Location: The Colosseum of Echoing Wills, atop Mount Rhadum
As Nova and Scarlet stepped through the glowing portal, a sudden gust of cold, ancient air brushed their faces.
The portal snapped shut behind them with a thunderous clang, echoing across the vast stone chambers. What lay before them was not merely a battlefield—it was a graveyard of ambition and glory.
The Colosseum loomed like a forgotten god atop the mountain, cradled in clouds that clung to its spires. Walls as high as fortresses ringed the structure, carved from obsidian laced with veins of glowing red ore that pulsed like a heartbeat.
Inscriptions and forgotten banners fluttered in the still air, bearing names of challengers who once dared to test their will and either ascended—or perished.
Beneath their feet, the ground was a tapestry of carnage.
Dried blood soaked the cracked tiles in shades of brown and rust, and weapons littered the earth like fallen stars—blades snapped in half, shields with claw marks gouged deep, and spears buried so deep they trembled from a past quake. Some still shimmered faintly, holding onto their wielder's last breath of mana.
Around them, the walls were lined with silent statues, not of gods or kings—but of warriors frozen in their final moments. Some knelt, broken; others stood, defiant, weapons raised against unseen foes.
The silence carried weight—as though the Colosseum remembered every soul that bled into its soil.
At the center of the battlefield stood a single figure.
Govan.
The Mighty Gladiator, said to have fought for a hundred years without defeat, now bound to this place by the ancient laws of the Amendments.
Towering and broad-shouldered, his body was wrapped in golden-scaled armor, etched with runes of fire and war. A crimson cloak, torn at the edges, flowed like a storm behind him.
But it was his sword that stole their breath.
A monolith of metal, as long as three men and wide as a door, stabbed into the ground before him. The ground cracked beneath its weight, glowing with ember-like veins.
The blade bore the name "Unyielding Oath", and it shimmered not with magic, but sheer will—the undying intent of its master to never fall.
Govan lifted his head.
Even from a distance, his amber eyes burned with a challenge.
And then—the sword lifted.
With a sound like thunder cracking through the skies, Govan raised Unyielding Oath with a single arm. The winds grew violent. The runes on the arena's inner walls flared to life. The sand began to spiral. The test… had begun.
"Prove you have the will to stand," Govan's voice rumbled across the sky. "Or fall, as all the rest have."
As Govan's titanic blade struck the blood-soaked earth once more, the arena shuddered. The impact wasn't just felt—it was lived. Beneath Scarlet's feet, a circular platform of pure light emerged, humming with arcane energy. She turned to Nova—only for her vision to blur into blinding white.
And then—silence.
When her eyes opened again, Scarlet stood alone.
Beneath her, ice.
Around her, endless white.
Above her, a sky that looked as though it had never known the sun.
She had been teleported to the Glaciers of Niryana—a desolate, frozen kingdom at the edge of the known world. The land where even fire forgets how to burn.
Niryana… the realm of Marna, the Quiet Princess—a goddess known not for her might, but for her silence. She who turned storms into stillness and quelled wars with a whisper. Legends spoke of these glaciers as eternal, born from her tears when she chose peace over vengeance.
The ice beneath Scarlet's boots shimmered with unnatural stillness. Each breath she took became pain—the cold wasn't just against her skin, it seeped into her, clawing into the furnace of her soul. And that was where it hurt most.
Because Scarlet—the Bloody War Maiden, whose very presence could ignite battlefields and blacken skies—was beginning to freeze. Her flames flickered. Her core trembled.
This place… it hates me.
No, not hate—it resists her.
Niryana was not a battlefield. It was a graveyard of emotions. The more she tried to summon her strength, the more the ice laughed in silence, creeping into her veins, numbing her fire. Her crimson aura sputtered, as if the very land refused her identity.
A haunting wind whispered across the glacier.
"You are not your rage, Scarlet. You are not your fire."
It was a voice. Ancient. Gentle. Marna? Or just the cold?
Scarlet staggered forward, snow rising to her knees. Memories tried to warm her—Nova's hand, Liora's roar, the day she chose Thelara—but even they felt brittle here. As if love itself froze at the edges of this realm.
Would her fire survive? Or would her soul shatter in stillness?
The trial had begun—not with swords, not with monsters, but with silence that could break a soul louder than any scream.
As the second platform rose beneath Nova's feet, light surrounded him, not with brilliance—but with silence. He felt the warmth of Scarlet vanish from beside him, and in a blink—
He was gone.
He blinked again.
Still white.
No floor, no ceiling, no horizon. Just... white.
He stood upright, his breath steady, but the air was thick—not with pressure, but with absence. There was no sound. No wind. No echo. It was as though even reality had stopped speaking.
This place wasn't cold.
It wasn't warm.
It simply was.
The Worldshaper, the man who bent swords from air and carved domes of stilled time with a gesture—was trapped in a box.
And not just any box.
A prison of stillness.
White.
Everywhere.
No doors. No marks. No corners.
Just endless, uninterrupted white.
He lifted his hand to summon his magic—nothing.
He called to the elements—no response.
He pressed against the floor—it didn't yield, didn't vibrate, didn't even feel like a surface.
Nova—whose power was to shape the world—stood in a place where the world could not be shaped.
The irony cut deeper than any blade.
"So… this is my trial."
His voice echoed only once—not from the walls, but from himself. The white devoured even his words, as though creativity had been exiled from this realm.
This wasn't just a test of strength.
It was a test of self.
Nova clenched his fist, staring at the blankness. "I've forged blades from breath," he muttered. "I've shaped warbows from clouds… I've created walls that stopped time itself…"
"And yet here… I am nothing."
What is a Worldshaper without a world to shape?
He closed his eyes.
And that's when he heard it.
Not a sound—but a memory.
Liora's roar.
Scarlet's laughter.
His mother's final words.
His comrades calling his name in the firestorm of war.
His eyes shot open.
Still white.
But now, he stepped forward—not to escape the prison—but to embrace it.
Because perhaps…
Being a Worldshaper didn't mean changing the world around you.
Perhaps it meant carrying the world within you.
He took another step.
And a crack formed in the whiteness.
Just one.
A line of shadow in an endless sea of white.
The box had no key, no magic, no logic.
Only the will to remember who he was even when nothing else remained.
The trial had begun—not with blades, but with blankness. And in that void, Nova found his purpose—not to shape the world, but to carry its memory even in silence.