A flurry of icicles and snowflakes as sharp as razors flew through the air, harrying Alforde as he moved across the main platform of the champion’s arena. The armorsoul did his best to ignore them, keeping his eyes on the floating snowflake platforms far above his helmet. Holly leapt from one to another, the muted colors of her training outfit – a sleeveless gray shirt and dark slacks – making it hard for the [Dungeon Champion] to keep track of her movements in the gloom of the arena.
The [Snowmancer] activated her [Fresh Powder], and Alforde was temporarily blinded as the room went white. When his vision returned there was another layer of snow on the ground, and Holly was nowhere to be seen.
Before he even had a chance to start looking, something hit Alforde hard in the back and he went flying. He hit the stage and rolled, then got up as quickly as he could and readied himself for the next attack.
“[Give No Ground]!”
The familiar gold light surrounded his body just as the blue-haired [Witch] crashed into him with her gauntlet forged of ice. The impact of the blow was great, but Alforde’s skill kept him in place and Holly’s construct shattered.
She danced back and raised her hands. The snowflakes in her eyes flashed, and another gauntlet replaced the one that’d just broken. Having grown tired of easily defeating Alforde with her whip-sword of snow and ice, she’d taken to using improvised weapons of her own creation. Then, when even that had been overwhelming for the [Dungeon Champion], she’d taken to handicapping herself further by restricting the ways in which she could use those hand-made weapons. For this bout, she was only using her left hand.
And still, she was up three stocks to one.
No matter how Alforde tried, he couldn’t keep up with her. She was faster than he was, and somehow stronger too. She fought the way snow fell, favoring attacks from above until she could overwhelm him on an equal plane, and there was a viciousness to her blows that Alforde wasn’t used to facing. It was like she was trying to kill him with every strike, even though he knew she wasn’t.
The armorsoul launched his fastest [Combination Attack] in retaliation, but Holly dodged it with a laugh and sent him sprawling with a cascade of icicles that erupted from the ground.
“You’re not going to be able to beat me like that,” she teased as she leapt into the air. “If you want to stop losing, you’re going to have to summon your Domain! Stop letting me control the flow of the fight!”
Using the new ectoplasm platforms Vee had just installed as steppingstones to return to her floating snowflakes, Holly resumed her hit and run tactics. Alforde quickly lost sight of her as more frigid precipitation filled the arena, and he tightened his gauntlets around Slammy’s handle.
“What are you waiting for, Alforde?” Holly’s voice echoed from every direction. “Summon it!”
“I’m trying!” he hollered back as snowballs splattered on his pauldrons. “I’ve been trying this entire fight! You keep breaking my concentration!”
The [Snowmancer]’s laughter filled the air, cold and utterly devoid of mercy. “Do you think the adventurers who come challenge Crestheart will just stand back and let you fumble around until you get your skill to activate? Of course not!”
She appeared right in front of him, her body melting out of the snow.
“When you asked me for help leveling up, you said that you wanted to make sure that you could do whatever Vee needed you to do as his champion. You said you wanted to put on a good show for the circuit so that any [Dungeon Scouts] watching it would bring their prospects to Crestheart. You said you wanted to win every fight that you got into. Do you think you can do that if you can’t call your Domain at a moment’s notice?”
Alforde jabbed at her, but Slammy’s handle found naught but a [Snow Dummy] that she’d somehow left behind. He still hadn’t figured out how she kept doing that.
A snowball as big as his torso flew toward him, but when Alforde tried to bring his hammer up to block it he found that his arms refused to move. His pauldrons were frozen solid, covered in a thick sheet of blue ice.
That was another one of Holly’s favorite tricks.
The snowball sent him flying, and Alforde knew that he was going to go over the edge if he didn’t stop it. Right on cue, Heart of a Champion activated, and Alforde’s plates were filled with a surging strength that felt limitless. He strained to move his pauldrons and was heartened by the sight of tiny cracks spreading across the ice, but breaking free would take too long at that speed. Flexing harder than he ever had before in his life – like he was participating in one of those allegedly natural [Bodybuilder] contests – Alforde shattered the ice and hooked the lip of the platform with his hammer to keep himself from falling.
He swung back and forth while his thoughts caught up with his instincts, and he tried to activate his Domain once more. He imagined a tiny snowflake doing as he wanted, then built up to a small breeze and a few errant icicles.
“[Chilling Tempest].”
The little Domain formed, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. Holly’s magic infused all the snow and ice in the arena, and wrestling even a few flakes away from Her control was a challenge, as his Domain’s claim to them was weaker than hers. But he persevered, and slowly started to take part of the storm for himself.
He bolstered his return to the stage with a gust of cold wind, and settled back into his fighting stance. Holly’s magic battered his will, demanding that the armorsoul give back what was rightfully hers, but Alforde shook his helmet and dug in his heels.
“You’re not taking it back,” he growled. “My Domain might be nothing more than a bastardized version of [Witch] magic, but this is my arena. I won’t be usurped here!”
He hadn’t needed to say all that, but sometimes it just felt good to be a little over-the-top.
His Domain howled as Holly increased the strength of her pull, and for a moment Alforde’s will matched the [Snowmancer]’s. Despite his determination, though, the effort quickly became too much to sustain for long, and the [Chilling Tempest] broke and vanished.
The armorsoul stumbled back as his skill faded, and Holly ended the bout with another punch that seemed to come out of nowhere.
Alforde resisted a surge of fury and frustration as he hit the ground. He closed his eyes until the last fragments of it passed. He’d lost, and that sucked, but he couldn’t deny that he’d made progress!
It was the fifth bout in a row he’d taken a stock, he’d even matched Holly’s will for a few seconds!
[Congratulations! You are now a Glaciernaut, Level 7!]
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
[Might +1]
[Congratulations! You are now a Dungeon Champion, Level 16!]
[Endurance +1]
[Heart Of A Champion +1]
[Your Chilling Tempest is now more reliable!]
The [Witch]’s mood mirrored Alforde’s own as she floated down to the ground on a feather made of snow. She was grinning, and the snowflakes in her eyes were sparkling like diamonds.
“That was a lot better,” she said as she held out her hand. “You were able to summon [Chilling Tempest] despite my pressure, which you couldn’t do even yesterday. With some more practice and another couple levels you might even be able to overwhelm my will entirely.”
“I won’t stop until I can!”
Holly chuckled. “I know. Let’s go ahead and call it here for today, though. I’m getting hungry and I’m sure Vee is ready to start heading back into town.”
Alforde nodded. “Okay. That’s fine with me.”
Flipping the hidden switch on the bottom of the platform base to deactivate the arena’s new platforms and hazards, Alforde picked up Slammy and hurried to follow Holly up the stairs.
----------------------------------------
Vee held up one of Hanako’s newest [Icicle Spear] crystals and squinted at it with a frown. The [Enchantress] insisted that her freshly learned faceting technique was a major improvement over her old one, but the [Dungeon Master] couldn’t see how. He even grabbed one of the old ones sitting on his desk – Hanako had brought both when she’d burst into the office with a gigantic smile on her face – and looked at them side by side, but there was nothing there that really differentiated them.
He resolved to offer a vague but positive statement -- something like “Yeah, it looks great, good job,” -- when he next saw Hanako, and hoped that she wouldn’t start asking him for his opinion on various differences between the two.
The telltale sound of Alforde’s boots coming up the stairs announced his friend’s arrival, though it was Holly who came through the door first. She looked smug and triumphant, while Alforde’s helmet was slumped forward.
“How was the sparring today?” Vee asked though he already knew the answer.
“We finished eighteen – no wait, nineteen – bouts,” Holly said.
”That’s quite a few. How many stocks did Alforde take?”
After the first few days of his friend’s battling with the [Witch], Vee had stopped asking how many matches his friend had won. Instead, he simply hoped that his [Dungeon Champion] had managed to take at least a double-digit number.
“Nine, but seven of them came in the last five matches.”
Vee gave his friend a thumbs-up and the armorsoul brightened just a bit.
Reginald let out a low whistle. “You’re definitely getting better, big guy, but that’s still brutal. I’ll tell you, Holly, we’re lucky as can be that most of the adventurers who come through here can’t hold a candle to you. We’d be out of business in a week if they could.”
She shrugged as she pulled a large sandwich out of the bag she’d stashed under a desk before starting her sparring session with Alforde and took a big bite. “I’m kind of a special case,” she said while chewing. “His Domain’s claim to ice and snow is weaker – than my magic’s, and I’ve been getting plenty of practice with real fighting for a while now.”
Near-inhaling the rest, she pulled out some pretzels and held one out to Vee. He shook his head, remembering the one time he’d tried them; they were so salty they made him feel like he’d been forced to drink seawater for a week straight.
“All this flashy stuff you guys do in the dungeon is nothing compared to brawling a dozen mud golems in an alley somewhere,” Holly said as she snapped two into her mouth.
“Mud golems?” Reginald asked, his eyes growing wide.
Holly nodded and took a sip of her water. “Yeah. They’ve been popping up for the last few weeks but only started causing real trouble recently by breaking into stores and stuff. Didn’t you guys have some here, too?”
“We had one, though it was made out of a bunch of little ones,” Vee said, thinking back to the strange creatures that’d come in through the window and ran around the office. He’d almost forgotten about them. Holly finished the rest of her pretzels and started wolfing down some dried emberberries. The speed at which she ate was, frankly, inhuman, and Vee once again wondered if she had a skill that made it possible.
“Do you know where they’re coming from?” Vee asked.
“Sort of. Luna and I know it’s a kitrekin summoning and controlling them, but he’s tricky and we haven’t been able to catch him so we don’t really know much else about him. Up until about a week ago, he seemed content with just a little mischief here and there, but now he’s started breaking into places and hurting people. It’s driving my dad crazy.”
Vee had a hard time imagining Sacre caring about random people or chaos around the city, so the fact that he was interested in the golems at all – let alone upset about their presence – was surprising.
His confusion must have shown on his face, because Holly popped the last of her berries into her mouth, burped a tiny flame, and explained, “It’s his rivalry with the don. The balance of power between them is always precarious, and my dad finally thought he’d found something to swing it into his favor permanently. And no, before you ask, I don’t know what it is.”
“What? I don’t get it, Vee said. “What does that have to do with the [Summoner]? Is it just because it’s a kitrekin or something? Isn’t that a little –”
“It’s a kitrekin that we’re pretty sure came from out of town,” Holly interrupted. “That’s the important bit. Out of town. See, when the roads were all messed up by the bandits, my dad and the don both started using some of the old tunnels for their business because they could skip most of the major roads where the bandits were congregating. They fought sometimes, and a few of my dad’s guys put a pretty good hurt on the don’s cronies. They even took one of their shipments.”
“I’m guessing that the [Summoner] appeared after that?” Reginald asked.
“Yeah,” Holly said. “Within days.”
Vee looked over at Reginald, who was frowning. He turned toward Holly and said, “So…your dad’s worried that the don’s powerful friends outside Oar’s Crest didn’t like having their operation messed with?”
“Pretty much. He’s worried that they’re going to send more heavy hitters to throw their weight around and shake things up around here.”
“Which means that what was supposed to be his master stroke might only be enough to barely avoid being ruined,” Reginald said. “Yikes, that’s a tough spot to be in.”
The group fell silent, except for Holly, who’d resumed eating and was chewing her way through a cookie with orange frosting.
This all sounded like a problem Vee didn’t need to be dealing with just then. Leaning forward, Vee put his hand on his chin and got to thinking.
Main Character Sheets:
Vee Vales
Primary Class: Ghost Maestro (Locksmagister University), Level 29
Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 21
Tertiary Class: Guy-Who-Takes-Things-WAY-Too-Far (Self), Level 5
Might: 13
Wit: 33
Faith: 21
Adventurousness: 7
Ambition: 14
Plotting: 20
Charisma: 15
Devious Mind: 23
Leadership: 17
Guts: 14
Intimidating Presence: 10
Citizenship: 20
Public Relations: 7
Determination: 2
Persuasiveness: 3
<3***Infatuation***<3
Alforde Armorsoul:
Primary Class: Hammer Afficionado (Self), Level 25
Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vales), Level 14
Tertiary Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), Level 16 (+1)
Additional Class: Glaciernaut (Sacha Silverblade), Level 7 (+1)
Might: 44 (+1)
Wit: 13
Faith: 28
Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vales): 9
Endurance: 22 (+1)
Intimidating Presence: 12
Heart of a Champion: 10 (+1)
Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 8
Vigilance: 6
Vanity: 1
Reginald :
Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???
--~%@(%$@ &% (*$ #&#e !i$$ (#$%#$%#$@!)~--, #$v@& ????
Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 39
Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vales), Level 16
Additional Class: Announcer (Vee Vales), Level 8
Might: 1
Wit: 33
Faith: 14
Ambition: 27
Greed: 22
Deceptiveness: 27
Manipulativeness: 37
$#&*!@!!: !!!
Loyalty: 47
Patience: 9
[#&%%%@%!#@__--#%]
Hop@#!! @#$@!@#
@#$@%%^
#4^5#*&_!+++#(@$#
Citizenship (Bound – Vee Vales): 7
Bonus: Holly's Character Sheet
Holly Sacre
Primary Class: Snowmancer(Self), Level 30
Secondary Class: Good Girl (Neve Sacre), Level 18
Tertiary Class: Surly Sidekick (Luna Redhenny), Level 11
Might: 38
Wit: 33
Faith: 12
Loyalty: 15
Adventurousness: 32
Guts: 46
Stealth: 22
Charisma: 11
Greed: 29
Ambition: 30
Pride: 28
Manipulativeness: 3
Reflected Glory: 8