The mournful screech of twisting metal echoed through the night sky. The Nautilus Floating Device, frozen into an ice sculpture by Trishula, Dragon of the Ice Barrier, was now plunging toward the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. Moonlight refracted off its frost-covered shell in a ghostly blue halo, making it look like a falling frozen comet.
Yet at that very moment, waves of freezing shockwaves patterned with snowflake motifs spread outward layer upon layer, like countless invisible hands of ice gripping Pseudo-Z-ONE's falling machine.
One hundred meters above the ground, water molecules in the air seemed to crystallize of their own accord, instantly forming a spiraling slide five meters wide. This escape route of ice crystals gleamed with a nacreous sheen, its surface covered in dense impact-resistant grooves. When the Nautilus device crashed into the entrance, the ice gave off a crisp chime like wind bells. Tens of thousands of hexagonal ice crystals burst out from the friction, trailing a galaxy-like path of shattered diamonds through the night sky.
Pseudo-Z-ONE's device bounced along the winding slide like an out-of-control mine cart, each impact leaving radial cracks across the ice. He slid all the way down the crystalline track before crashing onto the ground. Its metal chassis plowed a twenty-meter trench, then bounced three more times in succession. On the second bounce, its left mechanical arm stabbed into the rock layer and sent the entire machine spinning. The third landing was like a stone skipping across water; after smashing several boulders, it finally wedged itself into a crater-like depression.
He barely stabilized the machine, then laboriously controlled that mechanical body as it pulled itself out of the crater. Its two thick mechanical arms braced against either side of the pit, and mud trickled down from the silver-white mechanical body as it