As winter freezes Paladia and the war settles into sudden, costly eruptions, Helena notices Kaine becoming sharper and more worn down. He appears badly injured more often, refuses her help, and then collapses during one of her training sessions. Helena finds a stab wound full of shrapnel made from the anti-resonance alloy of lumithium and mo’lian’shi, which prevents Kaine’s regeneration from working properly.

Because Helena cannot rely on resonance to remove the fragments, she destroys her issued alchemy knife and turns it into manual surgical tools. Using the alloy’s negative space in her resonance to locate the pieces, Helena cuts into Kaine repeatedly as his body tries to heal too soon, removes the shrapnel, and hides half of it for herself while placing the rest in a more obvious bottle. Kaine survives, but the wound leaves a scar and the metal’s interference shows that the Undying are close to blocking resonance effectively.

When Kaine wakes, he instinctively grabs Helena by the throat and nearly kills her before recognizing her. He heals the injury he caused, but their conversation turns volatile. Kaine implies Bennet and the Undying still study Kaine’s survival, then attacks Helena’s loyalty to the Holdfasts and argues that the war is rooted not only in necromancy but in centuries of Holdfast power, guild resentment, and the Faith’s control over alchemy.

Kaine reveals that Morrough recruited guild families by promising to remove the Holdfasts and that some Undying objected once the violence escalated. When Helena asks who objected, Kaine names Basilius Blackthorne and describes how Morrough tortured Blackthorne through his phylactery until Blackthorne became monstrous and slaughtered his family. Kaine uses the story to insist that Morrough gives no one real choice, then cruelly taunts Helena about having let Apollo Holdfast’s killer buy her, leaving Helena shaken and ashamed even as she still asks for the week’s intelligence.

Back at Headquarters, Helena gives Crowther the visible shrapnel and is told to have Shiseo analyse it. Later, near solstice, Helena makes an emergency healing kit for Kaine instead of the gifts she once imagined giving Luc’s family. The following week, she explains to Kaine that she broke her alchemy knife to save him, presents the kit, and teaches him how to support his own regeneration. During the lesson, Kaine reveals that the High Necromancer has no eyes and sees through resonance.

Kaine unexpectedly gives Helena a solstice gift in return: a set of lightweight titanium-and-nickel memory-alloy daggers made to fit her and transmute into multiple shapes. Helena is moved by their beauty and usefulness, while Kaine brusquely orders her to wear them whenever she leaves Headquarters and forbids her from dismantling them for surgery. He then gives her another intelligence envelope and warns that her weapons training will become more intense.