FROST-Chapter 129: The Gates Beneath

Ezekiel was the first to move. Not with the fanfare of someone eager to prove himself, but with the grim determination of someone who already knew what needed to be done.

He stepped forward, boots crunching softly into the snow as he began his attack. The others followed, a blur of cloaks, steel, and defiance moving as one. For all their jokes and jabs as ’classmates’, they moved like a unit this time.

East stayed behind.

While the apprentices surged forward, cloaks snapping behind them like war banners, East remained still—his boots anchored in the snow, his eyes fixed ahead but distant in thought. One by one, they passed him—some with nervous energy crackling at their fingertips, others with blades half-drawn and faces half-set in fear. Yet none of them looked back.

And he didn’t call out to stop them.

This was it—their first real mission, their first taste of chaos not manufactured within the safety of training fields or shielded sparring rooms. As heartless as it sounded, East knew what this truly was: a test. One they hadn’t been told they were taking.

There would be no mentors pulling punches this time, no soft landings or delayed spells. What awaited them now was not theory—it was the unfiltered bite of reality. Magic that didn’t hold back. Enemies who wouldn’t show mercy. Fear that wouldn’t politely knock before entering.

East exhaled slowly, his breath fogging in the cold. They’ve come so far, he thought. But have they come far enough?

They hadn’t faced war. Not really. Their battles were always against themselves, their doubts, their limitations. But now, the storm had chosen to knock, and he had no choice but to open the door and let it in. This mission—this trial cloaked as duty—would show them who they truly were beneath the enchantments and borrowed courage.

He clenched one gloved fist behind his back, resisting the instinct to step in, to shield them as he always had. But if he did that now... they’d never learn to rise on their own.

"Go fly high, my angels," he had said.

Now all he could do was watch—and hope they flew.

Or at the very least... learned to fall with purpose.

East’s fingers twitched once, subtly, drawing a circle in the air with mana so faint only the wind noticed. A pulse answered him—quiet, distant, like a heartbeat from a world away.

He frowned.

Something stirred far beneath the surface of this reality and he couldn’t recognize it.

"Perhaps," he muttered. "This is him."

With a last glance at the path his apprentices had taken, East vanished in a ripple of cold, leaving behind only the impression of frost lingering on the bark.

Back in the chamber, the air was no less tense.

Silvermist had not answered Cloud’s question. She had not needed to.

The moment he spoke Frost’s name, a tremor passed through her—barely perceptible to the others, but Cloud saw it. A flicker in her ethereal stillness. A crack in her impossible calm. And then came the whisper of her power.

It started as a shimmer around her hands—faint, fragile, like starlight caught in water. But it grew. Spread. Not violently. Not in defiance. But with the quiet majesty of inevitability.

The chamber trembled.

And the floor beneath her feet lit up.

Sigils etched in light bloomed around her, each one older than the Kingdom’s founding, older than even the Archives dared to record. Magic not taught—but remembered. It was not elemental, not woven, not summoned. It was. It existed, as she did, because the world allowed it to.

"She’s... creating a resonance field," Theo whispered. "But she’s not using any conduits. No chants, no incantations—she’s just being. H-How could a human do such?"

One of the healers staggered back. "That’s not just mana—it’s a soul-tether."

Cloud stepped back, awe rising in him like the tide. This was beyond the Silvermist he had known—the supposed hopeless girl with too much empathy and too many secrets. This was something beyond his comprehension. Not quite divine. Not quite mortal. She was the echo of both. A relic made flesh.

Her fingers flexed.

A pulse of magic surged through the room, but unlike the destructive bursts from earlier, this one was soft—searching. Reaching. A single thread of starlight wove itself from her chest into the air, undulating like silk on a breeze.

It pointed eastward.

Her eyes slowly lifted to Cloud’s once more. And this time, they glowed. Not just with light, but with purpose.

"I knew it," she said, a smile curved on the corners of her lips. Her voice was firmer now, but still carried that dreamlike cadence. "Frost isn’t gone. She’s... t-trapped. But not in this realm."

Cloud’s blood ran cold. "Then where?"

Silvermist turned her gaze toward the horizon beyond the chamber walls, her pupils narrowing into slits of concentrated thought.

"Not the Guardian Realm. Not even the Between," she paused and then whispered. "He’s in the Hollow Depth."

The room gasped.

The Hollow Depth. A place spoken of only in the margins of the Forbidden Codices. A realm beneath the veil of all realms—where time, memory, and form decayed. Where even gods dared not look.

"Impossible," Theo breathed. "That place is myth."

"No," Cloud said, already shaking his head. "Not myth. I’ve read the Sealing Records. The Elders banished something there, centuries ago. And if that’s where Frost is..."

"He’s not alone," Silvermist finished for him, her tone distant, eyes glowing brighter. "There’s something else down there. Something ancient. And it knows I’m looking."

The sigils around her flared once before vanishing. The frost in her breath grew denser.

And Cloud realized something crucial—Silvermist was not fully human anymore. Whatever she fought within her, whatever forces had burned her clean, it had left behind something colder and ancient.

"Sil," he said carefully, "I am in no position to ask you this... but please, for my brother—for your master—and for the sake of the Human Realm, bring him back."

Silvermist blinked and then smiled. "Frost is the reason why survived my war," she whispered. "And besides, I won’t let him break his promise to be with me. He has to stay with me even if I have to drag him from hell."

—

The snow crunched beneath their boots as the apprentices descended from the frost-slicked cliffside. The forest below, dense with ironwood trees and ash-pine, seemed to lean inward like a living labyrinth, their frozen boughs heavy with white silence. Every step was a choice. Every breath visible, sharp with anticipation.

Cullen dropped to the ground with a thud, muttering curses as he adjusted the strap on his satchel. "If this mission doesn’t kill us, the frostbite will."

Gail landed beside him a heartbeat later, brushing snow from her gloves with practiced ease. "Then stop whining and keep moving. If you’re cold, conjure fire. You do remember how, right?"

"Gail," Levi warned gently. He landed a moment after, his cloak billowing as he straightened. "Let’s not start this mission by freezing morale."

Cullen gave a mock bow. "Thank you, Captain Switzerland."

"Captain Switzerland doesn’t carry hexfire in his ribs." Amethyst’s voice floated down behind them as she descended with the others, graceful as ever, barely disturbing the snow. Her gaze swept over the group. "We’re exposed out here. East said the gate is two hours north, right?"

"Correct," Kenji confirmed, appearing from the shadows of a frost-wrapped tree trunk. His breath misted as he checked the map burning faintly in his gloved palm. "But there’s a distortion up ahead—mana interference. Something’s warping the air around that section. A veil. Possibly illusion magic, or something... older."

Ericka frowned. "Older?"

Kenji looked up, solemn. "Guardian-class warding. Ancient. From the time before the cities rose."

A hush fell over them.

Everyone had read about the old magicks, but few had ever encountered them. They were the remnants of an era when the Guardians themselves shaped geography with a thought—when mountains bent to will and rivers wept starlight. That sort of magic didn’t sleep. It lingered. It remembered.

Ayumi stepped forward, arms crossed. "So what now? We wait for the Grandmaster to hold our hands? May I remind you, West, Sebastian, Ezekiel, and the others didn’t let us escape to go ahead just to get lost along the way."

"No." Levi turned north, his eyes hardening with purpose. "We go forward now. This is our mission. Ezekile wouldn’t have sent us together unless it mattered."

The path constricted into a frozen ravine, its icy walls towering on either side like jagged fangs carved by time and violence. Each step forward was swallowed by silence, broken only by the soft crunch of snow beneath their boots. The trees grew sparse here, their skeletal limbs clawing at the dimming sky—one that had begun to bleed from a bruised gray into shades of violet and indigo. A quiet omen. An unsettling stillness.

Did the townsfolk see the same sky?

By their calculations, it should still be a quarter to midnight in the human realm. Lights would still glow in distant homes, laughter lingering in alleyways, footsteps tapping over cobblestone. But here—beneath this suffocating canopy of ice and shadow—they had descended into a corner of the forest so remote, so untouched, that not even Levi, Cullen, or Gail—who had grown up with the city’s pulse etched into their bones—recognized it. It was a place forgotten by maps and memory, as though the land itself had been waiting for their arrival.

And it was far too quiet.

Their boots broke ice as they pressed forward, the snow growing shallower with every step. Magic hung thick in the air now, like static just before lightning strikes. Even Gail paused, frowning. "The wind stopped."

"No," Cullen corrected. "It’s still here. Just... listening."

Ericka suddenly hissed. "Something just brushed my neck."

Amethyst whirled around, her hands glowing faintly with wind magic—her specialty as the Wind Apprentice.

She cast a shimmered disc around the group, a defensive perimeter gleaming like spun glass. "Something is in here with us."

A sound followed. Subtle. Like dry leaves on tile. Then—a low, guttural click.

From the jagged outcropping of obsidian rock, shadows began to peel away—slowly, deliberately—as if the darkness itself were molting. It didn’t step into the world.

It unfolded.

A beast emerged like a nightmare being rewritten into reality, each of its spindly limbs cracking and reshaping as it tore through the veil. It stood impossibly tall, its skeletal form draped in layers of black gossamer robes that whispered and crackled like burning paper in the wind.

Every motion it made seemed to distort the air around it, like light recoiling from its presence. Its face—or what passed for one—was obscured by a jagged porcelain mask, fractured down the center and etched with runes that bled trails of dark smoke, curling into the frozen air like sentient ink.

"What in the actual fuck is that?!" Riruka hissed, instinctively stumbling back until her hand clutched at the hem of Kenji’s robe, nearly dragging him down with her.

Amethyst’s eyes sharpened into slits, her hand already twitching with ready magic. "That’s not a beast. That’s a puppet spell," she muttered darkly. "It must’ve been summoned by one of those cloaked bastards from earlier."

"P-Puppet spells are real?" Ericka blinked wide-eyed, inching behind Gail as if her notebook knowledge would protect her. "I thought they were just theoretical! I only read about them in the restricted section!"

"Well, as you can see," Cullen gestured toward the shambling, smoking figure with a flippant wave, "that oversized marionette is quite real."

"Can you blow it away with your wind magic, Amethyst?" Gail grunted, already summoning a flare of violet light in her palm. "You’ve got the strongest wind force among us."

"I already tried," Amethyst replied grimly, her eyes never leaving the thing. "I secretly weighed it with compressed wind pressure—it didn’t even flinch. It’s anchored with some kind of dark reinforcement spell."

"How about your gravity magic, Levi?" Gail turned, half-hopeful.

"I could try, but if I miscalculate even a bit," Levi muttered, jaw tight, "I’ll either do nothing or crush all of you into flattened tomato paste. Including myself."

"Well, that’s lovely," Gail muttered.

As tension crackled like static around them, Cullen let out an exaggerated sigh. Without ceremony, he stepped forward, nearly stepping on Riruka’s foot in the process, which made her yelp and hop back.

"Alright, alright—fine," he huffed, flipping his cloak back with unnecessary drama, sending snow scattering behind him. "I’ll play the hero today. The six of you, go. You need to reach the gate before the next wave. Remember what the Grandmaster said—he’ll only step in if at least one of us reaches that gate alive. If you all stand here gawking, he’ll have to send flowers to our families instead."

Ericka clasped a hand over her mouth, eyes sparkling. "Such a noble act, Cullen... so brave. I’m genuinely touched—"

"Go now!" Cullen groaned through gritted teeth, spinning toward the puppet spell. "Before I start charging for every second you waste staring at my beautiful sacrifice!"

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