34 – A Frozen Clash

Victor felt the chill of the fog before he was in it. His breath began to plume from his lips, and the damp air tried to cling to his hot, titanic flesh, only to be cooked off, steaming away from his embroidered hemp shirt. Looking at it, he wondered if he should have put on his armor. He wore his crown, as always, but if the ghouls had come with something dangerous… He summoned Lifedrinker, lying her crossways over Guapo’s back, holding her with both hands. She was far more essential than his heavy armor.

“Do we fight, battle-heart?”

“Maybe,” he whispered, continuing up the steep grade of the mountain road toward the bank of dense gray fog. It was about a quarter of a mile up, but Victor’s keen eyes could pick out the shapes moving within it. The more he thought about it, the more he found he didn’t relish the idea of those ghouls scraping his flesh with their filthy claws. He paused and slid from Guapo’s back, then he began summoning his armor and putting it on. He started with his greaves, then his boots, then the aegis, and finally, his gauntlets.

“We are fighting!” Lifedrinker crowed when he grasped her haft again.

“Probably.” This time, he didn’t whisper. He looked at Guapo, then sighed, shaking his head. “Sorry, buddy. I think I’ll finish on foot.” He severed the line of Energy that kept Guapo on this side of the veil. The shadowy steed broke apart into a cloud of purple-black smoke that roiled and churned until it dissipated into nothing after a few seconds.

Victor took confident strides toward the fog, his boots crunching on the loose shale. As he walked, he expanded his size, and soon his steps shook the loose stones on the slopes free, causing little rockslides in his wake. When he was about to step into the mist, he summoned his Banner of the Conqueror, and the blazing heat of his glory-attuned sun blasted moisture from the air, cleaving into the fog like a solar scythe and revealing the hissing, screaming pale figures of a hundred ghouls.

Maybe Lifedrinker’s bloodlust had influenced him, or maybe Victor was just in the mood to slaughter some monsters. Whatever the case, he cast Velocity Mantle, and then he was moving among them—a hornet among grubs—swinging Lifedrinker like Fate’s mandate, hacking the ghouls to pieces. They were like children to him, slow, tortured ones, screaming in the face of his blazing standard as Lifedrinker rendered them inert.

When they were all destroyed, Victor pressed onward, leading with the blazing light of his standard. He figured he’d clear the pass, pushing the undead creatures back down into the lands of his neighbor. He still didn’t know if this was an actual invasion or if the undead were just naturally creeping into unoccupied space. He had a feeling he’d find out soon; each hundred-yard stretch of the pass was filled with hundreds of ghouls, and he could feel a building pressure of death-attuned Energy as he pushed on.

When he rounded a wide bend in the canyon, he saw the slope grow even steeper and was a bit surprised to see ice and snow, despite the warm weather. The frost was mostly on the side of the road closest to the high cliffs, and Victor found plenty of room to walk steadily upward.

It wouldn’t have mattered, in any case; ice wouldn’t stop him. He’d melt it instantly with his breath if he needed to. He could fly over it. He could leap over it. All of that, leaving aside that he was supernaturally nimble and could probably walk right over it.

Victor laughed, brandishing Lifedrinker, as those strange thoughts flitted through his mind. He was maybe feeling a little full of himself, but he was enjoying the slaughter of the undead and was eager to see if something more challenging would present itself. The cold air felt good, and it quickened his steps. He lengthened his stride, and each one covered more than twenty-five feet. He laughed again at the madness of it. He was enormous! Nᴇw novel chapters are publɪshed on noveⅼfire.net

Rock falling down the canyon walls would have clued him in that something was happening, but he missed it in his levity and the already noisy passage of his gigantic, armored body. All he heard was the wind, the crunch of his boots, and the rattling echo of his steps up and down the canyon. Then, everything changed. Screaming roars and howling battle cries filled the air, and something massive hit him.

He felt the thing moving and scrabbling on his shoulders, perhaps surprised that he hadn’t fallen. Victor was more than huge; he was dense, especially when wearing his armor. The gigantic creature made him take a stutter step, and he felt the thing biting and clawing, but it couldn’t penetrate his aegis. Victor let go of Lifedrinker with one hand, reached over his shoulder, and dug his mighty gauntlet into something with dense, fur-covered flesh.

With a mighty roar, Victor heaved, trying to haul the thing over his shoulder. To his amazement, it didn’t let go, and he strained with no result. Then, the other screaming attackers reached him. They were humanoids, but giant, maybe half Victor’s height. Where their flesh or armor should have been, Victor only saw inky shadow. They reeked of death and chaos, and he figured they must be some kind of spirit-possessed entity.

As the thing on his back continued to roar, claw, and bite, the shadow people laid into him with great, inky weapons—axes, swords, hammers, and spears. They clanged and scraped against his armor, but where the metal beneath the shadows was stopped, the darkness bit through. At first, the weird, shadow-inflicted wounds were simply annoying, but then Victor felt a bit of lethargy in his arms as he continued to try to fling the thing off his back.

He immediately recognized the sapping bite of a strange, sickly Energy in his flesh, leeching away his natural vitality. As a bit of adrenaline shot into his mighty heart, Victor ignored the creature on his back and began to swing Lifedrinker around him, hammering her against those shadow weapons and flinging back his attackers. When Lifedrinker cut into their flesh, they wailed and fell away, but Victor saw them recover in the encroaching fog and dark.

That thought brought his gaze up and around, taking in the roiling dark. The fog merged with the gray clouds, and, in the light of his banner, Victor saw great sheets of sleet and icy snow whipping through the supernatural clouds. The air had grown frigid. The wind-blown sleet slashed against Victor’s exposed flesh—mostly his face—and he squinted into it, growling as his body’s inner fire more than compensated.

Even immune to the cold as he was, Victor was beginning to feel a little stressed by the thing on his back and his endless battle to keep the shadow beings’ weapons from wearing him down. Finally, as another spear slipped past his guard, and he felt the lethargy begin to build, his frustration reached a boiling point, and he cast Glacial Wrath. “You want cold?” he roared as the power of the rage-enhanced null frost coursed through his veins, into his muscles and bones.

He expanded, swelling with the power as his strength more than doubled. His vitality and regenerative capabilities surged to absurd levels, and Victor turned his attention back to the thing on his back. He reached his left hand over his shoulder and grabbed on with his gauntlet, this time taking such a prodigious grip that something hard shattered under his fingers. The creature screamed, and Victor flung his fist up and forward, throwing his former burden toward a cluster of shadow people.

He barely got a glimpse of his tormentor—massive, simian-like, with great white fangs. It howled as it flipped head over heels, smashed into a cluster of the shadowy giants, and then it and they flew into the icy, storm-filled chasm beside the road. With a sonorous roar, Victor turned his cold fury on the shadows pressing toward him, swinging their long weapons. He moved among them, graceful with his axe mastery, but heavy and deliberate like a glacier, hacking her razored, thirsty blade through their bodies.

The shadows tried to parry and block, but Victor’s power was like the inevitable advance of winter. He drove Lifedrinker through their weapons and split the magical bindings in their flesh that had previously kept her edge from biting too deeply. In moments, the powerful shadows were ripped from the cold, gigantic corpses they’d inhabited. They howled mournfully as they faded through the veil. Before long, Victor was standing over a mound of dismembered, frozen corpses.

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Even with his foes defeated, the icy, death-drenched storm continued to howl, and Victor decided to maintain his ice-imbued berserking state. With enormous steps, he pressed on, climbing into the pass, walking through the whipping storm like it was a refreshing spring shower. His rage was calculating, and he kept himself aware of his Energy levels—he’d hardly scraped the potential of his Core. In that whistling, icy wind, it was almost effortless to maintain his Glacial Wrath.

As he pushed through the storm and the road’s steep grade evened out, Victor noticed a heaviness in the air. It was a weight that couldn’t be attributed to the weather or even the oppressive Energy. No, it was something else: a presence. Something or someone powerful was ahead, and it stoked Victor’s icy rage to think of it. Some pendejo was standing up there, watching him, amused by his struggle against those shadows and that thing on his back. Victor threw back his head and roared—a sound like shattered ice and hunger.

He pressed on, his body icy blue with frost. Even Lifedrinker was coated in a layer of the jagged stuff. The sleet-covered road crunched under his boots, and his own frosty layer merged with it; his footing had never been so sure. It was a good thing because when the boulder hit him, the impact was enough to shatter the granite missile. He took a step back to recover his balance, growling as he brushed the shards of stone off his armor. He lifted his gaze to the heights, wondering exactly where it had come from.

When he couldn’t see any threat up there, he started forward again, and it dawned on Victor that what he’d taken for the shadow of the peak to his left was something else. It unfolded in the chasm and clambered onto the road—an enormous shadow being, easily twice Victor’s height. It leaned forward, and the darkness split to reveal two bright yellow eyes.

“You slew my children, stranger. What a bright light you carry with you! I find it uncomfortable.” It reached out its enormous arm, pinching its fingers together. Darkness fell over the stormy pass as shadows snuffed Victor’s standard.

Victor’s scowl deepened as he realized what the shadow had done. “You dare?” he growled. He could see well enough. His titanic eyes were proof against the dark, given even the faintest light; besides that, he was currently under the mantle of his Glacial Wrath. Everything was tinged in blue, and the shadow stood out starkly, limned in electric purple by Victor’s strange vision.

“I do. I sensed a vacuum in the valley. Old Fausto is gone. Was that your doing?”

A sliver of Victor that floated inside the icy abyss of his cold, rage-filled alter ego’s mind wanted to engage the shadow in conversation. He wanted to learn about its power. How was he so large? Was it all an illusion? Was he really a vampire? Unfortunately, the glacial wrath that filled his mind had him striding forward, planning attacks and caring very little about what the shadow was saying. Here was a target for his rage, and all that mattered was that he destroy it.

“Not talkative, hmm?”

Victor focused on the shadow’s right hip joint; it was the perfect height and angle for his most devastating blow. He activated Velocity Mantle and exploded into action. Lifedrinker screamed as she sliced the air, her edge vibrating and pulsating as she focused on her intended target. Victor moved his feet in such a way to make the blow look like it was going to be a shallow, forward cleave. The shadow reacted as he expected, swaying back at the waist, but hardly moving below that.

Lifedrinker howled with ecstatic anticipation as her edge bit the shadow. Victor put all of his prodigious strength and forward momentum into the blow, and he felt her bite at the harder stuff beneath the shadow. A lesser axe would have failed to dig into the adamant surface. A lesser axe might have shattered. Lifedrinker wouldn’t fail him, though. She screamed. She vibrated, and she split the diamond-hard flesh.

All the while, Victor pushed, and he roared, and the shadow, swaying back, summoned curved black swords that billowed white smoke. Lifedrinker dug in, the shadow howled, and those buzzing black swords hacked down, aiming to dislodge Victor. One hit his crown, knocking his head back, and the other slashed his throat, cutting halfway to his spine. As hot blood poured from the gash, freezing against his icy aegis, Victor stumbled back, but he still rotated, hacking Lifedrinker through that hip joint like a scythe through wheat.

Victor felt his flesh knitting even as he brought Lifedrinker up to guard, watching as the giant shadow stumbled back, its leg twisting awkwardly beneath it. Laughing mirthlessly, he inhaled deeply and blasted the giant shadow with a cone of null frost. It stumbled further, waving its smoking swords, but Victor heard a twisted laugh echo his own.

“Cold? You think cold will trouble me, upstart?”

Victor strode forward, Lifedrinker held ready. “It’s not the cold that should worry you.”

The shadow made a hissing snarl, retreating ahead of Victor, but then that snarl turned into a whine. As Victor’s ice shattered and sloughed away from the giant being, things were left behind. Those things blended with the darkness of the shadow’s unnatural outer layer, but still stood out. They were shadows within shadow, but they were wrong. They didn’t merge peacefully. They radiated the entropic absence of everything.

Victor didn’t know how it would feel to have those things melding with the shadows cloaking his giant foe, but he didn’t think it could be pleasant. The gasps turned into a low, panicked wail, and then Victor watched as the colossal shadow turned its smoking swords on itself, digging the blades into its inky flesh, trying to find the bits of the void Victor had gifted it.

While his enemy was distracted, Victor continued forward. He lifted Lifedrinker and, once again, took aim at the hip he’d almost severed. At the last second, the great shadow sought to block him, but Victor’s blow was too powerful, and Lifedrinker was too heavy. He smashed through the smoking sword, sending it clattering to the rocky, ice-covered road where it slid to the edge and fell into the depthless chasm. Lifedrinker hit home, and he felt her edge find her previous cut and widen it, blasting through the rock-hard cartilage, sinew, and muscle.

The giant shadow wailed, fell back, and crashed onto the road with such force that the ground shook. Victor looked up to see ice and stone falling. Would it be enough to bury him? Scowling, he blasted the avalanche with his breath weapon. His null frost merged with the falling ice and stone, filling in the gaps and super-freezing it, building a shelf on the side of the mountain. Grinning, Victor turned back to his fallen foe, lifting Lifedrinker high.

“No icy escape for you.”

A smoking black blade cut through the air, whistling toward Victor’s knee. He lifted his foot, catching the blade on the armored uppers of his Terror-scale boots. He felt the edge bite through, but only a little. It slid into his flesh, but came to a grinding halt against his bone. Meanwhile, Victor brought Lifedrinker down on the giant shadow’s extended wrist. She bit clean through and continued down to bury her razor-sharp edge into the enormous shadow’s chest.

Victor let go, letting her pull and dig, eager to feast on the shadow’s Energy. He could feel his foe’s Energy building even as Lifedrinker drank it away. The air was so cold that Victor knew it would have instantly frozen a normal human solid. Still, in his Glacial Wrath, he was perfectly comfortable. He stepped to the shadow’s side and knelt, pinning its remaining arm to the ground. Meanwhile, he leaned close and rumbled. “Do you think this cold will stop me?”

“I-I’ll freeze the world!” the shadow gasped.

Victor looked up. In his cold, calculating rage, he noted the echoing cracks coming from the depths of the canyon. Was that the game, then? Would the fool try to bury them both in his death throes? Victor stood and contemplated his options. He could grab hold of the giant shadow and fly him out of there, couldn’t he? He concentrated and summoned his magma wings, only to have them flicker and fade, unable to stay alight in the horrific storm. Victor frowned, glaring into the dark, whirling storm that surrounded them.

He took a step, but his foot was slow to pull away from the icy road. He could move, but could he move quickly enough? Briefly, he considered canceling his Glacial Wrath and immediately casting Volcanic Fury. Could he fight the cold with his heat? He abandoned the idea; his well of magma-attuned Energy didn’t run deep enough. No, it was best if he just ended this all before it got worse.

Victor turned back to the giant shadow and lifted his enormous, ice-caked boot. With all his might, he brought it down on the creature’s face, grinding his heel into one of those angular, yellow eyes. The shadow was taller than he, but it was narrow and not nearly as dense. Even so, Victor felt the hard shell of the thing’s skull grind and slide against the stone road.

Growling, he stooped, lifting his enormous Gauntlet of the Mountain’s Might. As the description stated, the gauntlets were incomparably dense, and they resonated with an overwhelming sense of gravity. As Victor’s fist fell, the inertia doubled and tripled, and then the void-forged steel impacted the shadow’s skull like a bomb going off. The concussion fragmented the hidden, diamond-hard skull, and the splinters of that blue, frozen flesh and bone showered the storm-thrashed mountain road.

The icy Energy immediately dissipated, and the storm winds began to slow their whipping frenzy. Victor stood, so satisfied by the visceral crunch of his fist smashing his foe’s skull, that he had to concentrate to maintain his Glacial Rage. He looked at Lifedrinker, shaking his furious countenance regretfully. “Sorry, I cut your feast short, chica.”