Chương 46: The Ice Wall

It had been hours since she left the ruins. Stelle had no choice but to keep climbing. The weather offered no mercy either—snow and wind battered her small frame, slowing her further with every gust. She could hear the Guardian somewhere behind her, already closing. The Blood Tribe had done everything they could to hold it back. It hadn't been enough to stop it entirely, only to buy her the head start she now had to spend. [Current reserves: 72%.] During the climb, and the brief time she'd spent inside the ruins, her core had finally recovered enough to matter. The Guardian closed the remaining distance in a single leap, its fist already swinging toward her. She managed to slip aside, but the impact still tore through the frozen ground where she'd been standing, the shockwave alone nearly enough to knock her from her feet. She fired the lantern's shadow-fire directly into its face, the explosion blooming bright against corrupted flesh. It barely slowed.

The beast simply pressed forward, raising both hands before slamming them into the ground, a burst of corrupted ice spikes tearing upward toward her position. She triggered [Simulation Sequence] for the barest fraction of a second the reserve could justify, just long enough to catch the one clear gap and throw herself through it. The beast didn't relent. She kept climbing between exchanges, dodging and countering in the same breath, until its mouth split open along the familiar seam. Here it comes again.

There was no dodging a frost beam clean. She triggered the lantern instead, dark violet fire roaring out to meet the beam head-on, melting it back before it could close the remaining distance. The moisture left hanging in the air gave her one more small advantage—enough to blur her outline, if only for a moment. I need to slow it down.

The beast screamed, a shockwave powerful enough to tear the mist apart entirely—but by the time it cleared, her figure was already gone from where it expected her, a fast blur of motion already opening a deep slash across its right eye. She fired the lantern again a heartbeat later, catching the second eye in the same burning arc. This should be enough until it recover eventually. But blindness still buys me time. She used the moment to put distance between them again.

The beast simply waited, its eyes healing slowly even as it stood there. By the time its sight returned, it located her again almost immediately, and the chase resumed again. It went on for hours—relentless pursuit against equally relentless evasion, neither side willing to stop first. But Stelle already understood this wasn't a fight she could win through attrition. She needed a way to stop it from chasing her at all, before her reserves ran out for good.

They reached a wide stretch of cliff eventually, and Stelle finally stopped, turning to face it directly. The Guardian answered with another burst of ice spikes tearing up from the ground. She moved without triggering Simulation Sequence this time, saving every remaining drop for what came next. She barely landed in a safe pocket between the spikes before dashing straight for the beast's flank—only for it to unleash a heavy blow that shattered stone and ice across her, tearing the skin along her side.

Her body bled freely, but she didn't stop, pressing the attack. Her blade found its corrupted hide in return, the cut shallow, doing almost nothing. The beast answered with sudden, violent fury—its body erupting in a spray of ice shards that caught her across the shoulder and left leg, driving her down hard into the snow before she managed to right herself. She gritted her teeth against the pain of the impaled ice still slowing her. That's a new move. First time I've seen it use that.

The beast was already moving again, slamming both hands down without warning. She twisted clear, but the force still caught her, sending her tumbling and rolling across the frozen ground. It leapt before she'd even fully recovered. She rolled clear again, the ground exploding where she'd landed a moment before, the Guardian's attention already snapping back toward her small, retreating shape.

Stelle scanned the terrain, searching for the exact spot she'd already marked in her mind, and spotted it—the base of a sheer rock wall further along the slope. She dashed for it without hesitation. The beast roared and charged after her, its massive frame closing fast. She stopped at the place then check her reserves. [Current reserves: 70%.] She'd managed to hold her usage tight enough during the chase to let her reserves tick slightly upward again. She'd need every fraction of it for what came next.

The beast lunged. She dodged, letting its full weight crash into the rock wall hard enough to shake the whole face of it, then leapt onto its back and struck at the base of its skull, doing everything she could to feed its rage. It slammed its body against the wall again, swinging both massive arms back toward her. She sprang clear, catching the stone above and hanging from it, just far enough out of reach that its arms couldn't quite close the distance.

The beast, seeing the gap, opened its mouth instead, charging its frost beam once more. Stelle didn't retreat this time. She dropped from the wall and lunged straight toward its open jaw, hanging directly in its path as the beam built to full charge. The beam released, and a wall of mist swallowed the entire area, the attack holding until it finally exhausted itself.

Where the Guardian expected a frozen girl, it found her instead wreathed in dark violet flame, her own skin scorching under the strain of holding the cold at bay. She'd spent more reserve on that alone than she'd wanted to, but there had been no cleaner option available. She ignored the pain and reached into her Spatial Inventory, pulling Cael's preserved body free in a single motion.

She shoved it directly into the Guardian's open mouth, forcing its jaw to close on something solid, then triggered [Frost Manifestation] to freeze the corpse rigid in the same instant while holding it, wedging its jaw open just long enough. She let the lantern float free, then kicked it forward like a thrown stone, straight down the beast's throat.

The Guardian's jaw finally crushed shut, nearly catching her hand in the process, but its claw caught her a moment later, rupturing her body before throwing her hard into a stone outcropping. She dropped to her knees, coughing blood, and felt something new stirring inside the fresh wounds—thin, dark purple veins beginning to spread outward from the torn flesh. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. [WARNING] [Highly dangerous radiation detected.] [Temporarily halting energy regeneration to protect the system core from corruption.] The claws carry it, she realized, forcing herself back to her feet, eyes still fixed on the beast. It's already inside my wounds. I won't be gathering any more energy after this. But I can't miss this chance. She didn't let the thought slow her down.

"Ember!" A surge of energy poured out of her and into the lantern inside the beast. Its stomach began to swell almost immediately, distended from the inside. She kept pouring and refusing to stop. [Current reserves: 63%.] [Current reserves: 45%.] [Current reserves: 28%.] She continue. The beast's stomach strained further with every passing second, unable to release the pressure building inside it fast enough to survive it. [Current reserves: 10%.] [Current reserves: 5%.] [WARNING] [Further energy consumption will result in system shutdown.] She kept going regardless, until the pressure finally exceeded whatever the Guardian's body could contain, and its stomach tore open from within in a single, violent burst. The sound of it cracked across the mountainside. Stelle was thrown like a ragdoll, bouncing hard off the mountainside before finally coming to rest against the frozen ground, her body scorched, bones cracked from the impact.

She didn't waste time and crawled, dragging herself toward the nearest rock and bracing against it, watching the Guardian's hollowed stomach already beginning its slow, stubborn recovery where it lay. Then the mountain itself answered the blast. A low, building rumble rolled through the slope above them, snow already beginning to shear loose along the ridge where the explosion's shockwave had finally destabilized it past holding.

Within seconds, a full avalanche tore down the mountainside, and the Guardian, still too consumed with its own recovery to react in time, had nothing left to do but be carried down with it. [Current reserves: 0%.] [System shutting down.] Stelle pressed herself flat against the rock, holding on with everything she had left, refusing to be swept away with it. The world roared white and formless around her until finally, the shaking stopped, and the mountain fell quiet again.

She dragged herself up from beneath the settled snow, using the stone to climb back to her feet, and looked out over the cliff where the beast had fallen. She had no way of knowing whether it fall completely. There was no time left to find out either way. She turned back toward the peak, and kept climbing. Her body was a ruin by any measure that mattered—burned, corrupted, broken enough that each breath came shallow and hard-won. Without energy left to draw on, her wounds had stopped healing entirely.

She kept moving anyway, certain that whatever else still hunted this mountain wouldn't wait for her to recover before finding her again. An hour passed. Her core refused to charge, no matter how she coaxed it. The corruption crept steadily higher, past her shoulder now, climbing toward her throat with the same patient inevitability it had shown from the very first wound.

Each step grew heavier than the last, the wind driving into her from every direction at once, as though the mountain itself carried a personal grudge against her continued presence on it. She didn't know, honestly, how she was still moving at all. Only instinct remained—some deep, stubborn refusal buried beneath everything else that had already failed her, keeping her feet moving long after any reasonable calculation would have called the attempt finished. She had no core to trigger a rapid evolution with.

No emergency reserve deep enough to wake her hibernating system on its own. Her vision blurred at the edges, her body sinking toward a cold that no longer felt like an old, comfortable companion, and somewhere in the numbness spreading through her bare feet and fingers, frostbite began its own slow, quiet work alongside the corruption. Minutes stretched into hours. The little girl kept walking without stopping, the sky darkening overhead, the snowfall thickening around her with every mile.

Her feet had blistered raw beneath the frost by the time she noticed them at all, and still her stride never fully broke. Day passed, and the agony never let up. The pain. The exhaustion. The hopelessness, she understood for the first time. Will I die here? her own mind kept asking her, over and over. The beast might not have found her again yet. It might already be somewhere else entirely, causing whatever ruin it still had left in it to cause. That knowledge did nothing to improve her own condition either way.

Half her face had already surrendered to the corruption—her left eye gone dark, a violet glow pulsing faintly where her pupil should have been, thin lines of the same sick color threading beneath the skin of her cheek like veins carrying something that had never belonged inside her to begin with. She looked up at the peak. Still so far away. Her burned skin had begun freezing over, and the toes beneath it had already gone dark and hardened past feeling.

Another days passed, and then another, before the ground finally leveled out into open space above the last ridge. She saw the wall first as nothing more than a strange formation—too vast to be anything but a barrier built with purpose. She walked toward it, one slow step at a time, until she stood close enough to press her remaining hand flat against its frozen surface. This is the wall separating me from the Saint. She remembered the old chronicle—the Sage using some forbidden technique to part it.

She had no idea how he'd actually done it, only that he had. She had no plan for what came next beyond the single, but an obvious answer sitting at the edge of her thinning awareness— [Frost Manifestation], the only power she owned that connected to whatever waited on the other side of this ice door. But that choice wasn't available to her anymore. She didn't have the faintest trace of mana left to spend.

Her system had already slipped into hibernation, quiet and unreachable, exactly the way it was designed to when nothing remained worth protecting. She fell. The cold ground caught her without ceremony, and for a long, formless stretch of time, she simply lay there, breath shallow, barely present enough to register her own thoughts as they drifted past. Is someone going to save me? No one was. She had chosen this—no. Someone else had chosen this for her, in some sense she still hadn't fully untangled.

To chase a trace no one else could see. To carry a burden that was never truly hers to begin with, and a wish she still didn't fully understand. All of it folded into an ending this unreasonable, waiting for her from the very beginning, whether the choice had ever really belonged to her at all. I can't fall here. Not yet. It's too short... countless years of nothing, and only two months of finally living.

She had slept for what might have been millions of years, sealed inside a crystal crossing a distance she still didn't fully understand, waiting for a world worth waking up into. And now, after all of that unimaginable patience, it would end here—taken from her in a handful of months instead, on a mountain that didn't know or care what she'd survived to reach it. It was disappointing. She hadn't understood the actual weight of being alive until she was already losing it.

Meeting people who mattered to her without meaning to. Learning things her own archive had never possessed to begin with. Traveling somewhere simply out of curiosity, for no reason beyond wanting to see it. Small, ordinary things and had never once let her actually feel until these last few months handed them to her directly. She didn't want to lose that. Not yet. Not here.

Slowly, with effort that cost her more than it should have, she pushed herself back upright, facing the wall of ice, and forced her focus down into the quiet, unresponsive place where her core should have been humming with life. She commanded it to absorb mana anyway. The pain arrived immediately, sharp and total, tearing through her chest hard enough to drop her back to her knees, coughing dark blood into the snow.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand and folded herself into a crossed-legged seat on the frozen ground before trying again. Her fingers had gone black, frozen past any individual movement. Corruption had claimed half her body outright now, her thoughts sliding in and out of focus, some other, colder pressure pushing at the edges of her mind as though it intended to simply take the rest of her while she wasn't looking.

She shook her head sharply, forcing her attention back into a single, narrow point, and reached for her core again. An hour passed. Something inside her finally shifted—small, faint, but real. A second hour slipped by in fragments, her focus fraying and reassembling over and over, the corruption tightening its grip with every cycle. She held on regardless, dragging her attention back each time it slipped, refusing to let the drift become permanent.

By the fifth hour, a thin, stubborn thread of mana had finally begun moving through her, working its slow way toward the core at her center. Somewhere in that long, grinding effort, something low and wordless nearly tore its way out of her throat—an ugly, animal sound she didn't fully recognize as her own. But beneath the fog and the pain and the cold pressure trying to claim the rest of her, some small, rational fragment of her mind held on, and kept working. She didn't stop. Until...

[SYSTEM] [Current Reserve: 1%. Charging.] [WARNING: Corruption saturation at 80% of total body mass.] Stelle rose to her feet at last, unsteady, and pressed her remaining functional hand flat against the wall of ice. [Frost Manifestation]