"I wonder what will happen if I do…this."
Arion snapped his wrist.
Frost Snap.
Droplets hung in the air—suspended mid-fall.
Lightning scoured the sky.
Ice sparked into being—a white fracture in the dark.
The spell didn't travel.
It jumped.
Droplet to droplet, the current leapt—a blue filament snapping through rain like lightning trapped in a mirror maze.
Each raindrop it touched turned to ice mid-fall, shattering into mist before the next flash reached it. A zig-zag of frozen weave, splitting as it threaded the downpour.
Karlon stood at the centre, surrounded by a constellation of frozen stars.
For the briefest instant, Arion saw it for what it was—not rain anymore, not even a spell in the ordinary sense, but a suspended lattice of unstable frost hanging through the storm.
Magnificent.
Then he pushed further.
His hands rose.
Luminary raced through the frozen weave in split-second bursts, catching up to the medium as the storm fought to keep falling, to keep moving, to refuse the shape he was forcing onto it.
The lattice resisted.
Pressure built immediately. Every thread of frozen rain strained against his hold, the medium shuddering as it tried to collapse out of sequence.
Arion bared his teeth and drew his hands inward.
Time slowed—his gaze locked onto Karlon between his open palms as his hands drew together around him from afar.
The nearer his hands came together, the more the pressure pushed back. The frozen stars trembled in their places. Cracks of frostlight zig-zagged through the weave. Luminary snarled through the lattice faster than he could comfortably control, forcing the entire formation to strain against itself.
Karlon's grin faltered, eyes reflecting the frozen constellation hanging all around him.
Arion forced his hands closer.
Closer.
The weave bucked.
The pressure fought him all the way to the end.
Then time exploded back.
He snapped his hands shut.
The constellation flared—bright, blinding, absolute.
For a split second it looked like a dying star trapped inside a cage of frost.
Then, without warning, everything collapsed inward.
Detonation.
BOOM—SHRRRRKK!
A sphere of frost exploded violently, erupting outward and swallowing sound and colour alike. Water vapour flash-froze mid-air; rain became shrapnel, suspended as glittering dust.
The shockwave rolled across the camp like a silent bell, frost blooming wherever the mist touched.
A thick cloud of frost brewed where Karlon had once stood, churning like a thunderhead trapped on the ground.
The after-freeze fed on what fell; every new droplet that touched the cloud flashed into crystal, the storm fuelling its own extinction.
Arion lowered his arms, the frostlight fading from his veins.
"…unstable conduction," he murmured, voice hoarse, arms shaking.
"Effective, though."
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
The frozen air creaked once, like glass under strain. Fire blackened to glass; coals turned pale, their red hearts locked inside a shell of ice. A single plume of vapour rose where warmth had died.
For a moment, even the smoke froze mid-curl. Only ice reigned there; even sound buried beneath it.
Until a voice made its existence known.
"Ignition Thread."
Then—
WHOOM!
A crimson arc tore through it, splitting the haze with molten light. The fire didn't burn the frost; it consumed it. Ice vaporised into steam in a heartbeat, feeding the blaze instead of dying to it.
Pressure spiked. The arc soared straight at Arion, leaving Essence like fire in its path.
Arion hurled ice to meet it halfway. It barely blunted the arc of flame.
A glowing line of Luminary Essence hung through the air for a heartbeat, then ignition—fire detonated, slicing through delayed space.
Arion's ice evaporated immediately.
The impact drove him back several steps.
Step.
CRACK.
Step.
Karlon's figure strolled out of the depleting frost cloud, his feet cracking the ground of ice, melting it into puddles in seconds.
Karlon's neck and limbs cracked, ice crumbled off his body as his scales purred, like they were breathing with heated breath.
Arion's stance had lost some of its earlier certainty. A bead of sweat slid from his jaw, evaporated, then froze mid-air.
A grin spread slowly across the man's face, eyes full of beast-like hunger as they met Arion's gaze.
"Shall we continue?"
His scales slithered again.
"Don't disappoint me, now."
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
TSCH–CRACK!
"Ignition Thread."
VRRRR!
Arcs of flame came in tandem with the blade's dance.
Slash.
Uppercut.
Spinning sidesweep.
Overhead slice.
Metal blurred into fire. Ice answered.
The air itself cracked under pressure.
Each burst of fire devoured oxygen, each pulse of ice stole its heat. The air couldn't decide whether to burn or freeze—so it did both, violently.
The frost died in a fiery collapse, a wall of ice shredded under the roaring firestorm.
Arion was trapped in a battle of elements, each new Frost Snap replacing the last before it could fully settle. The ice expanded violently, fracturing into chunks of exploding ice as the fire devoured it.
His opponent moved like a seasoned killer. Arion felt it in every swing—the weight of experience pressing him down.
Karlon laughed through the blaze, teeth catching the light like coins in a furnace.
The fire was stronger, denser and controlled.
The frost would be pushed back, inch after inch when the pause came—each breath between casts.
Shit! I'm gonna be cooked at this rate…
Heat pressed from every side. He'd burn if he hesitated.
Think.
He couldn't rely on power, versatility or skill.
Only two things.
Adaptability.
Knowledge.
Arion's eyes narrowed.
If he can do it, well…surely I can as well.
Vitalis pulsed towards his hand that held Recall. The shard reacted, a two-way connection.
She let out a warm pulse of recognition—the quiet consensus of wielder and weapon.
He imagined the process of Frost Snap, and within a few pulses, crystals formed along Recall—twisting and gliding off, freezing the air around it.
Air blew in a wide spinning tornado with each elemental collision; a byproduct that would rush towards Arion with high pressure.
He caught the gale's recoil, funnelling it through Recall's channel. The weapon howled, its edge sheathed in spinning frost—a cyclone in miniature, bound by will and thermodynamics.
While he improvised, his other hand glided above the ground, the dying heat seeming to be attracted to his slow, twisting palm.
A hue of orange lit momentarily, slicing the ground in its blurring speed.
He would not waste any Essence-saturated warmth; even the heat stripped away by each Frost Snap was being caught, redirected, and consumed.
In this deadlock, control mattered more than force.
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
Arcs of fire came one after the other. The flame pulled the oxygen from the air towards itself—producing negative pressure zones, localised vacuums.
The fire left dead pockets in its wake, stripping the air thin as it passed. Air folded inward around the streaks of flame. Rain flash-evaporated against them, feeding the arcs further as it gorged on the released oxygen.
"No! This won't do!" Karlon said, his blade singing as it cut through the air, "Won't do at all!"
Another arc bled through the air, "I was so thrilled! I hadn't been this excited for a long time!" He let out a tired sigh, "But sadly, friend, I see this act coming to an end."
The fire ripped through the ice some metres away, overwhelming it in seconds.
Then, in the moment between swings, he heard it—ice exploding. A spinning cyclone of ice and wind tore through the flames in its path, snuffing out its existence.
The cyclone shrieked through the steam.
Metal met icy winds. The blade guarded against its extreme air pressure—the cyclone cared neither for what it met nor for the blade's significance, pushing back anything that entered its path.
Karlon recovered his footing and hacked away the annoying icy winds that were stiffening his muscles; the blowback made him tumble backwards, the blade biting into the earth to regain his composure.
"You continue to surprise me! More, just like that! I need more—"
Yet as he looked through the dust and steam, Arion had vanished; only hot steam rose as the lingering elements continued to react.
His eyes cut across the clearing as he turned to check his blind spot—yet nothing.
He chuckled, "Now, now. Let's not be so shy… I don't bite. Much."
His eyes narrowed on the scene in front of him—he caught a sudden orange glint reflected from the wet mud, confusion snagged him for half a beat—then his vision shot skyward.
VRRRMMMM!
He saw Arion right above where he stood, a large disc of heat cutting through the air.
Karlon reacted, but without a proper guard, the impact overwhelmed him. The Heat Coil chewed into metal and scale alike.
The impact threw him back several paces, sending him sliding through the mud.
Karlon looked down. His eyes widened.
Kavisli was chipped.
"What….?"
—— ❖ —— —— ❖ —— —— ❖ ——
Cryo-Arc Constellation
Thermodynamics
Description:
Cryo-Arc Constellation exploits the instant where water is neither stable liquid
nor settled ice.
Instead of sending a spell forward, I let the storm become the medium.
Frost Snap arrests droplets mid-fall, suspending a lattice of supercooled nodes. Instability propagates through that lattice, jumping from droplet to droplet along the shortest collapsing path.
Each contact flash-freezes the node it touches, destroying the pathway and forcing the reaction to seek a new unstable neighbour.
For a heartbeat, the rain becomes a constellation—a self-rewriting circuit made of collapsing stars.
When enough nodes freeze at once, the system loses all remaining exits.
The air cannot settle on a state.
Everything collapses inward.
Science:
Cryo-Arc Constellation is an environment-driven phase cascade, not a projectile or directed discharge.
Frost Snap arrests raindrops in a metastable supercooled state—liquid water held below its freezing point without crystallising. Each frozen droplet becomes both a heat sink and a transient conductor for further phase transfer.
As freezing propagates from droplet to droplet, the system is forced to continually re-route through the most unstable nearby node. Each crystallisation event destroys its own pathway, ensuring the reaction cannot stabilise or dissipate gradually.
When enough droplets freeze within a confined volume, simultaneous phase change occurs.
The rapid release of latent heat is immediately overwhelmed by air contraction and vapour collapse, producing a brief pressure vacuum followed by explosive frost expansion.
The storm supplies both material and limits:
Dense rainfall accelerates lattice formation and propagation.
Sparse humidity causes premature collapse and failure.
The effect scales with instability, not power input.
In Layman Terms:
I froze the rain just enough to make it unstable.
The cold jumped from drop to drop, freezing each one and forcing the reaction to keep moving—until everything locked at once and the air collapsed inward.
Maxim:
"If the sky offers you conductors, let them destroy themselves."