Frozen in their final moments: claws arrested mid-lunge, jaws agape in a snarl, muscles tensed to rend. But the ice hadn’t simply encased them—it had erupted from within. Crystalline spears burst through hides, tore through muscle, and splintered bone, emerging in vicious, thorn-like clusters. Some creatures were pinned to the floor by icy spikes that had torn out of their own bodies; others were swollen into cloudy, grotesque blocks of solid ice.

And standing amid this frozen gallery was X.

She faced away from the door, her crimson hair catching the fractured light from a thousand icy facets, glowing with a cold, almost fiery sheen. Her head was bowed slightly. In her hands, she cradled something.

Santali moved toward her. The crunch of fine ice under his boots was deafening in the silence.

She didn’t turn, but he could see the minute, continuous tremor in her shoulders. Not from cold. Something else.

He stopped beside her and looked down.

Two curved shards of shattered culture-vessel glass. Inside them, shriveled and discolored, lay scant remnants of brain tissue.

Not whole—gnawed.

Chimeras preferred fresh brains, especially those still pulsing with activity and memory fragments. They had devoured most of it, leaving only broken lobes and remnants of brainstem. A pale, frosty rime coated the surface like the simplest coffin, preserving the last proof of existence.

Pale blue preservative fluid, mingled with blood and neural matter, dripped from between X's fingers and froze into crimson beads on the ice.

“I was too late.” Her voice rasping, unlike her own. “They were… eating. When I came in, they looked up at me, still chewing…”

She didn’t continue. Santali didn’t need her to.

He could see it: a pack of monsters gathered, feasting on two human brains. The brains' owners had been people he respected most, her parents.

And suddenly he understood—her earlier strangeness, the teasing, the reckless, almost self-destructive release. She had been saying goodbye. Not to him, but to the fantasy that a "home" might still be possible. To the childish hope that finding their remains could fill the void.

Santali reached out, intending to touch her shoulder, but stopped mid-air.

Not unwilling, but unable.

X now was a containment field at critical mass, a core of cryogenic energy one tremor away from eruption. Any contact might set it off.

He withdrew his hand, but his gaze locked onto the shattered neural tissue. His aerokinetic senses—his hyper-awareness of air currents—spooled up to their limit. The air flowing over those remains carried back data: minute vibrations, thermal ghosts, and…

…a frequency.

Faint, almost imperceptible. Like a heartbeat, yet not. It was… a signal. Bioelectric? No, more complex. Like encoded pulses, emitting rhythmically, weakly, from the residual tissue.

Santali's heart plummeted.

He recalled Matsuki 07's words: "The extraction of the Whites' brains is complete… Memory extraction progress is Fseventy-four and sixty-eight percent respectively."

Extraction complete.

If extraction was complete……

Then why keep the brains? In a resource-strapped Arctic base, why waste energy maintaining two organs whose "value" had been harvested?

Unless…

Unless they still had a purpose.

His eyes swept the lab: the emptied console, the missing terminals, the perfectly timed “too late,” the carefully staged horror of the Chimeras feeding, left for X to witness—

A Trap.

This was no accident. It was theater. And he and X were on stage.

Now came the climax: X holding the remains, her control fracturing, her power flooding out…

And then what?

His gaze snapped back to the tissue. The signal pulses were intensifying, cycling in time with the tremors in her hands. Resonating.

She was touching them. Her cryokinesis, her emotional storm, her very life signs—all vibrating in sync with those mangled remnants.

[The Key].

The Whites were the map. The Lunar was the key.

If the map had been read… what did the key unlock?——To activate what?

His mind connected the fragments in a white-hot chain:

False Matsuki knew they would come. Knew their objective. Knew her.

He left the brains. Staged the feeding. Made sure she saw it.

He wanted her emotions pushed to the extreme. Grief. Rage. Despair.

And the power that came with them.

A full-output cryokinetic surge, amplified by bio-resonance with her parents’ neural tissue…

What would that trigger?

Santali didn’t know the mechanism—only that nothing good would follow.

No time.

X was balanced on the edge. Any rational explanation would drown in the flood now.

—He needed something stronger—a stimulus violent enough to shatter the moment, immediately.

Santali lowered his gaze, then lifted it. A laugh, soft as shattering frost, escaped his throat, crystalline in the silence.

"Touching." He took a step forward, his eyes settling on her white-knuckled fist. His tone was pure assessment. "Clutching two lumps of degraded neural matter as if they were sacred relics. But Nyxl—"

He used the name. Deliberately. Slowly.

X’s spine locked. Her head turned in a slow, deadly rotation. Deep within her black pupils, a storm gathered and hardened into a vortex of pure, silent violence.

"What did you call me?"

"Nyxl. The 'Key'." Santali met her piercing gaze, his voice cruelly even. "The ultimate specimen extracted by the Whites from the Nightwatchers’ lab. The sole biological key to initiate the 'Terminal' protocol. How do you think I traced every lead these four years?"

He tilted his head slightly. His violet eyes held no emotion—only sterile scrutiny.

“Because from the moment you left that Moscow safehouse, every step has been inside their predictive model. Your return here, your discovery of this, even the look on your face right now.” He paused, as if stating an established fact. “And I am the actor who ensures the script reaches its final page.”

X’s knuckles cracked audibly. Preservative fluid seeped between her fingers, sizzling where it dripped, etching smoking pits into the ice.

“Proof.” Her voice was scraped raw.

"There's a non-coding region in your genome. On the short arm of chromosome seven. Marked 'Omega-K'." Santali's delivery was flat, clinical. "It's dormant under normal conditions. But upon contact with a specific protein marker—like the preservative now soaking your ‘parents’ tissue—it activates. It expresses a neuropeptide that progressively overwrites your prefrontal cortex. Simply put, it will make you walk willingly into the 'Terminal' and complete the link. The Whites modified this tissue, turning it into a final fail-safe, keyed specifically to you. I suspect they never told you. Afraid it would rob you of this last… comfort."

He extended his hand, palm up. A demand. A verdict.

"Now. Give them to me. Their purpose is served."

X stared, her chest rising and falling in shallow bursts. Then a smile—twisted, strained, almost tearing at the skin—stretched across her face.

“Fine.” She ground the word from her throat, thrusting her arm forward. “You want them? Take them.”

At the exact moment the tissues left her grip—

Santali’s outstretched hand did not receive them. His wrist snapped down, fingers clenching shut!

Air, compressed to a needlepoint and unleashed faster than sight, detonated in a focused shockwave directly through the two masses of tissue.

A wet, thick, pulpy crunch.

A crimson mist exploded between them. Ice crystals mingled with grey-white tissue particles into a cloud of frozen gore.

X's arm froze mid-air, locked in its pathetic, offering posture. Her palm was empty, save for residual streaks of viscous fluid rapidly freezing into slush.

She slowly looked down at her empty hand.Then lifted her eyes.

All sound in the lab vanished. Then came the almost-audible shriek of the thermometer's mercury plummeting. Thick ice sheets spread, thickened, crawled across walls, ceiling, floor in a single breath, groaning with teeth-grating intensity. The frozen Chimeras sculptures cracked with cobweb fissures.

The air recoiled as her hair snapped, each strand freezing into a needle-sharp icicle. A glacial, alien blue bled across the whites of her eyes, erasing all humanity from within. Then her gaze found him—a crushing void of absolute zero seized Santali in its inexorable grip, and he was locked.

"...You destroyed them."The voice was stripped of anything human—a raw, glassy screech of ice on ice, rending the air.

Santali retreated half a step in the lung-burning cold, raising his pistol. His movements were slowed by stiffening muscles, but the muzzle remained deadly steady.

"They were bait, X. You took it. It's over."

“Then let it end.” Her voice was absolute zero.

As the last syllable fell, the space where she stood was empty—replaced by an exploding mist of ice. In the next instant, a shadow wreathed in killing cold was pressed against him!

Sonic waves detonated inside the ice-sealed chamber, shaking icicles from the ceiling.

She raised her hand—not aiming at Santali, but at... herself.