Chapter 684: Meeting the team

The device was already at Moon’s mouth as he ran at full speed.

"Theo, I’m out. Fall back to the rally point, now. The spire’s gone and I’ve got the commander buried, but I don’t know how long that holds."

"Copy," Theo’s voice came back, filled with relief. "Moving."

Behind them, the white spire lay in ruins, a mountain of broken ice where a monument had stood, and somewhere beneath it, the commander clawed toward the surface.

No notification appeared in Moon’s vision notifying him of the Lesser Elf’s kill. But he had expected that a collapsing spire, however much rubble it dumped on the lesser elf, was never going to kill something at that level.

The commander was a pseudo-Surpasser, and being buried under ice would slow it, and cost it precious seconds to dig free, but it wouldn’t die.

Moon had never expected it to, not this easily. The collapse was a delay, nothing more, a way to buy the distance he needed for Camouflage to do its work and let him vanish clean when it counted most.

He kept running, hidden, putting ground between himself and the ruin.

Partway back, he spotted movement ahead.

The commander’s mount, the massive Arctic beast the elf had ridden south, prowling the snow with its head low, searching for something.

Moon immediately understood that it was likely looking for Theo.

But Theo’s concealment was strong and the distance helped. So the beast couldn’t find him, circling around the region in frustration.

Moon raised his right hand as he passed, and blue fire gathered in his palm.

"Explosion."

The azure fireball hurtled across the snow and struck the beast square in the flank. The blue flame erupted on contact, blooming outward and wrapping the creature in a devouring blaze, and where the fire caught, it sank in and lowered the beast’s resistance, letting the next wave of heat bite deeper still.

The Arctic beast bellowed, thrashing, but the blue fire clung to it, feeding on it, spreading across its frost-armored hide faster than it could shed the flames.

It went down in the snow, consumed, the blue fire eating through its resistance until nothing was left to burn.

Moon didn’t break stride, withdrawing his sword, cutting its neck, sealing the kill before immediately storing the dead beast inside his storage ring.

He couldn’t let the beast’s body remain here, otherwise, it would give the commander an indication of his direction.

Moon wasn’t worried about whether the commander heard the fireball or not, for all it knew it could have very well been a detouring tactic.

He kept moving toward the rally point, Camouflage still active.

--

Moon reached the rally point and found Theo waiting.

He stepped out of Camouflage a few meters away, and Theo jumped, ready to strike the figure before he registered who it was.

"It’s me, calm down." Moon smiled, "Let’s go, we need to meet up with the others."

Theos sighed wryly, nodded and fell in behind him, and the two of them set off across the snow, back toward the igloo where the rest of the team waited.

The run north took nearly an hour.

Eventually the igloo came into view ahead, and Moon spotted Elsa first. She stood outside it, positioned carefully, keeping herself tucked low and out of easy sight while still holding a clear line on the surrounding terrain, watching everything vigilantly.

She was on watch duty for a reason. As an archer, her eyes were the sharpest on the team, honed to catch movement at extreme distances, to pick a threat out of a landscape before it became a threat. If anything approached the shelter, she would see it before it saw them, and that early warning was worth more than anything.

It was only ever meant to be a temporary posting, a few hours of caution while Moon and Theo were away and the team was down two of their strongest combatants. Once the two of them returned, the danger of being caught shorthanded passed, and the constant watch could ease.

Elsa caught sight of them approaching, recognized the two figures crossing the snow, and lowered her guard, relief crossing her face as she straightened from her position to meet them.

Elsa gave their surroundings one final sweep, confirming nothing had followed them across the snow, then gestured for them to come in.

"Hurry up, we’ve been waiting for you. Come on in, before something spots us all standing around out here."

Moon and Theo ducked through the low entrance and into the shelter, where the rest of the team waited.

Marek looked up first, and the moment he saw them, he reached over and shook Vela awake. She’d been resting, sprawled on a bedroll, and she came out of the nap with a violent start, her hand slapping around for her hammer.

"What. Where are they? Where are the beasts?" Her eyes were still half-shut, her words tumbling out of her mouth. "The giant penguins... they were forming a line... marching towards us... somebody had to hold the wall..."

Marek stared at her.

"What?"

Vela blinked, trying to orient herself. "The penguins. The marching penguins. They had a war banner. One of them was a general..."

"There are no marching penguins," Marek said slowly, reiterating like he was talking to a child. "Moon and Theo are back, that’s it. That’s what I woke you for."

Vela’s face fell.

"Oh." She looked really disappointed for a moment, as if the marching penguin army had been a far more interesting thing to wake up to. "So there’s no penguin war."

"No penguin war."

"...Shame. It was a good battle." She scrubbed her hands down her face, then slapped both her cheeks hard, jolting herself the rest of the way awake, and when she looked up again her eyes were clear. "Right. Moon. You’re both back in one piece, what happened out there? Did you plant the runes to damage the white spire?"

Moon began to narrate what happened inside spire