Chương 28: Chucking Mountains

To say that Sint was a smidge surprised that the Trials hadn't been called off was a gross understatement. She was of half a mind to lodge a formal complaint with the academy administration once she got out of the dome of Living Mana. Her mouth curled. That's what people here did when they were faced with these sorts of situations, right? This wasn't the wilderness of Revorel where there was no law greater than that of who was predator and who was prey.

It was one of the reasons moving to Vyrd, to Arcoryx Academy, had appealed to Sint so much. So, if she was to take advantage of giving up everything she had left behind, then she might as well make use of every lever she had available, no matter how foreign they felt at first. Sint trudged through the snowy debris with her comrades. At least Kendren had finally managed to pull Alendra down from her acrophobic perch. The world shattered around them, and they were forced to stop for a few heartbeats.

Sint growled out a curse. This sort of challenge was beyond them. They were weathering magical lightning that froze everything it touched, trying to survive a wintry onslaught that included avalanches that were flying at them as much as they were landsliding in devastatingly. Sint shuddered to think what would have happened had Ryland not been there… She took a peek at the spell circle etched onto the translucent barriers Ryland had erected over them all before disappearing.

The Centreglyph's Tier had her staring yet again. That was beyond Tier [10], beyond Tier [15] even as far as she was aware. It proved it was just as high a Tier as it seemed. When the next freezing bolt landed right on Sint, she didn't even flinch. Her eyes were forced to squint in the brightness, but Ryland's spell just flared, and when the light cleared, everything was as it had been. Well, her surroundings were frozen solid, but Sint herself was perfectly fine.

Alendra applying her [Environmental Control] alongside Ryland's barrier ensured that the conditions weren't fatal. She was struggling to maintain it, though. They needed to reconstruct the Designated Area fast. Sint shook her head as she helped Kendren discover the first post and secure it. She kept getting surprised that the strands of her mane that had escaped her cowl weren't freezing solid. A part of her wanted to wonder how in the world was Ryland's magic that powerful. But then, this was nothing new for him.

Sint had seen it enough to get over her surprise, her shock, her sheer awe at what he was capable of already. Hadn't she? Regardless, there were more important things afoot.

"I can't keep the ground stable while also protecting us from the cold," Alendra said. She was right. If the temperature was warm enough to prevent the sleeting, freezing rain from frosting everything, it was also turning everything runny and unstable. Sint's feet kept slipping, even after Kendren had cast a Glyph of Stability enhancement over them all. He was surprisingly adept with his enhancement Glyphs.

"Then we'll just have to be fast," Sint said. She had already located the second fencepost they needed to draw in. Alendra didn't look convinced.

"Sure. Fast enough to prevent the fenceposts from slipping away too."

"Not to worry," Kendren said.

"My Glyph of Reinforcement can keep them upright for a bit." He chugged down a mana potion from his pack. It was a bit surprising, but of all of them, he was the one who had used up the most mana. As they drew in the second fencepost, Sint found an opposing team doing the same. They had secured one of the posts too. For a second, Sint tensed. If needed, she'd fight them for the post, then place it where it needed to go. But the other team—with the House Flitchard ass—just nodded and followed them along. Right.

There was no need for infighting, no matter how much of a jerk that brat from House Flitchard had been. Honestly, Sint was impressed at the barrier spells they were using. One of the Subglyphs of their spell circle was a Glyph of Link. They were using it to amplify all three of their barriers by sharing each other's power. Not a bad tactic. Still, they moved much closer to Sint's team and under the protective cover of Alendra's warmth. Sint didn't blame them for it one bit.

And then Kendren threw a firebomb into their flour granary.

"You know," he said, stepping forward. There was a look on his face Sint hadn't seen before. A look of tight, barely-controlled fury.

"I'm not just good with blessings and enhancements. I'm great with debilitations too." Several Glyphs of Delay emerged from him to fly at Flitchard's team. They cried out, unable to react in time before the Glyphs struck.

"Yooooouuuu aaaasssssss," Flitchard shouted, his whole body moving almost comically slow now. For all that his barrier spell was manufactured to stop the effects of the storm, it clearly didn't leave room to stop debilitation Glyphs.

"Iiiiiiiii shhhhooooouuuu—""Oh, shut it, you prick." A Tier [4] Glyph of Empowerment burned on his forearm. He was about to launch himself at the other team, but then, Alendra held him back.

"Kendren," she said.

"Stop it! Now isn't the time." He didn't fly off the handle and jump at Flitchard's group, which Sint honestly considered admirable restraint. That said, his face easily confessed that he really would have loved to do nothing more than take advantage of their weakened state.

"It's the least they deserve." A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Yes, but not now. Our main priority is surviving this mess." She was right. Sint looked around, noting that a few other teams who hadn't been blown away had now grown extremely wary. No surprise there. Seeing Kendren turn on a team that was ostensibly assisting them would undoubtedly make everyone else doubt their intentions. For who would dare to trust them if they ended up turning on the people trying to assist them? Especially in the middle of this insane mess?

And it wasn't like Sint could blame Kendren or anything. The fact that he had held it all inside for this long was a testament to his ability to prioritize what was actually important. She didn't really blame him for finally letting loose. Unfortunately, the other teams clearly didn't feel the same way.

"I swear," Kendren said when he noticed their reactions. He rubbed the back of his head with an apologetic smile.

"I'm not even that violent of a person. It's just that, when you get punched in the guts for no good reason, you kind of need to hit back, right?" That really didn't do much to win anyone over to their side of the matter. If anything, the other teams were holding onto their fenceposts a little too tightly now. Sint sighed. She supposed she could blame Kendren for being too hasty. If he had just waited until the posts were all in place… Then they got a handy reminder of their actual priorities. The ground trembled.

Everyone stilled. When they weren't shaking, that was. It felt like the onset of yet another avalanche, perhaps even another case where the mountains shattered to rain debris upon them. Then a distant, titanic groan made them all pause.

"That's coming from the direction of the monster," Kendren said in a hushed, tense tone. Sint cursed. Then she did so again when the sky got blotted out. She could only stare as an enormous monstrosity covered the entirety of the expanse above them. Her mind needed a second or two to compute that the being Kendren had warned them about was here. It looked exactly as they had seen it in his picture. A living, breathing mountain that had come alive with obliterating fury. A colossal beast of Living Mana.

And it intended to slam down on them all with its apocalyptic fury.

"That—" someone shouted up from the ground.

"That thing's Mithril-ranked." Sint shook her head, her mouth working on its own.

"No. It—" She could feel it. She had seen this happen before.

"It's growing even stronger." The monster began shooting straight down at them, a vengeful meteor growing ever larger. Sint's heart quailed. She could hear panicked screams. She could feel the tension in the air spiking to a ridiculous degree. Beside her, both Kendren and Alendra had frozen in the face of a threat they could barely comprehend, much less actively try to counteract. Dead. They were dead. There wasn't a single thing any of them would be able to— The monster just stopped. She wasn't sure why.

None of them were. Despite the enormity of their gargantuan enemy, the blizzard around them hadn't really abated. The lightning was still blasting in, the rain now just came in sideways, and bits and pieces of ice slashed in at random intervals. All that made it nearly impossible to make out what was going on. Nearly. Sint was certain she had seen a black crack appear under that enormous creature. The sort of fracture that reminded her very, very specifically about a certain missing teammate of hers.

Then the monster was jerked to the right. Almost like it had been thrown to one side. No. That was impossible. Throwing literal living mountains around would need magical strength of the kind Sint had never seen before. She had a Glyph Empowerment at Tier [5], and she wasn't certain raising it by ten whole Tiers would have given her enough power to chuck mountains every which way with the same efficiency as her stilettos. The monster didn't fly off to one side after it was thrown, if it had been thrown.

Instead, it just disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived.

"The posts!" Alendra reminded them with a yell.

"Come on! We need to get them together. Now." Sint frowned. Wouldn't they need to find the rest to recreate the enclosure from earlier? Finding them turned out to be unnecessary because it had already been performed. Team Three and the group accompanying had recovered some of the posts. The remaining ones had been brought by the rest of the groups. Kendren's magic had worn off, so even Flitchard's group was assisting. Not that it was going to make any of them in Sint's team look at the brute in a positive light.

Calamity kissing prick. Flitchard did shoot Kendren terribly murderous looks, who returned it with no less ferocity. Thankfully, they were stowing their animosity away for now. The important bit was that they were done with their part. The fenceposts were back in place and there was even a faint shimmer, like the last vestiges of the translucent veil from earlier was trying to resurrect itself. Although, the storm around them kept intensifying.

More lightning flashed everywhere, more tremors threw several mages to the ground. Kendren and another candidate were half-running, half-crawling around as they applied Glyphs of Reinforcement to the fenceposts. None of which Sint paid attention to because her instincts were screaming, her senses tingling with a stimulus she couldn't ignore.

"Where in the Realms are you going?" Alendra yelled from behind.

"This power," Sint said as she forged up the incline, towards the ridge in the distance.

"Can't you feel it? It's like it's trying to crush my heart."

"Ignore it! The timer will end soon and we'll be—" Another thunderous bolt cut her off. Alendra was right to focus on their real goal of surviving this onslaught of wintry madness, but Sint wouldn't be satisfied if the full picture wasn't clear. She wouldn't be able to rest if she didn't know what in the name of the ever-living Calamities was Ryland doing out there. Things were so chaotic, Sint didn't really hear anything further from her teammates.

She was almost on her hands and knees by the time the ridge came into view. And then she stopped moving when she reached a point where she could finally see. Ryland was there, far off in the distance, barely perceptible. Who else could that tiny figure be? The monster was there too, glowing with the kind of icy power she had been feeling all this time. Then Ryland killed the monster in the most impossible way possible. A rift had cracked open in reality.

The widest rift Sint had seen yet, an expanse of darkness edged with auric fractures in reality. An ocean so huge her heart went still for a few moments. Their enemy didn't sink through the rift and disappear, as she had originally thought. Rather, a titanic spear of bone thrust out from underneath and impaled the mountain of a monster. That was… That was a spine. One that belonged to some long-forgotten giant—no, not any old giant or colossi or anything of the sort.

Those terms didn't suit a creature whose spinal column could probably have covered the entire Continental River on Revorel and then some. Because Sint was sure she was witnessing the merest spiking tip of the spine. A spine that Ryland controlled at will. Her eyes flashed with the crimson lightning blazing out of the immense monster that had speared so high above them all. Its scream made her eardrums thrum painfully, yet she couldn't move herself to clap her hands over the sides of her head.

In the presence of this… this insanity, a bit of bleeding in her ears was nothing. And the thing was, she was pretty sure no one else could see it. Not a single one of them had joined her at the ridge, a location where it was already terribly difficult to make out what was going on. She could barely gawk at the smudged, blurred sight of the monster raised far, far overhead by the tapering, bony end of the spine, bleeding out a rain of lava.

For a long moment, Sint just knelt there at the display of inconceivable power. She felt… tiny. Flabbergasted as she had been over and over during the course of the Trials, she had thought she had gotten over it. That she knew how ridiculous Ryland could be. It was hard to accept that Sint didn't know anything at all.