Trainer | Cold Fear
He knelt. The sphere seemed to grow, its surface a smoky mirror showing him a pale, frightened face he didn't recognize. Don’t think about the sticking. Don’t think about the melting. Just… close the circuit.
"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."
The sphere sat there, malevolent and serene. cold fear trainer
Jace frowned. He was a veteran of the live-fire courses, the simulated collapses, the sudden ambushes. Heat, noise, chaos—he could handle those. They made his blood pump hot. But this?
Jace closed his eyes. He imagined the heat in his chest—the hot, furious, living heat—and he pushed it down his arm, through his wrist, into his fingertips. This is not cold, he lied to his own nerves. This is just the absence of something. And I am full of that something. He knelt
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 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. Don’t think about the melting
"I… can't," he whispered. His hands, usually so steady, were curled into white-knuckled fists at his sides. The cold was a weight, pressing the air from his lungs.
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.
Jace stared at the sphere. His mind, a sharp tactical instrument, became a slurry of static. Don’t. It will stick. It will tear the skin. The nerves will scream and then go silent. Then the bone… He could already feel the phantom burn of frostbite, a pain so clean and final it made a bullet wound seem like a bruise.
