. The future itself seemed to lean against his shoulders, cruel and unrelenting.
The voices screamed.
The dagger trembled in the king’s grip.
Player’s eyes fluttered once, unfocused, then closed. His body went slack, surrendering not in defeat, but in exhaustion so complete it felt like mercy.
The Cruel King lowered the blade.
Slowly.
“…No,” he muttered, more to the voices than to himself.
He turned sharply.
“Guards!”
From the shadows of the throne room, armored figures emerged, hesitant but obedient.
“Bind his wounds,” the Cruel King commanded. “Carefully. Do not let him die.”
The guards froze, startled.
“And chain him,” the king added, his gaze lingering on the unconscious boy. “Secure him. He is not to escape.”
As the guards rushed forward, wrapping bandages around frozen flesh and lifting Player’s limp form, the Cruel King looked back toward the throne.
The future was still uncertain.
But now, he had time.
And the young one who had defied prophecy with nothing but a wooden sword and stubborn will would not be wasted.
Not when such a fragile piece could change everything.