Chương 43: The Elder Words

Stelle stood with her black blade held loose at her side, watching the beast at the center. Elsie had already spent everything she had. Whatever ritual reserve of mana she'd been rationing across the fight, it was gone now, burned down to nothing—she could no longer restore anyone, could barely keep herself upright between the others' shoulders. Around her, the survivors stood in a ragged half-circle, exhausted past the point where exhaustion still felt like the primary problem. They had already done their best...

but if they continued like this, none of them would survive. Stelle thought, running the calculation back one final time. It had bought them this much distance, this much survival against a horde of Blood Tribe warriors that should have overwhelmed them twice over by now. But she was honest enough with herself to recognize the difference between winning and simply not yet having lost. These were not weak fighters. Doran, Gareth, Marlon—every one of them carried genuine skill and years of hard-earned experience.

Against ordinary Tier 1 and Tier 2 threats, numbers alone would never have been enough to break them. But against an Ancient beast, none of that mattered at all. Regeneration. She turned the mechanic over with cold precision. It pulled directly from the snow around it, rebuilding whatever damage they managed to inflict. In a desert. On bare stone. Somewhere without an endless field of frozen fuel stretching in every direction—there, perhaps, they'd have stood a real chance.

Here, on a mountain that was nothing but snow from base to peak, the creature had an essentially infinite well to draw from. A terrifying thing to fight anywhere. Here, it was closer to unkillable.

"MOVE!" Doran's voice cracked across the group, already breaking into a dead run.

"We can't fight this thing—we push through, now, before it decides to stop watching!" Stelle inhaled, breathing out a slow fog of cold air, and made her decision with the same detached clarity she applied to everything. I didn't intervene earlier out of conscience. I intervened because I still need more of them alive than not. The logic held now exactly as it had then.

"Doran," she said, her voice cutting cold and flat across the ice. The group stopped, turning toward the small figure at the sound of it.

"Head for the treeline where the Blood Tribe came from," she said.

"There's likely a path out from there—they didn't walk onto this lake from nowhere."

"Kid! What the hell are you—" Doran started.

"Survive. That's what you wanted, isn't it?" She cut him off before he could finish.

"Once I engage, carry the injured and go. Haland, Gareth, Lidia, Sable—stay a moment longer. When the beast starts climbing the cliff, I need the two ranged fighters slowing it down along its path. At least ten minutes before the rest of you leave as well."

"What are you trying to do?" Marlon asked, disbelief plain on his face even as he kept listening, kept weighing her words despite himself.

"I'll hold its attention as long as I can. Go first."

"Are you out of your MIND?!!" Doran's fury broke fully loose, already stepping toward her. The beast moved again towards their position. Stelle didn't wait for the argument to resolve. She was already running. Each step landed silent against the ice, her speed climbing past anything the group had seen from her before.

She closed the distance in seconds, ingulfing herself with dark fire before vanishing into the beast's own shadow, then reappearing at its flank with a fast slash across its lower leg—shallow, barely more than an irritation, but enough to draw its attention fully onto her. It answered with a downward slam of one massive fist.

She used the opening it created, leaping onto the arm buried wrist-deep in the frozen ground, and drove a fast spin toward both its eyes, blinding it for the space of a single, critical breath.

"She's fast," Gareth murmured, unable to look away, the whole group frozen in place watching a fight none can expect to see. Doran started forward, some instinct overriding everything he'd just agreed to, until a hand caught his arm.

"Doran!" Aroy's voice cracked out, rough and unpracticed after days spent barely speaking at all, the sudden force of it startling everyone who remembered exactly how far into himself he'd retreated after the rescue. Whatever had finally broken through the fog he'd been carrying, it burned clear and sharp now, entirely present.

"Are you still trying to be the hero here?! That girl already made her choice—she told us to go!"

"But—""Look at them!" Aroy snapped, gesturing at the exhausted, bleeding remainder of the group.

"You're the leader. Don't let whatever you're carrying get the rest of us killed on top of it." The words landed harder than they should have. Doran's jaw tightened, some old weight settling behind his eyes, and he didn't argue further.

"Doran, let's move!" Marlon was already hauling Elsie's arm across his shoulders.

"This is the only chance she's giving us." Lidia readied her crossbow with hands that hadn't fully stopped shaking.

"She said slow it down. I think she's planning something." She glanced sideways.

"Sable—can you still manage it?" Sable looked out at the small, distant figure holding an Ancient beast's full attention entirely alone, and found something left to answer with despite everything already spent.

"I'll give it everything I have." Out on the open ice, it wasn't really a fight anymore. It was Stelle refusing to let the beast's attention land anywhere but her. Good. They're moving. She caught the retreat at the edge of her vision, some of them already shrinking toward the treeline behind her. Now the next stage.

She triggered [Simulation Sequence], and let herself become as deliberately, thoroughly irritating as the beast's own patience could bear—vanishing, reappearing, cutting shallow, meaningless wounds that cost it nothing but attention, until its low, grinding growl climbed into something closer to genuine rage. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. She used that rage.

Ducking beneath a wide, furious punch, she bridged herself up onto its back, and the Guardian, feeling her weight land there, twisted its entire massive frame to swing its arm around after her. She let the motion carry her clear, launching herself into open air directly into its line of sight—an opening too obvious for it to resist. Its roar built before the fist came, a full, committed blow aimed to end things outright. Stelle didn't dodge.

She triggered [Frost Manifestation] instead, crystallizing a thin, hardened plate of ice across both feet, and met the incoming fist with her boots braced flat against it.

The impact arrived a half-second later, the ice shattering entirely under the force, but the angle held long enough to redirect the worst of it—her body absorbing just enough of the blow to convert its violence into momentum, and she was thrown, not crushed, hurled skyward in a single violent arc before a dark purple fire folded around her and vanished from the beast's reach entirely.

Above on the cliff, the shaman watched the whole exchange with the bored, unbothered patience of someone certain of the ending already. He saw the girl leap. He judged, with the same casual certainty, that it was already over. Then he felt it. Frost mana, sudden and unmistakable, blooming from somewhere far too close to be coincidence—and something in the signature struck a note his own blood recognized before his mind fully caught up to the recognition. His eyes went wide for a moment.

Then dark purple fire arrived a heartbeat later, directly in front of him, a black blade materializing out of the flame and closing on his throat before he'd finished processing the threat at all. He twisted, barely, and the blade caught him regardless—a deep slash carving across his neck, blood welling out in a startling, unmistakable shade of pale blue.

Stelle landed a short distance away, momentum bleeding off in a controlled roll, her eyes glowing cold blue in the fading shroud of black fire still curling off her shoulders. The elder raised his staff, channeling mana with hands that weren't quite steady anymore, his composure cracking at last. Looking at the sudden appearance of a threat. The girl readies her blade.

Earlier, she used the momentum of the Guardian's attack to launch herself into the air, calculating her position by predicting it with her [Simulation Sequence]. Below, the Guardian went suddenly still, its head snapping upward as though something had struck it from the inside. It looked toward the cliff, some deep, wordless certainty already driving it into motion before it began to threw its massive frame at the rock wall, claws finding purchase as it began to climb.

A whistling sound cut through the air a heartbeat later—Lidia's bolt, catching the stone beneath its grip and detonating in a thunder burst that nearly tore it loose from the wall entirely. A fire blade followed a half-second after, Sable's strike scorching across its clawed hand and driving it back down.

"Five minutes, we will give her more than that!," Lidia muttered, already reloading. Sable readied another cast, breathing hard. The beast surged upward again, ignoring the two women entirely now, desperate only to reach the cliff's top. They intercepted it a second time, pouring what remained of their reserves into holding it there, buying time neither of them were certain they actually had left to spend.

On the cliff itself, the shaman answered Stelle's advance with a volley of ice spikes, easily dodged, easily deflected. She read him clearly within the first few exchanges— Manipulator the one that controlling the beast below spoke to genuine, formidable power. But that power lived almost entirely in the bond he held over something else. Stripped of the beast, forced into direct combat himself, his technique carried nowhere near the same weight. She closed the distance and struck at his side.

He was fast enough to avoid the worst of it, but not fast enough to avoid all of it. He answered by dissolving into mist, his body scattering into the wind, fleeing along the rock in a blur no ordinary eye could have tracked. Stelle didn't let him escape. Her [Quantum Optics] caught the signature beneath the mist without difficulty, her eyes locked and glowing with cold focus. Then, a shadow-purple fire roared out from her lantern hanging in her waist to meet it directly.

The burning wave melted snow across the stone as the mist ignited and lost its shape entirely, sending the shaman's true form crashing back down, already burning. He tried to wash the fire out with a hurried snow spell. She was already closing the distance before it finished forming, her black blade wreathed in the same shadow-fire, and the strike that followed dropped him to his knees with a scream torn straight from something far older than pain alone. Stelle stood over him, blade raised, ready to end it.

"You...," he rasped. She stops, her blade hovering as her mind catches hard on the words, analyzing its sudden ability to talk.

"Lilian's descendant... You carry that." He continue.

"What did you say?" Stelle hearing the remark.

"You carry Lilian's mana. Don't you." Silent, with no words to follow, she has no answer she can give. The elder laughed—a broken, furious sound.

"Lilian...!! You traitor!. You cursed your own people!" Stelle went very still.

"That woman!," he spat, dragging himself half-upright against the stone, "made the lives of the Snow Fae a living hell. And you humans—you dare to worship her. A disgrace. A half-blood traitor to everything she was ever born to!" She didn't understand the words he was throwing at her. But the hatred behind them was real enough that no framework in her archive could dismiss it as anything but genuine. Lilian. A traitor.

Her mind turned the phrase over, again and again, failing to reconcile it against everything the Lost Sage's chronicle had told her—the resting maiden, the sacrifice, the frost that never fully stopped reaching outward. The distraction cost her. The shaman surged upward with the last of his strength, a fresh spell already forming, and a wall of blizzard-force wind slammed into her before she'd finished processing his last words, throwing her backward across the stone.

"I will kill you!" he said, rising fully now, swaying but standing.

"And every human who ever prayed to her name!" Stelle in the distance, injured but still standing, looks at him.

"I have no idea what anger you hold toward what's inside me… but I will not be the one who dies here." Something cold gathered around the elder then, thick enough to feel as pressure rather than temperature, and he turned, too slow, to find the source of it. Behind him, a floating dark lantern appears.

"Ember." The lantern answered with everything it had left, dark violet fire tearing outward in a single, roaring wall that swallowed the whole cliff-top in flame, the air itself seeming to catch and burn. The elder's body scorched black beneath it, his scream tearing loose and holding far longer than it should have, his hand still reaching, uselessly, for the staff he could no longer lift.

Stelle held the flow steady, pouring the last true reserves she had into keeping it burning, until finally his body collapsed, blackened and still, fused half into the scorched stone beneath him. She sank to her knees, her own wounds still bleeding freely into the melted snow. [SYSTEM] [Energy Reserves: 6%.] She looked at the corpse for a long moment, his last words still sitting somewhere she hadn't found a way to file yet. A traitor. She cursed her own people. The Snow Fae.

She turned the pieces over, slow and unresolved. Are the Blood Tribe... the Snow Fae? Was Lilian truly— A massive hand closed over the cliff's edge before she could finish the thought. The Guardian pulled itself up, slow and deliberate, its gaze sweeping first across the scorched stone, then settling on its master's blackened remains. Below, at the frozen lake, Sable and Lidia knelt in the cold floor, drained past the point of standing on their own.

Haland and Gareth reached them a moment later, hauling them upright between shoulders that had nothing left to spare either, already retreating toward the trail the first group had taken.

"What's happening up there?" Sable asked, her voice thin.

"We don't know," Haland said grimly.

"But you already gave everything you had. We need to move." At the top of the cliff, the beast finally turned its full attention on Stelle. She understood, in the same instant, exactly what she was looking at. The elder had been a Manipulator, it's Master—and a beast bound between the two that can't be simply dissolve the moment that master died. If anything, the severing of it seemed to be doing the opposite. It roared, a sound that cracked the air itself, and its body began to change.

Violet spikes tore upward along its spine. The corruption that had once claimed only half its frame spread now across the whole of it, consuming what little remained pale and untouched, until nothing was left that resembled anything it might once have been. Its mouth dripped violet saliva. Its eyes burned a solid, furious purple, dark veins pulsing visibly beneath skin gone entirely wrong. Stelle had no strength left to fight it. She had no choice at all, except to run. The beast followed.