Cold: Fear Trainer

It wasn't a gradual chill. It was a surgical strike of cold. The kind that bypasses the skin and pierces directly into the marrow. Jace’s breath exploded in a white cloud. His muscles seized, not from shivering, but from a deep, ancient shock. This wasn't discomfort. This was the cold that whispered of dead planets, frozen seas, and the heatless eternity of space.

Jace frowned. He was a veteran of the live-fire courses, the simulated collapses, the sudden ambushes. Heat, noise, chaos—he could handle those. They made his blood pump hot. But this?

He reached out. His fingers, clumsy and numb, hovered an inch from the surface. He could feel the cold radiating off it, a negative heat. His arm began to tremble from the shoulder down. cold fear trainer

His fingers touched the sphere.

The sphere sat there, malevolent and serene. It wasn't a gradual chill

"Do it," the voice whispered. Not a command. A conspirator’s nudge.

A hatch in the floor slid open. A single, flawless sphere of ice rolled out. It was the size of a child's head, and impossibly, impossibly cold. Frost cracked across the white floor toward Jace’s bare feet. Jace’s breath exploded in a white cloud

The pain was a white explosion behind his eyes. It felt like his skin was ripping into a million crystalline shards. He heard a sound—a raw, animal gasp—and realized it came from his own throat. But he did not let go. He wrapped his hands around it, the sphere searing him with ice. He stood up.

The drone’s red light blinked once. The air temperature plummeted.