10. Chapter 10 The Yeti
The creature charged.
It came out of the dark at a speed that didn't match its size, the massive body covering thirty feet of ice in three strides.
Bjorna braced and it hit her shield with both fists.
The sound filled the cavern, a crack that rang through the ice walls and came back doubled.
Bjorna skidded backward across the frozen floor.
Her boots cut trenches in the ice. She held, but the impact drove her back four feet before she stopped.
I'd never seen anything hit Bjorna that hard.
The creature towered over her. Its head was above eight feet, wide and flat, set between shoulders as broad as a doorframe.
White fur covered every inch of it, matted with ice that had formed into plates across its chest and arms. The arms were as thick as my torso.
Its hands were blunt and heavy and built for exactly what they'd just done.
It swung again. Bjorna caught the right fist on the shield and angled it past her, and the creature's momentum carried it sideways.
Sif was already moving. She came from the creature's blind side and put both daggers into the back of its knee.
The blades went in, but not deep. The creature's hide was thick and the layer of ice over the fur acted like armor.
The daggers found flesh but the cuts were shallow.
"It's armored," Sif said. She pulled free and dodged as the creature spun toward her, one massive arm sweeping the space where she'd been standing. "The ice on the fur isn't just frost. It's plating. That’s not fair."
Nott's bolt hit the creature in the shoulder.
The amplified [Ember Bolt] punched through the ice plating on impact and left a smoking hole in the fur underneath.
The creature roared, a sound that came up from its chest and shook frost off the ceiling.
It turned toward Nott and Bjorna hit it in the back with a [Heavy Strike] that opened a crack in the ice covering its spine.
Liv put an arrow into the crack. The creature stumbled forward a step and swung behind it, catching nothing, and Bjorna was already circling to hold its attention.
"Keep hitting the spots Nott opens up," Bjorna called. "The ice breaks and the flesh underneath is vulnerable. Nott, concentrate your attacks there."
The creature slammed both fists into the ground.
The impact sent a shockwave across the ice floor that knocked me off balance and sent frost shards spraying outward.
I caught myself on one knee and got back up.
The shockwave had spread in a ring from the point of impact, cracking the ice in a spiderweb pattern that ran all the way to the walls.
"It's got ground attacks," I said. "I would appreciate it if the ground stayed where it is."
"Hmm," Bjorna said. She was already re-engaging, driving the creature's attention back to her shield. "Stay mobile. Don't plant."
Nott hit it with a second amplified bolt, center mass.
The frost armor cracked and fell away in chunks, exposing dark hide underneath.
The creature swung at Bjorna and she caught the blow on her shield and the impact sent a tremor through her arm visible from twenty feet back, but she held and Larg's reinforcement held with her. But the hits were wearing on her.
I touched her shoulder between swings. The heal spread through her shield arm and the strain released. She nodded without looking at me.
"Thank you. I wish I could say that was the last time I was going to need that."
“I’m here when you need it. Be careful.”
Sif had been working the creature's flanks while Bjorna held it. She found the crack in the spine plating and drove a dagger into it, deep, and the creature screamed and turned so fast that Sif had to dive sideways to avoid the backhand. She hit the ice and rolled and came up running.
"That pissed it off. I think I'm onto something,” she called out gleefully.
"You're onto something that's about to crush you. Be careful,” Bjorna yelled.
"I'm always careful. Whatever do you mean?" Sif replied.
"You're never careful," Bjorna said. She drove forward and slammed the creature back toward the wall. "Nott, finish it. This big bastard packs a punch."
Nott raised both hands. The [Ember Bolt] that formed was bigger than anything she'd thrown in the run so far, drawing hard on the amplification crystal.
It crossed the chamber and hit the creature in the chest where the armor had already been broken, and it went through.
The bolt punched into flesh and the creature staggered, its legs buckling, and Liv put three arrows into the wound before it could recover.
The creature went to one knee. Bjorna drove the longsword into the base of its throat and it toppled forward and slammed into the ground and the chamber shook.
The chamber went quiet. The only sounds were breathing and frost settling from the ceiling.
I went to each of them. Bjorna's shield arm first. The accumulated impact from the fight had left deep bruising through the muscle, and her ribs on the left side had taken compression from the shockwave she'd absorbed through the shield.
The gold went in and worked through the damage.
She rolled her shoulder and her breathing eased.
Sif's hip had taken the brunt of her diving dodge. Bruised bone, nothing broken. The gold fixed it in seconds. I held her hip for a moment longer than strictly necessary.
"Enjoying yourself down there?" she said.
"Your hip needed healing."
"My hip is three inches higher than where your hand is."
I moved my hand. "Better?"
"Worse, actually. I liked where it was."
I winked. “I figured you did.”
Nott had a shallow cut on the back of her hand from a piece of ice shrapnel. Liv's shoulder was sore from the recoil of rapid shooting. Both healed in seconds.
"Is everyone good?" Bjorna said.
"I think so," I said. "That thing hit harder than anything we've fought tonight. How are you absorbing those? My teeth were rattling and I was twenty feet behind you."
"The shield does most of the work. My job is to make sure I'm behind it." She looked past the body toward the passage beyond. "We keep moving. The passage continues down."
We moved through the cavern. The creature's body was already starting to dissolve, the flesh losing definition and the frozen armor softening. By the time we'd be climbing back through here, it would be loot.
The passage narrowed and descended. Steeper than any section so far, with the ice on the walls growing thicker, the temperature dropping until my joints ached.
The ambient light had dropped to almost nothing.
Nott cast a small sustained flame above her palm and it threw dancing shadows across the frozen walls.
The notification appeared at the bottom of the descent.
[Cold Hollow. Depth: 5.]
I stopped. "That says five."
Bjorna looked at the notification. She read it twice. "Cold Hollow has four depths on the standard run."
"The full moon added a fifth," Nott said. Her voice was flat, processing. "The dungeon generated a depth that doesn't exist in its normal rotation."
"Has that happened before?" I asked.
"Not to my knowledge," Bjorna said. She looked at me, then at Sif and Nott and Liv. "I can't tell you what's down there. I've never been in a fifth depth of Cold Hollow because a fifth depth hasn't existed before."
"That's fine. I've gotten used to not knowing what's about to kill me. It's becoming a theme,” I said wryly.
Sif checked her daggers. "Should we be worried?"
"We should be cautious," Bjorna said. "Caution and worry are different things. Stay in formation. Stay close."
“You’re not scared, are you, Sif?” Liv joked. She had been mostly quiet this dungeon run.
“Bite me, bunny girl. Your human boyfriend is the only person that gets skittish in this party.”
“Hey, I heard that, and I object,” I replied.
“The truth hurts, doesn’t it? Heal that,” Sif said.
Depth five was silent.
There were no creatures. Liv couldn't find a heartbeat anywhere ahead of us.
Nothing moved in the passages. The ice on the walls was several inches thick and the temperature had dropped past anything I'd experienced in the run.
My breath came out in frozen clouds that didn't dissipate.
They hung in the air like small white ghosts.
I'd rather fight something I could see than walk into something I couldn't.
Liv's ears were working overtime, both of them sweeping the passage ahead in slow arcs. "I'm getting nothing alive. But I'm getting mechanisms. Pressure systems. Air movement that doesn't match natural ventilation."
"Traps," Bjorna said.
"Traps… you’re right," Liv confirmed.
The first one triggered thirty feet ahead of us.
Liv grabbed my arm and hauled me backward.
Ice spears fired from the walls on both sides of the passage, six of them, crossing in the air where I'd been about to walk.
They hit the opposite walls and shattered, and the sound of breaking ice echoed down the corridor.
"Thank you," I said. My heart was going fast. "That would have been unpleasant. I was almost fucking impaled."
"Don't walk ahead of me," Liv said. Her ears were still locked forward, scanning. "I can hear the pressure building before they fire. The mechanisms have a two-second charge cycle. Stay behind me and step where I step."
"I will do exactly that. I will step precisely where you step, every time, without deviation. I don’t want a giant ice spear up my ass."
“Daniel, you don’t like the butt stuff?” Sif giggled.
“I don’t mind butt stuff, but not on the receiving end.”
“So you’re a giver and not a taker? How generous of you.”
Liv chimed in. “Really? You guys are chatting about butt stuff in a room full of deadly traps?”
Sif came up beside Liv. "What else are you getting?"
"Floor stress ahead. Thin ice over something hollow. And air currents that don't make sense. The cold is moving in pockets, like depth two, but these are concentrated. The air inside them is colder than anything we've walked through."