A couple of hours later, the trail became too steep for the horses, and the party dismounted to continue on foot. Ed and Ingrid dismissed their respective mounts, and Neféli sent her own cloudhorse back to her father’s castle. Their progress slowed even further due to the rough terrain, and the party members soon found themselves walking single file through the narrow trail and struggling to climb over fallen boulders and ropes strung over deep chasms.
Which provided an excellent opportunity for the mountain dwellers to attack. The first indication of trouble was a thunderclap, which accompanied a bolt of lightning striking Ingrid, who was leading the party. The Valkyrie easily shrugged off the attack and started searching for the source, but a second bolt hit her before she thought to look up towards the near-vertical cliff.
A pair of large yellow goats were perched on an astonishingly narrow shelf of rock over the party, and Ingrid located them just in time to see one strike the rock with its horns, which fired a third lightning bolt in her direction.
“Tanngrisneer!” she yelled at her companions, and conjured a shield made of wood and leather to block the next attack. “Watch out for lightning bolts!”
Ed’s rifle was slung back over his shoulder to leave his hands free for climbing, and by the time he brought it forward and aimed, all three spell casters were already striking at the thunder goats. The beasts’ thick coat of wool provided a decent amount of protection against Lucy’s Firebolts and the Kitsune’s Acid Bolts, but even more surprising was the fact that when Neféli fired a lightning bolt at the goats, it seemed to ignore their resistance and cause more damage than the other casters’ attacks.
The goats changed their tactics after that and leaped from their perch to try and gore their enemies, and were met by a very annoyed Ingrid, flanked by the phantasmal naga and dvergr. A shield bash stunned one of them long enough for the party to concentrate on its mate, and it only took a few more seconds for the combination of melee and magical attacks to defeat both goats.
“Tanngrisneer?” Ed asked curiously once the adrenaline rush started to fade. “I don’t remember hearing about those, and these look like normal Raijū goats.”
“Granddad named them after Thor’s goat Tanngrisnir,” Ingrid answered. “But when more people started entering the Labyrinth, they wanted a more standardized and less fanciful naming method, so every lightning modified beast type was just put down as Raijū. But he kept using the more fanciful names among friends and family, so that’s the first name that comes to my mind.”
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“Tanngrisneer is much better name,” Katya said and started skinning the goats. “Names are important, and banality of masses is of great concern to people who make living from telling tales.”
“We just call them ‘goats’,” Neféli added. “Just like our horses are simply horses. These ones look similar to the domesticated ones our farmers raise and that the cyclopes like to carry off on their raids. More aggressive than the ones we raise though.”
“Interesting. I never thought of it from point of view of dwellers. But it does make sense for goats to just be goats to you.”
“I was wondering, Neféli,” Lucy joined the conversation. “How come your lightning bolts could hurt them? We’ve tried lightning based attacks and they always seemed to be either useless against Raijū or even actively heal them.”
“I’m not sure what you mean. I was just casting mage-bolt, which is the first spell our battlemages learn. And they always work against beasts.”
“That’s really interesting. It’s like air is the default element here and acts like physical damage in the rest of the Labyrinth.”
“Now you’re really confusing me. There’s no such thing as air element. The three elements are cloud, water and ice. Mage-bolt just does normal damage, just like our weapons.”
This got Ingrid back into the conversation. “Granddad is going to love this. A whole different elemental system based on water phases with lightning replacing physical? We’ll lose him for at least a year when he hears about it.”
“What did I say?” Neféli asked in bewilderment. “What are phases of water and what does it have to do with ice and cloud?”
“Never mind,” Ed answered firmly. “We can talk about this until smoke comes out of our ears when we get back to the castle, but we need to focus on our surroundings for now. It’s enough to know that Neféli’s spells work on native monsters.”
“You’re right,” Ingrid said regretfully. “But I’ll want a long talk about this when we get back. And probably to have some of your scholars join in too, since I doubt battlemages go for deep theoretical studies.”
“You’ve got that right,” the princess agreed. “We leave that to the sages.”
With the topic of different elemental systems laid to at least a temporary rest, the party continued up the mountain. The goat attacks became more and more frequent the higher up the mountains they climbed, but it looked like there wasn’t anything else living in that part of the pass, and certainly no sign of any cyclopes could be found.
They made camp that evening in a small cave the phantasmal dvergr carved out of the mountain, and closed the entrance behind them to prevent anything hostile from attacking during the night. The small air holes left in the wall weren’t enough for the cold breeze to enter, and the night was spent in a comfortably warm campsite.
Out of courtesy towards the princess, the party members each slept in his or her own sleeping bag, though Katya did offer to teach Neféli about ‘Other methods for the coping’. An offer which was hastily declined by the suddenly red-faced battlemage.