Tetra felt her heart pumping as surges of pure joy shot through her; the kiss of the wind as she dashed over the powdery snow was amazing, and she could feel herself sink slightly after each step until the snow beneath her foot compacted enough that she was able to thrust herself back upwards. There was a nearly solid plume of white rising behind her as she ran away from the warriors of House Spiritwind… and their commander…

Tetra knew that Heller would be able to catch up to her quickly, but most importantly she had felt like she was dying of boredom on the last half of the avalanche-ride. It had been amazing at first, when they were on the mountain and it had almost felt like they were literally falling straight down towards the valley on a massive chunk of ice – but then the clouds of snow had started to rise up around them, obscuring the view more and more as they reached the flatlands and started to slow down.

She hadn’t been able to hear anything over the roar of the avalanche itself, nor see what was going on around her, and the mix of anticipation and frustration had made her feel like she was losing her mind. Then the gradually slowing torture chamber had finally ground to a halt, and the cultivators of House Spiritwind had done their spirits damned job and cleared the field of view. Tetra had easily located a small group of beasts that looked like perfect targets for her frustration.

She didn’t want to risk staying around and snapping at her friends… or even worse, at the lady of house Spiritwind who was making all of this possible. She was truly fearsome, and every time Tetra saw her in action she felt in awe of how strong and commanding Jesvae was.

Not that running into action was a conscious planned decision – Tetra acted far more on instinct, and didn’t often bother to analyze exactly why she did something, as long as it felt like the right move… and this did, for better or for worse.

There was a group of four-legged beasts with hard armor plating on their backs not far from Tetra’s position, and she grinned as they struggled to move further away from the snow that had just arrived around them. They were capable of standing on their hind legs (to forage or to lash out with their sharp claws), but the scout reports from House Spiritwind had deliberately omitted this fact in the debrief that Heller and his friends had received.

These were the second most predominant species in this region, after the flying wasp-beasts (who had trouble penetrating their thick armored hides), and the two competing species were in the process of hunting the surrounding lowlands clean.

But none of this matter to Tetra.

An indigo light appeared in her hand as she summoned a long blade of Ki energy, focusing to make it as sharp as possible as she silently landed on the back of one of the beasts and plunged her blade straight through its armor. There was a significant amount of resistance, even with how sharp and fast her attack was, but it was nothing compared to Wulfric.

The beast roared in pain as the Ki blade pierced straight through its body, and Tetra nearly lost her balance as it stood upright and swung its front legs (arms?) around wildly. She braced herself with the Ki weapon, finding her balance before letting it vanish as she leapt quickly, spinning in the air to plant her feet and latch onto the side of a sturdy tree that she had noted before her ambush.

“What the bloody beast…” Tetra muttered to herself as a few of the armored beasts stood up on their hind legs to look around, suddenly towering up almost as high as Wulfric’s shoulders. The smaller ones did the exact opposite, hunkering down lower to the ground and tucking their limbs and heads into the softer parts of their bodies. The rest stayed as they were, looking around at the hollering beast that was still flaying wildly around itself.

Her first target was already dead, it just hadn’t realized yet as the small size of the entry and exit wounds hid the full extent of its injury. Her Ki weapons did far more internal damage than their size would indicate (an unexpected boon according to Heller, but it made perfect sense to her), and it sometimes took a few moments for her victims to stop moving.

None of them had spotted her thus far, which wasn’t surprising given the speed she was moving at, so she found another target and pushed off the tree at full speed. She chose one of the standing ones, figuring that they were the only ones that posed a serious threat to her due to the extended reach of their claws.

Tetra knew that she wouldn’t be able to hide her presence for long – her ability was too flashy for that – so she decided to go for distraction instead. A brief moment of concentration summoned a long indigo spear into her hand, which she thrust through the soft underside of her second target as it let out a roar of shock and pain.

This time she didn’t dissipate the solidified Ki yet, leaving the distinctive indigo weapon sticking out of the beast as she pushed off of it and shot towards the third target. The roars of pain drew the attention of the beasts all around her, but the distraction worked well enough as most of them were still staring at the vibrant weapon impaling their comrade, even as Tetra split open the belly of yet another beast.

Some of them were moving towards the still twitching beast impaled by the spear, but a few of them had noticed Tetra’s silvery form, even though the predominantly white uniform of House Spiritwind helped to camouflage her against the layer of snow covering the ground.

Without warning hundreds of ice shards sprayed the area, dozens of them impaling each of the standing beasts as every exposed spot was neatly targeted, sending fountains of red blood out of the jagged wounds as the beasts fell quietly to the snowy forest floor. At the same time, a flurry of snow swept into the area and rapidly began to condense into a towering form of ice that almost made the beasts look tiny - Heller had arrived.

Tetra used the opportunity to launch herself at one of the beasts that was still on all fours, not worried at all that Heller might hit her with an errant ice shard by accident. In addition to her speed and agility, Tetra had been born with an extremely rare skin type among their people – metallic skin combined with scales.

For those who only had scales, like Heller, they were formed out of a material that was somewhere between the sturdiness of bone and keratin. Those people generally had much stronger nails than usual as well (also like Heller) – though they weren’t pointed or formed for fighting like the claws that some people had – and their hair tended to be stronger and thicker than normal.

Metallic skin was different than scales, but there were some similarities. For one, it was much tougher than regular skin. but still soft and flexible enough to allow a full range of movement and dexterity. Next, just like with scales, metallic nails and hair were also strengthened, but the nails were thinner and would bend if too much pressure was applied, while the hair acted much like regular hair, but was slightly harder to cut.

Together, however, the combination of metallic skin and scales were much more effective than the sum of their parts, and each of Tetra’s small overlapping scales was composed of an extremely tough inflexible metallic substance, all of which was firmly attached to her strong yet supple metallic skin underneath. In her entire life, Tetra had never cut herself by accident, and now that she was an adult she couldn’t cut her skin even if she wanted too – at least, not without using an extremely focused Ki blade, or some other cultivation power.

Her bones were also quite strong, like all those with metallic skin, but Tetra (and the roughly one out of every several thousand others who shared her skin type) did face a unique problem: Her nails were extremely tough, and ever since she was a child they had needed the help of a blacksmith to grind them down. Her silvery horns were strong too, but since those were made of bone and not her version of super-tough keratin (like her nails and her scales), they were still within reason and could be shaved down with a sharp enough blade if she desired it.

Then, on top of all of that, the Ki that Tetra infused her body with to strengthen and toughen it for combat made her even harder to injure, to the point where she was (effectively) even more heavily armored than Wulfric in his iron form… Discounting the fact that he didn’t have to worry about internal injuries, of course.

As strong and confidant as Tetra was, she had long learned that the best defense is just not letting yourself get hit in the first place.