Chapter 737: Fruitless Struggle [II / Bonus - ]

Chapter 737: Fruitless Struggle [II / Bonus Chapter]

The Frost Mage didn’t wait. She swept two fingers across a glowing page of her spellbook and pointed them at the Swordsman’s sabers.

"Frozen Edge!"

KSSSSHHH!

A skin of living ice crawled over both curved blades and sharpened itself into a hissing serrated edge, and the Swordsman’s grin turned savage behind his scarf.

To the right the Spear Lancer dropped into a sprinter’s crouch.

His skysteel lance began to spin between his armored palms with a high whine, faster and faster, until the grooves along the shaft screamed.

FWOOOSH!

"Skybreaker Spiral!"

He kicked off the flagstones in an explosive lunge that shattered the paving under his heels.

This wasn’t the straight Comet... He drove the lance forward in a corkscrew of wind three layers deep, a drill of white and silver light aimed straight for the creature’s throat, dense enough to bore through two feet of solid granite.

At the same moment the Swordsman slid low across the frost from the left flank with his ice-sheathed sabers trailing two arcs of white rime.

SHHHHHHK!

"Twin Fang... Winter’s Cross!"

He snapped both arms outward in two crossing cuts, then spun and cut again.

Four crescents of freezing wind tore off the steel and flew in tandem with the Lancer’s charge, a pincer of drilling wind and slicing frost closing from both sides...

From the rear, still under the curve of the Bastion Wall, the Archer drew his longbow until the dark yew bent nearly double.

This time he set no frost crystal on the string as he set his own mana, compressed into a single blinding blue point.

"Frost Comet Shot!"

THWIP!

The arrow didn’t split.

It flew as one screaming streak of compressed cold that left a tunnel of frozen air behind it, aimed for the dead center of the creature’s skull...

And behind them all the Frost Mage slapped her spellbook open to a new page with her eyes burning pale cyan.

CRACK!

"Glacial Prison!"

Jagged pillars of permafrost erupted from the earth around the entity’s legs and snapped shut like the jaws of an iron trap, sealing it to the knees in three tons of solid ice...

The trap, the barrier, the blessings, the arrow and both blades arrived inside the same heartbeat.

The purple entity didn’t make a sound.

It stood buried to the knees in the Glacial Prison with its outline rippling like oil poured over water as its arms hung limp at its sides like empty sleeves in a breeze that didn’t exist.

Then its neck snapped.

CRACK!

With a sick jerk that no skeleton should allow, its head turned all the way around until its faceless purple front stared straight backward over its spine.

The Skybreaker Spiral struck.

The spinning skysteel tip hit the creature square in the center of the chest which was a blow that should have punched through its torso and blown its spine out the other side.

CHING!

There was no explosion of gore as the entity didn’t even slide back an inch.

The lance tip met the rubbery purple skin and the whole monstrous force of the charge simply died... The three layers of wind collapsed into a pathetic puff of gray dust.

’What?!’ the Spear Lancer’s mind screamed as the feedback reversed and drove the butt of the lance back into his own chest like a mule kick. ’It didn’t deflect it! It didn’t absorb it! Where did the force go?!’

Before he could pull his weapon back, the entity’s left arm gave a twitch.

Its long purple fingers, without visible knuckles, closed over the shaft of the lance with the indifference of a clerk picking up a pencil.

SNAP!

The hardened skysteel broke cleanly in half like dry kindling, however the Twin Fang crescents hit a heartbeat later and raked across the creature’s neck and shoulder.

SKRRRRRR!

The steel struck and shrieked but the edges didn’t bite.

The ice-sheathed sabers slid off the rubbery purple surface as if they were scraping greased diamonds and threw up showers of dull violet sparks... The frost was flung back along the blades and froze the Swordsman’s own gauntlets in a sudden white crust.

’It has no grain!’ the Swordsman thought in rising panic with his wrists jarred to the bone. ’There’s no muscle to cut! It’s like slashing empty water!’

The Frost Comet Shot struck the back of the creature’s turned head.

THOOM!

The arrow simply stopped against the purple skin and crumbled into cold gray ash, and its tunnel of frozen air drifted apart behind it like breath on a window.

From the terrace Elora watched the second wave fall apart with her heart slamming against her ribs.

’It ignored the charge... It broke the lance with one hand... It didn’t even notice the arrow?!’

Her breath came in ragged burning gasps and the cold in her lungs turned her spit to slush.

She forced more mana into the spellbook, and the cyan light flared so brightly that it scorched the sleeves of her City Lord robes.

The frost on the ground had spread sixty yards and was creeping toward the edge of the parade ground, but the spell still screamed for more.

’I need more time,’ she thought desperately, her nails biting into her palms until blood welled up and froze before it could drip. ’Just a little more! Hold on! Please, just hold on!’

The entity stood among the broken weapons with its head still twisted backward over its shoulder then it moved.

CRRRK!

The ice pillars around its legs turned to black rotten slush and fell apart without melting, as if whatever governed its body had simply decided they weren’t there.

The entity twitched forward.

Between one blink and the next it was no longer ten yards away... It stood right in front of the Spear Lancer with its purple chest an inch from his face.

The Lancer dropped the broken haft and grabbed for the short-sword at his hip.

’Too close!’ the Lancer thought.

THUMP!

The entity just leaned forward and bumped its chest against his breastplate with the lazy weight of a drunk tripping on a tavern step.

CRACK!

The golden blessings around the Lancer’s chest shattered into fading amber smoke as his steel plate caved three inches inward with a metal shriek!

"Guh...!"

His eyes rolled back.

He flew twenty feet across the frosted flagstones, skipping like a flat stone over water, before he slammed into the wall of the stables and slid down into a limp heap of dented armor.

...One down.

"Hold the line!" the Shield Knight bellowed, stepping forward to cover the fallen Lancer with the straining Bastion Wall. "Cleric, mend him! Swordsman, flank it!"

The Frost Mage was already moving.

Her spellbook’s pages whirled in a fluttering blur, and the air above her filled with long jagged shards of blue ice, a dozen of them, then two dozen, every one as long as a spear and hooked at the tip like a wolf’s fang.

"Rimefang Barrage!"

FWISH! FWISH! FWISH! FWISH!

The ice spears ripped down at the entity in a screaming line, one after another, so fast that the frost trails behind them blurred into a single white streak... They were meant to pin it, to slow it, to give the Cleric’s light time to reach the Lancer but the entity didn’t even turn around.

The shards hit its back and shoulders and burst apart one by one into glittering powder like snowballs thrown against a castle wall.

TSK! TSK! TSK!

Not one of them left a mark.

’Nothing...’ the Frost Mage thought, her spellbook trembling in her grip. ’Not even a scratch... What are we fighting?’

’I have to buy the Cleric three seconds,’ the Swordsman thought with blood roaring in his ears.

He shifted his grip on the sabers and ignored the frostbite numbing his fingers. ’Draw it to me... Take the hit on the parry and don’t let it touch the priest!’

He lunged in and carved deep grooves through the rime.

He didn’t waste a technique this time, the man relied on pure drilled swordsmanship and threw a blinding flurry of quick testing thrusts at the entity’s eyes, throat and hip joints.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

The entity bent sideways at an impossible ninety-degree angle, its waist folding like soft wax, and slipped the first three strikes with jerky twitches.

Then, as the Swordsman whipped his right saber around in a horizontal sweep, its left arm snapped upward.

CLACK!

Two rubbery purple fingers pinched the razor edge of the blade as the Swordsman’s momentum died on the spot and hundreds of pounds of force froze dead in midair.

’It caught the edge with bare skin?!’ the Swordsman’s mind shrieked as he strained with every ounce of strength to rip the blade free. ’It won’t move! It’s like it’s set into a mountain...!’

The entity’s smooth featureless face slowly turned toward him.

It had no eyes, yet the Swordsman felt the crushing weight of an ancient gaze bore straight through him and strip his courage away like meat from a bone.

’No... please...’

The entity’s right arm twitched and slowly rose. Its palm was open, flat and relaxed.

"Break away!" the Archer screamed from forty paces back, loosing three quick arrows at the creature’s wrist. "Jump back! Let the steel go!"

’I can’t!’ the Swordsman thought. A strange icy static was crawling up the blade into his hands. ’My hands won’t open!’

The entity’s open palm touched his forehead... It was a gentle, almost tender press of rubbery purple flesh against his brow.

SPLAT!

A sound like an overripe melon hitting the cobblestones echoed across the courtyard.

The force inside the Swordsman’s head simply turned itself inside out as a violent spray of black and crimson burst backward out of his helmet and painted the clean blue rime with steaming blood.

The twin sabers fell from his limp hands and clattered against the stone.

CLANG!

His body stayed upright for one horrible second as the fingers twitched once then he pitched forward into the red slush, dead before his knees hit the ground.

On the terrace Elora choked back a strangled shriek with her stomach heaving so hard that bile rose into her throat.

’Killed... He killed him.’

The Swordsman had guarded her carriage on the road to the garrison.

He had laughed around the fire two nights ago while he sharpened those very blades and in a fraction of a second, with no weapon, no chant and not a single breath of effort, he had been squashed like a beetle under an uncaring heel.

’No, no, no, no!’ Elora’s mind screamed, tears of helpless rage freezing on her eyelashes. ’Faster! Break through! Why won’t the spell settle?!’

The frost around her was howling now, a five-yard vortex of pure cold.

Her fingers had turned white, and the blood in her left hand was failing completely as the spellbook drank from her own body to feed the spell.

The cyan light was blinding, throwing jagged shadows across the terrace wall.

...There was only a fifth of the spell left to weave, just a fifth.

’Hold on!’ she begged silently with her eyes fixed on the four Heroes still standing. ’Don’t fight it alone! Fall back to the gate! Fall back!’

They couldn’t hear her... The roar of her own gathering mana drowned out every sound.

"You bastard!" the Shield Knight roared, with tears of fury streaming down his weathered cheeks under the visor.

He didn’t retreat because he really couldn’t... Behind him stood the Cleric, the Frost Mage and the Archer, and behind them stood their Lady.

If he broke, the whole defense would collapse in seconds.

He advanced in heavy desperate strides and raised the tower shield, pouring every drop of mana left in his core into the steel.

BOOM!

"Bastion Wall... Overdrive!"

The sapphire dome collapsed inward and condensed into a flat solid slab of force four inches thick, hovering just in front of the shield’s face and burning with blue fire.

He lowered his shoulder, put all seven feet of his weight behind the metal and drove the shield into the entity with the force of an avalanche.

’I’ll crush you against the stone,’ the Shield Knight thought, the veins bulging in his neck. ’Even if my arms shatter, I’ll pin you until the Lady fires!’

"Saint’s Burden!" the Cleric shouted behind him, and slammed his open palm against the knight’s back.

FWOOM!

Golden fire poured out of the Cleric’s hand and soaked into the blackened plate.

The knight’s charge doubled in weight as his boots tore twin trenches through the frozen flagstones, and the slab of force in front of him blazed from blue to white as the Cleric’s own strength was poured into it!

’Take all of it,’ the Cleric thought, his knees buckling as the light drained out of him. ’Take everything I have, brother!’

BANG!

The shield slammed into the entity’s chest and the air between them detonated in a flat gray ring of shockwave that blew the slush off the flagstones for thirty yards... however the entity didn’t budge an inch.

It stood there with its purple chest pressed to the glowing slab of force, twitching once then it lifted its right leg.

CRACK!

It gave the bottom rim of the tower shield one short lazy kick and the barrier, built to take siege fire, shattered like a thin windowpane.

SKRRRRR!