80. Stormfire (III)

It felt like Zane stood before a blizzard so massive it blotted out his world. This was no ordinary ice. It was woven through with Major Laws. This ice had a chilling deathly touch, and it felt dense as stone.

He raised his Chains and slashed. The Axes carved a shining red cross through the white.

And slashed it clean open.

The white fell away. Red licked down the white—and suddenly the ice storm was going the other way, turning against itself as more and more of it caught fire.

The whale sharks screeched louder, blasted harder, but it was like throwing dry wood into a raging bonfire. It just gave his Stormfire more fuel. Gave it a path straight to them.

The flame raced down the storm, swallowing as it went, until all Zane could see was swirling flickering red-white until it looked as though the whales were breathing Stormfire instead of ice.

Then the fire reached their mouths, reached their throats. And the Monsters burned, started choking on their own essence. They cooked from the inside out.

A few were smart enough to choke it off. Those came at him with their massive battering ram bodies, bursting out of the water, trying to crush him.

He slashed, slashed again, carved two shining lines in the air—burning steel moving smoothly through blubber and bone and muscle, coming out the other end. Whale halves fell side by side, convulsing with shock, smoked to essence.

That felt so easy.

Damn.

One of the beasts had made it to shore and was skidding across the ice, mouth cranked open, looking to swallow him whole. He wheeled his Axe back around and fed it down that fleshy, ribbed tunnel of a throat. He didn't even load it with a Skill. Just shoved it in, poured pure Stormfire through. And it roasted the Whale from the inside as it went down its slip-and-slide throat. The sheer momentum of the throw, the weight of the Axe going through, blew out its sputtering speed. And a Monster the size of a school bus came to a skidding not ten feet from his face. He peeked inside.

Just a tunnel of flame down there. In seconds it was hollowed out. Then it was nothing. The Whale Sharks were gone, smoked out.

Zane turned back to that huge block of ice, to the Leviathan stuck within it. And the beast let out a mournful, furious cry, a cry that shook the world, jittered the waters and the ice. It sent reverberations down Zane's steely body—it made him see double.

Then the icy sea began to stir.

He saw the beginnings of it coming. A shelf of a wave in the distance, starting right about where the Leviathan was, building, picking up plates of ice. Picking up speed and tons upon tons of water until it was a thirty-foot-tall behemoth surging straight for him.

One Rising Storm Slash tore it in half.

The icy water went sloshing to either side of him. He thought some might splash him for a second—then the Stormfire got hold of it. It was steam before it could graze him. That whole wave: just a wall of steam rising to the ceiling.

Zane grinned.

Stormfire was awesome.

He saw another shelf of water forming. The beasts seemed to be content to just shoot at him from its icy castle.

So Zane took the fight to it.

He loosed a Rising Storm Slash. It crossed the lake in a blink and sank deep into that great ice block, sizzling as it did. And the ice began to burn.

It was one small wound on one huge block. Luckily, Zane had essence to spare. He slashed, slashed, slashed again, loosed a blizzard of slashes, blanketing the face of the glacier with angry red scars. Soon he was lopping off huge chunks of it, sending barn-sized slabs sloshing into the lake.

Carving his way straight to that cruise ship of a beast.

The Leviathan bellowed that earth-shattering bellow again. Zane didn't need his Sage Mind empathy to tell him the thing was furious.

Then the glacier shattered. All at once.

The sound was ear-popping. The splash washed the walls, brushed icicles off the ceiling. And the Leviathan Glacier Whale splashed into the lake, and charged him.

Oh boy.

It opened its mouth, so huge and strange it could've been a portal to another world. And a freezing whirlpool spun up, sucking in water currents and air streams and whole icebergs, sucking everything down that black hole of a gullet, stripping chunks of ice off the very land Zane stood on and shunting it down its throat.

Zane stomped. He got his feet a good way into the ice, sticking his footing. Then he just kept slashing, and slashing, and slashing—

He was hurting it. He could tell. His fires were taking to its essence, to the flesh on the roof of its huge mouth. Still they were only little glowing pockets dotting that vast landscape of flesh…

Its vitality—just the sheer bulk of it—was too much. It was five, maybe ten seconds away and rushing in fast. And the winds tore at him like hurricane winds; they felt like giant cold arms grabbing at his body, dragging at him hard. He blinked his streaming eyes. He couldn't see himself standing much longer. The moment he lost his footing, he was going in.

Looked like he'd be going on a very unpleasant scuba dive. He figured he could carve it up from the inside…

Or.

He chucked an Axe straight at the ceiling, sank it several inches deep into the ice. He started loading his other Axe with essence, with Stormfire. As much as he could in the little time he had left.

Then he yanked hard. So hard his Axe came shooting right back out, but it didn't matter. He went shooting up too. Up out of the path of that icy vortex, up some fifty or sixty feet in the air, until he and the Glacier Whale saw eye to eye.

Then he loosed his loaded Axe.

ℝ𝕚𝕤𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕊𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕞 𝕊𝕝𝕒𝕤𝕙!

He wasn't ready for how that much Stormfire would look. It took his breath away. It was a light that eclipsed every other light. The contrast made it seem the sole brightness in a vast dark sea.

The power—the majesty of it—as he floated there, suspended in the moment, he felt like an astronaut on the edge of space, watching sunrise come over the curve of the Earth. Just this otherworldly bright, glorious red-white arc, dropping like an anchor. Straight into the glacier whale's eyeball.

Something squishy burst. And what was once black surrounded by white squirted out—until its whole eye went black. The Axe kept going—he felt it carve through flesh and fat, burst through bone, the shell of the skull. It met the squishiness inside.

Then it just kept going. And going. And going. Until it hit rock bottom.

The Glacier Whale crashed bellowing into the cavern wall. Zane was just lucky he was still midair. That impact looked pretty nasty. Cracks burst up and down the whole chamber. Skyscraper-sized icicles rained from the ceiling. For a second he was worried it'd all come crumbling down.

But it seemed to hold as he touched down.

The Whale was still alive, somehow still thrashing. It made some kind of sense—with that thing's size, it would be like sticking a needle through someone's brain. They could still live.

But what Zane was counting on came next.

The eye his Axe went through wasn't an eye anymore. It was a hollowed-out black crater, burnt to a crisp.

And somewhere deep in that skull, the Monster's whole brain was set on fire. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it. The roaring and the crackling flooded out.

The Whale gave one last shudder, flopped its tail, and lay still.

Then its pale gray-white skin turned whiter and whiter still, until it was pure light. Until the whole beast was one explosion of essence-light.

So much essence came flooding into Zane, and at once, he went blind for a full ten seconds. All he could see was white. Then—

𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝕌𝕡! 𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟠𝟟 -> 𝟠𝟠.

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕟 𝔾𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕣 𝕎𝕙𝕒𝕝𝕖 𝕙𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕖𝕖𝕟 𝕕𝕖𝕗𝕖𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕!

After all the steam flooded away, after all the waters settled, all that remained was a single bone-shard the size of a man's body, like a piece of pure white driftwood.

𝔾𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕣 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕟 𝔹𝕠𝕟𝕖 (ℂ)

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝕞𝕒𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕨 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔾𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕣 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕟 𝕤𝕠𝕠𝕥𝕙𝕖𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕟𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕕, 𝕒𝕞𝕡𝕝𝕚𝕗𝕪𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕨𝕚𝕖𝕝𝕕𝕖𝕣'𝕤 𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕟𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟𝕤 𝕥𝕠 𝕃𝕒𝕨. ℂ𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕒𝕚𝕟𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕖𝕢𝕦𝕚𝕧𝕒𝕝𝕖𝕟𝕥 𝕠𝕗 𝕒 𝕓𝕦𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕝 𝕠𝕗 ℂ-𝔾𝕣𝕒𝕕𝕖 𝕃𝕒𝕨 𝔽𝕣𝕦𝕚𝕥.

Zane put it in his Bag of Holding.

***

He came out of it in the tunnels, feeling pretty pleased with how it'd all gone down. This might've been the first time he walked through a boss without getting a single health warning.

He wondered how strong he was in world terms. Not just his ranking—his raw powers. He had to be getting up there, right? Probably at least top 20.

Well. That left just one boss, then. Jotun, Lesser Ice Giant. That Vanessa girl still hadn't cleared it, apparently.

His head felt a little better now. He was ready to use Sage Mind again. It didn't take a lot. Full-on comprehension, though… still no. It'd be a while before he was ready for that.

He came to the fork in the tunnels. He was back at the start of the second floor.

He glanced at his mini-map. That was a lot of tunnels, to be fair… you could get really lost in this place. Some of them seemed to go in circles.

Zane just picked one at random and went for it.

These tunnels went round and round, ribbed with uneven sheets of ice. It felt like he was walking down the intestines of some translucent snake. The light that washed down through the ice was a warm orange. It seemed to be early afternoon outside. He saw gobs of new ice studding the walls, wrapping around the ceiling. So Vanessa had been here before. No wonder everything was so cleared out.

It took a few hours before he saw his first red dots. He was pretty excited as they came rushing up to him. Finally, some action!

Then they came upon him, and he almost caught his mini-map and made a mistake. Where were these…

He frowned at the tunnel ceiling.

𝔽𝕣𝕠𝕤𝕥 𝕊𝕖𝕣𝕒𝕡𝕙 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟟𝟠

They were these little ice figurines with wings. They were the size of his hand. They flitted about like flies. They wore evil little grins. He frowned. A Rising Storm Slash almost seemed like overkill—and they were so small… how was he supposed to—

His vision blurred white and he blinked, grunting, wiping at his face. What the hell? They were cackling, laughing these tinkling little laughs as they zipped around his head. Even if he didn't have his Steel Body, that wouldn't have hurt. It was just annoying. Like getting water sprayed in your eyes. He slashed at them, and they flitted out of the way like flies from a swatter.

How were these even real Monsters? He didn't understand. He got out his Axes. He didn't get ticked off this quickly, this easily, usually. But something about these things just got him rankled. He was more than willing to go full Cyclone on these little shits.

The moment they saw steel, they shrieked and bolted. They were gone.

Zane figured out why they pissed him off. They reminded him of something.

… as far as Zane was concerned, those things were honorary birds.

Grunting in annoyance, Zane trudged along.

He was apprehensive at the next dot he saw drawing close, until he caught a glimpse of it through the ice. A blur too big to be a fake-bird. And it wasn't. It turned out to be a pile of jagged ice blocks welded together, nearly ten feet tall, with solid blue gemstone eyes.

𝔾𝕝𝕒𝕔𝕚𝕒𝕝 𝔾𝕠𝕝𝕖𝕞 (𝕄𝕠𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣)

𝔼𝕤𝕤𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕖 𝕃𝕖𝕧𝕖𝕝 𝟠𝟙

And behind it, cackling up a storm, were those freaking birds.

The Golem let out a shriek of a roar, then pounced. Its hammerlike arms smoked cold essence.

Zane split its head open with a frankly lazy Rising Storm Slash. Another lopped it clean off. And it toppled to a sad halt, smoldering at the stump.

Until essence started pouring out the birds in thick streams, hardening at the stump, sealing off the wound. In just seconds, you could see the nub of a head. Zane stared at it, frowning, then up at the birds. He ripped a Rising Storm Slash at the darn things. But the thing about being so small was they didn't need to move much to get out of the way.

The Golem had recovered enough to stagger up to a leg. Zane had enough. His Axe seethed Stormfire. Snarling, he raised it high and sent it crashing down in one harsh line.

It split the Monster in two. One ruler-line down its body. And both halves instantly caught fire; they spasmed as they melted.

Zane glared at the birds. Heal that. Stupid birds.

They flew away screaming.

That's what I thought.

God, he hated birds. And they weren't even birds.

***

A few hours of aimless wandering later, and he'd made scant progress. He'd smashed a couple more golems. Got spat on by a few more birds. He was thinking about calling it a day until he saw a white dot with an 'S' on it pop up ahead.

Oh. That Vanessa girl. He was pretty lost down here. Maybe she'd have a clue?

***

Vanessa Volkova was lost. Completely lost. She'd been here over a day. It felt like she'd gone backwards, if anything.

She was getting frustrated trudging down these ridiculous tunnels over and over. And the more frustrated she felt, the more her mind drifted.

She couldn't seem to stop replaying it—the absolute most humiliating moment of her life...