Chapter 28 #4
The ravine climbed. The walls pressed closer, then opened abruptly into a wider space, a bowl carved into the mountain where three ravines converged. Snow filled the bowl to waist depth in places, with rocky islands jutting above the white.
Kern raised a fist. Everyone stopped.
Silence. The wind had died in the bowl, blocked by the surrounding walls. The quiet unnerved him in an instant. It felt extremely unnatural after all the howling wind from the past hours.
Then, from somewhere above and to the left, came a sound.
Clicking, dry and rhythmic, like someone running a stick along a wooden fence. It came from the cliff face, from a shadow where the rock overhung itself, and it was moving.
Alsen’s scan caught the signature an instant before the thing appeared. Cold, structured, pulsing in patterns that reminded him of a heartbeat born out of ice and hate. “Incoming!” he shouted.
It dropped from the cliff face.
Bipedal, gaunt, malformed, taller than a man, but thinner, its limbs too long for its torso, its arms ending in three-fingered hands tipped with the same claws that had scored the wagon.
Its skin was the gray-white of old ice, mottled with patches of frost that grew from its body like tumors.
Ice crystals jutted from its spine and the joints of its elbows and knees, catching the flat light in a way that made the thing look partially translucent.
Its face lacked a nose, dominated by a mouth that split wider than it had any right to, filled with teeth made of ice, arranged in three rows. Two eyes, pale and reflective, sat above the mouth like chips of frozen quartz.
It landed in the snow ten paces from Kern and opened its mouth.
Just as Alsen started flying up, it screamed.
The scream hit them like a wall.
It carried something with it, a frequency that bypassed the ears and went straight for the center of the skull.
Alsen’s concentration shattered. The heating spell he’d been holding dissolved, as did the flight, the mana scattering.
His vision blurred, his thoughts scrambling, every thread of magical focus snapping at once.
He fell back down, barely staying on his feet.
Beside him, Arleria staggered. She pressed her hands to her temples, her composure cracking for a split second before she reassembled it through pure stubbornness.
Kern had already loosed an arrow. It took the creature in the shoulder, punching through the ice-crusted skin and burying itself to the fletching. The creature barely flinched.
Two more creatures dropped from the cliffs.
One to the right, landing between Alsen and Malick. The other was behind Kern, cutting him off from the group. They moved wrong, limbs jerking in angular bursts, covering ground in stuttering lunges that were nearly impossible to track.
“Formation!” Arleria shouted.
Not a chance. Five people in a snow-filled bowl, three creatures coming from three directions, and no Luna to turn an area into a death zone.
Derell met the first creature head-on. It swiped its claws. He blocked with his shield. The hit clanged, the impact driving him back two steps through the snow. He stepped back in, countering with a slash. The blade bit into the creature’s forearm, spraying bright teal, viscous slush.
Malick swung at the one that had landed near him. The warhammer connected with its torso, the impact amplification enchantment doing its work. The creature flew sideways, crashing into the snow, ice crystals shattering from its spine. It was up again in a second, still fast.
Alsen pulled on his power. The scream had scrambled his focus, so he had to be careful with the first spell.
Indirect missile. Times ten. He had the missiles curve sideways. The missiles curved outward, slamming into the creature nearest Kern. Three hit, shattering chunks of its ice armor. The rest missed as the creature jumped up, pouncing at him over Kern.
Perfect.
He raised his hand, forming the next spell.
Lance of annihilation.
Power exploded from him. In a single moment, the lance annihilated the creature, leaving behind only the hands and feet, the rest deleted in an instant. The lance tore through the mountainside, the mountain, and up into the sky.
One down.
The other creature near Kern lunged. Kern rolled sideways through the snow, came up to one knee, and nocked and released an arrow in practically an instant.
The arrow pierced the creature’s knee. The thing stumbled, its leg buckling, but it caught itself on its clawed hands and kept crawling toward him with mindless persistence.
Arleria fired a spell of her own. Pink and black light swirled around her and then burst. In needle-like beams, it pierced the creature at four points. It went rigid, twitched twice, and collapsed into the snow.
The last one screeched.
Alsen’s world went white. Pure, blinding disruption, worse than the first scream by an order of magnitude. His knees buckled. He caught himself, one hand in the snow, the other pressed against his forehead. Arleria dropped to a knee beside him. Malick and Derell stood stunned in place.
The creature swiped at Derell. He slightly bent, the monster’s claws raking over his pauldron, scratching deep into the steel. He regained movement, shifted his weight, and drove his shield into the creature’s face. The creature staggered.
Malick stepped in and smashed its face with the warhammer. Its head exploded into shards of ice. The creature collapsed.
Silence returned to the bowl.
The ringing in his ears faded. Alsen’s concentration reassembled itself in pieces, each thread of focus returning like a limb waking from numbness. The cold hit him again, the adrenaline fading, though this wasn’t exhaustion, just the place and the lack of clothes.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: ENEMIES DEFEATED – FROST HARPIES (3)]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: 1500]
[LEVEL UP!]
[CURRENT LEVEL: 18]
He dismissed the notification.
Derell leaned against the cliff wall, breathing hard. He rubbed the shoulder with the damaged pauldron. The claw marks managed to damage the enchanted plate armor. “What the hell were those things?”