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.
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.
His fingers touched the sphere.
The room was a perfect cube of white, lit from an unseen source. No shadows. No corners. Just the endless, humming blankness. Inside it, stripped to a thin gray uniform, stood Jace. He was the subject. Across from him, a sleek drone hovered, its single red sensor like a pupil.
"That is the fear response," the voice said, with a hint of satisfaction. "It is not cowardice. It is logic misapplied. You see an object that will destroy tissue. Your brain, correctly, screams 'No.' But the trainer must overwrite that. The mission will not care for your nerves. The mission will require you to handle the cryo-core, to seal the hull breach, to retrieve the black box from the flash-frozen compartment." 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.
He looked at his palms. The skin was an angry, blistering red, already peeling in places. But he was holding them open. Not clenched. He was showing the wounds to the ceiling, like an offering. The pain was a white explosion behind his eyes
He took one step forward. The cold bit into his shins. Another step. The air was so frigid it felt thick, like breathing splinters.