Wonderful.

That was the single word, super-saturated with all the sarcasm she could muster, that summarized the entire situation in Tanya’s mind.

Lukas Aguilar, her prey-turned-ally-turned-hunter, was slowly stalking towards her, eyeing her like an injured rabbit with nowhere left to run. That fact alone made her want to gripe about just how far out of hand everything had gotten. Thankfully, she still had enough juice to keep throwing shit at him and maintain a stalemate.

Then again, Lukas only seemed to get exhilarated when faced with stronger and stronger variants of her attacks.

It was surreal, it was nasty, and it all made absolutely no sense. Worse yet, she couldn’t bring herself to throw anything really nasty at him. Maybe it was whatever he did to her, or maybe it was her growing attraction towards him, or maybe it was so she could savor the sensation of being in control of her Everfrost without giving into the ice.

Or maybe it was simply because he’d saved her life.

Even now, she could sense Ezzeron’s growing frustration as she kept firing wind-spells at him one after another, even as he smacked them out of existence. Every wind blade met with the spiraling force of a lifeforce-enhanced punch.

Really, who’d even known such a thing was possible?

She hadn’t used the Frost yet, despite knowing it would immediately end the fight. Everfrost would feed upon Lukas’s lifeforce, continuing to do so until every cell of his body had frozen in place.

There was no undoing it.

But if he kept hammering against her defenses, kept slowly encroaching upon her, sooner or later she’d be forced to do something she would come to regret.

“IS THIS ALL YOU CAN DO?!?!” her opponent roared, gathering power around him before attacking.

Tanya sent an appropriate counter, but it was too late.

“Tch!” she grimaced, as her latest attack exploded in a gust of dust and debris. Whatever technique Lukas employed to create those lifeforce-enhanced attacks, they were somehow incredibly well-suited to countering her wind attacks. Whether it was her sniping tactics, long-range bombardment, or wide-area blasts, her opponent was perfectly capable of countering them all with incredible ease.

The knowledge slowly gnawed away at her resistance to firing Frost-based attacks at him. Maybe if she tried something simpler—

She winced, slightly lurching forward. The pain in her back grew stronger with every passing second. There was no doubt she had already bruised several ribs, if not outright fractured some of them. It was a small mercy she knew how to consciously employ lifeforce to heal herself mid-battle. Otherwise, this would easily be her last—

BOOOM!

…

On second thought, this still could be her last.

Unless she acted. And acted quickly.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Tanya muttered, frustration and pain warring for dominance on her visage as she raised her hand. A spear of Everfrost immediately formed in her palm, before shooting straight towards Lukas’s head.

SMASH!

Tanya froze.

That… that couldn’t have just happened. Could it?

She glanced at the fallen shards of ice on the ground, her stare unblinking. Gathering her power, she flung two more in quick succession.

They shattered before crossing half the distance.

What was happening? This— this was absurd. It was just impossible. Everfrost was a killer, and the bane of every lifeforce user. For her cursed ice to fall apart like this… It was unthinkable.

No.

Tanya pulled herself back together.

I’ll figure this out. I’ll— I’ll—

Uncertainty engulfed her. And that wasn’t good. She was known to do rash things in the face of uncertainty.

“ICE STORM!”

An arctic-gale howl escaped her coupled with a spiraling harpoon of tiny shards of Everfrost, each of them perfectly capable of draining the lifeforce of any standing creature to zero. This wasn’t a mere storm. It was the onslaught of an executioner.

The signature spell of her other self’s design.

But Lukas Aguilar did not relent. He did not shy in the face of danger. He did not falter in the presence of certain death. Instead, he raised both hands aggressively and yelled, his voice more bestial than ever before.

[ [ [ BUUUUURRRSSSTT!!!!!! ] ] ]

“They’re on the other side of the wall.”

Zuken nodded, his eyes still closed. He had never been one to discount Elena’s sensory abilities, and he wasn’t about to start now. This entire mission had become a giant clusterfuck, and the sooner they found Tanya and extracted her from whatever situation she’d found herself in, the better.

At this point, he just wanted to get the hell home.

“Anything else you can tell me?” he asked, feeling Avriel’s mana slowly dripping through his veins.

“Yeah. There’s something off about Tanya,” Elena murmured.

“See?” Olfric took the opportunity to cut in. “I told you. She’s up to no good. Always has been.”

Zuken counted down from five, furrowing his temples in distaste. Dealing with two children took its toll on him at times. At this rate, he was going to get a headache.

“I think she caught a cold.”

…

The dull pain throbbing in the back of his mind had to be his imagination. It just had to be.

“And what exactly do you mean by that, Elena?”

“I dunno. She just feels colder.”

Zuken opened his eyes and looked at Elena, who stared back at him as if she thought it explained everything. Then again, for her, it probably did.

The world was a bit different for people like Elena. As much as she looked and felt bremetan, she wasn’t. She was a changeling, one who would one day change into a full elf, or revert back to being completely bremetan. But until that choice came to pass, she’d have one foot in both worlds. Her common sense and perception would stay warped, regardless of how much she tried otherwise.

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” she replied after a moment’s thought. “There’s something else. And it’s hungry.”

Well, that was more on brand with this place at least. He was becoming rather used to dealing with these so-called hungry monsters.

“Alright, enough out of you,” Olfric gruffly cut in. “Banksi, can you tell us anything useful?”

Zuken pursed his lips. As an Earth-type he was more attuned to subtle shifts in the movements of rocks and the terrain around him. That meant analyzing subtle differences in pressure, among other things.

“There’s a lot of activity on the other end. Whatever is over there with Tanya is throwing out a lot of kinetic force. I imagine it’s a monster of gargantuan proportions to wield this much momentum behind its attacks.”

And Tanya was fighting this creature single-handedly.

Was she finally using her full power?

“All right, I’ll open a gateway through the wall itself. Whatever is on the other side will probably attack us as soon as we enter, so make sure your water-whips are ready, Olfric. Elena—”

“Muku and Buku can attack too.”

Zuken opened his mouth to say something about Elena’s choice of monster names, but decided against it. “Right. Whatever works. And if you get an opportunity, use your… familiar to mind-fuck them.”

“Joey doesn’t mind-fuck anyone. He’s a baby!”

“Yeah it doesn’t mind-fuck them,” Olfric snarked. “It just massages your mind so hard it becomes mush.”

“I hate you.”

Olfric beamed.

Elena looked at Zuken with wide soulful eyes for some support. But when he awkwardly glanced away, she frustratedly sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Anything inspiring you want to tell us before we go through, Zuken? Something to raise our morale?”

“This is going to suck, and if either of you let your guards down, you should expect horrible things to happen to all of us.”

“Not what I was going for,” the brunette gasped. “I was looking for something inspiring and romantic, not a deadly warning!”

“Inspiration leads to overconfidence,” Olfric added his two cents. “It’s better to be patient and level-headed in a situation like this than gung-ho and liable to overlook critical details. While I would have chosen more… tasteful words, it doesn’t make him any less right.”

“Shit happens,” Zuken sighed. “If there’s one thing I know about battle, it’s that no plan ever survives the enemy.” He paused. “Not that we should discard our current plan. This actually has a chance of working.”

Elena shot him a skeptical look, before shrugging and stepping back, allowing her spider-esque monsters to take the lead.

“Alright,” Zuken exhaled, raising his arms. “I’m opening the portal.”

His armbands began to glow.

As the two attacks met, the sound alone was enough to drive a robust mind mad. Tanya didn’t know what it was, specifically. It was too loud for that. All she remembered was screaming reflexively against something that grated at the inside of her ears, her own voice lost in the din. Rocks and chips of ice whirled around in the cyclone that raged between them, her own hair flying all over the place as if it had come to life. And in the midst of it all was a soft throb of pain in her back, perhaps the only thing keeping her grounded to reality.

It was like standing before a vicious thunderstorm, while taking shelter behind a pebble.

On pure instinct, Tanya called forth Ezzeron’s power and surrounded herself with a wind-shield. Yet, even then, she could feel the aftereffects of the explosion pelting her through her defenses. The power behind the lifeforce, the hate and hunger powering it— as someone who understood the concept of hunger better than most, she knew what she was facing.

This was a true monster. Someone who could be her greatest enemy. Or her greatest ally.

And more importantly, she figured out how he was countering her attacks.

Lifeforce.

Everfrost was more than mere frost. There was a curse placed upon it, a conceptual addition that consumed lifeforce and added the power to the frost to grow further— a process ultimately leading to the victim becoming a large, frozen chunk of dead tissue. The greater the lifeforce rushing through them, the more hungrily the Everfrost consumed them.

But Lukas Aguilar wasn’t allowing the frost to touch him. Instead, he was imbuing his kinetic attacks with lifeforce.

The moment her ice shards came in contact with his bursts, the Everfrost devoured it, an action that let the curse run its course before so much as touching the victim. It was a simple, ingenious solution to her most lethal powers.

The Everfrost bled Lukas’s attacks of their lifeforce. But their momentum—

WHAM!

“Fuck!” she grimaced, as Lukas sent a crushing wall of force towards her. Her wind-shield blocked most of it, but something sharp and jagged hit her below her left shoulder. The impact was vicious, like getting slugged with a weighted bat, and it spun her aside in an explosion of whitenoise that her fear-addled mind substituted for pain.

Spitting out a glob of blood, Tanya painfully settled into yet another defensive position.

The bastard struck a low blow— literally —by aiming a kinetic bombardment at the floor, sending thousands of broken shards of rock at her. Cutting monsters into pieces and destroying walls were one thing. But being a Wind-spiritist didn’t mean shit if you were to die by a thousand cuts.

Especially while trying to defend against a much stronger enemy that was steadily getting closer.

The stalemate wouldn’t last much longer.

She needed to find Zuken and Elena. She needed to find a way to destroy the anomaly’s core. But first, she needed Lukas Aguilar back to normal. Otherwise, she could forget about the first two objectives.

“It’s been fun,” Tanya gritted out, suppressing the urge to wince, from the bruises and cuts on her face, “but it’s time to end this once and for all.”

She raised her arm.

Lukas launched himself towards her, his fingers poised like claws.

Tanya felt the ice rush through her.

Lifeforce whirled around Aguilar.

Her lips twisted.

His teeth bared.

“WIND SHEAR!”

[ [ [ BURST! ] ] ]

A naked, unseen force exploded between them, but Tanya continued onwards. She felt Lukas’s fingers encircle her neck, felt his intoxicating lifeforce ensnare her senses. It would’ve been all too easy to give up, to let him have his way, to tear her apart, to literally have her.

Tanya suppressed all her inner dialogue and focused solely on her one, final spell.

Her fingers grabbed his wrist, but not in defiance.

A small smile formed on her face.

“ARCTIS!”

Cold, the pure preternatural cold of true Winter, flooded out of her broken palm and right into Lukas’s clenched fist. There was a horrible crackling noise as the temperature of his flesh dropped like a heavy weight, far below freezing temperature.

The results were rather surprising.