9. Chapter 9 The Frost
The staging area looked different at night.
The clearing was the same, the trampled dirt and the ring of tall, thin trees right where I remembered them.
But the moon sat above the treeline and the light it threw was blue and cold, and the shadows under the trees were deeper than anything I'd seen in the morning runs.
Two torches burned on iron poles near the registration building, the flames catching in the wind and sending orange light across the ground in unsteady washes.
A single party sat against their packs near the treeline, eating something in silence. The clearing was empty beyond them.
Bjorna was already walking toward the building.
The moonlight hit her shield where the reinforced bottom lip caught a different color from the rest of the blackstone, Larg's work showing clean in the pale light.
Nott fell in beside her with her hands in her pockets and the two amber crystals riding in the pouch at her belt.
"It's quiet," Liv said. Her ears were turning, pulling sounds from the treeline and the path behind us. "Last time there were a dozen parties out here."
"Full moon runs aren't for everyone," Sif said.
She stood beside me with her arms crossed and her silver hair loose past her shoulders, her blue eyes scanning the clearing and the treeline and the other party with the same careful attention she gave every room she walked into.
"Most parties skip it. The risk isn't worth the payout unless you know what you're doing. "
"And we know what we're doing?" I asked.
She looked at me. Blue eyes, steady, a little amused. "We killed a boss yesterday. I'd say we qualify."
"You got thrown into a wall yesterday."
"And I looked gorgeous doing it."
She did. She always did. The moonlight caught the silver in her hair and the bare strip of stomach above her beltline and I had to make a conscious effort not to stare. I had bigger priorities than checking out my party member, but my eyes disagreed.
Bjorna came back from the building with Nott beside her. "We're registered. Let’s do it."
"Did he say anything about the full moon instance?" I asked.
"She," Bjorna said. "And yes. She said what I told you: the dungeon generates differently on a full moon.
Different creatures, different layout, different hazards.
" She looked at each of us. "Same formation.
Sif on point, Liv reads ahead, Nott mid with Daniel, I hold the line.
Stay close. We don't know what's down there. "
"Comforting," I said.
"It wasn't meant to be."
We crossed the clearing toward the mouth of Cold Hollow.
The stone arch sat in the side of the hill where it always sat, natural rock framed with worked stone, old and solid.
But the air coming out of it was different.
The cold I remembered from the standard run had been compressed and made specific, like the air behind a refrigerated truck door.
This was thicker and denser, a cold that had weight to it, pressing against my face before I reached the threshold.
The sourceless ambient light inside the passage was dimmer than I remembered, tinged blue instead of the flat white glow from our last run.
Sif went through first. Liv followed. Bjorna ducked under the arch and her shield scraped the stone on the way through. Nott stepped in ahead of me and I went after her.
[Cold Hollow. Depth: 1.]
The cold hit like a wall.
Not the compressed chill of the standard run.
This cold went through my coat and my shirt and sat against my ribs.
My breath came out in a visible cloud and the moisture in my eyes stung.
The stone around us was the same wet slate color, but a thin layer of frost covered every surface, glinting in the dim blue light.
Ice crystals had formed along the walls in delicate patterns that looked like ferns pressed into glass.
"Damn, it’s cold," I said. "I'm already freezing my ass off."
"Full moon," Bjorna said. Her breath came out in a plume. "The dungeon is pushing harder. Stay tight."
The first chamber opened ahead of us and Liv stopped at the entrance. Her ears locked forward, both of them, and then one rotated to the side and came back.
"I'm not getting goblins," she said. "Something else. Four contacts, maybe five. Low to the ground, fast heartbeats. They're spread across the chamber in a pattern I haven't seen before."
We moved in. The chamber matched the first one on our standard run in size, the floor of a small barn, twelve-foot ceiling. But frost coated the walls an inch thick and the floor had become a sheet of dull ice. There was no resin, no egg clusters, no screeching.
I didn't see them until they moved.
The first one came off the far wall at a dead sprint.
It was low-slung and fast, a quadruped about the size of a large dog, pale fur so close to the color of the frost-covered stone that it had been invisible until it moved.
It ran in absolute silence, no howl and no screech, just the click of claws on frozen rock.
A second one came from the left. A third peeled off the right wall.
Two more followed the first from the back.
"Those are not goblins," I said.
Bjorna stepped forward and braced. "They are not."
“I kind of wish they were,” I replied.
The pack hit us as a unit. They came from three angles at once, the lead creature going straight for Bjorna's shield while two flankers tried to cut behind her.
They were fast, faster than anything I'd fought in Cold Hollow, and they moved in silence with a coordination that was nothing like the screeching chaos of the goblin swarms. They cut and circled and came again, their pale bodies blurring across the icy floor.
Bjorna caught the lead creature on her shield and the impact rang off the stone.
The thing weighed more than it looked. She drove forward with a [Shield Bash] and it tumbled, and Sif appeared behind the two flankers and put a dagger through the spine of one before the other knew she was there.
Nott dropped a bolt into the second flanker.
Liv put an arrow through one of the rear pair mid-stride, the shot threading between Bjorna's shoulder and the wall.
The last one tried to run. Sif caught it at the chamber exit and finished it.
The chamber went quiet.
I stood behind Nott with my hands ready and my heart going faster than the fight justified. Nobody had a scratch.
"I've never seen those in Cold Hollow," Bjorna said. She was looking at the body of the one she'd shield-bashed. Pale fur, lean build, claws built for grip on ice. "The full moon has changed the ecology entirely. These aren't variants of what we fought before. These are a different species."
"They're fast," Sif said. She pulled her dagger from the one at the chamber exit and wiped it on the creature's fur. "And they coordinate. The flanking wasn't random. They had a plan."
"They're also really quiet," Liv added. "I almost didn't pick them up. Their heartbeats are fast but their footfalls are barely there. If we'd walked in without scanning, they would have been on us before we knew."
"Good thing we have the best scout in the business then," I said.
Liv's ears went high and she grinned. "Keep talking. I like where this is going."
"Your ears are gorgeous when they are tracking shit in dungeons."
"My ears?" She put her hands on her hips. "What about the rest of me?"
"The rest of you is in dungeon gear and carrying a bow. Give me something to work with."
"My pants are still tight. I made sure to wear the tight ones."
"I can see that. Your tight pants and attractive ears are both appreciated. Now can we focus on the fact that there are ice dogs trying to kill us?"
Sif snorted. "Ice dogs. That's what you're going with."
"I don't know what else to call them."
Bjorna sheathed her sword. "Move. We need to see what else has changed."
[Cold Hollow. Depth: 2.]
The steps down were slick with ice and I kept my hand on the wall for balance, which was a mistake because the wall stung through my gloves.
The frost on the stone had thickened into actual ice, opaque and blue-white, and the ambient light had dimmed further.
The air tasted different, metallic and thin, like breathing at altitude.
The cold pockets were new. Sections of air that were colder than anything around them, sitting in the passage like invisible walls.
I walked into the first one and it hit me across the chest and face like stepping into a freezer.
My lungs seized for a second and the moisture on my skin turned to frost.
"Don't walk through those," Bjorna said from behind me. "Go around."
I grimaced. "It would have been nice to know about thirty seconds ago."
"I didn't know they existed until just now. This is new."
The depth-2 creatures were waiting in the first chamber.
They were bigger than the runners. Bipedal, lean, with skin the color of dirty ice stretched over long limbs.
Taller than me by a foot, hunched forward at the shoulders, their arms too long for their bodies and ending in hooked claws that caught the dim light.
Three of them stood in the chamber, arranged in a loose triangle with a cold pocket between them and us.
They didn't charge. They didn't make a sound.
Flat pale eyes tracked us across the ice, and they waited.
"Those are worse," Sif said from somewhere I couldn't see.
"They're using the cold pockets as cover," Liv said. She'd gone still, both ears pointed forward and locked. "They're positioned so we have to push through the cold to reach them. They're smart."
"Smart is not what I wanted to hear right now," I said.
Bjorna assessed for three seconds. "Nott, bolt the left one. Liv, take the right. Sif, when they react, take the opening. I'll push through the cold pocket and engage the center."