Nym’s first thought was to use hydrokinesis to divert the snow. It couldn’t be that heavy, after all. Then he watched it obliterate a fully grown tree on the way down and decided that it could in fact be that heavy, and that the better course of action would be to get everyone out of the way.
He flew straight up and used greater telekinesis to grab seven students who were walking on the snow. Panicked yelling filled the air, though it was barely audible over the rumble of the avalanche. The other students flew higher, all of them flocking around Professor Lakton. Nym brought the group he’d pulled up over to join the rest, and together the whole class watched snow wash away the trail they’d been following.
It took a minute or two for the snow to pass by. While they waited, Nym said, “This happen often up here?”
The professor frowned down at the rushing snow. “It does seem awfully suspicious. Avalanches happen, but the timing on this one…”
Nym cast perfect sight and scoured the mountain side. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for exactly, but a casual glance was all it took to spot dozens of humanoid figures gathered together in the snow above where the avalanche had started. “There’s something up there. I can’t quite tell what they are.”
“We can’t go after them now,” Professor Lakton said. “We have prior business to attend to.”
“The lesson?” Nym asked, surprised. “You’re not going to take everyone back to the facility?”
“It’s a tight schedule,” she said, her face pained. “If we had more staff, I’d say go take care of them, but if there’s more of them that attack from another direction, I’ll need your help to defend the students.”
Nym didn’t like it. Something had attacked them, something smart enough to work in a cooperative group and with enough magic to drop an avalanche on their heads. The attack had been easy enough to foil, but whatever the creatures were, they were going to slink away to come at them from another angle.
Nym spun up an air golem and sent it out to scout the creatures. He linked his scrying to it and watched it get closer to the shadowy creatures while he moved the rest of the class into the cave. A team of them were working on excavating the snow out of the mouth, at least far enough to get people in. Once they were safely inside, he turned his full attention to what his golem was seeing.
There were twenty-eight of them gathered together, arguing violently with each other. They were tall, taller than any human could be at least, and broad shouldered, but with gangly limbs and thin, wrinkled chests covered in patchy white hair and loose skin flaps. Horns came out of their heads, glossy blue-and-green to match their skin.
Nym’s golem didn’t transmit sound back to him, but it was obvious the things were arguing with each other. It was a fight of words punctuated with periodic fisticuffs. Not a one of them was without a broken nose or black eye, but even as he watched, their noses shifted back into place and bruised skin faded back into blue-green to match the rest of their bodies.
The regeneration was impressive, but what was really curious about it was the way the creatures moved. When one attacked the other, their attacks always managed to either perfectly predict how the target would dodge, or it was completely off, oftentimes lashing out in the opposite direction of the way they needed to strike.
Nym couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but he was sure the creatures possessed some kind of snow or ice magic that had allowed them to start the avalanche. Their position was too much of a coincidence to be anything but the cause of the disaster.
“Professor Lakton, I’ve got a scry on the attackers. I don’t recognize what they are, but maybe you might?”
He started to describe them to her, but she immediately cut him off. “They’re trolls. Tribal creatures, very territorial. Meat eaters, but they don’t mind it cold or even frozen. No doubt they saw an opportunity to reinforce their larders with some fresh human corpses. They’re probably arguing about whether or not to try again.”
“Trolls,” Nym said. “Hmm. I think someone told me about them once. They can see the future?”
“That’s right. It’s what makes them dangerous. They’re very difficult to fight against when they do attack, but at the same time, they almost never attack unless there’s a strong chance they’ll win. They must have misjudged something in their divination.”
Nym assumed it was because of him. He wasn’t sure why exactly, other than to pin it on general ascendant weirdness. That professor who’d examined him a year ago hadn’t had any problems seeing his future, so he wasn’t sure what would trip up the trolls. Maybe he’d see if Archmage Veran could cast some of those spells on him, just so they could see how weird the results were.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“There aren’t that many. I could be up there, fry the lot of them, and back inside of 5 minutes.”
She considered for just a moment, cast a glance at the assembled students filing into the glacial cave, and nodded. “Don’t let yourself get drawn into a prolonged encounter, please. I’ll station myself at the entrance and keep everyone safe.”
“Anything I should know about trolls? I was planning on hitting them with lightning, but if you think something else would work better, I’m open to suggestions.”
“It might work, but you’d need repeated blasts for each one. If it were only a few, that would be a winning strategy. For as many as you say are there, wide-spread fire would be a better choice. Trolls in general aren’t fans of open flames, and glacial trolls hate it even more.”
“Why’s it always fire?” Nym muttered. “Just once, could it be something else?”
Fire remained, as always, his weakest element. He’d put a lot of effort into improving it, had even learned a few third circle spells, but his intent filter just wasn’t correct. It was close, he thought, but still missing something. Maybe he ought to find a place like Glacial Valley except for fire and study it, or whatever it was the kids were supposed to be doing.
Nym put both parts of his partitioned mind to use multi-casting spells. He started with a camouflaging sphere, similar to Archmage Veran’s disc, except fully enclosing him. Then he teleported to the spot his golem was stationed at using a variant spell that brought active magic along with him. Once he was there, he cast out an immense thermal barrier in a bubble encircling the surrounding trolls.
He didn’t want what he was about to do to trigger a second avalanche, so that barrier was the most important part. The last thing he needed was to have to dig out an entire Academy class that he was supposed to be protecting. At the same time, he didn’t want the trolls escaping either, so he added a selective kinetic barrier to the area as well. Anything that ran into it from either side would bounce off, hopefully keeping the trolls contained.
A hyper kinetic barrier would have been stronger, but also vastly more draining since he had to keep the entire area powered at all times. He wasn’t sure he could manage that even without doing anything else, so the kinetic barrier would suffice. If nothing else, it should slow down any troll and allow him to tag it with a greater telekinesis before it got away.
The last spell was the kill shot. He flooded the interior of the thermal barrier with third layer arcana, as much as he could channel over sixty seconds. And then he ignited it into a flash fire, burning it all up in an instant and raising the temperature inside the barrier so high that he couldn’t contain it. Plumes of superheated air jetted out the top, thankfully into the open sky, without disturbing any snow.
The trolls trapped inside went berserk, at least the ones that survived the initial conflagration. No longer blue-green, they instead were a charred black without a single tuft of hair left. Weirdly, the ones that were still alive were now hornless, and a grey, slimy blood ran down the sides of their skulls. A chorus of raging wails came up from the group, but Nym was hidden from sight and they didn’t know where to direct any sort of counterattack.
He resealed the thermal barrier as best he could and watched the heat slowly cook them. A part of him almost thought he should feel bad, but then, they had tried to kill him first. That he wasn’t actually in any danger didn’t change the fact that if they’d had the power to do the job, he’d be buried under twenty feet of snow and freezing to death.
Still, he did have a class to get back to. He flooded the area with arcana again, ignited it, and left their corpses cooling on the now blackened and snow-free mountainside.
* * *
It took the class an hour or so to get everyone calmed down from the attack, despite Professor Lakton’s best efforts. That did mean Nym had plenty of time to get back and got to observe the entire lesson. It was kind of weird, at least to him. Mostly she just gave a normal lesson on intent filters, adding aspects to arcana, and how to most efficiently partition and channel it into the soul well.
While she was lecturing, the students were watching the shifting light patterns come through the ice ceiling of the cave and shivering. Unlike himself, they were allowed no magic to protect themselves from the cold, and no amount of clothing was going to get the job done. They were huddled together, obviously miserable, and occasionally shooting hate-filled glances at Professor Lakton.
She definitely noticed them, but if anything, seemed perversely amused. In fact, the longer the lecture went on, the more Nym got the idea that she was subtly encouraging them to glower in her direction. Every few minutes, the professor would say something to egg them on, to rub in the fact that they were shivering in the cold and she was not.
Nym was reminded of the flight lessons he’d joined in on when he’d first met Brogan, and his own tactics of verbally berating his students. At the time, Nym had thought the man was just a hard teacher and a bit of a jerk, but personal experience had shown him that emotions could help cement an intent filter in place. It was one more thing to tie that memory back to the intent they were trying to develop.
That did not stop him from noticing no less than four different students cheating and casting warming spells on themselves. Nym considered saying something, but it wasn’t his job, they weren’t his students, and if they wanted to cheat themselves out of the classes they were paying thousands of crests for, that was their problem. Besides, he didn’t feel like trying to make up some sort of lie to explain how he knew they were cheating.
When it was time to go a few hours later, Nym sent out two different air golems to canvas the area for more trolls, or for any other threats. Everything came back clear, and the trip back to the Academy’s glacial valley training facility went smoothly, or at least as smoothly as it could go with a bunch of teenagers who had trouble keeping themselves moving forward.
It was a long, slow trip, one which grated on Nym’s nerves as he constantly scanned for threats that never materialized. It was only after they were safely back behind magically crafted and reinforced walls that he let himself relax.
“Looking after a bunch of people is stressful,” he said to himself. “But only two more days.”