Chapter 667: Building A Horde

The beast roared, flames spilling from its jaws in a rolling cloud of heat that melted the falling snow in a wide arc around it. Its orange eyes locked onto Moon as he approached, and it lowered its head in warning, steam pouring off its hide, its whole body displaying aggression meant to drive the intruder off.

Moon simply smiled at the theatrics.

He wasn’t bothered in the least by the display. He kept walking, unhurried, straight toward a beast that had just breathed fire in his direction, and the calm of it made the team behind him tense.

They were still processing the beast itself. A fire-type creature, alive and thriving in a wasteland where everything else was built around ice. It went against everything the environment should have allowed, which meant this was something special, an adaptation rather than an ordinary resident. Watching Moon walk toward it like it was nothing only deepened their unease.

The Arctic Fire-Prowler charged.

It lunged with its jaws wide, another gout of flame roaring toward Moon, and Moon answered without breaking stride.

He raised his second hand and released his own fire that met the beast’s flame head-on and split it apart, the two streams canceling in a hiss of steam from the evaporating snow. The Prowler recoiled, surprised.

Moon was the first creature to ever threaten its own fire. Whatever this intruder was, it wasn’t prey, and it wasn’t afraid of its deadly fire.

Then Moon shifted to lightning.

Purple bolts tore into the beast, threading through its steaming hide and locking its muscles, and the Prowler’s lunge collapsed mid-motion.

Moon didn’t kill the beast, rather, he beat it down to a pulp, matching its fire with his own whenever it tried to burn him, answering its charges with lightning that seized it in place, breaking its ego piece by piece. Every time the beast committed to an attack, Moon shut it down and struck back harder, teaching it a lesson that every predator eventually learned.

There was always something stronger.

The Prowler’s aggression slowly left its body. Its roars turned ragged, then quiet. Its orange eyes dimmed as it stopped trying to fight and started trying to understand what it was facing, and in that moment of hesitation Moon closed the distance and raised his hand.

Curse.

The thread reached out and sank into the beast’s mind, and this time there was nothing to sever it. The thread fell into place cleanly, and the Arctic Fire-Prowler went still for a moment.

Then, it lowered itself before him, submissive.

"Stand."

Following his order, it rose and padded after Moon as he turned back toward the team, following at his heel like it had belonged to him all along.

The team stared.

Vela’s hammer hung forgotten in her grip. Kayn’s mouth parted slightly and Elsa’s calm gray eyes had gone wide.

They had just watched Moon walk up to a fire-breathing apex predator, out-burn it, out-fight it, and then somehow bind it to his will, a beast that had been trying to kill him just minutes earlier now trailing behind him like a hound.

"How," Marek breathed. "How does he keep doing this."

Nobody had an answer.

Moon walked back into the group with the Arctic Fire-Prowler at his side, steam curling off its hide, and gave them a small smile.

"Found our first counter. Time to find more."

Moon finished speaking, and every face in the team carried an invisible question mark. None of them dared imagine what the sentence fully meant.

Controlling one beast was already groundbreaking to them and something unheard of for a mage. It broke rules they had understood their entire careers, rules about what a single fighter was supposed to be capable of. And judging by his words, he intended to do this again, and again, to build something out of the very beasts that ruled this frozen waste.

If he could control one so easily, and he clearly could, then the question wasn’t whether he could control another.

It was how many.

Nina watched him from the corner of her eye.

She had thought she knew a lot about Moon. She had fought beside him in the first S-Rank gate, had seen him hold a team together through horrors that should have broken them, had watched him do impossible things when impossible was the only option left. She had walked out of that gate believing she understood, more or less, the kind of fighter he was.

Seeing him now made her feel like she had never seen anything at all.

Every time she thought she had the measure of him, he reached into his kit and pulled out something new.

He seemed to have a trick for every situation, an answer waiting for every dead-end, and just when she caught up to one revelation he was already three steps into the next.

She didn’t know how deep it went. She was starting to suspect nobody did.

Moon turned south again, the Arctif Fire-Prowler falling into step at his side, steam hissing off its hide as its paws melted the snow beneath it.

"Come on," he said. "The Stalkers avoid this territory for a reason. Where there’s one of these, there might be others."

He started walking and after a moment, the team followed silently.

Ten minutes later, the team ran into another beast of a different species.

It wasn’t an Arctic Fire-Prowler, but it was powerful in its own right, and Moon decided at a glance that it was worth adding to his growing collection.

[Arctic Grizzler]

[Details: A massive bear with ice affinity and extraordinary durability. Its thick hide and dense muscle let it shrug off blows that would cripple most beasts, and it can coat itself in armored ice to reinforce its already formidable body. Slow but nearly immovable.]

The Grizzler wasn’t a counter to the frozen horde the way the fire Prowler was. Its ice affinity made it kin to the Stalkers and Creepers rather than their predator. But its durability was a very important trait that Moon found useful to the team.