Chapter 664: The Dark Ice Spire Opens

With everything set in motion, Moon made his way back to his perplexed team, who had watched the whole thing from the rise without being able to see him at all.

His body reappeared in their vision when he was just fifteen meters away, and the sudden materialization out of empty snow made a few of them flinch, hands jumping to weapons before their minds caught up with what they were seeing.

Moon smiled slightly, satisfied that his little prank had gotten a few of them.

"Everything is ready."

The team had a hundred questions crowding their minds, how he had vanished, how he had crossed open ground toward a horde of Five Star beasts and come back alive, what he had done out there.

But none of them asked. They understood, without needing to be told, that this was Moon’s secret to keep, and prying into a fighter’s hidden methods was a line none of them were willing to cross.

Moon reached through the Curse connection and gave his order.

Attack the Frost Stalkers.

Out near the ruined pillar, the seven Frost Stalkers had already been thinned by the ice spears, the survivors circling the shattered rune formation, sniffing at it, heads low, searching for the source of the attack that had struck them. The pillar had killed several of their number before it collapsed, and the rest were tense and agitated, looking for something to blame.

The Snow Creeper moved toward them.

One of the Frost Stalkers glanced at the approaching Creeper and then dismissed it, turning its attention back to the pillar. Two beasts sharing the same territory around the spire, its presence meant nothing unusual.

That was its biggest mistake.

In the next instant the Snow Creeper struck, one massive claw ripping across the Frost Stalker’s flank and opening it to the bone, and before the beast could even react to the pain the Creeper’s jaws closed on it and finished the kill.

The other Frost Stalkers rounded on the Creeper snarling, their attention wrenched away from the pillar and onto the Snow Creeper that had just slaughtered one of their pack. They lunged, and the Creeper met them, and suddenly the snow around the ruined rune was a churning knot of violence.

The commotion pulled every nearby eye toward it.

More Snow Creepers turned to watch. More Frost Stalkers padded closer, drawn by the sounds of one of their own being attacked. And the Snow Creeper that had felt something wrong earlier with its fellow creeper, came lumbering to the aid of Moon’s controlled beast, because from the outside it simply looked like a Creeper being ganged up on by a pack of Stalkers, and instinct told it to back its own kind.

That was the crack that split the horde.

Within a minute, more than two dozen of each species had thrown themselves into the fight, Creepers against Stalkers, the truce that had held the horde in balance shattering as species divided against species.

The unknown larger beasts near the spire stirred at the growing chaos, and the violence kept spreading outward, each new death dragging more of the horde into the brawl.

The equilibrium was gone.

The team watched from the rise, staring down at a hundred Five Star beasts turning on one another, the impossible fight they had faced minutes ago now dismantling itself before their eyes.

"How," Kayn breathed, not taking his eyes off the carnage. "How did you do this?"

Moon simply smiled and said nothing, watching the horde tear itself apart below the dark spire.

Bodies began to drop across the snow.

Frost Stalkers tore into Snow Creepers, and the Creepers answered with claws and crushing weight, and the white ground turned red and churned beneath the brawl.

As the wounded Creepers neared their ends, blizzards began erupting across the battlefield, thirty-meter domes of screaming ice detonating one after another, and each one swept up whatever beasts stood nearby, Stalkers and Creepers alike vanishing into the white and emerging shredded or not emerging at all.

The death mechanic Moon had warned his team about was now working entirely in their favor, each dying Creeper taking a cluster of its own attackers with it.

The other beast races stayed out of it.

The unknown larger creatures near the spire, the ones the team hadn’t been able to identify, held their positions and simply watched the carnage unfold, without moving to help either side.

Moon noted that immediately.

Then the spire changed.

The black ice lit up from within, its deep fractures flaring with a pale cold light, and the surface of the structure split.

A massive iced gate several meters in height and width opened at its base.

Before the eyes of Moon, Nina, and everyone else, a humanoid figure walked out of the gate.

It was tall and slender, walking calmly despite the chaos outside.

Pale skin, long limbs and a bow strapped across its back, and a quiver at its hip. It carried itself in an aloof manner, its face stoic.

Elsa’s eyes narrowed sharply.

"This...Is that an elf?"

She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. The idea that this gate, this frozen wasteland, held an elf, or perhaps a whole population of them inside the dark spire, was problematic.

Elves were among the most powerful races in the entire Second Sanctuary, their bloodlines, their intelligence, their innate skills all placing them far above most beasts.

Moon shook his head, his eyes fixed on the figure emerging from the spire.

"No, this is not an elf, It’s a lesser elf. Look at the ears, they’re shorter and rounder than a true elf’s, and the eyes are less colourful."

The distinction mattered since even the weakest of elves were A-Rank creatures.

Although the lesser-elf was much weaker than a True-Elf, it was still smarter and deadlier than anything else in this frozen waste.

And it was an archer.

Moon’s eyes settled on the bow across its back.

Right now, the lesser elf had walked out of the spire into a battlefield of its own beasts slaughtering each other, and it did not look pleased.