The world was a screaming siren. Red lights strobed across the opulent corridors, painting the gilded walls in hues of blood and emergency. Gunnar stood as the epicenter of a rising tide of porcelain and steel. The Chess Soldiers, their movements an unnerving blend of military precision and enchanted jerkiness, poured into the grand suite, their spear tips forming a thorny, advancing forest.
Gunnar didn't move. He let them come. He closed his eyes for a single, stark heartbeat, and the world went silent. In his mind, there was only a singular, crystalline purpose: Clear the path.
He opened his eyes, and they were no longer golden. They were the color of a winter storm, devoid of warmth, filled with a cold.
His first step was a declaration of war against the very ground he walked on. A shockwave of absolute zero radiated from his boot. The plush, crimson carpet flash-froze, the intricate threads becoming brittle daggers of ice. The wave washed over the front rank of soldiers, their advance halting as their metal feet were instantly, irrevocably fused to the floor. They were statues in a museum of imminent death.
He flowed forward, a glacier carving its way through a mountain range. He didn't run. He glided, his feet skating effortlessly on the ice he created. A soldier lunged, its spear aimed for his heart. Gunnar didn't parry. He simply dropped his shoulder, letting the spearhead scrape harmlessly against his Haki-coated clavicle. In the same fluid motion, his hand shot out, not in a fist, but with fingers rigid as iron. He drove his hand clean through the soldier's ceramic chest, the sound a sickening crunch like shattering pottery. He didn't pull his hand out. He kept moving forward, using the impaled soldier as a gruesome battering ram, smashing it into its comrades before contemptuously shaking the broken pieces from his arm.
He burst through the ruined doors of the suite onto a magnificent balcony overlooking the central courtyard. Below, the scene was a terrifyingly beautiful tableau. Hundreds of soldiers—biscuit, chess, and jam-filled—were assembled in perfect phalanxes on the gingerbread cobblestones. It was an army summoned to crush a single man.
Gunnar didn't hesitate. He launched himself over the balcony railing, a dark comet against the flashing red lights. He didn't aim for a soft landing. He plummeted, turning his body into a projectile.
BOOM!
He landed with the force of a meteor strike, his impact shattering the courtyard in a fifty-foot radius. The ground didn't just crack; it exploded. He landed in a three-point stance, one hand pressed to the ground. A wave of ice, far more powerful than before, erupted from his position, turning the entire vast courtyard into a treacherous, gleaming ice rink.
He rose slowly, his head bowed, his breath misting in the cold air he generated. The army, momentarily stunned, recovered its programming. A horn, made from a giant, twisted piece of licorice, blared.
The charge began.
What followed was Blood Bath.
The first wave was the pawns, a hundred strong, their spears lowered. They slipped and slid on the ice, their formation breaking. Gunnar didn't wait for them to reach him. He stomped his foot, hard. The ice beneath them cracked, but not randomly. He created a web of fissures that guided their stumbling charge, funneling them into a tight, chaotic bottleneck.
Then he moved.
He slid into their ranks, a blur of dark cloak and brutal efficiency. He snatched a spear from a clumsy soldier. The wooden shaft immediately frosted over in his grip, becoming as hard as steel. He spun, the spear a whirlwind of death. He wasn't stabbing; he was obliterating. The spear's tip shattered chest plates. The butt of the spear caved in helmets. In a single, fluid rotation, he took out a dozen soldiers, their broken forms skidding across the ice.
From the flanks, the knights charged, their movements more agile. They leapt, their swords held high, aiming to surround him. Gunnar tossed the spear aside. He met them head-on. He caught the wrist of one knight, twisted it until the arm snapped with a dry crack, and used the knight's own sword to decapitate the one beside it. He ducked under a slash, his free hand shooting up to grab the offender's throat. He didn't squeeze. He flash-froze it. The knight's head and neck turned to brittle, translucent ice before he casually backhanded it, shattering it into a cloud of glittering dust.
The sheer, visceral brutality of his style was a weapon in itself. This wasn't the clean, elegant fighting of a swordsman or the wild brawling of a street fighter. This was the methodical, soul-crushing violence of a god of war.
A massive rook, a living siege tower, rumbled across the ice, its path clearing a trail of crushed cobblestone. It was aimed to pulp him. Gunnar stood his ground, watching it come. Just as it was about to hit, he dropped to one knee and slammed his fist into the ice.
A wall of solid, opaque ice, ten feet thick and thirty feet high, erupted from the ground directly in the rook's path. The rook slammed into it with a deafening **CRUNCH**. The wall held. Cracks appeared, but it held.
Gunnar was already moving. He ran up the sheer face of the ice wall he had just created. Reaching the top, he leaped. As he descended upon the stunned rook, his right arm transformed, becoming a churning, oversized club of molten rock.
He brought the lava club down on the rook's head. The impact didn't just dent it; it melted and shattered it simultaneously. Magma and molten ceramic exploded outward, showering the nearby soldiers in a deadly, sticky rain.
He landed in the center of the carnage, the lava receding from his arm, leaving behind steaming, cracked skin. He stood amidst the broken, frozen, and melted bodies of his enemies. The once-pristine courtyard was now a hellscape of his own making.
The remaining soldiers, perhaps fifty or sixty of them, hesitated. Their programming screamed 'attack', but the scene before them screamed 'certain death'. A new emotion, one they were not designed to feel, began to seep into their enchanted minds: fear.
Gunnar let the silence hang for a moment. He tilted his head, a series of sharp cracks echoing from his neck. He looked at the remaining army, then up at the highest tower of the chateau where he knew she was. A cold, predatory smile finally touched his lips.
He picked up a fallen knight's greatsword, the metal groaning as it frosted over in his hand.
"Round two," he growled, the words misting in front of his face. He began to walk forward, a single, unstoppable force against a faltering army.
***
From the high, ornate window of the Queen's Chamber, the three women had a god's-eye view of the unfolding massacre. The pane of spun sugar glass vibrated with every ground-shaking impact, the flashing red emergency lights casting their terrified faces in a hellish, pulsating glow.
The two nurses were pressed against the far wall, their hands clasped over their mouths, their bodies trembling uncontrollably. They were professional caregivers, accustomed to sickness and injury, but this was something else entirely. This was not a fight; it was an act of erasure.
"He… he's not human," one of the nurses stammered, her voice a reedy whisper. "He's a monster. A demon clad in ice."
"Did you see what he did to the Royal Guard?" the other choked out, her eyes wide with horror as she watched Gunnar use a struggling Biscuit Soldier as a club. "They're made of reinforced cracker dough! It takes a cannonball to even chip them!"
For them, Gunnar was the embodiment of the terrifying stories they were told as children—a being of pure, destructive force from the chaotic outer seas, come to shatter their perfect, orderly world.
Pudding stood frozen by the window, her knuckles white where she gripped the sill. Her mind, usually so quick and calculating, was short-circuiting. .
This wasn't the wild, emotional rage of her mother. It was cold, methodical, and brutally personal. It wasn't just brute strength; it was a high-level battle IQ married to the power of a natural disaster.
"He's… analyzing them," she whispered, a fact that terrified her more than the violence itself. "He's learning their attack patterns and using the environment against them. He's not just fighting them; he's playing with them."
But Smoothie's reaction was a world apart.
She was not cowering. She was not terrified. She stood right at the window, her hands pressed against the cool glass, her face illuminated by the distant chaos. Her breathing was steady, her eyes wide, not with fear, but with a fierce, burning pride that seemed to light her up from within. A slow, genuine smile spread across her lips.
"Look at him," she murmured, her voice filled with a breathless, possessive awe. The nurses and Pudding looked at her as if she had lost her mind.
"Sister, he's a monster!" one of the nurses cried out.
"He's my monster," Smoothie corrected, her voice low and proud. She watched as Gunnar caught a sword with his bare hand and shattered it. "You see brutality. I see a promise being kept." She turned her gaze to Pudding, her amethyst eyes shining with an intensity that rivaled Gunnar's.
"This is the man I chose, Pudding. Do you understand now? All those political marriages Mama tried to force on me… all those pampered princes and brutish kings. They were insects." She turned back to the window, her hand moving to rest protectively on her stomach. "That… is a man. A man who would tear down the sky and freeze the seas for his family."
She let out a soft, almost wistful laugh. "He's going to get his cloak dirty."
Down below, Gunnar brought his lava club down, and the resulting explosion of molten ceramic sent a tremor through the chateau. The nurses shrieked and huddled together. Pudding flinched, her respect for the man growing in equal measure to her fear of him.
But Smoothie just leaned her forehead against the glass.