A Memory of Zero Degrees

Chapter 7: The Price of Prophecy (3)

She glanced at him, then at the overflowing carts, and shrugged. "I'll let it slide. You look like you know what you're doing." She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly. "Or like you're about to do something crazy. Either way, not my business."

Arthur said nothing. He loaded the bags into a rented van another hundred dollars he wouldn't miss and drove back to his apartment building. He made four trips up the stairs, his enhanced muscles barely registering the strain, and stacked the provisions in the center of his living room. The mountain of food was a monument to his new purpose.

[Mission Progress: 115/100 kg.]

[Reward Pending. Commencing Host Upgrade...]

A wave of warmth washed over him. It started in his chest, just behind his sternum, and radiated outward through his limbs, his fingers, his toes. It wasn't the warmth of a fire or a blanket. It was internal, cellular. It felt like his body was being rewoven from the inside out, threaded with filaments of frost resistant steel.

[Reward Acquired: Passive Skill 'Cold Resistance Lv.1']

[Effect: Host's tolerance to sub zero temperatures increased by 40%. Cellular damage from cold exposure significantly reduced.]

He needed to test it. Immediately.

Arthur left his apartment and walked two blocks to a convenience store. The afternoon sun was high and punishing, the heat radiating off the asphalt in shimmering waves. Everyone around him was sweating, fanning themselves, seeking the refuge of air conditioned cafes. Arthur felt... comfortable. The heat was there, but it was distant, muffled. As if he were watching it through a pane of frosted glass.

Inside the store, he walked to the back, where a large commercial freezer hummed against the wall. It was filled with bags of ice the kind you bought for parties, for coolers, for sprained ankles. He grabbed a five pound bag, paid the bored clerk two dollars, and stepped back out into the sun.

He tore open the plastic. The cold hit his hands immediately. A normal person would have felt the sharp, stinging bite of frost, the urgent alarm of nerves screaming to let go. Within two minutes, the skin would turn red, then a waxy, bloodless white. Pain would follow, a deep, throbbing ache that signaled the beginning of cellular death.

Arthur held the bag of ice in his bare hands and waited.

One minute. The cold registered as a pleasant coolness, like holding a chilled glass of water.

Two minutes. No pain. No discoloration. His skin remained its normal, healthy pink. The ice began to melt, water dripping through his fingers and onto the hot pavement, where it evaporated almost instantly.

Three minutes. Four. He turned the bag over in his hands, flexing his fingers around the frozen mass. It felt... comfortable. As if his body had simply decided that cold was no longer a threat, merely a different state of being.

"Hey, man. You alright?"

Arthur looked up. A young couple had stopped on the sidewalk, watching him with a mixture of curiosity and concern. The guy, a lanky kid with a skateboard tucked under his arm, was squinting at the bag of ice in Arthur's hands. His girlfriend, a petite blonde with a nose ring, was frowning.

"Your hands," the girl said. "They're gonna freeze. You should put that down."

"I'm fine," Arthur said. His voice was calm, almost bored.

The guy shook his head, a grin spreading across his face. "Nah, nah, I get it. My boy here is in love. Look at him. Holding ice like it's nothing. Probably gonna walk right into that jewelry store across the street and buy something real nice for his girl. Gotta keep it cold, right? Champagne? Roses? Something fancy." He nudged his girlfriend. "See? Romance ain't dead. Some guys still put in the effort."

The girlfriend rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "Yeah, well, if you held a bag of ice for me until your fingers turned black, I'd just call you an idiot. Come on."

They walked away, their laughter light and unburdened.

Arthur watched them go. The bag of ice was now half melted, a cold slush dripping down his wrists and soaking into the cuffs of his jacket. He felt none of it. The cold was just a sensation, a data point. What he felt, deep in the frozen tundra of his chest, was something else entirely.

In love.

The words were a cruel joke. The last time he had been in love, that love had kissed him with a mouth full of the food he had given her, and then she had helped strip him naked and left him to die in the snow. Love was a trap. A weakness. A beautiful lie that people told themselves to make the dying easier.

He thought of Sera's warm lips. Rivan's hot, steaming piss on his frozen face. The laughter of the two men in the wholesale club, dismissing him as a fool who had fallen for a YouTube prophet.

He thought of the ten girls on his old list. The ones Rivan had promised to hunt down and violate, to make them carry his children and pour their degradation on Arthur's corpse.

His grip on the ice bag tightened. For a moment, he imagined it was something else. Something that bled. Something that could feel pain.

With a sudden, violent motion, he hurled the bag of ice into the gutter. It burst against the concrete, shards of ice scattering like broken glass. A woman walking her dog flinched and hurried past, her eyes wide with alarm.

Arthur turned and walked back toward his apartment, his stride long and purposeful. The sun beat down on him, but he walked in his own private winter. The world around him was warm, loud, and blissfully unaware. It was a world of romantic gestures and casual mockery, of doomsday prophets dismissed as cranks and fools.

In thirty days, the laughter would stop. The ice would come. And Arthur, wrapped in a cold that no longer hurt him, would be ready.

[System Notification: Tutorial Phase Complete.]

[Host Status: Cold Resistant. Provisioned. Primed for Phase 2.]

[Awaiting Next Mission Directive...]

The blue text faded, but the cold inside him remained. It was the only thing that felt real anymore.