Chapter 238 - The Winter Festival IV

Claire brandished her lizard as she glanced around the room. She watched as a score of enemies surrounded her. All twenty men oozed raw confidence, even though they wore thick goofy mantles over their armour. In fact, it was precisely because of the out-of-place, thick, nanny-knitted capes that they proceeded with so little hesitation. It was not just to look ridiculous that the unfashionable knights wore their cloaks, nor was it for comfort. Nay, the pulpy threads were donned for function and function alone, for they were woven with the spell-resistant fibres of the spiderwood pit, a plant specialised in the entrapment and consumption of mages.

The cloak’s nullifying effect was limited to the bits it covered. A carefully aimed attack would render the shrouds ineffective, and more powerful spells could rip through them. And the latter weakness was precisely why the individuals deployed on the mission were also more magic-resistant than their peers. It was a well-thought out plan with Arciel’s strengths targeted directly.

Unlike her tentacled friend, however, the lyrkress was just as comfortable in close quarters as she was lobbing projectiles from afar. She didn’t hesitate to dash into the fray and approach the closest elephant-headed mercenary with a lizard-faced glaive. The bluescale dug her foot into the ground with such force that the wood beneath the carpet splintered, and swung her blade with enough strength to blow the building away.

Her target opened his eyes wide, but managed to react in time regardless. The erdbrecher met Boris’ blade head on, punching his edge with the gemstone gauntlet that ran from his hand to his shoulder. For a moment, it looked like the elephant’s defense was solid, but the sapphire-studded glove that protected his fingers gave in and crumbled away. He quickly pulled back as he recognized his loss. The man twisted his wrist and guided the incoming blade away from his face just before the lizard claimed his fingers and chopped them to bits. It was not just a defense that he managed; the monk lowered his hips and thrust his fist straight towards her chest.

His aim was obvious; he was looking to smash through the icy protrusion that lay between her breasts and strike her solar plexus. It was a veteran’s approach; races with built-in catalysts, like unicorns and dwarves, were often disoriented upon losing their horns and beards. And though he didn’t know it, he had guessed right. Qilin were similar. Their horns were both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.

Assuming that they could be broken.

His second gauntlet was met with the same fate as his first. Claire’s shard extended to ten times its previous size at the moment of impact, crushing his stone glove and severing his arm at its base. The lyrkress glanced at his exposed flank, but backed off instead of pursuing. She dashed over to the lunar witch’s side and drove her pole weapon towards the fish-headed attacker closing in. The knight turned in time to see the strike, but he was not as swift or skilled as his elephant-headed ally. There was nothing he could do to stop the inbound lizard, who turned into a scythe midswing, from catching him by the gills and splitting his head in two.

“I could have easily dispatched him myself,” said Arciel, with a pout.

“Of course you could.”

Claire summoned her pony as she spoke. The misshapen horse opened its mouth wide and consumed a blast of light while its master whipped her weapon towards its caster. Boris transformed again midflight, assuming the form of a mighty axe with a hundred pound, three-headed blade. He tore right through his target’s flimsy wooden shield.

The mage cursed as his blood splattered across the carpet. Neither his silken cloak nor his plated metal armour was able to deter the lizard from digging deep into his flesh and rending his heart. But even with the vital organ destroyed, the elephant refused to fall. He trumpeted, loudly enough to shake the building’s foundations, as he tore the lizard from his chest and pressed his trunk against the gash. Another ray of light was fired from the face-limb, cauterizing the wound and sealing his ribcage before its contents could fall all over the floor.

Claire charged at the mage, but two of his allies inserted themselves between them before she could reach him. A third rushed her from behind, while a fourth placed his hands to the ground and channeled a powerful spell. It was not an attack, but rather a wide-ranged restorative that targeted all of his allies—the man with the missing arm grew another limb while the man with the lizard-hole in his chest saw his pectoral flesh restored.

Both Arciel and Claire turned on the healer immediately. One lobbed a spear made of ice, while the other launched a blood-forged blade. But none of the projectiles landed on target. The healer grabbed his trunk and gave it a tug to create a powerful barrier that kept both their magic missiles at bay. Claire dashed forward while the magical sparks flew, called Boris back into her hand, and struck at the cleric’s rear, but her halberd was blocked by the very same defense.

One of the fishmen dove towards her before she could recover and struck with his trident. Its iron barbs threatened to pierce her flesh, but she transformed her runecloak into a thick layer of iron and stopped it shy of ripping her apart. He tried to retreat, but she chased with another attack. Her body morphed, turning lyrkrian as she drove her hooves towards his chest. But while he was certainly struck, the Vel’khanese warrior was not her primary target.

Claire had transitioned immediately into another attack on the healer. A fully powered swing sent a crack through the barrier, and another nearly shattered it to bits, but she was driven away by the erdbrecher whose arm she had previously removed. He warded off three of her kicks with his fists and threw a corkscrew punch towards her belly—an attack that she avoided by assuming her humanoid form. She dove between his legs, turning lyrkrian again mid-slide and goring his thighs with her talons.

He collapsed where he stood, just outside of the healer’s reach. It looked like a fatal wound with the amount of blood pouring onto the carpet, but he wasn’t quite dead until Arciel seized his vital fluid. She forged it into a blade and drove it straight up. It pierced his legs, but didn’t stop there. The bloody spear continued to rise until it emerged from the top of his skull.

A trio of scyphs moved to attack the princess while she was casting the spell, but she sank into the shadows and slipped away. One tried to jab his spear into the darkened spot where she had vanished, but he hit nothing. His attacks lacked the requisite properties to strike at the immaterial.

The light mage, who suffered not from that particular weakness, followed with another wave of magical projectiles, but that too was unsuccessful. She evaded his shining hounds by sliding beneath the seats, slinking between them like a speedy slime. He began looking around as soon as he realised that he had lost track of her, only for the squid to pop up behind him and retaliate with a magical blast of her own. Albeit to little effect.

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Her spell was banished by his cloak, dispersed back into nothingness by its antimagic threads. Despite the initial failure, she was undeterred. She dodged into another shadow and fired a saw blade forged of the night. Though it looked unassuming, the spinning disk cut straight through the cloak and nearly robbed the light mage of one of his legs.

For a moment, it looked like the squid’s party held the advantage, but enemy reinforcements began pouring in from all over. They descended upon the sun room from the surroundings roofs, breaking the glass panels as they leapt inside.

A particularly well-decorated penguin leapt in front of Claire before she could regroup with the umbral witch and raised his wings in front of him. Both were crackling with lightning, infused with such an exorbitant amount of raw magic that the air around him almost seemed to shimmer and shake. His spell was released as they made eye contact, a burst of energy erupting from the tips of his scale-like feathers. The twin bolts converged, turning from blue to white as they took on the shape of a charging bear. The attack was powerful enough to send its caster tumbling backwards, but the lyrkress pressed forward regardless. She trusted her inbuilt resistance and took the attack head on.

It hurt more than she expected; her whole body coursed with pain as the electrical waves invaded her circuits. The voltage was so high that the discharge set half the room on fire. But even with her nerves inflamed, Claire refused to miss a beat. She stepped forward and drove Boris towards the ice-bird’s gut. It was on track to connect; the lightning blast disrupted his vision and prevented him from seeing the attack until the last moment. But he managed to evade it. Leaping just above the war hammer, the penguin dashed along its handle and made a beeline for her throat.

Again, his wings found themselves coated in lightning, the bright blues and yellows crackling as the plasma fashioned itself into a pair of blades. His second spell far outclassed his first, powerful enough that its own caster was suffering burns from the recoil. But it mattered little.

Because the attack was never delivered.

A breath caught him before he could make it to his target. His magic-resistant cloak offered not even the slightest hint of protection. It joined his flesh in cracking to pieces and disintegrating to specks of dust. He narrowly survived the attack; half his body was completely obliterated, but he was still breathing, so she batted him with her lizard and sent him flying across the room.

Headhydra took center stage as the penguin relinquished the spotlight. The three headed lizard leapt from her spot between the lyrkress’ ears and tackled one of the kelpfin warriors in the middle of his descent. Contact was the bomb’s trigger. The puppet’s mana ignited on impact, producing a powerful vector-based blast that sent blood, guts, and bone flying all over the room. The spiderwood cloaks greatly hindered the walking explosive’s effectiveness; those not in direct contact suffered only minor injuries, but the former dungeon monster cared not. Its flesh reforming, it wandered around the room, latching onto random enemies and blowing their bodies to bits. While Headhydra became the enemy’s main focus, Claire disguised herself by copying the Vel’khanese uniform. She pulled the mantle over her face, covering it as she focused her efforts on tempering her mana.

Her circuits glowed as the raw energy pulsed through them, only growing more powerful and refined as she continued to channel. One of the enemy mages noticed almost immediately, but her three-headed grenade leapt into his face and prevented him from interfering with her casting. Unlike a Cadrian caster, the erdbrecher opted for a barrier that prioritised his own survival over the mission’s success.

A mistake that paved the road to his demise.

Claire took a deep breath. Her eyes were closed. Her heart was steady. Her mind was calm. Once everything was in order, she twisted her wrist. And opened the door to the realm of eternal frost.

___

A small frown appeared on Lia’s lips as she matched her opponent’s moves. They were circling each other, slowly moving at an angle as they maintained a distance just outside of striking range. Every time one of them took a step, the other would match. A perfect, rhythmic dance.

Both duelists were buying time. He was focusing on her allies, observing their abilities with a keen eye, while she was waiting for his to perish. The cat knew exactly who she was up against. The warrior that stood before her was one of the three that Arciel had actively warned them about, a fierce leech loyalist whose presence on the battlefield could not be ignored. Still, Lia was confident. She didn’t need to defeat him, at least not by herself. If she stalled long enough, the others would destroy his subordinates, and they would be able to take him down together.

That had always been the plan. The only deviations were the time and the place; they had expected to encounter him when they charged the castle, after they gathered their allies and launched an all-out assault.

He didn’t move until the sunroom’s windows shattered. With the breaking glass as the signal, he threw his patience aside and ran towards her with his blades trailing behind him. He ducked right before they clashed and twisted his hips, a spinning, diagonal slash, backed by the weight of his body.

Lia met the blow with a horizontal sweep. Knowing that her opponent had roughly two hundred levels on her, she began immediately by converting her lifeblood to power. He was caught off guard by the burst of strength, but he was not outdone. The lizardman blocked the attack with just one of his swords and swung the other straight at her neck.

Its arc was beautifully crafted. His form was too perfect to be the result of a skill alone. The carefully refined swing told her of the hundred years he had spent refining his technique, the long hours and days, the blood, the sweat, the tears.

But beauty alone did not a deadly counter make.

Natalya side-stepped the attack and kicked him in the leg. The five thousand points of health she sacrificed punched straight through his armour and shattered his shin while she spun around and aimed a slash at his midsection. Her sword whipped through the distance between them, its tip snapping forward like a loaded spring. The rapier’s spinning blade tore through his flimsy armour and landed right in his gut.

It was caught in his flesh, stuck between two of his ribs not because the cat lacked the strength to wrench it through, but because she had released the weapon as soon as it had entered his body. Lia dropped into a crouch, all four limbs on the floor before leaping straight up. She grabbed her master’s sword with her teeth as she ascended and forced it up through his flesh, ripping up his chest and cleaving his elongated jaw into two perfect halves.

When she noticed that he was still twitching, she grabbed the weapon with both hands and brought it down on his skull.

Only to find herself on the other side of the room.

It took a moment for everything to register.

First was the pain. Her gut screamed for her attention. She tried to take a breath, but her diaphragm refused to listen. Its muscle fibres were no longer intact. The whole dome-shaped mass had been crushed, obliterated by something or other. She needed to get the air back into her lungs. So she drew the rune she needed to enrage whilst raising her eyes and checking on her opponent.

His armour was still a mess, but his wounds had healed. His broken leg, his torn up chest, and his cloven chin had all been restored to their previous states, and not because his allies had healed him. The only medic on the field was too busy defending himself from a bloodthirsty moose.

The lizardman’s recovery stemmed instead from a much more familiar source. It was the fury in his heart, the frenzy of war, and the flame of loss. In that way, they were very much alike. Both were bloodborn berserkers. Battle-crazed avatars of rage that turned their madness to power.