Weaving through a psychic mindscape was an arduous affair.

Not because it was difficult, since any idiot with a smudge of psionic potential could throw psionic power at someone’s mind like a battering ram. But more often than not, it would induce extreme reactions, often resulting in a mind-melting pot of agony for the victim and causing all psychic structures within the mind to go haywire.

The trick was to pass undetected, and guide the victim’s mind into thinking in specific directions without leaving behind obvious signs of manipulation. The inception of ideas was always a difficult thing since the bremetan mind was always quick to identify which thought was conceived by itself versus foreign stimuli. Most minds quickly recognized intrusions and sent out flares to their consciousness, causing the victims to scream in agony, once again, destabilizing the psychic structure.

One might as well find a thorn in a haystack after that.

Tanya had picked up some handy psionic skills during her travels, but she’d always lacked the finesse required for the job. Subtlety was the name of the game, and between her ability as an aeromancer and the frost, Tanya’s approach was far better suited to be a sledgehammer. Direct intrusion, psionic bursts, enthrallment—those were her thing. Navigating through psychic matrices like the changeling? That was way above her paygrade.

Still, the mind of this pyromancer was…strange. Not because he had powerful defenses or budding psionic skills, but because of how exceedingly easy it was. If she didn’t know any better, she’d say she was entering the mind of someone with a broken psychic architecture.

Not for the first time, she wished the changeling was there. It was ironic. Now that her inhibitions were suppressed, she was actively recognizing the changeling’s prowess, when she had gone out of her way to avoid it in the past.

Tanya slowly felt the sensation of having a body come back, despite knowing such feelings were purely illusory. Closing her eyes for a moment, she allowed her other senses to come to the fore. Satisfied there were no hazards nearby, she looked around and—

Blinked in surprise.

The land in front of her was…impossible. She could see stars with such clarity that was impossible in the Asukan lands. She watched as a different time, a different place, a different era began to superimpose with the present. Lightning flashed across the horizon, with meteors flying across the heavens. And there, upon a floor that seemed levitated in endless space, in a hall that would have caused the Asukan gods to go green in envy, was a royal throne, and upon it, sat someone Tanya had never seen.

Her hair was blacker than the darkest of nights, with skin as white as the finest marble. Her lips were the color of frozen mulberries, fitting perfectly onto a smooth, lovely face that had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. And yet, no matter how much she tried, how perfect each one of her facial features was individually, Tanya couldn’t behold her perfection in its entirety.

All around her were hundreds of entities—real and phantasmal, human and not, creatures of myth and history—all genuflecting in reverence.

This wasn’t just any entity. Who she was, and what she was doing in the stranger’s mind, Tanya had no idea.

The entity raised a finger, and smiled cruelly at her.

“Scum!”

The force of will that condensed on her in that single word was so dense that Tanya thought it was going to break something. Like maybe the entire World. She was thrown out of the mindscape and found herself on the floor, gasping like a landed fish. She struggled to push herself up, but couldn’t move so much as a finger. She brought her will into focus, the power of Frost singing in her veins, with the idea of using it to deflect some of that force away from her and—

—and suddenly, sharply, felt her will directly in contention with another. The power that held her down was no ordinary force or Terramancy. It was no gravity or pressure modulation pushed to bizarre extremes. It was the simple, raw, brute application of the will of this being that held her pinned down upon the floor, and she could no more escape from it than an insect could stop a shoe from descending.

Tanya fought against that psychic pressure with all her might, and after expending every single bit of lifeforce she could muster, she was only able to raise her head up and—

And stared at the impossibility before her.

The stranger was free, standing upright, no longer broken and bound. The shards of Everfrost on his limbs, on the other hand, had been shattered to bits, with his entire body healed as if it had never been hurt in the first place.

It was impossible. In all her time traveling across the Empire, there had been nothing she couldn’t overpower with the Frost. Even Ezzeron had bowed before it, and the kami was one of the strongest in the entire Asukan Empire. The ice that would feed on life and destroy to its content until the universe itself was wholly submerged into eternal darkness. She was the Claws, the Teeth, the horror that made bremetans seek shelter within their homes at night. She was—

She was—

She was ████████████

“Shard of an emperor.” The stranger smiled maliciously, the female’s words coming from his lips. “Did you think I would not recognize that vile stench? Not even a god, and you dare lay your hands on what is mine?”

The stranger lowered her pointing finger.

“Know your place!”

Energy rippled across the stranger’s skin like liquid lightning, exploding out in a radial wave with a huge, crackling roar. Space itself warped and shattered around him like the flickering wisps of an inferno. For a split second, gravity vanished around the young man’s body, making every single slab of shattered rock rise up, as if caught in an invisible force. Then that enormous power slammed everything and everyone straight down, as if crushed by a single, gigantic, invisible anvil.

Tanya could feel her own bones straining under that enormous pressure. Despite her anger and her defiance, she knew for a fact that had this pressure been directed solely at her, it would have compressed her mind into something too dense and too inert to function, like a tiny diamond formed out of crushed coal.

This cannot be real, she tried to reason. This is an illusion. It has to be. It has to—

“I know of your ilk,” the stranger replied. “Vestiges of a power lost to time. Clinging to life by staining the souls of your descendants.”

Control didn’t feel so easy now; the gentle whispers of the Frost at the back of her mind had now become a chorus calling for blood, now, before everything was ruined—

“I know of your kind. Castoffs that forever live in the delusion of getting it all back. Becoming a whole that you never were.”

Tanya screamed, rage and bitterness bubbling up against her will like poison from a wound, so intense and cold that it made the Frost itself feel warm in comparison. She did not lash out; her pain did it for her without any conscious effort, as a thousand spears of frigid tundra erupted out of her body in a storm of death.

Each one was stopped in midair by invisible hands.

The stranger hadn’t so much as lifted his finger.

And the point had been made.

“I know of you.”

The stranger spread his hands out invitingly.

“But do you know of me?”

She felt Ezzeron throw his impossible might to propel the spears ahead, but they would. Not. Move. The anger rising within her could have scorched the entire chamber. Her frustration and contempt could freeze everything within sight into an arctic tundra. But some part of her, a part that felt utterly alien even to herself, recognized this power. This was a ███████ ███████—

A…what? Not one of the divinities. No Asukan god or goddess would enter the zone where Amaterasu’s Light held no sway. None of them would ever suffer the ignominy of possessing a mortal mind like a parasite. Not an emperor either, so that only left—

Tanya’s eyes widened.

The stranger’s teeth showed.

“Then why are you not kneeling?”

Kneel? Tanya may have had the short end of the stick. She may pale in front of this individual’s power. But she could absolutely defy anyone. Even this stranger.

The fight would certainly be lopsided, but not hopeless. And by Wind and Thunder, she was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch her out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter. She stopped pressing at her bindings with her limbs and started using her mind instead. She didn’t try to push them away, or break them, or slip free of them. Instead, she allowed Frost to take over. She allowed the primal impulses that she had always kept restrained to overwhelm her, and focused on that reality, where the power of Everfrost would freeze those bindings and shatter them to dust.

As it happened, Tanya reached into the part of her soul where one of the primal forces of the universe existed. Coldness. Hunger. Death. A flood of madness and horror and pain and raw, shrieking loneliness so intense that it chilled her to her soul, all running rampant through her brain without her consent or any response to her attempts to fight it off. During all this time, the Frost had only lowered her inhibitions and projected its own common sense upon herself, but this was the first time she was reaching for it, allowing it to not just assault her physical form, but also lay waste to the territory of her soul, the most hideous indignity imaginable. As the Asukan part of her screamed in utter horror at this invasion and defilement by this obscene, twisted insanity, she had something of an epiphany.

Such coldness. Such hate. Such hunger.

And power. Power like nothing she had ever felt. Not even when she’d faced Ezzeron at his mightiest.

Even as the tide of darkness battered against her mind, Tanya studied it, analyzed the composition, learned and adapted, and the thing engulfed her and began to truly understand it.

This wasn’t just Frost. This wasn’t just a lifeforce-leeching twisted creation.

This was ███bu██████r.

Tanya had no idea how it would interact with Ezzeron’s powers, but at this point, she barely had anything to lose. She gathered up the Frost within her, used it to infuse herself while allowing Ezzeron to flood her with every bit of his energy, and cast the resulting compound against her bonds. She was casting everything she had done, everything she believed in, everything she had chosen—everything she was—against the will of a likely ancient being of terror and malice, a fundamental power of the World.

The result of that wasn’t an explosion. Not really. There was no light, or sound, or force. Rather, it was a mad outpouring of power that tore through her entire form. Part of it condensed into hoarfrost and crawled all over her left side, with icicles protruding out at random places. It covered her face, her neck, her breasts, all the way to her shoes, making her look like a crystal mannequin. A long, thin tendril erupted out of her left palm, forming a familiar frost whip. The rest of the energy expanded outward, forming wind that spun around her right half, forming an identical whip, only crafted purely out of wind.

And suddenly, the stranger’s will could not hold her.

“You don’t get it, do you?” she whispered, slowly pushing herself to stand up straight. “This power that flows through me devours energy. You may be stronger than me, and you may pin me down. But I can feed and feed on you until you are nothing. And that makes me your predator.”

Her face became a thundercloud, her lips twisting into a snarl of pure hate. “You want me to kneel, do you? This is what I’ll do. For bringing me such quality food, I will make your demise quick.”

The stranger threw his head back and laughed. Scorn ran in that laughter, with genuine amusement—the cold, alien amusement of a spider. It made her want to clutch her head. He stood there, hands hanging free, completely disregarding her threat, in a manner akin to the primal dictator that shone in the Asukan skies.

“I won’t.”