Knives & Levels - Chapter 104

Julia wiped a bead of sweat while gazing at the ice sculpture of a Yeti in front of her. The blizzard raged around, taking control of the landscape. It was worse than Julia thought. Any attempt to control her water as pure water was thwarted. The water would not cooperate in this environment, as everything lent itself to being ice.

Therefore, she must convert the water to ice, as it was the only effective way to fight under these conditions. The very Edicts in the air made it nearly impossible for water as a liquid to exist for long.

She didn't understand the underlying principles of why she could use ice now. However, her attacks were limited as she and Sarah fought against this duplicate version of the Yeti. She could make a barrier; it would freeze in seconds and lose its effectiveness, but she could conjure it long enough to block an attack. That much she’d done several times, stopping a hit from hitting her or Sarah.

Sarah, for her part, was trying to play the role of ‘tank’ in the same way as Nick. Throwing herself at them and the Yeti.

But there was a problem: the Yeti adapted to her tactics after realizing that Sarah was a nuisance. Whenever Sarah got close, a gale of blizzard would push her away, keeping her from making physical contact, while the Yeti relentlessly pursued Julia—maybe it saw her as a weaker prey.

Regardless, she was growing frustrated as she threw spear after spear formed of ice at this monster, hoping it would produce a different result. She'd stayed behind to buy people time. Given her influence over water, she thought she could combat this. After all, hadn't it helped her against other enemies? Hadn't it helped repel the cold of this place?

But when faced against a creature that practically thrived and lived off that temperature deficit, she'd been thrown into a position where she felt useless.

Sarah screamed, her Crescendo activating as she tried once more to close in the distance, her steps bringing her quicker before that gale would burst into her and throw her away.

It was a terrifyingly effective method to limit her from making any progress. From what Julia understood about the Edict, it revolved around repetition. She could never get anywhere if she never got the ball rolling by landing a single blow.

Julia sure it was frustrating for her friend since Sarah couldn't make any headway into this fight because there were no gaps for her to make her appearance and find a way to combat this creature.

But it wasn’t much better for her. As many spears as she threw, the Yeti brushed them off. Best case scenario, she got in a little bit of chip damage.

For both of them, this fight sucked.

The result was that Sarah and Julia kept retreating further, trying to fend off the monster and deal whatever damage they could. This ice Yeti was simply too much. At the rate it was going, the best they could do was maybe try an organized retreat again.

Knowing this monster was at its capability, she wasn't sure what would happen. Maybe there was a range to which this ice form could exist, or maybe, if she got lucky, Colt would find a way to disrupt whatever this thing was doing—if Colt was even alive.

She tossed that thought from her head when it appeared, trusting that her friend would find some way to survive, even if he couldn't win. Out of all of them, he had the biggest survivability, thanks to his incredibly put-together skill set, which enabled speed and even the ability to phase through attacks. He was a slippery ghost compared to the rest of them.

And here, now, as she threw another spear of ice and watched it shatter into a thousand shards around the Yeti, she saw that her hope of fighting this on her own had been too much. Thank god Sarah stayed behind, since at least she distracted its efforts, but this thing wasn't running out of steam. No matter the amount of ice it was swirling around, it seemed to still have the same amount of power, which, she thought, in part, was again that damned environmental advantage going on around them.

She could feel the ice and feel the way it worked, and she could feel the Edicts that this thing was using surging around the landscape, but she couldn't quite interface with it. Surge was meant for water-based attacks. Condensing it and making it into ice limited her options. She could surge a spear forward, giving it a boost to speed as her ice spear flew towards this creature, but that was about the extent of what she could accomplish, compared to the vast ability and control that this thing appeared to have.

She leaned into the environment, trying to carve out her own place in it, swirling more spears out of ice as she felt her mana dipping and her strength weakening.

If this were a war of attrition, she wouldn’t win. That much was clear, so what was the difference maker? She had to find a way. She had to find a way to take control of the environment and use that to play against an even field when she was fighting this foe. Otherwise, there just wasn't a simple way that this would work out at all for her.

She knew that intuitively, but knowing that and somehow finding and making a big leap to supplement her power are two entirely different things. So it was to her great surprise when, out of the blizzard around them, she saw a familiar man appear from where he had left fifteen minutes ago.

"Nate," she said. Her eyes widened as she saw the soldier return from the snow and cold. 

He had a hardened expression on his face and in his hands… Just what was that? His hands were glowing, two burning flames of bright blue. The flames curled inward, and the blizzard shied away from them. In the vapors of those flames, Julia could’ve seen small stars, as if looking through a frosted lens into the heavens above.

His hands were wrapped around his hammer, and as he came closer into sight and rushed at the Yeti, the blue flames ignited the weapon.

The Yeti was surprised as Nate was upon it, slamming his hammer on its back. The blue flames contesting the swirling ice around them. The blizzard pushed back against Nate, trying to disrupt him, but he held steady as if his body were made of steel. The weapon in his hand burned brightly as ice shattered against it, flickering and fighting against the Edicts in the air.

Whatever he'd found wasn't like Julia. He wasn't trying to grasp the environmental Edicts and take control to gain an edge in the fight. No, Nate had gone the exact opposite direction, using an ability that directly contrasted with what they were facing, and somehow it allowed him to use his weapon in a way that pitted him against the influence of the Yeti.

Normally, against the actual boss, Julia thought that this would be a poor option, knowing that the thing probably had far superior Edicts to whatever they were facing here. But the way that the Edicts were utilized so far from the body of the monster they were facing had an almost dimmed effect to them, meaning that as Nate slammed his hammer down, the blue fire burst like a star igniting. The ice flesh of the monster gave way, melting beneath the might.

He sheared through the gale and then slammed his hammer into the Yeti, sending cracks down its chest as the blizzard around it temporarily broke, revealing its insides. Seeing her opportunity, Julia fired another ice spear directly into that broken air, knowing it didn’t have the same defenses as before.

Nate stumbled back from his attack just as the spear slammed into the Yeti's chest, letting it crack further. The thing roared as Nate brought down his weapon again after spinning it, igniting even further with a blue light that seemed to banish the deep crimson around them.

In the next second, he slammed it into the monster’s head, shattering it into hundreds of pieces. The Yeti’s ice body collapsed, spilling across the ground and leaving nothing behind but a thousand shards of ice.

Julia let out a deep breath, staring at the remains of their enemy.

Nate accomplished what she’d been struggling to do in one fell swoop for almost twenty minutes. He’d saved them.

Though she tried to stand out like Colt, her ally ultimately came for her and saved them.

The break didn't last very long, though. There was never time for a break. She looked at Nate, her mouth trying to form words, maybe a thank you for coming back to help them out. She wanted to cry at her own failure, maybe. 

Instead, it was Sarah who spoke up first. "Really? You gave me all that shit for not wanting to leave Colt behind and then you went and did the same thing for us?"

Nate scratched the back of his head. "I got fed up with Nick," he admitted. "You can only take so much before you're willing to give up on a person. And though he's been trying, I don't really feel like his heart's in this mission." He said that, his voice going grim as he looked back towards the blizzard he'd left the injured man in.

“And… You just threw him in the snow?” Sarah was both in awe and incredulously annoyed.

"We can go and see if he's okay. We'll have to catch up to him. The blood trail will lead us back to where he is, and then we hide in a cave." He stopped.

Seen in the distance, another shadowy figure appeared. Another Yeti made of ice.

Damn. Again? Can’t this mob stay down?

Just as she was reacting to the appearance of another problem, a streak of light cut through the blizzard and snapped into the monster, the Yeti reeled, and then another arrow crashed into it as a follow-up, blowing holes of water and steam in its body.

Standing, barely perceptible in the blizzard, was Nick. The guy didn’t want to stick around and freeze on his own. It might be a small miracle he arrived…

Nick wasn’t done there either; he loaded another arrow and fired it. This one split four times, then he fired another immediately after that, and after that, he was spamming them out in a barrage of magic that was like unleashing a waterfall. The light arrows condensed, forming around and hitting their new enemy, this creature made of ice. He operated on the same principle as Nate. His Edict used the heat of the light to contest the ice and cold and deal real damage.

Within seconds, he brought the Yeti to its knees. Seeing her opportunity once more, Julia formed her own spear of ice and crashed this too into the newly appeared monster, shattering it once more like the one before. These things didn't yield any experience from defeating them, and they just simply sapped their strength. She could only hope that the difference they were making here affected whatever Colt was doing.

As the Yeti went down, so too did Nick. The light archer fell into the snow without a sound.

They rushed over to Nick's collapsed position as one. Julia took him in. By some miracle, the man had dragged himself through the blizzard.

“Sorry,” Nate said as he got to a knee, pressing a hand against his forehead. “You should’ve stayed put.”

Nick shook his head. "You were right. I've been nothing but a burden on you all, and I won't be anymore." He flexed his foot and grimaced while looking down. There was a hole in it and it’d been seared closed, likely with a light arrow.

The fact that this man was even able to come back on his own was a testament to his willpower and the decision to come back. He could have kept going. With that same repair, he could have dived deeper into the blizzard and found a cave to hide in; instead, he struggled his way to them. If they’d died fighting this thing, then he would’ve shown up and died too.

For the first time since they accepted Nick out of that prison, Julia felt a glimmer of hope, seeing the man they had left behind previously. He was there, buried somewhere she was sure, and seeing him go through this effort to follow his allies after whatever Nate had said, well, it was a promising sign.

She looked over to the blizzard, wondering when the next Yeti would form and unwilling to wait any longer. 

"We have to go," she said. "Let's hurry, and if there's any more, we'll bash it together." Hopefully, another one didn’t come.

Well, whatever, Julia thought. Flexing her power over the cold, feeling how these Edicts wrapped around and trying to study them, she would learn from them if there were more. She would take whatever she could, trying to understand this new power. It wasn't the power of water but the power of ice, and now that she had gotten a feel for how to use it, there was no telling what more she could learn.

That was the point of this dungeon, right? In order to secure their future and save the city in New Nashville, what better for growth than a trial through ice?