Defenceman: Parallel Ice (Non-Canonical Saga)
Copyright© 2025 by Cold Creek Tribute Writer
20. Engineered Chaos
Coming of Age Story: 20. Engineered Chaos - Defenceman: Parallel Ice (A Non-Canonical Saga) builds on Cold Creek’s Defenceman series while offering a new interpretation. Michael Stewart’s journey extends beyond the rink into intrigue, modeling, and the launch of his AI: Aegis. From Ann Arbor to London, Japan, and Spain, the story explores honor, love, betrayal, and resilience. Rivals and allies test his limits in the arena, courts and shadows—where triumph demands sacrifice and heart both on and off the ice.
Caution: This Coming of Age Story contains strong sexual content, including Romantic Celebrity Sports Interracial White Female Oriental Female White Couple Royalty
The Fracture in the Crowd (July 11 – 04:17 CET)
The world snaps into horrifying clarity below me.
Rika lies twisted across the aluminum stairs, her right arm bent open at a grotesquely wrong angle, bone jutting pale and slick through torn skin. Blood streaks the ridged metal beneath her in thin, uneven lines that run and pool with the vibration of thousands of feet pounding the walkways around us. The air tastes like burned magnesium, sweat and adrenaline mixed with the metallic odor of blood.
Just to her left, a teenage girl sits half-collapsed against the slanted rise of the lower platform, blinking hard against the blood trickling down the side of her face. Her hair is matted, her expression dazed but steady, like she’s trying to process a blow she doesn’t quite remember taking. She presses one palm to her head, winces, and then looks at her hand as if the blood is only a minor inconvenience.
The walkway beneath me vibrates again, harder this time, as the crowd surges backwards from the flare’s dying smoke. People shove without looking, scream without knowing what they’re screaming about, bodies colliding with other bodies in a frantic attempt to escape a danger they never actually saw.
Phones are everywhere—up, always up. Dozens of screens glow coldly in the dark, capturing the aftermath with the same hungry detachment they had when the flare burst in the air just moments before. People who were recording sparks and music and dancing are now recording broken limbs and blood without even understanding the shift in context. I see myself reflected in one screen, a distorted silhouette frozen at the top of the stairs, and it hits me that whatever story is forming here, I’m already implicated.
One photographer doesn’t move with the crowd. He stands at the base of the stairs, lens raised with eerie precision as he tracks me, tracks Rika, tracks Willow. His stance is too solid, his timing too perfect, his calm too absolute for a festival shooter. He adjusts something on his camera without taking his eye off the viewfinder. The crowd jostles past him, but he never flinches, never stumbles.
I’m too stunned to process what that means.
Asuka is already moving. She doesn’t yell my name, doesn’t wait for me to say anything, doesn’t even look for the attacker. She launches herself down the stairs with the kind of instinctive, ferocious certainty only years of training provide.
“Willow—behind me!” she shouts, voice slicing through the noise.
Her head whips up just long enough to meet my eyes. I see fear, fury, and a calculation forming so fast I can’t even keep up with it. She turns away again before I can speak.
I try to follow, but my legs don’t move the way I want them to. For a heartbeat I’m stuck, gripping the rail, looking down at bone and blood and the impossible angle of Rika’s arm while my brain argues with itself about whether this is real or a hallucination.
Then my body catches up with my mind, and I start down the steps—
—but Dušan’s voice hits me like a wall.
“Back! Michael, stay back!”
He’s already at the lower platform, crouched between Rika and the girl, issuing rapid-fire instructions in Serbian while waving two EXIT security guards away from the stairs. He has one hand stabilizing Rika’s head, the other checking her breathing and pulse, and he looks so completely in control that for half a second, I believe everything is going to be fine.
The girl touches her scalp again, grimaces, and then gives a small, almost embarrassed laugh.
“It’s okay,” she mutters in accented English. “I’ve had worse nosebleeds from volleyball spikes.”
It hits me sideways—this absurd, brave little attempt at humor amid all the blood. One of the guards stifles a nervous laugh. Dušan doesn’t even blink; he’s too deep in triage mode.
He calls something sharp and urgent into his radio. The EXIT guards nearest the platform start spreading their arms wide, trying to force the crowd back from the stairs and away from the injured. Their orange security shirts flash in and out as bodies collide with them from every direction.
Then I see what Dušan sees.
A torn strap. A scuffed casing. Rika’s bodycam lying just behind her elbow, still blinking faintly.
He grabs it, checks the lens, and slips it into his pants pocket. One motion later, he unclips his own bodycam as well. He stands and pushes his way toward me, weaving through the thick rush of people with a clarity of purpose I can’t match right now.
When he reaches the top landing, he doesn’t waste a single breath.
“Asuka,” he says, holding out both bodycams.
She reaches up and takes them instantly.
“Get him out,” Dušan orders. “Hotel Leopold. Straight there. Do not stop.”
“No,” I blurt. “I’m not leaving. I’m going with—”
“You are not safe here,” he cuts in, sharper than I’ve ever heard him. “You are not helping here. Go.”
Rage hits me first—rage at myself, at the attacker, at the universe that let me shove a body just hard enough to send Rika tumbling. But under it sits something worse: the cold realization that Dušan is right, I’m not helping, only adding to the chaos.
“Asuka—move,” Dušan commands, already turning back toward the injured. He snaps something in Serbian over his shoulder; a sharp directive aimed at two EXIT guards hovering near the periphery. They immediately break off and fall in behind us, ready to guide.
She grabs my arm, firm and absolute. “Michael,” she says quietly, her voice controlled and deadly calm, “we move now.”
Willow presses into my other side, trying to match Asuka’s pace.
The crowd parts for them only because the guards and Asuka force it to. I follow because I don’t know what else to do.
The moment we enter the first tunnel leading out of the fortress, the noise behind us folds into a distant roar—still loud, but filtered through the fortress’s stone walls. The two guards lead us through narrow passages, past storage doors and support beams.
Asuka slows just enough to lean in close, her breath warm against my ear in the cool tunnel air.
“Do not talk in your room or Willow’s,” she murmurs. “They’re still compromised.”
The words piss me off but I know she is right.
We’re not just dealing with an accident.
We’re not just dealing with chaos.
Someone is listening. Someone is watching. Someone knew how to strike.
We exit the tunnel into the night air and I feel the weight of everything pressing down at once—Rika’s broken arm, the girl’s blood and the attacker’s disappearing silhouette.
Lockdown (July 11 – 06:05 CET)
By the time we reach my suite the room feels like a different universe altogether: too clean, too bright, too untouched to make sense after the chaos of the fortress. Two BIA officers stand posted in the hallway, one at each end, watching the corridor with the rigid stillness of men assigned to protect.
Willow sits heavily onto the couch, fingers trembling so badly she drops the bottle cap on the first try. She mutters an apology even though none of this is her fault. Asuka retrieves the bottle, sets it on the table with measured care, then gravitates toward the window, the fortress lights reflecting off her expression like she’s searching the stone for the pattern she missed.
I pace because standing still feels impossible, my head full of metal-on-metal impacts and Rika’s impossible angle and the blood that pooled where her arm shouldn’t have gone.
“Michael ... you didn’t—”
“Don’t,” I snap. Too sharp. Too fast.
Willow flinches, her face crumpling.
Before I can fix it, before I can breathe, my phone vibrates and I see the name.
Jack Danner.
I lift the phone to my ear and say “Jack”—but Asuka is on me in an instant.
She’s across the room before I can continue, her hand closing around my wrist, her other hand forming a clear, silent command: Stop talking. Now.
She mouths: No. Bugs.
I freeze.
Jack’s voice bursts through the receiver: “Michael? Are you there?”
Asuka leans in close. “Tell him one minute,” she whispers so softly it barely qualifies as sound.
I swallow. “Jack—hold on. One minute.” I lower the phone against my chest without muting.
Asuka is already moving.
Two steps to the bathroom. A quick visual sweep around the frame. Her fingers dart behind the hinge, then under the vanity lip, then behind the towel rack.
She finds it right where she expected.
A tiny metal glint. A microphone no bigger than a thumbtack.
She plucks it free without a sound, shows it to me for half a second, then walks into the main room and sets it on the table beside the fruit tray as casually as if she’d found a loose thread on her sleeve. If anyone is listening, they’ll hear everything they expect: quiet tension, footsteps, muffled conversations. Nothing more.
She comes back and points to the bathroom, her gesture sharp: In. Now.
Willow rises shakily from the couch and follows us. Asuka turns the shower on full; water roars instantly, filling the small tiled space with a blanket of white noise thick enough to mask our conversation.
Only when she’s satisfied with the sound barrier does she nod.
I bring the phone back to my ear and hit speaker at the lowest possible volume.
“Jack,” I whisper. “I’m here. Had to move.”
His tone tightens, but he doesn’t ask questions; he trusts my caution. “Good. Then listen closely.”
Asuka stands with her back braced against the bathroom door, arms folded, guarding the only entrance like a choke point. Willow lowers herself onto the closed toilet lid, wrapping her arms around herself, breathing shallow but steady.
Jack continues, voice tinny under the shower’s roar: “Tell me you’re not talking to hotel staff, security, or anyone else.”
“No,” I whisper.
“And tell me you haven’t opened social media.”
“I saw thumbnails. That’s it.”
“That’s already too much.” His tone sharpens. “Listen carefully: you say nothing to anyone until Serbian counsel is looped in. Not a word. Not to hotel management, festival staff, random guests—no one.”
He pauses, then lowers his voice a fraction. “And Michael—be careful with Dušan too.”
I tighten my grip on the phone. “He’s helping—”
“He is,” Jack says with controlled steadiness. “I respect the man. But he works for Serbian security. His first loyalty is the law, not you. If this escalates into a legal case, anything you say to him becomes part of the official record. And right now? That record can be spun in six different directions.”
A cold knot forms in my stomach.
“So keep it simple,” Jack finishes. “Updates only—no theories, interpretations, or guilt-soaked explanations. Counsel leads the narrative, not you.”
I press my thumb against my eyebrow, trying to breathe.
“I—Jack, Rika—”
“I know about Rika. I’m getting updates from Dušan. Focus on what you can control.”
“What I can control,” I repeat bitterly.
“There’s one thing,” Jack says. “Evidence.”
Asuka reaches into her jacket and produces the two bodycams she recovered—Rika’s and Dušan’s—placing them carefully in my hands.
Jack continues, “I need all five cameras. Yours, Willow’s, Asuka’s, Dušan’s, and Rika’s. We want as much evidence as possible.”
“My laptop is outside,” I say quietly.
“Then go get it,” Jack replies. “But don’t speak. Don’t make noise. Bring it in and close the door.”
Asuka nods once, adjusting her stance by the door.
I slip out into the suite—just long enough to grab my laptop from the desk—keeping my mouth shut. I’m back in the bathroom within seconds, shutting the door behind me as Asuka watches silently.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“Good,” Jack says, voice steady and reassuring. “You know how to do this, so just walk me through as you go.”
I plug in the first bodycam via USB cable, and the laptop recognizes the device immediately.
“I’m in,” I say quietly. “Root directory.”
“You should see the DCIM folder,” Jack replies. “Open that, then look for the subfolders marked with yesterday’s and today’s dates.”
“I’ve got them.”
“Great. Copy those folders into the secure-share we set up earlier.”
I select the folders and drag them into the secure folder. Progress bars begin their slow crawl across the screen.
“Good,” Jack says. “Now repeat that for the remaining cameras. We need every angle possible.”
Behind me, Willow hugs her knees on the closed toilet lid. “Is this going to ruin everything?” she whispers.
Jack answers quietly. “No. This is what protects you. All of you. Just be patient. Let us do the heavy lifting on the analysis.”
He pauses before continuing. “And Michael—if Dušan asks for copies, have him contact me. Don’t volunteer anything early. Serbian counsel will decide how and when the official release happens, but Dušan is going to want the footage for his reports.”
“That makes sense,” I say, and it does. Dušan isn’t the enemy. He just works inside a system that doesn’t care how scared we are—and since a Serbian girl was injured, the stakes are even higher.
Jack goes on, “I know you’re going to watch the videos yourselves. I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise. Just don’t act on anything you see until we’ve done a full timeline reconstruction. I promise we’ll keep you in the loop.”
“Understood.”
He takes a breath. “Michael ... the guilt you’re carrying—set it down for now. We build this using evidence, not fear. You can process the emotions later. Right now, you’re doing exactly what you should.”
The words steady me more than I want to admit.
“Okay.”
“Finish the transfers,” he says gently. “Then get somewhere you can think clearly. We’ll keep working on our end. Call me if anything changes.”
The line goes quiet.
I look down at the cluster of bodycams on the cold tile—five small devices blinking steadily, waiting.
Asuka nudges my shoulder. “Rika’s room isn’t monitored,” she says softly. “We can watch the footage there.”
I nod, complete the transfers, and close the laptop once I’m sure everything copied successfully.
Because whatever happened tonight—whatever the world decides to believe—the truth is inside these recordings and now it’s our turn to see it.
The Looming Crisis (July 10 – 23:20 EDT)
Jack Danner saw Hanna’s text at 11:20 p.m. in Ann Arbor and felt the familiar shift in his gut—the one that meant a crisis was forming. A little over an hour earlier in Novi Sad, the accident had already unfolded; now the first EXIT videos were appearing on Facebook.
Hanna Sanders saw them immediately. She didn’t hesitate. She sent one group text to the three people who needed to know at once.
Hanna → Group (Kiyomi, Jack, Melissa):
“Something happened at EXIT. People hurt. Michael is in one of the videos. Please look.”
Kiyomi responded within seconds.
Kiyomi → Group:
“Everyone join a call. Now.”
They connected almost immediately.
Kiyomi began, calm but direct. “Hanna—what do we have?”
“Six videos so far,” Hanna said. “Different accounts, different angles. It looks chaotic. Michael appears in one frame, but no one is naming him. Comments are mixed—some people confused, some guessing, some blaming the guy at the top of the stairs. Nothing organized.”
Jack opened the first clip she sent. Early smartphone quality—grainy, shaky—but enough to see the flare, the crowd surge, and two bodies falling hard down the metal stairs.
He checked the next clip. Same moment, different angle. No context in any of them.
“Send everything you have,” Jack said.
“Already did,” Hanna replied.
On a second screen, Melissa tracked comment clusters. “Some accounts pushing this are new. Very low follower counts. A few repeating phrases, but not coordinated enough to call it a campaign.”
Jack scrubbed the video again. He paused at the moment the flare burst—too well-timed for coincidence, but he didn’t say that yet.
Kiyomi broke the silence. “Jack. Next steps.”
Jack didn’t hesitate. “First, Serbian counsel. Bill needs to start calling as soon as lines open.”
“He will,” Kiyomi said. “I’ve messaged him already.”
Hanna checked the newest uploads. “More EXIT footage coming in, but still no direct tags on Michael. A couple users saying ‘the tall guy pushed,’ but nothing organized.”
Jack clicked through another clip. The flare. The low swing toward Willow. Michael reacting. Rika caught in the chain.
He exhaled. “We hold position. No statements. No posts from anyone. Nothing public until we understand exactly what happened.”
“Agreed,” Melissa said.
“Kiyomi,” Jack added, “before I call Michael, I need a status from Serbia. I’m contacting Dušan now.”
“Do it,” Kiyomi said. “Then call Michael immediately. He’ll be overwhelmed, and we need him steady.”
Jack called Dušan’s and his update was short: Rika injured, teen stable, no fatalities, both transported. Michael, Asuka and Willow back at the hotel under guard. Then Jack returned to the group.
“Dušan confirmed the injuries,” he said. “Rika is stable but hurt badly. Teen girl stable. Michael, Willow and Asuka secure at hotel”
Kiyomi inhaled once, controlled. “Go. Call Michael now. Reassure him, get the raw video, and tell him we will schedule a full debrief once counsel is in place.”
Jack nodded, ending the conference call.
He pulled up the latest queue of posted EXIT clips, glanced once at the repeating frames, then reached for his phone.
A few seconds later, he dialed Michael—
Crisis Briefing (July 10 – 23:50 EDT)
Soon after Kiyomi ended her call with Jack, the house was already awake. She moved quickly through the quiet halls of the Compound, stopping first at Hiroto’s study door. She spoke low, controlled.
“Hiroto—there has been an incident in Novi Sad. We should meet.”
He registered her tone immediately. Within minutes he, his brother Takeshi, their father Ryuichi, and Takeru gathered in the conference room; the urgency was clear.
Kiyomi stood near the end of the table, hands folded, waiting until they were seated before beginning.
“Thank you for coming. I’ve just spoken with Jack,” she said. “There was an event at the EXIT Festival. A flare caused a crowd surge. Rika was injured. A teenage girl as well. Early videos are online.”
Hiroto’s expression tightened. “Rika’s condition?”
“Stable,” Kiyomi said. “Injured, but conscious before transport. Serbia’s ER team is treating her now.”
Ryuichi nodded once, acknowledging the update.
Takeshi asked, “Is Michael hurt?”
“No physical injury,” Kiyomi said. “But he appears in the early videos. He was at the top of the stairs when the surge happened.”
Takeru frowned. “Are people blaming him?”
“Not directly,” she said. “A few comments speculate because he’s in the frame, but nothing organized and no clear narrative yet.”
Hiroto leaned forward. “What did Jack see?”
“Very limited footage,” she replied. “He slowed several of the public clips. All of them show a flare, crowd movement, and then the fall. The videos are too chaotic to interpret intent, and angles are incomplete.”
She paused before continuing.
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