Chapter 748: Frost Giant
Chapter 748: Frost Giant
The ground came up fast.
Noah had been running the wall for close to an hour, the Void Striders eating the descent in long spiraling loops, and the blue pulse of Storm’s lightning had long since disappeared somewhere below him into a dark he couldn’t see the bottom of. Then the bottom found him.
He saw it maybe three seconds before he hit it, a pale surface rushing up through the dark, and he pushed off the wall hard, redirecting his momentum sideways, and landed in a roll that carried him twenty meters across whatever he had just landed on before he came to a stop on one knee.
He stayed there for a moment.
Then he looked at his hand.
Snow.
His fingers were in snow. Real snow, packed and old, the surface of it crusted with age, the kind that had been sitting long enough to compress into something closer to ice at the bottom layers. He pressed his palm flat against it and felt the cold coming up through it from somewhere below and the cold was not the ambient cold of a cave system. It was sustained and deliberate. The cold of something that produced it continuously.
He stood up and looked around.
The shaft opened at the bottom into a space so large that the walls of it were not visible from where he stood. The ceiling above him, the underside of the planet’s crust, hung maybe two hundred meters up, and it was covered in formations that hung downward like teeth, pale blue-white, translucent where the light caught them, each one the size of a building. The light itself came from those formations, a cold diffuse glow that had no single source, just the accumulated luminescence of thousands of them casting everything below in blue-white.
The floor stretched out in every direction under a layer of snow that was completely wrong for a planet that ran forty eight degrees on its surface.
Noah looked up at the shaft he had come down. A circle of red far above, the planet’s sky, impossibly distant. No Storm. No blue lightning pulse anywhere he could see.
He looked forward.
Pillars.
Massive ones, each one maybe thirty meters tall and ten meters across at the base, arranged in rows that extended into the blue-white distance. Not natural formations. Too regular, too deliberate, the surfaces of them worked smooth in the lower sections where something had shaped them before whatever had happened here had frozen everything in place. Ice had grown over them since, thick layers of it built up over what looked like a very long time, encasing the lower sections entirely and climbing the upper sections in translucent sheets that caught the cold light and threw it back in fragments.
Between the pillars, more snow. Drifts of it banked against the pillar bases, piled into the gaps between rows, covering whatever the floor had originally looked like under two or three meters of accumulated white.
Noah walked forward.
The snow under his boots made no sound. Too old and too compressed for that. Just pressure, the slight give of something that had been packed for long enough that it had stopped being soft.
He passed between the first two pillars and looked up at them properly. The stone they were made from was dark, almost black beneath the ice, the surface of it carved with something he couldn’t make out through the frozen layers. Patterns or maybe Lines. The suggestion of text or imagery, detail that the ice had preserved by burying it.
Between the third and fourth row of pillars he found barricades.
They were enormous. Slabs of the same dark stone as the pillars, each one the height of a four story building, arranged in overlapping lines that created a series of barriers across the open space. Not a wall. A series of walls, each one staggered behind the last, the kind of layered defensive arrangement that was built by people who expected something to come through the first one and needed the second and third to matter.
Behind the barricades, just visible through the gaps between them, the suggestion of something larger. A gate. Dark stone and pale ice and a scale that made the barricades look like furniture arranged in front of it.
Noah stood and looked at the barricades and the gate beyond them and thought about what kind of thing you built seven layers of defense against.
The system pinged.
[UNKNOWN ENERGY DETECTED]
[BIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION: UNKNOWN]
[PROXIMITY: CLOSE]
[RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN AWARENESS]
Noah turned around and out of nowhere, something lounged at him.
A frost drake hit him from above.
It had been clinging to the underside of the nearest pillar, pale scales the color of old ice, almost invisible against the frozen surface it had been pressed against, and it dropped on him with its jaws open and both forelegs extended, each one ending in claws the length of his forearm.
He got his arm up and took the forelegs on his forearm and the impact drove him down into the snow to his knees and the drake’s jaws snapped shut on the air where his head had been half a second earlier.
It was big. Not Red Death Dragon big, but big enough that having it on top of him was a structural problem. Eight meters nose to tail, the body built low and dense, the scales sitting tight against each other in overlapping layers that caught the cold light and scattered it in pale blue fragments. Four legs, each one heavily muscled, the hindquarters more powerful than the front, built for the explosive downward strike it had just demonstrated. The tail was broad and flat, sweeping across the snow behind it, and the breath that came from its open mouth was not fire.
Cold. A concentrated jet of cold that hit the snow beside Noah’s head and turned the surface of it to solid ice in under a second.
The system pinged again.
[FROST DRAKE IDENTIFIED]
[STATUS: BONDED]
[TAMING: UNAVAILABLE - EXISTING BOND DETECTED]
[RECOMMENDATION: NEUTRALIZE]
Noah looked at the notification for the half second he had available and then drove his elbow up into the drake’s jaw.
Its head snapped back. He rolled sideways, out from under it, came up on his feet and put three meters between them.
The drake shook its head, reset, and looked at him.
Then it screamed.
The sound bounced off the pillars and the barricades and the ceiling two hundred meters above and came back from every direction simultaneously, and before the echo had finished resolving two more drakes dropped from the pillars to the left and right.
’Three,’ Noah thought. ’Bonded to someone. How is that even possible?’
He looked at the gate through the gaps in the barricades.
’Whatever is behind that gate, these things are guarding it.’
The first drake charged.
Noah sidestepped and hit it across the jaw with a void barrage at contact range, three shots in a half second, and the drake’s head went sideways and it hit the snow and slid and came back up slower than before. The second one came from his left and he blinked, appeared behind it, drove his fist into the base of its skull with everything his Strength stat had behind it.
BOOM.
The drake went into the snow face first and stayed there.
The third one breathed on him.
The cold jet hit him across the left shoulder and Noah felt it, the temperature differential registering even through his stats, the sustained output of a frost drake’s breath weapon cold enough to crack stone. His jacket frosted over at the shoulder. He looked at it.
’Interesting,’ he thought, and hit the third drake with Rend.
The tearing force caught it across the chest and the drake staggered backward and the first one was back up and coming at him from behind and he stepped aside and grabbed its tail on the way past and swung it into the third one and both of them went down in a tangle of pale scales and flat sweeping tails.
He finished them cleanly. No cruelty, no extended exchange. The system had said neutralize and he neutralized and he moved on because the gate was right there through the barricades and whatever was behind it was what Storm had come here for and Storm was nowhere he could see and that was starting to bother him.
He was three steps from the first barricade when the ground shook.
Not an earthquake. Footsteps.
He turned.
They came from between the pillars on his left, emerging from the blue-white dark in a line, each one moving with the unhurried confidence of something that had never needed to hurry because hurrying implied doubt about the outcome. Six of them. Then eight. Then twelve.
Frost giants.
Four meters tall, the smallest of them. Built like the pillars, broad and dense and covered in the same pale ice-blue skin that made them look like the frozen formations had decided to stand up and pick up weapons.
Their hair was white, not the white of age but the white of something that had never been any other color, thick and hanging loose around faces that had the angular geometry of something carved rather than born. Their eyes were pale blue, almost white, the irises barely distinguishable from the sclera, and each one carried a mace that was the size of a small vehicle, the head of it dark stone wrapped in metal that had frost growing on it in patterns that moved as they walked.
They did not speak.
They looked at Noah standing between them and the barricades and they moved.
The first one swung its mace in a horizontal arc that would have taken a normal person sideways at the hip. Noah blinked. Appeared above it. Came down on the mace’s backswing with both feet on the giant’s forearm and drove the arm down and the mace head hit the snow and went through it and into the bedrock below and stuck there for two seconds while the giant tried to pull it free.
Noah was already somewhere else.
The second giant brought its mace down in a vertical overhead strike, full two-handed commitment, and the impact when it hit the snow sent a shockwave outward in a ring that knocked loose snow off the pillar bases in a cascade of white. Noah had moved a half second before the strike landed, blinked to the giant’s left shoulder, and hit it in the side of the neck with a straight right hand.
The giant’s head went sideways. It staggered. Didn’t go down. Turned toward him with those pale eyes and swung the mace backhand and Noah blinked again and appeared behind it and hit the same spot in the neck a second time.
It went to one knee.
Three more came in simultaneously from different angles, the coordinated approach of things that had fought together before and knew not to take turns, and Noah moved through them the way he moved through things when taking turns with them was not an option, constantly in motion, the Void Striders letting him shift direction at speeds that made the giant’s tracking a permanent half second behind him, each hit he landed targeted and deliberate, the same spots, building damage on structures that were built to absorb it.
They were strong. He gave them that. Each blocked strike that transferred even a fraction of the force rattled his arms. Their maces, when they connected with the snow and the stone beneath it, produced craters. A direct hit would have been a problem even for him.
But they couldn’t catch him.
He was too fast and they were too committed to each individual swing, the momentum of the maces working against them the moment he stopped being where the swing was going. He used that. Let them swing, stepped inside the arc, hit the joint where the arm met the shoulder, moved before the backswing could catch him.
Twenty minutes of this.
The snow around him was cratered from missed mace strikes and stained dark from the frost giants that had gone down and stayed down, and there were three left standing, and those three had finally spread out enough that coming for him from three directions simultaneously was going to require him to deal with one before the other two arrived and the timing on that was tight.
He grabbed the nearest one.
Both hands on its forearm, the Void Striders firing, using its own mass against it, and he moved and the giant went with him and went into the second giant and both of them hit the snow in a collapse.
The third one.
Noah blinked directly in front of it and hit it in the chest with both hands and the force of it drove it backward three steps and he followed it and grabbed it by the throat and lifted.
The giant’s feet left the snow.
He held it there and looked at it and its pale eyes looked back at him and its hands came up around his wrists and tried to pry them apart and the grip was extraordinary, the strength in those hands, but his grip was already closed and closed was a different problem from open.
He pulled back his right hand.
The null strike coiled around his fist, purple, the void energy finding its shape, and he looked at the giant’s face and the giant looked back at him and neither of them moved for a moment.
"Enough."
The voice came from behind the first barricade.
Female. Deep, the resonance of something built on a larger scale than a human throat, but unmistakably female, and carrying in it the tone of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed without repetition.
Noah held the frost giant where it was and turned his head.
She stood in the gap between the first and second barricade, having appeared there without him hearing her approach, which meant she had been there longer than he had realized or she moved in ways that didn’t make sound.
Taller than the giants he had been fighting. By a full meter, maybe more. The same pale blue-white skin but with a quality to it that the others didn’t have, the surface of it not rough like packed ice but smooth, the way deep glacier ice was smooth, the kind that formed over centuries of pressure and had a translucence to it that let the cold light from the ceiling formations filter through the outer layers.
Her hair was the white of fresh snow, not hanging loose like the others but braided in complex patterns that coiled around themselves in ways that had taken time and intention. Her eyes were the same pale blue but darker than the others, the iris present and distinguishable, a deep cold blue that caught the light the way clear water caught it.
She wore something across her shoulders that wasn’t armor and wasn’t clothing in any conventional sense, dark material that moved with her breathing, and around her neck a chain of stones that were the same dark color as the pillars and the gate behind her.
She was looking at Noah with the expression of someone who had not expected to find what they were looking at and was deciding what to do about that.
Noah looked at her.
He was still holding the frost giant by the throat.
He set it down.
It moved immediately to stand behind him, putting itself between Noah and the gate, which was interesting. They weren’t protecting themselves. They were protecting what was behind them.
Noah looked at the female.
She looked at Noah.
"You are small," she said.
"Relative term," Noah said.
Her eyes moved across him. Down and up. Reading something. "You are not what came before," she said. "The ones who came before were different. Loud. They broke things." She looked at the fallen giants around him, the craters in the snow, the frost drakes at the edges of the space. "You break things too."
"They started it," Noah said.
Something moved in her face that was not quite a smile but lived near one.
"What are you," she said.
Noah looked at the gate behind her. At the barricades. At the scale of the defensive preparations that someone had spent a very long time building in an underground space beneath a planet nobody had looked closely at.
"I’m looking for a dragon," he said.
_____
A/N
Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed the Chapter.
So here’s the thing. I’m trying to go back to multiple Chapters per day.
Mostly two per day and maybe bonuses of 2 so that’s four per day. I can do that and keep the length the same too.
All I need is increased support from you all. As you know, without you there’d be no point of this story.
I don’t want to pressure anyone with goals like powerstones and golden tickets or even a magic castle milestone anymore.
But just get me to the top and I’ll make sure to release as many Chapters as I can.
We start at 4 and can go up!
I’d love to hear a feedback or what you think!
Powerstones, golden tickets and gifts would be greatly appreciated and rewarded as well.
Let’s go!!