Counting down

The Games We Play

Counting Down​

I barely had a moment to process what that feeling might mean when Keppel twitched an overly long finger and razor sharp icicles formed in the air above us, falling towards us in gravity's hold. There were a number of ways I could have dealt with a tactic like that, but it was obviously a distraction so I went with simple and quick—I drew upon a small bit of the fire around me and channeled up upwards in quickly spreading curtain. The icicles fell through, melting slightly as they did, and then I simply reached out with Xihai to grab them by the water on their surface and fling them towards Keppel.

The shards slammed into the ice of his chest, most snapping on impact but several penetrating deeply enough to stick—none of which made him so much as hesitate in the process of lifting his hand. I crouched reflexively and drew closer to the Tiger's warmth as the temperature around me plummeted, dropping swiftly into three digits below. An instant later, my brain caught up with what he was doing and I skipped a step closer to Nora, the manifestation of my soul dropping down on all fours around her and opening his jaws.

Heat and light gathered between blazing teeth and I kept my eyes trained on Keppel as he dropped down on his hands and feet as well, bracing himself. Quickly, more and more ice grew around him, as if to shelter him within an iceberg, and soon there was little left but a massive pillar of ice with a vague shadow held within.

"Flare," I said quietly and the sphere exploded forth, not expanding until after it reached its target—and then exploding into a sphere of fire that dwarfed even the shielding iceberg. In held its shape for a moment before exploding in truth, shattering the ice as much as melting it and sending up massive columns of smoke and steam, waves of heat washing over us as it did.

My eyesight shifted briefly to compensate, cutting through the sudden covering and seeing the truth clearly. Wherever the sphere had touched, ice had melted except for a scarce few veins that still held out. The frozen tomb Keppel had tried to conceal himself in laid shattered, broken open by the attack to reveal…absolutely nothing.

I twitched once and then strode purposefully five steps to right, my Tiger leaving Nora and the melted ground around her behind to follow swiftly. The Tiger lifted an open hand before slamming it down on the surprisingly deep layers of ice to reach in and grab what lurked within. With a mighty pull, he tore a bone-white figure from the ice, lifting him high into air as he raised his other fist—

And suddenly his entire burning form was disrupted, the flames all around him flicking out in an instant. The sudden shock hit me like a knife of ice to the heart—and then I felt the real cold that went along with it. In an instant, I felt myself freeze solid, starting with Adamant skin and reaching quickly deeper to solidify liquid blood and freeze nerves. For a moment, I knew what it was like to feel truly, truly cold; a brief moment of agony followed by a numbness that had nothing to do with my ability to erase pain and everything to do with nerves too cold to keep working.

I stepped forward anyway, ignoring the feeling of brittle skin breaking and limbs shattering to draw nearer to the source. The cold increased with each step, but past a certain point it just didn't mean anything; too cold to feel anything was too cold to feel anything. The Tiger, form dying down to a vaguely glowing ember, continued to lift its hand as I reached out in turn—and the area around us abruptly exploded under our combined assault.

The temperature rose as rapidly as it had fallen, my power returning sensation to me mere moments after I'd lost it. Unfortunately, the first of such sensations was that of being broken and skinless, but I brushed it off, lunging back to Nora's side in an instant. Though the Gamer's Body and my Elemental Resistance had let me weather the worst of that extreme temperature shift without more than a large chunk of HP damage, Nora's organs had begun to fail swiftly, her Aura already taxed from the battle. I held onto her tightly and healed her as the Tiger drew close again, flames renewing in its figure.

As it did, though, I kept its eyes focused on Keppel as the taken Hunter slide easily to his feet with an alien sort of grace owing to his warped form. Long spikes of bone jutted out from the sides of his mask, all of them aimed backwards over the now smooth expanse of his skill. His body had been changed greatly by Conquest's touch, leaving him with a reptilian, almost serpentine appearance, with layered scales of bone stretching down his now far too long neck and body such that they all seemed to flow together. His limbs were stick thin, giving them an almost stretched appearance that almost seemed pasted onto his body, but even then, his fingers were far to long for his hands and each had too many joints. Already, a body of ice was growing over him again, like moss in fast-forward, but…

Without a doubt, I'd sensed his approach that time, finding him long before my eyes spotted him. I'd felt something, a flash of dread that I knew wasn't my own and I'd simply…known where it was coming from. It was new sense that I assumed I owed to my new skill Empathy, different from my elementals or enhanced vision in a way that was hard to truly explain. But it wasn't something I could see nor something being fed to me by another; I simply…knew. I could feel the Auras around me flickering in a way that I just understood, and I'd known Keppel was about to attack, that Nora was dying, that Ren was slowly succumbing and was distracted by what was happening to Nora, that all around me villagers were panicking, fleeing, succumbing—

At first I'd been unsure of what I was feeling, like I'd opened my eyes for the first time to a mix of color and shape but hadn't been able to understand what it meant. But now…I felt it all, something flowing and extreme and powerful. The immensity of it all should have been too much for a person to bear.

Thankfully, I was the Gamer—and the Gamer's Mind didn't do overwhelmed. I noted the new world of sensation around me, skimmed it quickly, and dismissed most of it as not immediately important. Then I focused on what was, thinking through the implications as I forced Nora's heart to keep beating.

The emotion I'd felt before had definitely come from Keppel, yet I couldn't imagine Conquest feeling such things—relief that I'd keep him from hurting people, dread that he was about to attack us. The obvious conclusion, then, was that it wasn't the thing running Keppel's body that felt that way, but rather Keppel himself, somewhere deep underneath it all. Perhaps it was his 'mind,' perhaps it was his 'soul,' but whatever it was, it knew what was happening to at least some extent—meaning he was trapped inside of a body that Conquest was using as he pleased. I wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing; while it lent credence to the theory that Conquest's host were alive in a sense that meant they could be saved, it had the unfortunate downside of meaning they were trapped within, forced to suffer and watch as he used them to slaughter innocent people.

Though thinking about it, I wasn't all that surprised. Even beyond the fact that Conquest was a sick fuck that didn't deserve to live, given how the Grimm were drawn to negative emotions, having such a captive audience must have been delicious to them all. From that perspective, it made complete sense to keep them alive and aware; it might have even served as a way to attract other Grimm.

But man did I really hate Conquest.

I finished healing the damage to Nora, who was gasping for breath like she was drowning in open air—which she sort of had been for a little bit there, when the cold had gotten to her lungs. I nabbed a blue crystal from my Inventory and healed her again, restoring much of her Aura even as I gave her Regeneration; it should be enough to keep her a bit safer for now. That done, I rose again, eyes on Keppel who'd made a new body for himself, this one significantly less human then the last. It had three arms on each side, no head, and everything below the waist was in the form of a snake—the front half of a snake, with another head where the tail should end.

"Fall back a bit," I murmured to Nora, who had a hand over her no longer struggling heart. Even so, her other hand grasped her war hammer tightly and she tried to rise quickly. I felt a flash of regret—I hadn't thought it wise to send Suryasta against Keppel given his ability to absorb heat in massive quantities, so instead I'd sent Levant and Xihai, hoping they'd be able to do something about the ice he created. But Keppel was too strong, even for the both of them, and between the area affected and her inability to draw close for fear of infection, Nora had been forced to burn her Aura just to protect herself against the dropping temperature. It must have been frustrating, to have such an enormous amount of raw power but to be unable to draw close and use it. "This will be over soon."

I lifted my eyes to meet Keppel's, once again embedded in his construct's chest.

"So," I said conversationally. "You can swim through ice? That's a neat trick—but I hope you didn't expect it to work on me."

"You're perceptive," He admitted. "I'd figured you'd catch on quickly, but I'd kind of hoped to get near enough to at least kill the girl. Oh well, though; if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, right?"

I said nothing for a moment, letting him talk as I reaching out to Xihai and Levant. This was something I'd tried before, though I'd never found anything like success—but suddenly, I knew I could do it. Taking a deep breath, I imagined two songs coming together; Air and Water merging to make Ice, as I'd done many times before. I felt that pattern inside me, a hum beneath the echoing song of the red Dust, too quiet to be heard or express itself.

But then I reached out to my Air and Water Elementals and did the same thing.

Levant unraveled in an instant, tilting her head at me inquisitively even as Xihai fell into a puddle of already-freezing water. But then the ice forming around me began to ripple and a figure began to rise from it, her shape larger than that of either of her component Elementals, perhaps ten centimeters shorter than me. Her hair was the pure white of freshly fallen snow and the rest of her body transparent and clear as purified ice until frost began to form on the surface like a second layer of skin. She had no eyes that I could see, but a thick, frozen mist rose from the sockets and hide everything but a dim light that seemed to glow from within each.

Water and Air in balance, she looked at me and smiled, revealing rows of neatly arranged icicles instead of teeth.

"Trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results?" I asked Keppel. "You must be insane."