The silence that followed Ren’s declaration was completely different from the breathless, adrenaline-fueled lulls of the battlefield.
It was a suffocating, absolute stillness...
It was like those veteran commanders were staring at a ghost, the blood draining completely from their faces.
"No." Selphira said it before he could even draw a breath to explain himself. Her voice cracked like a whip, sharp and laced with a terror she hadn’t felt in centuries. "It is infinitely too dangerous!"
"If you crystallize yourself," Julius added, stepping forward, his exhaustion entirely forgotten under the crushing weight of the ultimatum, "it is over! All of it... The entire war and our bright future lost."
The youngest yet more politically significant Qilin prince grabbed Ren’s shoulder, his grip unnecessarily tight.
"You are the only living being on this planet capable of reversing the crystallization process. If you fall to it, there is absolutely no one left to pull you out of the problem. Our King Dragarion has been trapped in that frozen state for years and not even him can escape without your help. And if you freeze, we don’t only lose hope for our previous King but much more. And without you, almost everything we have bled to build over the last year is lost forever."
Ren looked at his friends. He saw the genuine, unmasked terror in their eyes. He knew exactly what he was risking. He was risking an eternity trapped in his own mind, staring blankly at a world he could no longer save.
"I know," Ren said.
He certainly knew...
He understood the huge risk intimately, vastly better than anyone else breathing on this battlefield. Ren had literally served as the conduit for that forbidden energy once before. He had felt the insane power current and knew the crystallization process, felt it creeping through his veins. It was an ancient power that offered absolute, god-like dominion over the world, but it could end up demanding your soul in exchange.
"I know the risks," Ren continued, his voice steady despite his exhaustion. He spoke rapidly, cutting off any further protests before they could take root. "But my three-way fusion pushing my baseline output into the Diamond tier grants my body a localized immunity near the core of my system. It acts as a buffer."
He held up a hand, tracing a glowing, microscopic runic array in the air to make two light mana spheres and illustrate his point to the veterans.
"I have already tested the theory using the power of the fusion absorbing weaker ether runes. The absolute key to surviving it is outward pressure. I have to absorb a manageable fraction of the energy, aggressively maintain a flawless outward flow, and never allow the ether to pool in my core faster than my metabolism can push it."
He looked Julius and Selphira directly in the eyes.
"I can do this... I have spent the last year obsessively training my fusion’s Diamond rank mana control without even realizing this was the exact scenario I was preparing for."
Selphira didn’t blink.
"And if your calculations are wrong?" she asked softly.
"Then I crystallize..."
Ren didn’t try to sugarcoat it. He didn’t offer false comfort.
"I freeze solid, just like the King," he stated flatly. "But listen to me very carefully. It does not matter what we don’t do today. If I refuse to take this gamble, our world ends anyway. The artifact successfully drains the sphere below the academy, claims the third ring, and returns here with an insurmountable power spike in its regeneration. It will tear my adamantium tower apart given enough time, breach the castle doors, and mutate into an entity we lack the power to kill. The safe option no longer exists on the board. We are only left with a suicidal gamble, or a guaranteed loss."

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