Second Trial

Just as Vahn was wondering how to complete the Trial, a second window appeared, informing him that he had to weather the Queen of the Frozen Abyss's fury for ten minutes. Fimbulwinter's Encroachment took precisely ten minutes to reach maximum stacks if the person in question held their ground, but if they moved around, they would gain an additional stack for every 2.5 meters moved.

'In other words, I need to stand my ground...' concluded Vahn, spreading his feet and adopting a horse stance with his Touki erupting outward like a golden flame, encompassing an area of nearly five meters. Immediately after, two additional wolves broke free of the swirling blizzard, charging at him from his flanks.

'Too easy...' thought Vahn, a second layer of gold enveloping his body as he abruptly opened his eyes, revealing glowing golden irises. At the same time, the bodies of the wolves flattened as they leaped at him, crushed by pure telekinetic might and his domain.

Sweeping out and flourishing his hands to form a cross in front of him, Vahn created a tempest of his own, enveloping nearly a hundred meters of the stone platform in swirling golden light.

fwoosh fwoosh fwoosh fwoosh 

Hinting at a pattern, Vahn noticed four wolves emerge in the third wave, which, after running headfirst into the energy swirling around him, burst apart into frigid white mist. Ten seconds later, eight wolves appeared, all but confirming that each wave would be twice the size of the last.

'But if their strength remains the same, their numbers shouldn't matter...' thought Vahn, immediately refuted by Sis pointing out (If a new wave spawns precisely every ten seconds, then by the time ten minutes have passed, their numbers will have increased to 1,152,921,504,606,846,975. I believe that matters a great deal.)

'I stand corrected...' mused Vahn, immediately retracting his destructive tempest of Touki to confirm if the wolves spawned every ten seconds or only when slain. Unfortunately, it seemed to be the former, as thirty-two wolves appeared while he was fending off the previous batch of sixteen.

'How are a quintillion wolves expected to fit in such a small arena...?' Vahn wondered, clenching his teeth as, even with A-Rank Pain Tolerance, the pervasive chill of Fimbulwinter's Encroachment caused extreme, growing pain in his extremities.

Answering Vahn's question, the eighth wave was significantly smaller than the seventh. Instead of one-hundred-and-twenty-eight wolves, there were twenty-eight of the three-meter variant and one that was more than five meters tall and seven long, excluding its tail. It also had a blue gemstone embedded in its forehead and prominent fluff around its neck, giving it an aura of majesty or, at the very least, seniority.

Directing a Ki blast at the larger wolf, Vahn was surprised when it stepped forward, opened its mouth wide, and promptly swallowed the baseball-sized energy sphere whole, causing its torso to swell with golden light as it exploded within. Despite this, the wolf was very much alive and well, an almost human smile developing across its face before it swiftly opened its maw and expelled a spear of ice with near-sonic velocity.

Though briefly surprised by the larger wolf's capabilities, Vahn had no trouble smacking the spear of ice aside with the back of his left hand, fragmenting it into countless smaller ice shards. Then, materializing his Legendary Spear in his right hand, he threw it like a javelin, piercing the larger wolf through the head via its mouth. It ostensibly tried eating his spear as well, but with it traveling at more than seven times the speed of sound, the wolf never stood a chance.

"So, that's how it is..." muttered Vahn, expecting two larger wolves and fifty-six smaller wolves to materialize in the ninth wave. Instead, only two larger wolves emerged, indicating that when their numbers exceeded one hundred, a stronger variant would appear, and their doubling would begin anew.

Confirming Vahn's suspicions, an even larger wolf appeared during the wave 128 of its lesser variants were expected to spawn. This time, the wolf that appeared was ten meters tall, fourteen long, and had a long, wispy tail, bringing its total length to twenty-eight meters. Furthermore, it had icy blue horns growing from its head, a large icy gemstone embedded in its forehead, and predominately dark blue fur with a distinctive, white, star-shaped pattern on its chest and a white underbelly.

'This Trial is completely absurd...' thought Vahn, his chapped, frozen lips cracking as he grinned wryly. Fortunately, he still had his regeneration, causing the cracks to seal before he flung his spear with all his might. His dwindling mobility was beginning to become an issue, but his spear flew true, piercing the larger wolf's chest and leaving behind a swirling void in its wake before rebounding off the light wall encircling the arena.

Though Sis calculated he would only need to defeat a little more than eight hundred wolves, with six iterations of scaling, Vahn began feeling overwhelmed midway through the fourth variant. The size of the wolves actually decreased, but they darted around with speeds exceeding Mach 2. Ordinarily, such speeds wouldn't be an issue, but with his mobility and even his reaction time slowing due to Fimbulwinter's Encroachment, they started being able to avoid his spear throws. And things only went further downhill after he accumulated fifty stacks, which caused him to feel as if there was a delay between his thoughts and actions.

In a desperate attempt to regain the advantage, Vahn emulated Kizaru's Pika Pika no Mi, converting his body to light and allowing him to assail the wolves with lasers that moved at near-lightspeed. If they were pure light, they wouldn't do more than blind his opponents, so he had to condense it until the photons gained mass, reducing their speed but allowing them to penetrate and burn objects by producing heat in excess of 5,000 degrees.

With Vahn's attacks suddenly going from supersonic to near-lightspeed, the fourth, fifth, and first few waves of sixth-generation wolves didn't stand much of a chance until the number of Fimbulwinter's Encroachment stacks applied to him increased to 98. At that point, his lasers, which were similarly debuffed, only had a velocity of Mach 17,150. This was still much faster than the wolves were capable of moving, but since he needed time to process their movements and take aim at them, they were able to read and evade his attacks preemptively.

Taking advantage of Vahn's exposed back as he fired a barrage of lasers at a group of puppy-sized wolves with gold, lightning-bolt-shaped horns, an opportunistic wolf managed to dart in and take a bite out of his calf as if it were made of tofu. Due to the numbness that had settled in his body, Vahn didn't even notice a chunk of his leg was missing until he attempted to put weight on it, causing what remained of his leg to fold and snap like a twig.

'Oh, shit...' thought Vahn, his pupils contracting to the size of pinholes as more than thirty of the miniature wolves pounced on him in concert, their mouths open to reveal swirling vortexes in the backs of their throats. Any other person might have perished in such a situation, but Vahn still had a few tricks up his sleeves, his entire body converting to brilliant gold light that burst outward like a sea urchin. It then came together a few meters in the air, albeit with several pieces of him missing, courtesy of the little monsters devouring the literal photons that formed him.

Unfortunately for Vahn, his evasive actions applied the remaining stacks of Fimbulwinter's Encroachment on him, causing him to effectively freeze before freefalling toward the wolves awaiting maws.

"That's enough..." asserted the voice Vahn attributed to the colossal wolf, followed by a wave of ice and snow collapsing toward the center of the arena, swallowing up and dispersing the voracious wolves and serving as a cushion for Vahn's frozen body to land atop.

Emerging from within the blizzard, a more than fifty-meter-tall version of the colossal wolf from Vahn's dreams loomed over him, its crimson eyes expressing countless emotions before it closed them, exhaling a plume of frosty condensation from its nose, and stated, "A great man once said that power is meaningless unless it is used to protect and preserve that which we hold dear. You may have the potential to shoulder everything, but that is not the path to happiness but solitude..."

Punctuating its statement, the oversized wolf placed its left paw on Vahn, effortlessly covering his entire body. Then, before applying pressure that caused the stone platform to break and crumble, sending Vahn falling into a black abyss, it appended, "Take care of our daughter..."

'As I thought...the 'Mama' Lupheria was referring to was this mysterious wolf...' thought Vahn, closing his eyes as a feeling akin to sinking to the bottom of a very deep body of water enveloped him. At least, that's how it felt at the beginning. After a few seconds had passed, he felt like he was rising upward through a warm liquid, prompting him to open his eyes and discover that he was floating toward the surface of what appeared to be a crystal-clear sea.

"Pwah...!"

With his stacks of Fimbulwinter's Encroaching melting away with the rigidness in his body, Vahn surfaced to a breathtaking view. There was a large volcanic island in the distance, but instead of staring at it from afar from sea level, he was looking up or, more accurately, down at it from a bird's eye view, his position upside down as the body of water he was in formed what some would call a firmament.

"Is this still the Frozen Abyss...?" Vahn asked aloud, freeing himself from the water and overcoming a brief sensation of weightlessness before he fell toward the island in a controlled freefall.

(According to the Corridor's interface, this is a new Floor called the Abyss's Maw) revealed Sis, indicating a direct connection between the Floor and the Frozen Abyss. After all, when Vahn first entered the Frozen Abyss, it warned there were nine Trials. With the previous Trial of Gleipnir being the second, there should be at least seven more to overcome.

With such thoughts in mind, Vahn elected to touch down near one of the pristine sandy beaches lining the rather sizeable island's coast. He would need to have Grayfia or someone else perform a sweep to be certain, but he approximated the island to have the same dimensions as the frozen isle from the previous Floor. In place of ice shelves and ravines, however, it was dominated by megaflora and presumably fauna, with the palm trees near the beach exceeding sixty meters with coconuts comparable in size to exercise balls.

'It's like everything has been scaled up...' noted Vahn, precluding that he had been scaled down since his height was still listed as 195cm within his expanded status window.

sfsfsfsfsf

Somewhat confirming Vahn's theory, a spiky, red-shelled crab more than three meters across abruptly emerged from the sand before crab-walking toward him at nearly twenty meters a second. It had a very large crushing claw and a snipper with long, jagged, scythe-like pinchers, but Vahn remained calm and raised his right hand to form a finger pistol, blasting the oversized crustacean in the face.

Though his attack caused an explosion and stunned the oversized crab, Vahn was surprised to realize that was all it had done. There was some surface-level damage on the crab's face and a few places where purple-hued blood flowed out, but it seemed more angered than injured.

Demonstrating another of its capabilities, the giant crab frothed at the mouth before expelling a pressurized stream of water that kicked up a large plume of sand and sliced cleanly through Vahn's still light-formed body.

"Not bad," said Vahn, firing a laser that briefly pushed the giant crab back before fully penetrating its body. As it fell, he received a rather surprising system notification.

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Acquired 22,338 OP for defeating a Crimson-Shelled Snipper(B-Rank)

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'Unless that was a hidden Boss, the difficulty of the Floor is a lot higher than the previous one...' noted Vahn, his brows perking when he noticed the Crimson-Shelled Snipper's Drop Item. It appeared to be a tantalizing crimson string bikini at a glance, but when he inspected it, he confirmed it was a B-Rank item with some impressive defensive stats despite covering barely more than it should...

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