They say the cold in Curitiba isn't meteorological; it's a personal insult. Before the Rifts, it was just a meme about people who love wearing puffer jackets. Now, thirty years later, Southern Brazil had become something geographers called "The Zero Entropy Zone."

  I called it "The Corpse Fridge."

  "Arthur, if I lose one more toe to frostbite, I'm docking it from your pay," Valéria complained, her teeth chattering. She was driving the armored van (now painted matte black to avoid reflections) through a gray snowstorm on the old Régis Bittencourt Highway.

  "Heater busted again?" I asked, not taking my eyes off the portable microscope I had bolted to the makeshift table in the back of the van.

  "The heater runs on Heat Stones. The last stone died ten kilometers ago. We're running on engine heat and Madame Gristle's hatred."

  I looked to the side. Gristle was sleeping under a pile of monster furs, snoring so loudly the window glass vibrated. Luna was sitting in the lotus position, wrapped in three blankets, clutching her sonic baton like a hot water bottle.

  "The cold makes the Parasite slow," I murmured, rubbing my chest.

  Since the battle against the Solar Knight, my symbiotic tenant had been acting strange. It spent too much biomass regenerating my hand and creating that shield. Now, with the external temperature hitting -15°C, it was entering a state of semi-hibernation.

  [METABOLIC ALERT: CORE TEMPERATURE LOW.]

  [REQUEST: CALORIE INTAKE. PREFERENCE: FIRE SEAL BLUBBER.]

  "We don't have seal, we have a granola bar," I replied mentally, eating a piece of dry ration that tasted like sawdust.

  I looked out the rear window. The road was a graveyard of rusted cars covered in ice. The fog was dense, limiting visibility to ten meters.

  But I didn't need to see. I needed to analyze.

  I went back to the microscope. The slide contained a sample of the "snow" falling outside.

  "It's not frozen water," I announced. "It's spores."

  Luna opened one eye.

  "Spores? Like... fungus? We're breathing mushroom?"

  "Highland Cryo-Fungus. They float in the air, enter the lungs, lower body temperature, and when you die of hypothermia, they sprout from the inside out."

  "How lovely." Luna pulled her gas mask up to cover her face. "Why did we come here again? Oh, right. Because we're the country's number one terrorists."

  "Sovereignty's radio signal doesn't reach here," I explained. "The magnetic interference from the Southern Rifts creates a sanctuary. And where drones don't fly, we survive."

  Suddenly, the van swerved violently.

  Valéria cursed, spinning the wheel. The vehicle skidded on black ice, spinning 180 degrees before hitting the guardrail with a metallic crash.

  "Everyone in one piece?!" shouted Valéria.

  "What was that?!" Gristle woke with a jump, drawing her cleaver.

  "Roadblock. But it's not the police."

  I looked through the cracked windshield.

  It wasn't patrol cars.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  It was trees.

  But not ordinary trees. They were Hangman Pines (Araucaria Carnivora).

  They had grown right through the asphalt, breaking the concrete. Their trunks were black and twisted. And hanging from the lower branches, swaying in the freezing wind, were not pinecones.

  There were corpses.

  Dry bodies, preserved by the cold, wrapped in thorny vines.

  And the worst part: they were moving.

  "Necro-botany," I analyzed, fascinated and terrified. "The tree uses the bodies of previous victims as puppets to attract or attack new prey. It's a muscular root system."

  "They're coming!" screamed Luna.

  The Araucaria branches bent down. The hanging corpses detached from the vegetable ropes and dropped to the ground, running toward the van on all fours, moving like clumsy spiders.

  "Exit the vehicle! If we stay here, we get crushed!" I ordered, kicking open the back door.

  We stepped out into the biting cold. The wind howled.

  There were about twenty "puppets." Skeletons wearing the clothes of tourists, truckers, and adventurers, with glowing roots pulsing inside their ribcages.

  "I got the left!" Gristle roared, charging. Her cleaver sliced the air, cleaving three puppets in half. But the roots reconnected in seconds. "Doctor! They won't die!"

  "Of course not! They're already dead!" I shouted, dodging a bony claw. "You have to kill the plant, not the fertilizer!"

  Arthur (the Parasite) tried to activate my arm blades, but the response was sluggish. The cold was stiffening my joints.

  [ERROR: HIGH BLOOD VISCOSITY. ACTIVATION FAILED.]

  "Damn it!" I drew my manual scalpel and a flask of Volatile Herbicide.

  A puppet leaped at me. It was an old highway patrolman, his blue uniform tattered.

  I rolled in the snow, feeling his nails tear my thermal coat.

  I kicked his chest, hearing ribs crack, and threw the contents of the flask onto the "roots" coming out of his mouth.

  The liquid hissed. The roots withered and turned black. The puppet fell inert.

  "It works! But I only have three doses!"

  "Arthur! The Mother Tree!" Luna pointed.

  The largest Araucaria, in the center of the road, was moving. Thick roots burst from the asphalt like giant squid tentacles, rising up to crush our van.

  "It's going to destroy our supplies!" Valéria fired her shotgun, but the buckshot only chipped the tree's hard bark.

  I needed to think fast.

  Cold. Fungi. Plants.

  The biology of this place was based on slow heat absorption.

  The trees were warm-blooded predators. They saw us as thermal batteries.

  "Luna!" I shouted. "Remember the frequency we used to break glass?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Forget the glass. I need a Thermal Resonance frequency. I need you to make the water molecules inside the trunk vibrate!"

  "Like a sonic microwave?"

  "Exactly! Cook it from the inside!"

  Luna planted her feet in the snow. She adjusted the baton. The crystal at the tip glowed a deep red.

  She didn't scream. She emitted a low, constant hum that made my teeth ache.

  VMMMMMMMMMM...

  The invisible sound wave hit the Giant Araucaria.

  The tree froze mid-strike.

  Inside the trunk, the frozen sap began to vibrate. Friction generates heat. Rapid heat in a closed environment generates pressure.

  "Harder, Luna!" I urged, while Gristle protected me from the remaining puppets.

  Luna increased the power. Her nose began to bleed, the blood freezing before it touched her chin.

  CRACK!

  The sound of splitting wood rang out.

  Smoke started pouring from the cracks in the tree bark. The sap was boiling.

  BOOM!

  The trunk of the Araucaria exploded from the inside out. Shards of incandescent wood flew like grenade shrapnel.

  The tree toppled, burning in the snow.

  The moment the "Mother" died, all the puppets fell to the ground, their disconnected roots withering instantly.

  Silence returned to the road, broken only by Luna's panting breath and the crackle of burning wood.

  "Sonic microwave..." Luna fell to her knees in the snow, exhausted. "That was new."

  I walked to the remains of the smoking tree. With my scalpel, I dug into the hot wood and extracted a nodule of crystallized sap, glowing with an amber hue.

  [ITEM: BLOOD AMBER.]

  [PROPERTY: CONCENTRATED HEAT SOURCE.]

  "We have fuel," I announced, tossing the chunk to Valéria. "Put this in the van's heater. It'll keep us warm until the border."

  We got back in the vehicle, bruised and frozen, but alive.

  As the van started up again and the blessed heat began to circulate, I looked at the horizon.

  The fog had lifted a bit.

  Up ahead, rising from the white ruins like a gothic mirage, were the towers of Curitiba.

  But they weren't empty.

  Pale, ghostly lights shone in the windows of the broken skyscrapers.

  And hovering over the city, there were no birds or wyverns.

  There were Gargoyles. Biological gargoyles patrolling the airspace with military precision.

  "Welcome to the Necropolis," whispered Gristle, looking on with respect. "They say here, the monsters formed their own society. If Sovereignty is the Order of Humans... Curitiba is Organized Chaos."

  "Perfect." I smiled, feeling the Parasite wake up with the heat of the sap. "I always preferred chaos. It's easier to dissect."

  I buckled my seatbelt.

  The second stage of our journey had begun. And if the welcome committee was a killer tree, I could hardly wait to see what the city's doorman had in store for us.