The Arctic was a blinding expanse of white and fractured blue ice. Yamato, a magnificent, snow-white warrior built like a mountain, stood sentinel on the edge of the floe. He wasn’t human, nor animal, but the very spirit of the cold, his eyes the deep, endless blue of the polar night sky. He was the appointed Guardian of the Arctic, sworn to protect the fragile life within its domain.
A young polar bear cub, barely a year old and still clumsy on the slick ice, had wandered too far. Drawn by the scent of a distant seal colony, the cub decided to bravely swim across a treacherous channel of open water.
The swim was short, but the danger was ancient and immense. A shadow, vast and dark, moved beneath the icy water. It wasn’t the familiar orca or Greenland shark; this was a primordial terror. It was a Megalodon, somehow surviving in the cold depths, a ghost from a warmer age, its massive jaws lined with serrated teeth, each the size of a man’s hand.
The cub cried out in a terrified squeal as the colossal shark surged upwards, a churning wave of black water and blinding white belly.
Yamato saw the attack instantly. With a roar that cracked the silence and echoed across the ice shelves, he moved. He didn’t swim; he willed the ice to his aid. Leaping onto a thick, jutting spire of ice, he focused his immense power.
The ice under the Megalodon’s path buckled and fractured. A huge, jagged shard of glacial blue ice, as sharp and long as a spear, shot out from the water, narrowly missing the cub but striking the Megalodon’s tough snout with the force of a battering ram.
The giant shark bellowed a soundless, underwater explosion of rage and pain. It recoiled, momentarily stunned, its attention diverted from the small, defenseless prey to the powerful entity that had dared to wound it.
Yamato, without hesitation, plunged into the freezing water. He seized the paralyzed cub gently by the scruff of its neck and, with a few powerful, ice-breaking strokes, propelled them back toward the safety of the main ice floe.
The Megalodon, its chance lost, circled once, a massive, vengeful shape beneath the surface, before deciding the fight.
