Battle Two - Nadya vs Irina

The moment Irina hit the ground, the garden stopped feeling like a battlefield and started feeling like a grudge match years in the making.

But first, the past - the pieces that brought them here were stitched into every strike.

They had met as teenagers in a covert Russian military program that operated under a name no one was allowed to speak.

They were trained to be the sharpest blades in the dark: assassinations that never happened, espionage missions denied before paperwork could even be written, sabotage blamed on accidents.

The three of them - Sven, Nadya, and Irina - were a nightmare trinity.

Their teamwork was suffocating, seamless, brutal. They trusted each other's footfalls more than orders.

Sven specialised in infiltration - quiet, charming, infuriatingly smug, and always the first through a locked door.

Nadya was combat incarnate - loud, direct, violent in the way a wildfire was violent.

Irina was intelligence - cold, analytical, emotionally distant, but brilliant. The mind that saw ten moves ahead and never panicked.

Then came the Z Virus.

The world was shaken, then evolved.

Some infected deteriorated slowly into The Withered - a tragic class of humans who never recovered, whose bodies decayed over months while their minds drifted into comas they'd never wake from.

They weren't monsters.

They were extinguishing candles.

But the trio? They were among those who mutated instead.

Their awakening had not been heroic.

It had been screaming.

Sven's legs spasmed violently, his muscles tearing and weaving back together, blinking uncontrollably with each step.

Nadya's palms ignited into explosive energy, detonating uncontrollably for days until she managed to control them, only after scorching her body.

Irina's body froze her entire medical bay during her mutation event, killing more people in the accident than any mission she'd ever been sent on.

The Russian military's response was immediate: "Super soldiers."

The leash followed the praise.

Eventually, they ran, hating being controlled.

All three became outlaws until one broke from the line...

-

SHINK - SHINK - SHINK.

The ice spears screamed forward, a hex formation like before, but faster and more refined. Irina had already summoned them before the first exchange - disciplined, rigid, rotating in the air like cold planets.

Nadya detonated an orb beneath her heel.

BOOM!

The blast launched her into a spiral flip. Her hair flared behind her like embers caught in a hurricane. She formed three more orbs from her belt and snapped them into the air with a grin.

BOOM - BOOM - BOOM!

Each explosion intercepted a spear mid-flight. Ice shards and flame residue spiralled in a glittering, lethal snowfall.

"You always were too loud," Irina spat, forming another spear in her hand - longer, denser, jagged with intent.

"And you always talked too damn much," Nadya shot back, landing on the edge of a frozen fountain, the marble already frost-cracked beneath her boots.

Irina surged forward on a sheet of ice, riding it like a blade cutting along the earth.

Their first collision hit like a memory.

CLANG.

Nadya blocked with her forearm.

Frost surged outward from Irina's spear, climbing Nadya's skin in cracking white veins before she forced the cold back with heat flaring from her arms.

"You really want to do this again?" Nadya growled, orange light blooming in her palm.

Irina slammed another spear down from above.

CRACK - THUD!

Nadya vaulted sideways on a blast, riding the recoil into a shoulder roll before sprinting back toward Irina.

"I told you," Irina snarled, summoning two ice blades, "you can't win this time either."

"Oh yeah?" Nadya smirked, teeth bared, heat radiating off her skin as frost evaporated around her. "Then why are you shaking?"

Irina wasn't shaking from the cold.

Hell, she had long since stopped feeling it.

She was shaking from history, from frustration, from...

Irina spun, raising a wall of ice like a sudden winter cliff.

The ice wasn't smooth.

It was weaponised, layered, and thick enough to trap artillery fire.

Nadya detonated an orb against it anyway.

BOOM - KRAK!

The explosion cracked the wall, but it was far from enough to shatter it.

Frost-glass fragments bloomed outward, slashing through the air like razors.

Nadya shielded her eyes, skidding back, but not before Irina was already behind her again.

Ice skated beneath Irina's feet like liquid metal poured into a mould.

She swung.

CLANG!

Another block.

Nadya's arm screamed under the pressure but didn't break.

"Why do you still fight for that psycho?!" Nadya snapped, kneeing upward to create distance with a pulse orb that detonated under her elbow.

BOOM!

Irina flew back, coat steaming, but her boots landed on a frozen pond that cracked outward in concentric rings.

"We all have our reasons," Irina hissed, voice breaking like splitting ice.

She stabbed forward again.

Nadya twisted away, frost scraping her ribs as she slammed an orb into Irina's sternum at point-blank range.

BOOM - THUD!

The internal pressure spiked late, detonating inside Irina's guard rather than outside it. Irina's ice armour wasn't built to resist concussive force from within.

She staggered, coughing out frost-mist.

"You've gotten sloppy," Nadya said, eyes narrowing.

Irina spat blood - then froze it into needles mid-air and launched them.

FWOOSH - SHINK!

Nadya ducked, sliding into a palm-slam on the ice that detonated another orb outward.

BOOM!

Irina raised a shield, but the blast launched her sideways into a statue in the previously serene garden.

It shattered into ice-dust and stone.

Irina stared at the rubble, breathing hard.

"All you know how to do is live carefree and destroy," she snarled, voice cracking again.

Nadya didn't respond immediately.

She formed another orb, the firelight flickering in her palm like a heartbeat.

"I also know what it means to refuse a leash," Nadya said, voice low, eyes locked. "But you?" She jabbed a finger at Irina. "You put the leash on yourself."

Irina lunged again, screaming this time - not from pain, but from truth.

"There was no choice!" Irina yelled, frost-mist blooming off her skin as her aura flared like a polar storm.

Nadya detonated orbs to skate backwards across the ice.

BOOM - BOOM - BOOM!

"Of course, there was a choice!" Nadya screamed back, voice finally matching Irina's volume. "You could've told us! We were your squad, Irina!"

Irina slammed another spear into the ground. The ice surged upward like a prison of frozen stalagmites.

"Tell you what? That I would kneel for a devil if he promised me a cure that would help my sister?" Irina barked, summoning a new spear and hurling it.

Nadya blocked with an orb, detonating it mid-guard.

BOOM!

The recoil launched both of them into the air.

They collided mid-fall, fists meeting like a thunderclap of muscle, ice, and fire.

CLANG - CRACK!

They landed in a crater of fractured ice and stone.

Irina stood first, wobbling, summoning another spear - but Nadya intercepted her hand with a grab that crackled frost into fire-steam on contact.

"You should've told me," Nadya said, voice low again, but laced with a rare crack in her confidence.

"I did," Irina snarled, "tell you something." She jabbed a finger at the rubble. "I asked you to join the Association with me. And you said no. You didn't even ask why."

Nadya blinked, breath misting.

"You didn't give me a reason," Nadya growled. "We swore never to serve corrupt governments or organisations again, Irina. Never to be weapons. Never to be owned."

"And I swore to keep my sister breathing," Irina countered, voice dropping into a trembling whisper that carried more force than her screams had. "You have a home to run to, Nadya. I have a hospital bed that will go silent if I don't pay the price."

Nadya froze again.

'Have? No, I had a home to run to, but your boss…' she thought internally, but this wasn't about her.

She let her old friend have her moment.

Because that was the first time Irina had ever spoken her mind directly.

It seemed like it had been weighing down on her for so long that the quiet and cold woman couldn't help but break.

Nadya exhaled, stepping back, but Irina kept going.

"You became a brawler, a fight-club queen, an outlaw," Irina snarled, summoning two more spears, "and Sven ran the world chasing coin and women. And me?"

She stabbed a spear into the ice again. "I found a monster who promised me time. Promised me a cure. Promised me Mila wouldn't die alone."

Nadya raised a palm, but Irina slapped it away.

"If you had told me, told us," Nadya whispered, teeth clenched, palm glowing orange again, "we could've found another way."

"There is no other way!" Irina roared again, ice exploding outward from her body in a bloom of jagged frost that forced Nadya to detonate orbs to escape the flash-freeze.

Nadya burst along the cracked ice runway, fist cocked, orb glowing like a dying sun.

They collided again.

BOOM - CLANG - THUD!

The final blast detonated late again, Nadya's control over her explosions far surpassing their previous encounter. She then followed it up with a powerful fist driven forward by an orange burst.

Boom!

Irina's rock-cold armour cracked inward, and this time, it didn't recover.

She flew back, sliding across the cracked ice pond until she smashed into a frozen tree that exploded into splinters of frost and bark.

Irina didn't rise again.

But she could have.

She simply… didn't want to.

Because after finally getting all that off her chest - the silent grudge she'd carried like permafrost around her heart - she almost seemed to give up.

Not from weakness, but exhaustion.

From a debt finally spoken aloud.

From a fight that had stopped being about winning and started being about being heard.

Nadya stood above the rubble, bruised knuckles steaming, breath uneven.

She crouched, staring into Irina's unconscious face.

"You absolute idiot," Nadya muttered. "You really thought I'd join you without a reason?"

In another world, things might be different; the three of them might all have been working for Nyx.

Or maybe Irina's sister might not have become a Withered, and the three of them could have fought as outlaws together.

Nadya sighed, eyes soft for a beat, then hard again as she stood.

Irina had chosen a madman's promise over freedom.

Nadya had chosen freedom over all promises.

And misunderstanding, unspoken love, and unbent knees had led them here - in a garden that would never be peaceful again.

And somehow… things were only going to get worse.

Lenny and Zeke finally hopped down from their perches as the ice began to melt, steam rising like the aftermath of a volcanic winter - their battles had ended long prior.

"That crazy woman won," Zeke murmured, brushing debris from his trousers. "But… it feels like they both lost."

Lenny cracked a small grin - tired, impressed, uneasy.

But despite defeating Nyx's Mutant Guard Squad, this seemed to be only the start of his twisted game…

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