“You’re sure it’s safe?” In an uncharacteristic show of worry, Ylsa was having second thoughts about me warping everyone up to the top of the wall. “What if something’s up there to ambush us?”

The tall dark figure of Arlian walked up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll stand in front and tank the first few blows so you fleshlings can get reoriented. It’s not that different from my normal [Earth Glide], but for ice, so I should be good.”

“It’s a bit more than that, but Arlian’s right.” I tried to sound confident. “I’ll warp us up there and we’ll be able to keep going. You have the sled in your bag, right?” I looked at her questioningly.

She nodded, but before she could respond, Jaegan cut to the chase of the matter. “It’s time to go. Everyone form up on the boss. Alright?”

The bloody cough from the day before was absent, and I chalked it up to [Lordly Aura] buoying him up. I’d informed the rest of the party of what I’d done, but didn’t mention it to the man himself, or he’d likely have gotten mad at me for some reason despite the effect it had on his health. He was practically back to normal, for now at least.

Once everyone was gathered around where I stood with a hand on the wall of ice, I braced myself and spoke as calmly as I could while focusing on warping us through the ice to the top of the wall. “[Elemental Surge].” I’d learned that intention was everything with the Skill, with more than a few false starts when I’d accidentally started tunneling the night before a few times.

That day, the warping went perfectly as we all went from standing at the foot of the wall to standing twenty feet from it with weapons brandished. The [Arcweavers] were the first to react to the spears of ice flying toward us as they threw up a combined wall of wind to throw them off target. It wasn’t a second too soon as more than a dozen different ice spears hurtled up and over our party before sailing down to the ground far below.

Thinking fast, Ylsa produced the covered sled from her bag, but just before she was about to dive into it, a spear ripped straight through one side and out the other right where she’d sat the day before. She recoiled back, her usually light grey face as pale as a ghost.

“[Wall of Force]!” I howled before a semicircular wall of pale blue energy sprang up around our group. I looked around and found no one was injured, but Volta and Voltaire were flickering for some reason.

“What’s wrong?” I asked them directly. “Why are you flickering in and out?”

For once, it was Voltaire who spoke, as his sister wasn’t fully there at the moment. “It’s the ice spears, they’ve got some kind of disruptive magic on them. We’re not of this realm, or even Genovia, so it has a disruptive effect even through our elemental constructs, as they are connected to our essence.”

His words were quickly proven true as a salvo of spears hit my wall and it felt like I’d taken a maul straight in the gut. I grunted painfully. “Yeah, I can tell.” In a flash of inspiration, I pushed another full percent of my Mana regen their way through the [Elemental Pactlord] window and they slowly faded back into view. “Let me know if you need more, OK?”

They bowed deeply. “Of course, Pactlord.” With uncanny grace, the pair began hurling lightning bolts over the wall in graceful arcs that each ended on a different spear of ice, exploding them before they could hit my barrier. “We’ll do our best to assist as long as we’re around.”

To his credit, Jaegan wasn’t panicking, he was problem solving. He turned and addressed the group as a whole. “It seems we’re not going to be sailing straight up the mountain like yesterday.” I held my tongue about not having had it so easy and he nodded appreciatively. “Give me options, people. What do we have that’ll let us move through this icy shitstorm?”

For a second, it looked like Ylsa was going to give a solution, but she shook her head sadly instead. “I have nothing to assist with that I can think of.”

Arlian echoed her sentiment. “I can get myself up there, but I can’t bring anyone with me.” He paused and gestured to me. “Why not use [Elemental Surge] to move through this storm?”

I opened my mouth to rebut his point before closing it and thinking about it for a second before nodding. “I could do it, but I’d be out of Mana if I tried doing it all the way up to the top of the mountain.”

Jaegan’s head whipped around to glare at me. “You can do what?” It looked like he wanted to yell at me, but instead he slowly released the air that’d been building up in his lungs. His tone was calm, despite the obvious rage behind his words. “I need a real number, how much Mana do you have, how much does it cost to travel with all of us using [Elemental Surge], and what’s your regeneration rate reduced to with Arlian, Volta, and Voltaire around?”

Doing some quick math, I smiled a bit. “Total Mana pool is 648 at its peak.” He coughed in surprise, but waved for me to continue. “And with Volta and Voltaire eating eight percent of my base Mana, that leaves me with 596 to work with. As for my regen rate, I’m elven enough to get a full Mana pool back in four hours normally, but with Arlian taking a percent and a half, and the siblings taking eight percent, It’s more like four and a half hours if I’m doing nothing but meditating, more like ten hours if I’m active. As for traveling with all of us in my Skill?” I shrugged and pointed back at the wall behind us before sagging as another batch of ice spears slammed into my wall. “That took twenty-four Mana. I’m not sure how much it’d cost to go a longer distance with it.”

“What’s your max teleport range on it or the base Skill?” He leaned in. “We’ve got more than sixty miles to go…”

Checking my Status, I blinked a few times before blushing. “Is that all? I hadn’t checked this morning.” Peeking in the corner of my vision behind my Status window, I saw the indicator that we were sixty-four miles from the top of the mountain slope.

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The [Mage]’s eye took on the twitch I felt I’d single handedly jumpstarted for him. “How far?” His toe began to tap in irritation, making Arlian and Raiju snicker.

“So, I was really tired last night and didn’t exactly check until now–”

“How. Far?” He legitimately began to growl at me.

“It’s ten Mana per mile, max range of one fifth of my [Wits] per jump. The cooldown on that is twenty minutes.” Seeing his glare, I clarified. “A little less than twenty-five miles.”

“Pack it up, Ylsa!” The tactician spun on his heel. “Everyone get ready for a fall. Arlian, when we land, please make us a couple walls of stone to hide behind if you can.”

“Can do.” The [Obsidian Knight] was the consummate subordinate, accepting orders that made sense without missing a beat. “Standard ten foot box OK? Otherwise, I’ll need help.”

“Perfect.” Jaegan whirled on me. “Jump at a thirty degree angle straight up the slope. The gradient’s a bit less than that, but it gets steeper the higher we go, so we shouldn’t get dumped out too high off the ground.” He turned to Raiju. “Can you make a bubble of air for us to land on if we end up falling?”

She shook her head. “That Skill is totally locked down in here, sorry.” Her tail hung between her feet. She was obviously depressed not to be able to help.

He moved to pat her head, but she pulled away. “Don’t worry about it. We wouldn’t have gotten this far yesterday without you. Let your lazy master do some work, OK?” He pulled half a sandwich from his spatial ring and tossed it to her. “We’ve got this.”

“I’ll take care of the landing, should it be needed.” I grimaced. “I can always turn into a [Mud Baron] and catch us if it’d be a bad one.”

Every woman there, even Volta, shot me a glare that told me in no uncertain terms that was the worst idea they’d ever heard.

Hands up defensively, I backtracked. “Did I say a [Mud Baron]? I meant a [Water Baron].” I laughed nervously. “Trust me, it’ll be fine.”

For half a second, I thought Jaegan was going to strangle me, but he looked away instead. “Jumping in ten seconds. Everyone gather up!”

Channeling the energy in the snow beneath me, I flexed [Elemental Surge] and a moment later our party stood on a perfectly flat patch of light blue snow. Moments later, a box made of obsidian sprang into existence with the only openings a dozen arrow slits that served double purpose as air holes. Less than a second later I heard the sound of ice smashing into magically reinforced obsidian, but it held, so I didn’t spare it another thought as I spun down to the ground and began to meditate to get back the one hundred and twenty Mana I’d just spent.

“One-twenty, by the way.” I muttered before letting my mind wander as I meditated.

During the cooldown period for the teleportation portion of [Elemental Surge] I was still aware, even if I wasn’t actively helping.

Arlian’s box of obsidian did really well until large ice balls, far larger than the earlier ice boulders, started hurtling down the slopes toward us, gaining speed all the way. At Jaegan’s direction, he tried making a ramp in front of the box, but the second the first giant snowball hit it, the ramp shattered and the snowball blasted into the forward wall of our shelter.

Without another word, Jaegan summoned a ramp using [Wall of Force] in its place, and none too soon, as four more rolling boulders of ice were headed toward us mere moments later. I bled for him, but these were our roles and he’d ask for help if he needed it. Probably?

Each boulder that ran up his ramp was like a solid hit from a boxer to the old man. The third one hitting got him to spit up blood, but he held on for the fourth to slam in. The impact of that boulder was enough to make blood spray from the corners of his eyes, but he refused to yield.

“No snowball’s going to do me in!” He howled to no one in particular.

During my entire recuperation period, the onslaught of ice boulders, icicle spears, and hurled ice balls didn’t let up and neither did Jaegan. He chugged healing potion after healing potion so he’d be able to maintain the barrier through the incremental damage he was supposed to be taking.

Doing some rough math based on the Party interface’s data, I was astounded to find that, if he wasn’t protecting all of us, everyone in the group would have died to two or fewer hits from the massive boulders slamming into them. Jaegan may think I’m a monster, but he obviously didn’t spend enough time looking in the mirror to be throwing out titles like that.

The second the cooldown was up, I pulsed the Skill and sent us hurtling up the slope toward the summit.

Instead of blue snow, this time it was dark blue, nearly black and, from the looks of everyone around me, it was cold up there. The barrier of obsidian slammed into place a second later, but no impacts came. Instead, it just kept getting progressively colder and I watched as my Party’s HP slowly dropped as I tried to meditate.

No matter what they did, nothing helped. The [Arcweaver] siblings, beings born of lightning, fire, and air, tried to make a fire, but found themselves unable to do so. They were still made of those things, so everyone gathered around them, but it wasn’t enough. The moment Jaegan’s already diminished HP hit twenty percent, I knew I had to step in.

“[Elemental Form].” I intoned as I reached deep into the elemental sub-plane of magma for the form I was looking for. The temperature inside the obsidian box skyrocketed from the double digit negatives all the way up to something akin to the first floor’s hotbox as I turned into a [Magma Baron].

As a [Magma Baron], my body had grown nearly two feet in all directions and was entirely composed of molten rock. My skin shimmered with an intense, fiery heat, and I could see my eyes glowing with an otherworldly light in the obsidian walls. Every little movement felt ponderous, but from the looks on my friends’ faces, they were glad to see me helping out. Except for Jaegan.

He glared at me, despite his body visibly relaxing as the blue started fading from his fingertips. “You’re wasting Mana, change back. We can deal with a little cold for the next ten minutes.”

My breath was like the air around a sauna. “It’s only been two minutes since we landed. You would be dead long before ten minutes were up. The rest of you might be alive, but you, Jaegan “Wallbreaker” Toretto, would be dead in less than two minutes, let alone ten.” Despite his rage, I shrugged my surprisingly flexible shoulders. “It’s a one time cost I’ve already paid to be like this, so get over it. Heal up and relax for a few minutes. I’ve got a bad feeling about the summit and we’ll be there after the next jump.”

After a few minutes, I gave up on meditating and instead decided to just pop one of Aunt Megara’s Mana potions if I needed it. Instead, I spent that time discussing life on the elemental sub-plane of magma with Arlian and learned a lot. He agreed to go through the tome I’d learned from and point out any inaccuracies he could find for both the earth and fire planes, which I appreciated.

What good is a textbook if it’s full of bad information?