Aurora Epitaph

Arctic winds sliced like the Church's judgment blades against Alys' exposed skin. Her tactical visor glazed with ice crystals, each breath shredding her throat. Frostrose vines pierced the permafrost with a nails-on-chalkboard screech, fluorescent sap oozing from cracks to freeze into ice-crystal arrows—a navigation method she'd devised with Cinder on their final mission.

"Three centuries of Church engineering made this a reliquary for saints' bones." Kaine's chainsaw draconic wings shattered the final ice wall. Diamond-dust glitter erupted in the aurora's glow, the cavern refracting alien cyan and viridian hues—a captured galaxy frozen in ice.

At the chamber's heart hovered a hexagonal cryo-coffin, bathed in liquid nitrogen's sapphire radiance. The man inside mirrored Kaine's face, his obsidian mechanical arm engraved with forbidden glyphs: "Godslayer Prototype-01." Plutonium-239-etched characters pulsed lethal radiation even at absolute zero. Alys' vines recoiled from the coffin's surface, symbiotic leaves withering with agonized shrieks.

"Sacrilegious vermin!" The Inquisitor's Divine Mech crashed through the ceiling, its arm cannons forged from molten shards of Leah's clay doll. Crimson energy beams tore the air—Alys spotted the tiny collar code etched inside the barrels, identical to Leah's abduction tag. Her pupils constricted. Frostrose vines lashed Kaine's wrist with -100°C fury: "Three seconds. Don't fail."

Time fractured. Plasma bolts froze three centimeters from Kaine's temple. He saw Leah's hair fragments suspended in the energy stream, golden strands carbonizing. As his chainsaw wings shredded the mech's chestplate, the Inquisitor's mechanical face grinned beneath the visor: "Embrace your destiny..."

The coffin exploded. Prototype-01's mechanical arm struck like a viper, piercing the mech's core. Fluorescent coolant sprayed across the ice, crystallizing into the Church's thorned rose emblem. Alys yanked Kaine back as the liquid ate through their armor—its composition matched Cinder's crystallized blood.

"Children, free me." Ilana's hologram rose from a bronze casket, this "voluntary martyr" now revealed as a nerve-tubed horror. Her mechanical eye whirred with grinding gears, synth-voice crackling: "Polaris Lab... hides the Godslayers' true cradle..."

Alys' vines rampaged. Ice thorns impaled three Godslayer embryos clawing through the ice—half-meter tall horrors wielding spinal chainsaws, their glowing pupils reflecting her own Church sigil. When one pressed its face close, she saw her exact features replicated in miniature.