The ice beneath Doma's feet had already spread across every surface of the Japanese-style room.
A wall of frost half a foot thick covered the remaining paper door frames. Ice crystals encased the wooden ceiling beams in transparent columns. The red carpet had long since lost its original color, leaving nothing but a dead white expanse.
The temperature was still falling.
Minus forty degrees. Fifty. Sixty.
Every water molecule suspended in the air had frozen into tiny, visible ice needles. They floated densely between the two of them, refracting the last traces of lantern light.
Cold poured from every pore in Doma's body. He held both fans across his chest, their surfaces so densely covered in icy patterns that not even a needle could slip between them. His rainbow irises contracted to two points, fixed on the black-clad figure standing with his back to him six meters away.
That figure did not turn around.
Yaha moved his left hand off Shinobu Kocho's shoulder, lowered it a few inches, and gripped the wrist of the hand holding her Nichirin Blade.
He lifted her hand, blade and all, up to his face.
His scarlet dead-fish eyes stared at the purple liquid remaining inside the blade's hollow structure, and his brows drew together.
"That's all?"
Shinobu Kocho looked down at the wrist he held so casually, then up at his face, half covered in Cursed Markings. Six meters away, Upper Rank Two was unleashing his Demon Aura at full force. The cold had already coated the edges of her sleeves in white frost.
Yaha did not look at Doma.
He was counting the gradations inside the blade's tubing.
"Seventy percent." He released Shinobu Kocho's wrist, his voice dripping with disdain. "You've been fighting this long and only used thirty percent? Are you playing