Jesvae Spiritwind shook her head at the reports on the desk in front of her, again wishing that it wasn’t against the law for commoners to read and write. Each time she got a new agent, precious months had to be spent teaching them enough to make their reports legible… Jesvae understood that keeping knowledge firmly in the hands of the nobility was a true and tested control mechanism, but she considered that one of the main problems of their society: Too much control.

All the commoners who joined her group were taught the secrets of literacy, but they couldn’t take the risk of giving them Cultivation Techniques – there were too many groups who would act against her if she took that leap. It was already hard enough to convince people that the Merrik was dying, and she had to make that her main focus for now. Revolution could come later.

Letting out a sigh, Jesvae rubbed her temples, sending threads of ice into her hair to massage her scalp. The reports in front of her made absolutely no sense: One said that the boy was in The City (and had been for a long while), the other detailed his present activities as an apprentice Blacksmith in North Stone Village.

A meek voice interrupted her wandering thoughts, asking for permission to speak.

Jesvae grunted, scowling up at the gigantic Warrior from House Flameward who was making his report. The man shivered, taking a step backwards before he caught himself.

“Well, get on with it!”

“Y-yes, my Lady F… uh… my Lady Jesvae.” The Warrior stammered, nearly using her actual title by mistake, an error which would have cost him dearly. Jesvae only gave warnings once, and that was if she was in a good mood. “T-the,” The Warrior stopped to clear his throat, “The information we received was correct, My Lady. The Fourth Heir of House Runetail is working together with the faction that wants to close The City, should… should the Merrik...” The Warrior paused again, this time to gather himself – it was a hard thing to say, but he knew Jesvae did NOT like it when people avoided the topic. “Should the Merrik die.”

Jesvae nodded, leaning back in her chair as a spear of ice formed in her hands. She understood why they wanted to close The City… they were cowards. Afraid that the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of desperate commoners would descend upon them, depleting the food stores faster than the land within the walls of The City could fill them.

The population outside The City was at least four times the population within, their entire civilisation having experienced an unprecedented period of expansion ever since the decision had been made to try and settle the lands that were once the sole domain of the beasts. The coming of the Merrik had changed everything, giving them hope such as they had never experienced before: and his loss could doom them to extinction.

The most optimistic estimates state that The City could sustain just under half their total population, but that didn’t take into account the increased birthrate; a phenomenon which is still not well understood by most nobles. People within The City still maintain their cultural norm, which is two children spaced out over a period of twenty or thirty years.

Now, however, there were many commoners who had become accustomed to having a child every four or five years – a birthrate that would be completely unsustainable in the closed environment of The City! How long would it take them to re-adjust? Would they have to return to the barbaric days of pre-history, where the oldest legends spoke of sacrifices being sent out of The City, just to ensure there was enough food for those who remained?

No… closing The City was not an option. She looked at the tall Warrior, a handsome enough man, if he had a bit more spine.

“Have they tried to reach out to Heller again?”

“Yes, My Lady.” The Warrior suddenly spoke with greater confidence, back on a topic he was comfortable with. “We had to kill three, but the rest are being held for the Shieldwall.”

Jesvae nodded, turning back to the reports on her desk – the deaths were unfortunate, but their goal was important. She was starting to wonder if being the apprentice of the Merrik somehow gave Heller the ability to be in two places at once, although it sounded ridiculous. Still, they couldn’t take any chances – watchers would have to be kept active in both locations. He was too important to her cause, and she couldn’t allow the cowards within The City to bring him over to their side.

And with Firebrand somehow having gotten involved… Jesvae shuddered; up till now, she had been the most powerful person involved in this struggle, with most of the bigger players refusing to admit there was even a problem. She had leveraged her personal strength to build a truly influential organization over the last dozen years, but Firebrand… he could tear everything apart just by himself, even if he weren’t the Regent of House Flameward! All of her carefully laid plans to bring Heller to her training grounds, hidden in a safe place deep within the mountains, destroyed just like that… and Firebrand probably didn’t even know.

But… if only, somehow, she could bring him to her side…

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The re-combination process took substantially longer than it had in our trial runs, but was still done in under ten minutes. I turned around and grinned at the other me, both of us now in sync right after the merge. I could see that he was bulkier than either of us had been separately, combining the broader shoulders and arms of a blacksmith with the physique of a warrior in training – and, of course, I had exactly the same build.

We did a few stretches, just making sure that everything felt in order, and then went through some simple exercise I had planned out. First we both tried summoning a tiny amount of ice with the Spiritwind Cultivation Technique… and it worked for a moment before we both began to feel dizzy. Strange… so… did that mean that the techniques here are a part of the soul as well? That didn’t make any sense to me…

After that we tried using the powers separately, and that worked with no issue at all – but unfortunately I didn’t have a filter in place to stop me from overloading… But that was easy enough to solve, I would just use the Spiritwind techniques only with the duplicate with the Ice powers, and the Flameward technique with my Electricity package.

I also noticed that we had pooled and then split our remaining CP, which I had been somewhat expecting. I had spent quite a lot on my Ice powers, especially the Frost Elemental form, but I had a lot more to go. I wanted to set the alternate form to switch itself on automatically if I suffered critical injury, like I had setup with Wulfric, so that I would have a bit of protection from unexpected attacks. Sure TR was kind of nice, but it did nothing if I didn’t have a chance to activate it – and even then, it couldn’t protect me from capture or confinement, and it was useless after the time limit ran out.

At this point, I viewed TR as more of a training power than a useful combat ability, as it let me test out my abilities and practice combat without having to hold back. In a real fight, I’d be much better off with a power that stopped me from getting injured in the first place, or maybe allowed me to tank a bunch of damage without getting cut to pieces and needing time to regenerate.

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I traveled back to the city using the same method I had used to get to North Stone Village: By creating an animated ‘eagle’ out of ice, and then fusing it with my Frost Elemental form. Between the two abilities I could travel quite rapidly without much risk of injury, though the animated ice couldn’t move nearly as quickly as the spread out Frost cloud was capable of (I still wasn’t even sure why it was able to move so quickly – one of the many things I was going to investigate about my new power).

Euphoria. Freedom. This was nothing short of amazing, and I felt at that moment that I would never get tired of flying like this. Of course, I knew that at some point I would reach the limit of my endurance and need to rest, but I had practiced using my ice abilities enough that to fly like this wasn’t any more draining than taking a brisk stroll around a park.

I kept an eye out for any beast activity below me as I flew far above the treeline. It was probably the most relaxed I had felt in a long time as I soared along, only occasionally having to re-freeze the ice eagle as the bright sun beat down upon us. The only difficulty was that I still had to deal with the disorienting 360-degree sensory input that the Frost cloud had, but I was able to cheat by keeping the majority of my body within the ice eagle itself (where there wasn’t really much to see).

I finally spied a herd of beasts down below – which made me realize that I was MUCH too high to spot individual beasts… oops, my bad… so I decided to follow them and see where they were headed. There weren’t any settlements in the area, and we were about a days walk from the road that connected my village to The City. The were moving quite rapidly, so I had to use a bit more energy to keep up with them, but I was in no hurry to return to the Flameward Barracks; to be honest, I was happy to put it off, as I had no idea what kind of reception might be awaiting my return (I was planning to simply walk into the city, and say ‘Firebrand did it!’ to anyone who questioned me). My exit from The City a day ago hadn’t been all that smooth, and I just hoped that nobody was freaking out…

About an hour later I saw a brilliant explosion in the air, a clear signal that the Warriors of House Flameward had spotted the incoming herd of beasts and were in the process of getting everyone to safety. I decided that scouting ahead to make sure that everyone had gotten to safety was worth the discomfort of melting a little bit (it wasn’t exactly pain, but it did NOT feel good), so I abandoned the ice eagle and did my best to focus on moving forwards.

The results weren’t great, and I was definitely disoriented, but it only took a few minutes to arrive above a large farming settlement. There were a few people still making their way to the shelter in the middle of their community, but nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry and I had a sense that the warning had arrived with plenty of time to spare. I quickly re-created my ice eagle, happy to get out of the scorching air around me… well, alright, it was actually pretty mild, but when you are made of frost anything above zero seems way too warm.

I don’t know what came over me, but for some reason I decided that this would be a good test of my abilities. Is overconfidence a side effect of being able to fly? It would certainly explain a lot of the stupid decisions comic book heroes liked to make… and… actually, now that I thought about it, the ones that couldn’t fly were almost always the clever ones… Regardless, the horde hadn’t seemed very large, just a few hundred. What could go wrong?

I knew that I’d have to create a whole lot of ice in order to deal with them, and I didn’t want to destroy all the crops in the area, so I moved to head the beasts off. Ideally, I wanted to draw them to me, so I flew just above the tree-tops, watching the cloud of dust and debris approach me at speed. These beasts were pretty fast, probably faster than the lizard-monkeys had been, but they were also very easy to spot from a distance and much smaller in number.

I almost changed my mind when I got my first good look at them, four legged beasts that were shaped like a mutated triceratops with four horns… quadceratops, I guess? They didn’t have the typical armored flange of a triceratops nor the beak like mouth; instead they had a smaller row of spikes running down their backs and a large maw filled with flat teeth. They were also smaller than I imagined true dinosaurs might be, though they were still at least the size of a full grown elephant. So… basically, gigantic spike-backed four horned rhinoceroses… At this point I was VERY glad that I could fly. See? Flying is the BEST!

My first instinct was that they were probably herbivores, but it’s not as if I could take that chance. We had learned in Academy that the only good beast was a dead beast, and that even beasts that didn’t eat people would happily trample or gore us to death. Best case scenario, they eat or trample our crops, and the Merrik will kill them if he happens upon them anyway – might as well get a bit of practice in.

I quickly created a giant sized version of Iggy, my trusty ice golem, giving him equally large swords of compacted ice to fight with. He was as tall and bulky as I could make him, well over twice the size of a full grown adult; my plan was for Iggy to distract them while I circled above, raining a jagged shower of frozen spears upon them. I started lowering the ambient temperature in the area around me, expanding myself beyond the borders of the ice eagle as I prepared to release control of it (Iggy would be greatly weakened if I tried to maintain both).

The small forest around me had slowed the beasts down a lot, the sound of falling trees coming closer and closer. They probably could have squeezed through if they really tried, but apparently they were part lumberjack, as they were taking great pains to ensure that not a single tree stood in their wake. I aimed my doomed ice eagle at where I figured they would break through the trees, and started making extra thick ice walls and towers to make sure I had plenty of material to work with.

My timing was off by less than a second, as the kamikaze eagle slammed into a row of trees just before the lead quadceratops entered my killing field. It might be worth mentioning that, although I had termed my construct an ‘eagle’, it needed to be large enough for my spread out Frost form to fully enter – so, roughly the size of a small bus. It was largely hollow on the inside, but it was still easily big enough to knock a few trees over, anyway; making a construct that large was very close to the limit of my current abilities.

A few of the beasts stumbled, which further impeded the charge of those behind them, but the full crest of the wave of spiky flesh was more than a dozen beasts wide and at least twenty long. If I had simply dropped an ice wall down in front of them they would have absolutely destroyed it, but I had taken the time to setup my ambush and the ‘wall’ was now more of a square. It was twice as wide as their herd, and nearly as deep as it was wide – I could feel how dry the air was, a rush of wind lifting leaves off the ground all around me as the air I had just taken all the moisture out of flowed upwards in a steady gust. Just for a moment, I wondered if it was possible for me to accidentally create a tornado…

Iggy ran straight at the horde and leapt over the leading quadceratops, just clearing its horns, the beasts about the size of a small horse compared to him. His twin blades slashed downwards, brilliantly executing a move I had been practicing for months, before landing squarely on the beasts back as it crashed into my blockade. The earth shook and the sound of the impact probably would have deafened me if I had ears, ice flying everywhere as the first few rows of the horde charged into those in front of them, deep bellows of pain and anger accompanying the ongoing collision. Unfortunately, the last dozen rows of the quadceratops herd (still well over a hundred strong) managed to veer off to the sides, but by this point I had started pelting them with razor sharp spears of ice from above, and a few of them had started dropping.

They had startlingly tough hides, taking anywhere from four to ten ice spears to knock even a single beast down, and I started seeing the flaw in my plan – at my current rate of activity, I would probably fall unconscious from exhaustion before I had exterminated even half of the horde! Iggy wasn’t faring very well either, struggling within the tide of confused beasts who had crashed into my trap. He was finishing off the healthiest survivors, mostly those in the back rows, but even in the front of the herd had a surprising number of survivors, with most of the dead having gotten skewered from behind by their fellows.

I kept attacking as I flew off to hem the beasts in, creating ice walls below me as I tried to force them back to the center of my trap. At this point I had created far more ice than I had ever attempted in weather this warm, and the wind was continuing to pick up, but I judged that it would be alright, guessing that the volumes I was dealing with shouldn’t be enough to affect weather patterns on a large scale. The damn quadceratops were just too tough! They couldn’t immediately break through my ice walls unless they had a head start, but I only had a certain volume I could work with at any given time. I had to choose between a thin wall that could keep up with them, or a thicker wall that they would quickly outpace.

A few seconds later I gave up my chase, frustrated at how ineffective it was., I was starting to realize how much easier it was getting to control my actions, so I decided to fly down and try engaging a few of them directly. Having a clear goal in mind seemed to help tremendously, as it allowed me to focus on a single area and move (and act) in that direction.

I pictured myself holding a pair of ice-broadswords, with my Frost swarm packed up tight together so I could gather the strength to wield them. I was already using ambient Qi to speed myself up, but now I was able to add to my attacks directly as well – for some reason, that ability had never worked on ranged attacks, including my ice constructs (like Iggy), no matter how I tried. Maybe it was tied to my soul somehow? I had no idea.

Two of the quadceratops took offense at my presence now that I was solid enough to clearly see, a swirling cloud of frost manifesting as a giant legless humanoid. We traded a series of blows, but since their horns passed through me with barely a twinge it was somewhat of a one-sided fight. I wasn’t nearly as strong as Iggy, but adding ambient Qi to the attacks made up the difference… when it worked. Even after all my practice, it was still difficult to time correctly, and it took precious concentration away from my swordplay – I really needed to speak with Firebrand, get him to tell me the secret of bonding a weapon to my Qi. I just needed to find the crazy bastard first…

It still took me ten solid hits to bring down a single quadceratops, and I discovered that their thick scaly skin hid a hard bony plating underneath. I managed to thrust deep into the neck of the second beast, and I decided to move on and let it bleed out. I had drawn the attention of a few more at this point, but taking them down this way was far slower than using my ice spears had been.

I flew back up and made my way over to Iggy just in time to see him get smashed to pieces by a quadceratops that was much larger than all the rest… probably the leader of the pack, possibly even an evolved ‘nascent’ beast. Working to re-create my construct, I unleashed a volley of ice spears upon the alpha quadceratops, which released an echoing bellow as it swiveled its head, searching for a target; but my frost body was far to spread out at this point for it to recognize what (or where) I was.

After the initial barrage the beast stopped paying attention to my attacks, its thick hide seemingly able to nearly negate my efforts – the occasional scratch appeared, but the rest of the ice spears shattered harmlessly upon contact. By the spirits, I had split solid stone walls with these ice spears, and they could punch a hole in solid steel armor!

The nascent beast had found the newly made Iggy and was busy trying to destroy him again, but neither of us were able to harm it… I cursed, wishing I had access to my lightning powers. They may not be all that powerful anymore, but electricity was excellent at penetrating armor or hide, generally just jumping directly across any protective plating and cooking the vulnerable meat inside.

My final effort was to create massive ice walls around it, suffocating the damn thing, but after I had it half way surrounded the alpha quadceratops abruptly bellowed and started emitting a strange red aura that covered its entire body! It thrashed around wildly, cracking its icy prison into a half dozen huge chunks. I tried to re-envelop it, but before I had a chance it leapt clear and began madly charging off into the forest, accidentally passing through a small part of my spread out body. I felt a sharp pain, similar to a fireball striking me, but I could tell that the red aura wasn’t actually emitting any heat. What the fuck?

The damage wasn’t substantial, but the fact it could hurt me at all was a huge shock. Was that a cultivation power!? Something was going on, but before I could investigate the beast slammed into the forest, sending shattered trees flying in its wake. It was moving at least four times the speed that the herd had originally charged in at, far too fast for me to be able to do much more than watch it escape.

I took stock of the encounter as I flew around picking off the few stragglers that hadn’t fled yet. Overall… I guess it was a win? I technically stopped the horde, and the crops were largely undamaged (trampled here and there from a few of the fleeing beasts). I counted my kills: 53 dead quadceratops, when it was all said and done, but the majority of those killed each other when they had slammed into my trap.

It did give me something of a benchmark for how powerful the Merrik was, however… I’d seen him destroy hordes larger than that in seconds. In all honesty, there was no comparison between us… yet.