Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

-We should be killing Santa Sclavus, then.-

We both just looked at the Mick in the Markspace. -Seriously?- Princess Kristie /asked.

-Aye, and not Sealing the Dungeon there, either. Some nasty high-Level crap there for the killing, although not near as friendly as slaughtering olthoi be.-

I was going to say something about olthoi not being friendly, and just paused. -Using magic AND high-Level?- I /inquired bluntly.

-Aye, and so doubtless worth far more than some mere bugs now. Wouldnae actually know, since I never went in the place after the Fall, but things are a lot more balanced around such things now, aye?-

-They should be,- I /admitted cautiously. -What are we talking about?-

-Powerful Knaths, be looking like moving gumdrops. Tasty, too.- Okay, that was extremely dangerous ranged attacks… but tasty? Well, Knath’s looked like jello... -Very nasty Penguins.- I /blinked, then remembered that the Penguins here were magical, dangerous, and intelligent, among other things. -Hostile Snowmen, and the nasty sclavi as it were. The Knaths were the worst o’ it.-

-Well, then, I guess we’re going to have at least something to look forward to later on.-

-Aye. Be eager to see how well I do in that place...-

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It was pure stupidity, but Kris didn’t care. Sometimes what you earned out of something was based on how you approached it. For Melee types, that meant bonus Karma for openly confronting something and overcoming it with raw skill, strength, and ability, rather than clever tactics.

Basically, it was gimping yourself by not playing it smart so you’d get a ‘fair fight’. And while it was stupidity incarnate, well, Rantha Stupidity Stats were pretty damn high, as her mother always said.

They weren’t going to permit this thing to return. So, once it died, it was going to be vivisized. There was only one of them that they knew of, and they knew its spawn location, too, given that it sat right back on top of it whenever there was nothing else to kill.

It was only supposed to spawn in the Winter, but nobody had bothered to kill it for years, so it had remained around. The Gotrok had lost enough warriors to drunken dares trying to kill it, only for it to respawn in the winter over and over once again

THE Abominable Snowman.

It couldn’t fail to see her coming, with Quaver out and ringing out DING! TING! Along with a Blade that was Firephasing and basically solid fire, just this side of a lightsaber. Lost Light swirled around her Sword, with Soulfire, Banefire to Constructs, the gleaming stars that were the Blackfire Stones, and the Fire Atlan Stone glowed hotly in his pommel. Lost Light was ready to do its deflecting business, and she was ready to hew into this thing.

It was just an animated Construct, with only vestigial awareness and thoughts, although word was it had learned some basic tactics by staying around long enough to realize that Yield, then Vuln, then blast away, and Imperil, then bash away, worked a bit better.

But she had numbers working for her, and if she wasn’t as full-amped as someone doing a total debuff on the thing, she didn’t really care.

The Magic Yield Other swirled out, trying to take down her Magic Resistance, and ran flat into her Null and failed utterly. Plat-grade, Princess Kristie noted as she charged in.

Triple damage charge, quadruple damage One Strike, plus a crit exploded on the hit, and solid flame roared through ice both harder than steel and as fluid as water. Conduits of force slid around and past Quaver’s edge as she chased after them, fine-tuning her awareness as she did so, and the dance began as her opening lunge buried hilt-deep in its center section, snipping the internal energies animating the thing… but there were a whole lot of them, and snipping them down faster than they mended themselves was going to suck.

But hey, that’s why it had 100k of Health Qi to rip through.

Seven Dragons ki ignited and swirled around her, heightened consciousness and awareness of battle flows, rhythms, movements, and weaknesses rising about and through her as all the Ways came online and dancing to the attack.

It was a Construct, a magical thing, with programmed analytical attack patterns, power that ignored the limitations of flesh and bone, no sense of pain, and speed very unexpected of a snowman. It would have Healed itself at a fearsome rate without the Blooding on Quaver to stop it, and she attempted to get Seven Dragons Raging going on it, not bothering with the Blood Rose for the moment.

It started to Cast War Magic at her, and her attacks blurred into existence, a full Flurry, preset pattern executing faster than she could think, trailing lines of different color as one Dragon fed into another. Bright shining Sun leading the way, gentle Moon arcing past ethereally, Shadow snaking in, Ocean coming out of the darkness, Crystal cleaving long and sharp, Storm rebounding with impossible speed, and Fire blazing up and high in triumph…

She ducked just enough for the lashing tree-trunk arms spinning like a power drill to only rip down the side of her face, sliding around them and continuing her flurry unabated.

+7d6 each attack until they stopped chaining, Crushing Blow and Flaming Burst crits exploding with fire and fury.

She’d actually Invested Flaming Burst into her Sword for this fight, just to add more explosive power into her crits!

Its torso bent and twisted crazily, rotating in three different directions and changing its axis. Quaver flicked back and Lost Light was like a bar of light in front of it, but it still caught her straight on.

Three hundred pounds and more of weapon arm, hardened wood infused with razored obsidian and steel smashed into her like a battering ram, and she went flying backwards, her feet leaving the ground. She pulled a complete somersault in the air as she vented the kinetic impact and landed a full fifty feet away in a crouch, skidding another thirty feet as dirt flew up beneath her feet, turning, sliding…

And then she was coming back at it in a charge far too fast for a human, while it was upping for another blast of magic at her.

The impact of it on her Null was jarringly crystalline, feeling like something violent and cold had invaded the stillness of her Null. It was a sensation she had not felt much, save when Ryin was unleashing spells at her to test and temper her Null.

The protective effect of her Necklace saved her from the liquefied nitrogen and frozen carbon dioxide doing major damage, and she bulled through the impact that splashed her with a terrifying, skin-shattering cold.

With grinning rage, she tore back into the thing, her charge ripping and tearing as she hit its upper body, nearly impaling herself on its spear-head of a bright orange ‘carrot’ nose. Fire erupted, and Healing Edge flared over her frozen face, starting the process of chasing away and mending over a hundred points of cold damage as fast as she could swing.

The unanchored pivots of the head and torso chased over its face as she clove two of the armored nodules that formed the points of its jagged-tooth smile, icy steel for jagged teeth vibrating and snapping over as she drew Quaver around against its rotation.

The jagged crystals of its snowy body tried to rip and tear at her skin and gloves as she slid around it, timing her descent for the wind-up of its center torso. A long line of melted water and severed force-strands followed her down as she dropped, refreezing behind her in a visible line, and then she was scrambling sideways, grinning, as she cut and slashed through the largest bottom portion just as crashing and slashing timbers whirled and chased after her with uncanny speed, ripping up the ground with brutal violence behind her heels.

Chopping off bits and pieces of it didn’t seem very effective, but the number of strands it had holding itself together was finite, and the spinning anchors that connected and pulled back the three spheres that made it up were constantly shifting and re-orienting.

Cutting its torsion points only gave it a momentary disconnect, snapping back into proper tension after literally two seconds… but two seconds was enough time to do something if timed right.

Like now.

Another blast of cold magic smashed into her, but she was already into making a Blood Rose, her Null rotating and sinking the blast. First petal, second, third…

Her fourth petal was formed by blazing right through its lower pivot, and the arms starting to spin and tilt towards her popped violently high as they went uncontrolled and lost their aim.

Five, six, seven!

The pale icy white rose swirled in profound beauty and alignment, drawing random factors together and lining things up as the Snowman tried to get back online, even lurching down and over to try and impale her with its bright orange spike of a nose, maybe chew on her skull and neck.

Flurry into Seven Raging Dragons. Each successful attack added another d6 to the stack atop each blow, even as crits erupted wildly for the few seconds this thing in front of her was most vulnerable.

Fire exploded up and down the Snowman, incidentally shearing through the top pivot it had whipped down into range of Quaver, and its center ball almost fell off its bottom one at the feedback from two released pivots, needing to be re-established…

Another blow snapped around, its abdomen hanging off the side, jerking around wildly and lashing across to slam into her right side and smashing her off it and backwards… just as her culminating One Strike hacked into the incoming blow no organic thing could have gotten off.

Over half of its left trunk arm blew apart with a truly monstrous crit, basically four at once going off on the cut and blowing right through its solid core and frozen hardwood instantly.

Kris let the impact send her flying into a nearby house and through its roof, crashing against the far wall and mostly out the window there.

Five ripping cuts, trying to bleed despite stabbing frozen daggers into her flesh, were embedded up and down her side. Her healing factor, juiced by Soul Magic and alchemicals, stopped the bleeding almost instantly, and her reinforced bones weren’t chopped apart, although she did dislocate her shoulder.

Ki grabbed as she rotated her arm, muscles pulled and twisted with the immaculate control of a Vajra-user, and her shoulder popped back into place, just as steel-hard snowballs the size of her head, hurled with the power of a repeating catapult, pounded right through the house’s walls, looking for her.

This ability was why the Gotrok had stopped messing with the Snowman, as the number of iceballs the Abominable Snowman could hurl was equal to a whole group of lugians. It had battered down dozens of them at times when they tried tossing rocks at it. Most such groups had been shattered and sent running as balls of jagged, steely ice exploded around them, letting them learn the hard way you didn’t have to be rock or metal to be a thrown weapon.

Kris rolled and was on her feet, motoring sideways into the open.

Iceballs raced past and behind her. It could certainly spin faster than she could run, but its projectiles still needed to reach her, and it still needed to manifest the iceballs, so there was a gap between the balls she had no problem dodging back and forth between with superior lightfoot… and it was spinning in a non-weapon mode as her closing rotation became a high-g juke and was suddenly in on it before it switched to weapon mode.

One Strike, charge, focusing all the damage into the solid, adamantine-hard flame that Quaver currently was, Lost Lights wedging open and cracking loudly through its throwing stump.