Michael waited on the other side of the yeti, slightly closer than he’d been before, but unable to move forward more and risk drawing their attention. He was on his own, but so was Marcus, holed up somewhere in the snow. They were both waiting for Ollie, Lance, Davi, and Pyotr to start their distraction. The general plan was to draw the yeti away from the rift so that Michael could get close enough to start sealing it. While he closed it, Marcus would do his best to keep any of the yeti off of him that he could, though Michael was certain he’d have to be fighting them off himself as well.

When Ollie sent out his signal, he did it with flair and style. Two massive balls of flame crashed into the center of the largest groups of yeti, annihilating a half-dozen of them immediately and catching an additional twenty on fire. Just as they were searching for the source of the flame, Pyotr, Davi, and Lance plunged into them. Lance drove his spear into one of them quickly, before leaving it behind and cutting another down with his sword. Pyotr danced in their midst, a whirlwind of death as his blade whipped out, dealing fatal wounds as he dodged between their long arms and raking claws. Davi was like a living tank, using his entire body as a battering ram as he slammed into the sea of white fur, shield first slashing out his bastard sword with broad strokes that wounded and killed at least two with every strike.

Just as the yeti began to rally, Ollie loosed another fireball into them and the rest of them began to fall back to him as he sent out a bolt of lightning into a tight cluster of them that seemed to arc from one to another in quick succession and drop three of them.

Ollie stumbled a bit as they fell back, and Lance helped him to his feet as they fled from the yeti that were now all surging toward them. Even with that impressive opening salvo, there were still dozens of the beasts, but the hope was that they might panic and flee when the portal was closed and enough of them were killed. They had always retreated after just a few casualties, so it wasn’t too mad of an idea.

With all their attention in the opposite direction, Michael slowly picked himself up and started making his way closer to the rift, feeling the desire to jump out of his skin and run build up as he got closer. He made it ten feet without any yeti noticing him, then twenty, then thirty. The cold wind was blowing so hard and fast that he was forced to summon shields in front of the eye slits in his helmet to keep from being blinded. When he was less than fifty feet away he raised his hand and began to focus.

Gold light began to spread across his palm and for the first time in an hour he could feel his fingers as the warmth of his wife’s touch spread through his hand and began to radiate outward. Gold light poured from it, and he reached out his attention, feeling the edges of the rift in front of him, and grasping them with his will. He clenched his fist and began to close it.

Very suddenly their whoops and hollering all ceased and they turned from Lance, Pyotr, Davi, and Ollie to him, and an avalanche of white fur began to surge in his direction.

Michael kept his focus on the rift in front of him, trying to close as much of it as he could. He drew his sword and shield, turning to face the oncoming monsters. He wasn’t going to be able to close it before they reached him, but he felt like he could keep pushing it closed as long as he stayed close to it.

Before they could get close, gunshots began to ring out and those in the lead began to suddenly drop. The ones that fell seemed to have been selected specifically to tangle up as many of the others as possible. Marcus had looted a number of rifles from the dragoons that had been hunting them before, and now he used all of those rifles to fire off an impressive salvo that bought Michael some breathing room.

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Michael raised his sword and squared his stance.

“Divine, I will seal this rift in your name,” he said and actually began to run toward the yeti, his sword and shield becoming surrounded by holy fire before he reached them. The sense of wrongness that emanated from the rift ceased as he dedicated his actions to the gods and he felt that same powerful sense of rightness that had been with him when he’d closed the first rift, and fought the foul beast in Seras’s cave.

Michael could see the regret in the eyes of the first yeti to reach him as he cut it down, his blade passing through the beast like a knife through butter. The second went down with just as much ease, as did the third, then the fourth.

Michael kept moving as he fought, doing his best not to be surrounded by the yeti as they charged him and keeping as many of his deeds active as possible. He hoped for a moment that maybe one of the larger yeti would be considered nobility in its world, but he couldn’t detect any benefits from his Baron Breaker deed. As he fought he did his best to keep closing the rift, and could feel it responding to his will, though not nearly quickly enough.

Before long he was absolutely mobbed by the creatures around him, but he was managing to stay standing. His Rift Sealer was doing a lot of the heavy lifting, random blows would be diverted from him at the last moment, or stopped to hang awkwardly in the air around him before he could be reached. Those blows that did near him were batted away by his shield, lighting the creatures on fire, and all the while he repeated simple, effective swordstrokes to keep all of them at bay with his now divine blade.

Still, he was being overwhelmed and his recovery and durability were hitting their limits. Closing a gate, maintaining smite, and keeping himself healed, not to mention running and fighting all the while was just too much for him to keep up for long. Marcus’s well timed shots were buying him time, but there was only so much he could do. The rift was nearly closed though, and the wind coming through it was even stronger, actually creating so much focused air that it acted as a kind of wall, blowing some of the yeti away before they could reach him.

One of the larger yeti managed to grab his leg from behind and drag him back, nearly causing him to lose focus, and when he was on the ground, the others began to leap onto his back and smash their fists onto his armor as they jumped up and down on top of him.

He heard a cry from near him as Lance leapt into the thick of the fray. He couldn’t see what was happening, but felt the attention on him lessen and he managed to cut his way back to his feet.

Lance was fighting like a man possessed. His sword was a blur as he carved his way through as many of the yeti as he could. When a yeti nearly dropped him with a rending slash to his back, Michael raised his hand and extended his healing to him.

A wave of snowflakes shaped into blades slammed into the other yeti courtesy of Ollie, and behind them came Pyotr. He actually leapt onto one, kicked its head as he landed, and used the momentum to land on another before repeating the process.

Davi was the last to arrive. His shield had been lost and he was ignoring his defense as he carved his way through the yeti with his bastard sword.

Suddenly there were shimmering purple shields all around Michael that the yeti were bouncing off of, and Michael saw Ollie holding a hand out toward him even as he blasted yeti charging him back with a wall of force.

Michael turned his focus wholly back to the rift in front of him. He slammed his sword into the ground in front of him and held out an opened hand. He could feel the rift resisting him now, pushing back against his attempt to seal it, and through the wind and snow he could see the shadow of something large approaching the rift from the other side. A mass of black fur, easily as high as the rift itself. He roared, feeling the strength of the divine rally behind him as he clenched his fist. There was one last powerful gust of wind that knocked everyone back, and then it stopped.