Chapter 332 Captain.

Chapter 332: 332 Captain.

"JESTER!"

The voice didn’t just echo—it thundered through the ancient stone halls with the force of a howling winter gale.

Jester stopped dead, spinning away from me. He drew his robed figure up in absolute, unadulterated shock as thick, jagged veins of white ice rapidly began to spiderweb around the massive brass frame of the trophy room doors.

I let a slow, immensely satisfied grin spread across my face.

"JESTER!"

The second shout was significantly closer. It ripped through the heavy silence of the room in a blistering, elemental rage, rattling the glass of the specimen tanks.

The huge doors groaned in protest, the metal violently contracting as the ice thickened, crawling relentlessly through the cracks and sealing the hinges in frost.

"Master!" one of the masked henchmen up in the gallery yelped, his voice cracking with panic. "The main front gates... they’ve been completely broken down!"

"What? Show me the feeds!" Jester barked, his glowing green smile twisting into a snarl.

The massive digital screens arrayed around the upper gallery flashed. Images from deep within the castle’s security network flickered to life.

A freezing, blinding white fog was sweeping violently through the lower halls, frosting over the lenses just moments before the cameras went completely dark.

Jester whipped his head around, watching the monitors die one by one, filling the room with the harsh hiss of snowy static.

The henchmen were racing frantically between their control panels, babbling in terrified confusion as the alarms began to blare.

The very last functional camera showed the grand corridor leading directly to our room.

A concentrated mass of swirling white—like a localized, Category 5 blizzard—rushed down the hall, devouring everything in its path.

Then, the final camera died with a sharp crack of freezing glass.

Jester turned slowly to face the great brass doors. The metal was groaning under immense atmospheric pressure.

And then, with the sound of a detonating bomb, they burst completely open.

A deafening blast of snow and subzero cold howled into the trophy room, instantly dropping the temperature by sixty degrees and freezing the polished stone floor and the lower walls in a treacherous layer of jagged, uneven ice.

The biting wind ushered in a single man.

His heavy, military-issue greatcoat whipped violently in the gale. His pale blue eyes were blazing with a freezing, apocalyptic wrath, and a thick, pristine white beard rested upon his chin.

He wore a heavy peaked officer’s hat that looked exactly like a pristine World War II reenactment prop.

But it was absolutely no prop. It was as terrifyingly real as the man who bore it. The very air around him was actively snapping, popping, and crackling with the sheer output of his subzero presence.

He looked like a relentless, unstoppable relic of Stalingrad physically brought into the present day to exact vengeance.

The Captain had arrived.

And stepping right through the swirling blizzard a half-second behind him was Glacia.

She looked even more coldly furious than her father, which I hadn’t thought was physically possible.

Her chin was tilted back in aristocratic defiance, her icy blue eyes were flinty with unbridled anger, and her long white hair whirled in a halo around her.

God, but I loved that woman.

I turned my attention back to Jester, who genuinely looked uneasy for the very first time since I’d met him. The smug, untouchable warlord actually took a half-step backward.

"Captain Zero," Jester said, forcing his voice into an amiable, diplomatic purr. "What an absolute surprise! And to what do I possibly owe the—"

"SILENCE!" the Captain roared.

His voice boomed with another concussive blast of freezing air. His heavy, leather-gloved hand rose, pointing directly at the sorcerer.

The reinforced walls of the castle physically shuddered under the decibel level, and another wave of frost coated the floor, creeping up the pedestals of Jester’s artifacts.

"You dared, Jester! You dared to threaten my daughter!"

Jester raised his chained hands placatingly, trying to salvage the burning bridge. "Now, Captain, let’s not be incredibly hasty here. There has clearly been a misunderstanding. I assure you, I would absolutely never—"

"Liar!" Glacia spat. A sudden, violent surge of icy anger made her white cloak and hair swirl wildly around her. "We know absolutely everything! We know you framed me for murder. We know you actively wanted the heroes to seize me and lock me away in a black site! We know you intended to steal me away from my beloved!"

"I—" Jester began, his green eyes darting between the two walking glaciers.

"I know everything, Jester," the Captain boomed.

His massive hands balled into tight fists, the knuckles popping with frosty crackles. Freezing air swirled into a localized vortex around him and Glacia.

Massive, stalagmite-like icicles began growing rapidly out of the stone behind him like a terrifying mass of spikes, completely sealing the exit and trapping everyone inside the room.

He raised his arm, and a gargantuan, jagged mass of solid ice began forming in the air directly above him.

"You dared. You absolutely dared!"

The Captain swung his heavy arm down, and the suspended frozen mass immediately followed suit, dropping like a meteor.

Jester jerked both his arms up with a panicked snarl. A crackling, hemispherical barrier of green, eldritch magic surged into existence around him, shuddering violently as the ice boulder smashed into it.

Completely undeterred, the Captain raised his hand again. He brought another massive chunk of ice up, then slammed it down, physically hammering at Jester’s magical barrier.

"You will pay for this, Jester!" the Captain howled with all the untamed fury of the Siberian tundra. "You! Will! PAY!"

The stone floor actively buckled under the sorcerous villain. His green shield buzzed like a dying hornet.

The barrier suddenly exploded as a third, massive hammer of ice came down, completely destroying both the ice and the shield, sending lethal, razor-sharp shards whizzing blindly through the air.

Jester slowly rose out of the resulting cloud of frost and smoke, heavy green static buzzing furiously around his robes.

"Idiot!" Jester snarled, his polite veneer entirely shattered. "When the rest of the Council of Nine hears of this unprovoked breach, they’ll come for your head!"

"If the entire world came after me for defending my own daughter, then I would gladly declare war on it all!" Captain Zero thundered back.

Solid ice grew rapidly under his heavy boots, lifting him high into the air on a freezing, jagged pillar, raw icy power swirling visibly around his outstretched hands.

Jester let out a guttural growl. A thick nimbus of crackling green energy surrounded him, carrying him effortlessly into the air to meet the Captain.

Shadowy, writhing tentacles made of pure void began to tear themselves out from within his wide sleeves and from the dark recesses of his cloak.

The Captain cast his arm violently forward.

Jester did the exact same.

Blasts of searing, eldritch green lightning and thick, absolute-zero rays of icy power met squarely in the exact middle of the trophy room.

The resulting impact sent a massive, percussive shockwave of displaced air crashing outward.

It hit me like a physical brick wall, forcing me to hunker down flat against the frozen floor just to keep from being blown backward.

Well. It looked like the heavy hitters were going to be extremely busy for the foreseeable future.

But I knew this distraction wouldn’t last forever.

I hurled myself across the slippery floor, my heavy steel plates dragging on the stone, and scrambled frantically toward the biggest crushed chunks of the green crystal Ratchet had stomped on.

Captain Zero might be strong enough to take on the geopolitical world, but taking on a reality-warping alien god? I wasn’t so sure about those odds.

The only guaranteed way to kill Jester was the crystal, and that meant I desperately needed as many pieces as I could gather.

As my fingers closed around a handful of the glowing green stones, a polished leather dress shoe slammed down onto the floor, missing my hand by a fraction of an inch.

I looked up, finding Samuel looming directly over me. His face was flickering wildly with his absolute fury.

"You will suffer eternally for this indignity," he snarled, heavy black-and-white static buzzing dangerously around his raised hand.

"Counter-offer," I said, casually noting a bright flicker of light approaching rapidly from the corner of my eye. "I don’t, and instead, you go flying entirely across the room at top speed?"

Samuel sneered and reached down to grab my throat.

Which was highly unfortunate for him, because that meant he completely missed the blinding blast of white magic that slammed squarely into his chest.

It physically lifted him off his feet, throwing him all the way across the room and violently crashing him through several priceless, glass-encased display cases.

Vanessa blew right past me, her hands glowing as she hurled successive shots of white magic after her brother.

Samuel rolled painfully back to his feet, pulling himself out of the shattered glass, his entire body buzzing like a television caught in a thunderstorm.

"Father always liked you more!" he barked furiously, firing a thick ray of humming black power straight at her head.

"Go see a therapist, you psycho!" Vanessa shot back. She effortlessly dodged the black ray and fired another concussive shot of white light. "I’ll kill you both!"

Samuel ducked the blast, the stone pillar behind him exploding, and shot his own volley back at her. "You stole my favorite vintage shirt!"

"You wrecked my first car!"

"You ruined my piano recital!"

"You always stole my turn on the Xbox!"

"I absolutely hate you!"

"I hate you mooooore!"

I winced, keeping my head down as the lethal blasts of magic shot back and forth directly overhead.

Well, then. It certainly seemed like the heirs to the New Order had some deep, underlying familial issues to work through.

It was probably best I just... stayed out of the crossfire and left it to them.

"Sir!"

Glacia was suddenly at my side, her cape pooling around her as she dropped to her knees on the frozen floor next to me. "Sir, are you alright?"

"I’ve certainly been better," I admitted, clutching the glowing green shards in my fist. "There’s some kind of runic dampener built into the floor of this room completely shutting down my mutant powers. My armor is dead weight. We need to figure out a way to—"

Heavy, high-caliber bullets suddenly pinged sharply into the stone floor right around us.