Chapter 12: Frozen Court

Thin air, sharp as fractured crystal, razored Omega’s lungs as he finally crested the final rise of Giant Mountain. Six spans of brutal, soul-scraping ascent had chipped away his strength and scraped his conscience raw, but the sight that greeted him still stunned him into silence. A single, seamless obsidian disc—vast, wide as a great lake under a starless sky—stretched before him, its flawless surface broken only by drifting curls of low-hanging violet mist that clung to the rim like living breath. No snow, no rubble, no natural feature marred its perfection; the mountain’s peak had been planed into a perfect circle, as if carved by an intelligence that despised randomness and erosion.

A sub-audible hum vibrated through the soles of his makeshift boots, a deep thrumming resonating from the black stone itself. Concentric glyphs, faint as watermarks, lay dormant across the surface, radiating from a recessed hub at the disc’s exact center. As he took his first step onto the obsidian plane, something crunched beneath his foot. He looked down – not rock, but a small shard of smooth, dark metal, clearly artificial, etched with a strange spiral symbol he didn’t recognize. It felt cool, inert. He picked it up, turning it over. Someone else had been here. Climbed this high. Left this fragment behind. Who? Heart pounding with a mixture of apprehension and validation, he tucked the shard away.

He looked up again, scanning the vast, empty expanse. Then he saw them, scattered across the dark surface like pieces on an immense game board.

Ninety-nine figures dotted the plane, each arrested mid-motion like insects captured in amber thousands of loops ago. Some knelt, hands half-raised as if shielding against a sudden, overwhelming flare of light. Others stood poised with weapons drawn—spears fashioned of luminous crystal, curved obsidian blades glinting darkly, even one wielding a lattice of pure white silk that tugged a painful, unspoken guilt from Omega’s core. Every single one of them was locked inside a translucent casing of what looked like vivianite frost. The ice glittered with captured lavender light beneath the swirling mist, fine hairline cracks mapping their bodies like hastily sketched constellations. Within the frost, their faces bore expressions frozen at the cusp of realization: horror, wonder, exhaustion, disbelief.

Omega cautiously approached the nearest figure—an Aeveric youth, judging by the bronze skin threaded by delicate silver filaments. The youth’s eyes glowed dimly behind the ice, caught forever in the act of stepping backward, mouth open in a silent gasp. A jagged glitch, like shattered data, split the boy’s torso: his hips were visibly mis-aligned with his spine, the space between filled with a waterfall of pixelated static that refused to finish rendering. Omega shivered, a cold unrelated to the air temperature settling deep within him. These were no ordinary travelers lost to the elements; they were anomalies like him, marked and collected, each carrying the scars of computational misfires, glitches in the simulation’s code.

He wandered the disc in widening circles, cataloguing the impossible tableau. A Verdani woman whose skin resembled verdigris-streaked bark; her mouth was frozen mid-chant, leaves petrified mid-flutter around her form. A Montian warrior encased in bulky quartz armor flickered alarmingly between solidity and a transparent wireframe outline. One tall, imposing figure—face entirely obscured by a riot of shifting black feathers—seemed composed less of matter and more of shifting probability; every few clicks the feathers subtly rearranged themselves into a new configuration, only to snap back the next tick.

Snow-fine frost dusted their shoulders and hair, clinging to eyelashes and outstretched fingers. But the air, though cold, felt too dry, too charged for natural ice. Not frost, Omega realized, leaning closer to inspect the casing around the feathered figure: the crystalline structure was incredibly intricate, forming microscopic patterns within the lavender ice. Are we all marked by the same fracture in reality? The thought sent a cold knot tightening in his stomach.

As he moved closer to the center, the deep hum underfoot intensified. Concentric rings of glyphs flared to life around him, first a dull gray, then pulsing with vivid amethyst light. Lines of energy chased one another along pathways buried beneath the obsidian surface, visibly linking the ninety-nine pedestals where the frozen anomalies stood. At the disc’s exact center, the recessed hub kindled with a sudden, blinding radiance.

Omega’s right index finger twitched involuntarily—an echo of the long-absorbed insect, a ghost muscle memory that still surfaced in moments of stress or sensory overload. He rubbed the finger against his thumb, swallowed against a suddenly dry throat, and advanced cautiously towards the now-glowing hub. Thin rings of pure light rotated slowly within the recessed space, stacking vertically into a cylindrical shape. He expected words, a voice, some kind of interface, but the cylinder simply pulsed silently… waiting.

Clicks stretched into marks. Wind skittered violet mist across the smooth, black floor. He thought of Pebble’s quiet, steadfast presence held safe inside him, of the crystalline hound he had burned into absolute nothingness, of the villagers who would never understand what strange, terrible mechanisms governed their world from this impossible summit. Survivor’s guilt and the familiar, low-grade ache of his systemic energy deficit tangled together, leaving him feeling light-headed, disconnected.

He raised a tentative hand toward the pulsing cylinder of light—and the entire disc quaked beneath his feet. A low groaning sound resonated through the obsidian as the frost encasing the ninety-nine figures seemed to shimmer and contract. Above the central hub, stark white text materialized:

Gymnasium Core Booting…

Gymnasium. The word landed like a physical blow, resonating with Aris’s fragmented warnings, hinting at training, testing, containment. A thunderous crack spider-webbed simultaneously through the ice encasing all ninety-nine anomalies. Shards flaked away in slow motion, caught momentarily in some kind of mag-lev suspension before dissolving into glittering, lavender-tinged fog. Yet the SIs themselves remained frozen, their eyes still open, pupils dilated in static horror or awe, locked in their final poses. His arrival, the completion of this strange set, had triggered the process.

Omega staggered back as four enormous archways irised open silently from the obsidian perimeter—north, south, east, west—each rimmed in rune-lit gold that pulsed with contained power. Doors constructed of overlapping metallic plates slid smoothly into place behind the arches, sealing whatever lay beyond.

The hum crescendoed into a complex chord that vibrated through his very bones. Glyphs across the disc surged brighter, casting stark, elongated shadows from the frozen figures. Omega dropped instinctively to one knee, covering his ears even though no true sound struck them; the vibration passed through matter itself, through his carapace, like the entire summit was a bell struck by some cosmological hammer.

Then—absolute silence. The glyphs dimmed to a patient, steady glow. The intense humming faded back to the delicate, sub-audible thrumming beneath the stone. The golden arches remained closed.

Omega pushed shakily to his feet. All around him the ninety-nine statues gleamed under the ambient light, still caught mid-gesture, present but not yet active. Whatever machinery had booted considered them accounted for, but not yet released. They were waiting, just as the arches were waiting. Waiting for the Gymnasium Core to finish booting? For a command? For a further convergence he couldn’t begin to fathom?

A hopeless, slightly hysterical laugh sputtered out of him and echoed unnaturally against the silent obsidian. This frozen court bore witness to his arrival, yet offered no guidance, no explanation. Still, he could sense purpose radiating from the structure, as surely as he could sense the faint twitch beneath his skin: the Gymnasium had awakened, but it had not yet opened its doors.

Omega stared at the four sealed, golden gates, each rimmed with complex symbols that mirrored, in unsettling ways, the circuit-like patterns beneath his own flesh. No path forward, no path back—even the mountain winds had fallen utterly still. The entire world seemed to draw breath, holding it.

Deep within the disc, beneath his feet, something massive, larger than stone, turned a final, silent cog.

The ground lurched violently.

Omega spread his feet for balance as a new ring of glyphs seared to life directly underfoot, pale silver light spiraling rapidly inward toward the central hub. Within the glowing center cylinder, a slender vertical seam appeared. Pure, white light leaked out, brighter than any dawn.

And the gates stayed closed. Waiting.