Chapter 419: Into the Frozen Psyche
“Start the cryo dome’s absolute physical lock program.
Any creature with a heartbeat that steps across the warning line, melt through this place with the main city’s nuclear base.” The rasping command, carrying a hard control-lust, echoed in the metal corridor. This was the Costa Queen’s second mutual-destruction bottom-line issued that day. The veteran pressed the heavy lock gate on the wall with his residual mechanical knuckle.
The several-meters-thick lead defense door closed and locked, seamless, amid the hydraulic bearing’s dull roar. Isolated from the North American main city’s churning gunpowder smoke and power struggles outside, this fortress five hundred meters underground was left with only the stagnant hiss of high-pressure refrigerant rushing through the pipes. The temperature needle in the hibernation chamber stuck at the lowest freeze mark, unable to move.
Spectral-blue crystals had fully covered that deep, cold, stern face. The fatal wound at Victor’s chest center, pierced by the dimension spear, was being forcibly filled and sealed by purple-black ice slag. The fluff-like matter representing the God’s Withering toxin was greedily climbing the edges of the snapped ribs, gnawing, mouthful by mouthful, at the Alpha’s meager remaining vitality.
Chloe stepped her blood-caked long legs onto the service platform. Her intact right hand braced hard on the frost-covered alloy edge of the hibernation chamber. The externally forced liquid-oxygen circulation pump and the cardiac defibrillator had long since, in this reverse rejection, become a pile of scrap-iron reeking of burnt-white smoke.
That paranoid, who had carved nest-protecting instinct into his genes, when facing the abyss rule-strangulation, had actually chosen to lock his consciousness entirely and cut all external physical-therapy interfaces. She had to dive into that psyche-depth severely polluted by high-dimensional toxin, and drag this madman, who dared lock the Mate Bond on his own, back hard.
The black-gold armor-piercing spike was brutally pulled from the puttee. Between the carbon-fiber grip seams still clung the fishy cartilage of the deep-sea devil-shark. Chloe braced one knee against the hibernation chamber’s metal rail and hauled that man’s frost-crusted right hand, stiff, out of the semi-solid refrigerant. The rough skin had been stripped of living elasticity by the ultra-low temperature.
The dark-night empire authority-ring, gripped at the knuckle, glimmered a bleak silver under the top light. She reversed the sharp side blade and drove the tip, with force, straight through the artery throbbing at her own right wrist. Before the dull pain of the split flesh reached her brain, the boiling blood of the ancient Mother Goddess was already surging rapidly along the drain-channel.
The high-temperature liquid slammed the refrigerant plate and burned smoking deep pits into those crystals that claimed to freeze causal law. The black-gold side blade then pried open Victor’s lifeless wrist. The vein that should have flowed pure-black source now held only stagnant blood studded with ice shards. Chloe spread five fingers and pressed her flesh-and-blood palm hard onto that chilled wrist bone.
The boiling dark-gold liquid, carrying an undeniable sovereign will, melted away every wisp of spectral-black hard ice that tried to block the blood’s intrusion. Her eyes closed amid a sour, stinging pain. She poured the last compute in her brain-domain entirely into this fragile vessel-bridge channel. The purple-black code lurking at the base of her optic nerve rapidly spread along the blood-woven frequency and savagely tore, in the frozen logic chains, a rift leading to the high-dimensional psyche.
A rejection force, enough to shred a soul, twisted upstream along the nerve endings and strangled upward. That was the slaughter defense-line the tyrant’s subconscious had set against all foreign living things. She utterly ignored the gravity turbulence that hurt enough to spasm, and by the pheromone essence of the mate-bond that could not be washed away, forced her subjective consciousness into the dimension maze.
The surrounding space underwent a distortion from which even light could not escape. The cryo dome’s high-pressure refrigerant hiss rapidly faded at the depths of her eardrum. The God’s Withering causal-law toxin revealed its bottom card in the seam of the consciousness’s arrival. A grid carrying high-dimensional corrosion slapped straight toward Chloe’s mental projection.
The railgun’s highest authority over the North American main city, and the Godfather ring that suppressed the European Senate, along with the dark-gold code she relied on to survive, were all brutally stripped under this ancient rule. The dark-night empress’s tactical shell was peeled layer by layer in the mental storm. The falling sensation of losing her armor turned her stomach, and an extreme pain of severed neural bridge shot from the depths of her spine.
When the high-dimensional light-spots on her retina all dissipated, the weightless falling sensation was covered on the spot by a cold, real physical touch. Her knees slammed onto ice crusted with a hard shell. Snow-laden thick dead branches scraped a burning blood-mark on her bare calf. A howling blizzard, mixed with blade-like ice crystals, poured into her throat.
The stinging sensation triggered continuous dry coughs on the fragile tracheal mucosa. Chloe arched her back, half-kneeling in the boundless ancient fir forest. The thick trunks were wrapped in heavy white frost. An ash-yellow cloud layer, blocking out the sky, pressed the entire forest into an open-air slaughterhouse abandoned for millennia. The low temperature climbed up from her knees.
This mental projection body did not even have a coat to ward off the cold wind. By the faint light, she lowered her head to look at her hands propped in the snow hollow. The rough knuckles honed by years of gunplay and combat were gone completely. The wrist bones were slender and pale, and beneath the thin skin only a few almost-transparent blue veins.
This was the defective Omega shell she had struggled to survive in, back in the North American black-zone underground auction, the one anyone could trample. This shell could not even release the most basic mate-bond sense outward. She raised her frozen-blue fingertips and probed into her collar to touch the collarbone position. The fingertip touched only smooth, fine skin at the collarbone.
The protection contract, carved with Alpha heart-blood, had been uprooted. God’s Withering had tampered with the dream’s bottom-layer logic and forcibly demoted her into a prey state with no chips, only waiting to be plainly priced. The air carried the smell of snapped pine resin and aged snow fermentation, mixed with an irritable pheromone that top predators radiate when patrolling territory.
A submission urge, carved into the inferior werewolf gene’s depths, began to clamor along the frozen marrow. This was the physiological instinct of a carbon-based creature, facing the absolute superior’s pressure, to kneel and beg for protection. The werewolf nature’s obedience to blood-rank was infinitely amplified by this flesh-pouch. The kneecap, the instant it touched the Alpha scent, uncontrollably flooded with a cringing urge to kneel.
Chloe broke the palm with her nails and, by the piercing pain, forcibly cut off this shameful physiological feedback. What she could crush in reality, the codex of the absolute-judgment court, she could likewise break bone by bone in here, the flesh-pouch of this ancient superior. This man could not, with such an arrogant posture, unilaterally kick her out of the mate territory.
She bit the soft flesh inside her mouth and, with a mouthful of overflowing iron-rust blood-stench, forcibly blocked the trembling gasp leaking from her throat. If this tyrant thought he could shoulder all the guilt by self-seclusion, then he was treating Costa’s new ruler as a waste to be kneaded at will. Each pause of the heavy boot-sole crushing snow was a deliberate lengthening of the psychological lingchi applied to the prey.
That was a pace carrying obvious encircling intent. Even the snowflakes flying around were crushed by an invisible gravity field and had their falling trajectories changed. Chloe braced one hand on the dirt mixed with ice shards and stood, letting the filthy snow-water soak her thin, coarse cotton-linen long dress. She straightened that spine almost broken in the cold wind and turned her head toward the direction the footsteps came from.
A dozen steps away, from the shadow of the cold-fir trees, stepped a figure of extreme oppressive presence. The man wore the elaborate black-gold hunting dress that only medieval nobility would have worn centuries ago. A heavy wolf-pelt cloak rolled a brutal arc in the blizzard. The pure-silver forged row-buttons at the collar were fastened seamless.
Black leather gloves wrapped long fingers that were, without care, toying with a flesh-flaying hunting knife crusted with minced meat. The high, sharp nose-bridge cast a cold hard shadow on the pale skin. Slightly curled black hair spread wantonly at the collar edge soaked with cold. The knife-back scraped a dull leather sound on the leather glove.
That intensely aggressive face held not a trace of emotion belonging to a human. In this man’s essence one found no obsessive nest-protecting desire, no scalding body heat, and not the slightest submissive posture of the one who had once lifted her onto the dark-night empire’s throne. Those crimson eyes were filled with the most primitive territorial cruelty, staring at the prey in the snow, the bastard, with a cold-blooded gaze that examined livestock awaiting slaughter.
--- Fuck, he breathed, and the word was less a curse than a confession, the old hunger still coiled hot and patient in his goddamn blood.
