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CH 165: Cracks
🕑 Added 2025-07-28 14:00:12 +0000 UTCThe first ice lance in the barrage to hit Reid slammed into his armor and knocked him face-first into the ground. The second and third followed soon after, crashing against his armor with ominous shrill cracks. Every moment, ice impacted the rock all around him, plunging into stone and breaking as they landed. Shattering shards of ice threatened to put a lucky chunk into his face, or through his eye.
Reid covered his face in the crook of his elbow and crawled forward while he stayed prone. More frozen lances smashed into him, threatening to crack through and break his armor. Marrow's trait, delocalize damage, wasn't acting quickly enough to distribute the damage from his back to other areas - and he could already feel bits of ice making their way into his skin.
Face covered, weathering the strikes, Reid pushed forward while hoping he was crawling in the right direction.
Every second brought more attacks and worsened his situation, until marrow gave way. Reid felt multiple pieces chip off, and made a decisive move.
He flipped over.
Both arms shifted to cover his face, and Reid used the climbing spikes left in his boots to kick himself backwards on his heels. Ice slammed into the tops of his thighs. Even through his armor, the impact of the magic knocked the wind out of his lungs, and threatened to make him wretch as it pummeled his stomach.
Reid grimaced, and kicked.
The mole king, back in the warrens, had displayed awesome magical might, even as old and worn as it had been. He recalled, at the time, wondering just how impressive it would have been in its heyday. The Skink gave him a reasonable answer, as an impossible mass of ice continued to rain down on the mountainside.
It would have been a monster.
The beast had been throwing around absolutely massive attacks so far in the fight - especially once it started taking the fight seriously.
But, safe behind his shield, Reid hadn't quite actualized just how serious the thing's magic was. The sheer mass of ice raining down on the mountainside was absurd, and the attack was still going. Plus, the beast had been holding its breath attack on the lip of the ledge the entire time, and was getting ineffectively hit by its own magic while it did. An absurd level of power and might.
His front armor started to crack. Reid clenched his jaw and pushed an unhealthy amount of power into his legs. He needed safety. Time to think. Some sort of reprieve.
Any other problems were second to getting impaled by ice.
Heels dug into stone, and Reid kicked out. His legs erupted in hot pain as his calf muscles ripped themselves apart under the strain of violent motion. His back slid over a mass of fractured ice and cold stone.
Bone armor splintered and flew away in damaged chunks, and shards of ice found purchase in his abdomen. They created an instant, paradoxical feeling that mixed the normal heat of a stab with a draining cold that felt like life itself was fading away from the wound. The silver lining of it all was that the ice didn't halt his momentum. The magic attack still fractured on or shortly after impact - which meant it couldn't pin him to the stone under his back.
Moments that felt like an eternity passed, and Reid's arms hit the rocky wall.
He worked through the pain of his injuries, and grabbed onto the wall and ground as he shoved his body against the stone. An ice lance slammed into the wall above him, sending down a shower of ice and rock that clacked against what remained of marrow. His armor was missing large chunks of material, and wide portions of it were only one or two good hits away from breaking apart themselves.
The timing of it all didn't make sense. How long had this attack gone on for? When this hit him in the air, it was definitely shorter than the ice still raining down. Was it something to do with the sky, or maybe the beast had switched from its breath attack on the cliff's edge to send out more volleys of falling ice? He spared a peek in the direction of the creature, but the absurd amount of ice raining down limited his visibility to only a few feet in front of himself. He needed to act, somehow. Ideas flitted across his mind.
Reid tried to craft himself cover. A crude shell of bone grew and started to cover him - but he had neither the time nor the attention to give the thing an internal structure capable of holding up to the barrage of attacks still raining down. It flaked and shattered, adding to the debris already covering him. He swore internally, and tried to repair Marrow - but his armor greedily sucked down mana with little result. That was a dumb idea. It had taken days to repair Marrow after the magma crab fight - there was no way it was going to get fixed any quicker now. It would probably be better to just keep using his mana to create a bunch of shells that shattered, then hide under the rubble -
...That wasn't a bad idea.
Reid formed another shell that quickly broke, and immediately started on a new one. He forced energy through himself as he continued on with the seemingly pointless repetition.
Ice continued to fall. Reid heard the mountain itself cracking and complaining against the impacts. The layers of broken bone atop him grew into a pile, then a mound.
Almost there.
A lance struck close and scattered some of the debris. Reid clenched his teeth and swore at himself. He had to make this work, and he needed to do it now.
His hands shook with effort as he strained against his wounds to raise them within the heavy pile of bone and ice.
He pushed everything he could muster into a single, simple act.
Reid used his magic and the innate crafting sense he always took for granted to touch and feel every shard in the mound of broken bones. Thousands of tiny protrusions grew from every surface near another bone - like stalactites and stalagmites reaching for one another. They connected by the dozens, then the hundreds as the act sucked greedily on Reid's mana. More ice fell close, and he lost swaths of unfinished bone with each near strike.
An orange-yellow glow accompanied Reid's shout as he pushed himself over the line to complete his effort. The sound of impacting ice abated, replaced by an inconsistent snapping of breaking bone.
Reid opened his eyes, and blinked. It was dark.
Right. That made sense. He closed his eyes again, and felt out his new haphazard creation. A massive, lumpy mound sat atop him - made from an impractical number of bone shards fused to one another in an incoherent pattern. The wall it created was feet thick, and though it shook and snapped as ice continued to fall, it didn't fail. Each small surface acted like its own sacrificial plate. They shattered from direct impacts of ice, but the ice shattered in return - and with its lessened momentum, mostly bounced off of the rest of the intact bone.
He'd solved the immediate danger. Reid rewarded himself with a deep breath - but stopped when the action tugged at broken bones and ice shards. He inspected himself with his hands. His armor - Marrow - was even worse than he'd thought before. Aside from a few half-intact pieces, most of the armor was missing. The rest wasn't going to do much in the way of defense anytime soon. Thankfully, the section around his bangle was still intact.
He was also missing more flesh and muscle than he'd realized, and it dawned on him that he hadn't brought Requiem with him during his crawl.
His worry for his mace quickly left his thoughts. He had to focus on the here and now. The fight was still here, and outside, the beast king was doing its damndest to obliterate Reid. It was only though his tenacity and Nyx's help that he'd managed to deal damage to the beast and stay in the bout so far. He bit his lip - he wasn't alone here.
"Nyx, you there? You alright?"
"Better than you, Reid. But I don't know how much more I can do during the fight. Don't want to drain my whole tank and have nothing left for your evolution. Leviathan knows you're still going to kill this damn thing."
Reid cracked a smile.
"You know, your ingenious little shell here is doing wonders against this ice. Intentional or not, it's only breaking one surface at a time, and there are tons of shards the ice would need to break through. This might be the perfect time for a bit of recovery on your part. Plus, you really pissed the thing off. I don't think Crinoptera is stopping anytime soon."
"How the hell does it have so much ice anyway? The ice it shot before was tiny compared to this."
Nyx's voice came back amused. "It didn't. It's been dual-casting the ice breath and the ice lances for a while ... and I just realized this is the first time you've dealt with that. Right. Dual casting - technically possible with enough skill, causes you to burn mana at a massively increased rate. Now shut up and use this reprieve. Take one of Winnie's pills, and eat and drink something. Triage and basic healing, then drain the battery band, and get your weapons back."
Reid nodded silently. Items were summoned from storage and consumed. He turned his attention inward, and set to work. Sounds of snapping bone faded as his focus moved over broken bones and torn muscles. He knit blood vessels together and regrew skin over mended flesh. Bundled resources from the junction between his power and constitution metaspaces flowed down and fed the process. They sped up the process noticeably, but pulled hard on his mana.
When he pulled himself back out of his bodywork, everything seemed quieter around him. His bone shell was still there - hectic plates a foot thick intact. His body was wet, and Reid realized he was lying in a few inches of water. The realization put a smile on his face. Reid had sent his system into overdrive to push along his healing, and the heat that had generated melted the ice that had wounded him - along with the ice trapped in his bone shelter with him. It was an unexpected benefit of the process, and he was grateful for his painful, burning ability in a new way.
He summoned a few new bites of meat, and started draining his Battery Band. The mana-storage ring was filled to the brim, and Reid needed every drop with how aggressively he'd been using his own pool. It flowed into him, fast and bright, until the ring fell apart with a soft pop. Reid winced, then pulled out his dagger.
He greedily sucked down the mana stored in the dagger - only slowing when he felt his reserves reach a workable level. There was still enough left in the dagger to keep going, but Reid didn't want to put himself at risk of damaging the thing. Unlike his ring, Little Nap was a weapon, and that meant it could still be a tool for this fight. Not that stabbing a strip-mall sized creature with a knife was going to be effective, but still.
Mana done, Reid summoned more meat and water, and hurriedly chewed through them. There was still a fire burning in his gut, and he wanted to get back in the fight. He wasn't done yet, and he was going to finish things.
An odd sensation shot through him, and Reid squinted his eyes to try and make out the meat in his hand with the dim light. After a few moments, he flicked that piece to the side and pulled another from storage. There was no need to risk some sort of food poisoning from eating potentially bad food in the dark. He masticated on a new piece of fire-roasted skink, and reshaped the space around him. Bone shifted away to give him enough room for his next task - Recall.
Mana swirled and gathered within him, and light flashed as he brought back his shield.
Bonewall wasn't first because he wanted it most - but because he knew it was a necessity in this fight. It was also the piece of equipment that seemed to take the most effort and concentration, so he wanted to get it out of the way first. The bulky, massive shield popped into existence and immediately took up most of the sparse room inside the bone hollow. He cleared away a little more space, and mana swirled again.
Next up was Requiem. Reid had a sense that his mace was still intact, sitting outside on the shelf somewhere - but this was a hell of a lot easier than going out to look for it. Light flashed, and the old familiar diamond grip greeted his open palm. He ran a thumb over the names carved there. It had been some time since he used Requiem with a bare hand - but with marrow still ostensibly broken, he'd removed his gauntlets. Something felt good and right about holding Requiem's grip with his bare hands. As he grew himself a new, temporary set of armor, Reid intentionally kept his hands bare. The makeshift armor was modeled after his unintentionally brilliant bone dome - a mass of bone shards and plates fused together, with the intention for individual surfaces to break and give way. It was the best he could do for the moment.
Reid pushed out, shifting and folding away bone.
He had equipment good enough for the moment. He was as recovered as he could hope to be in the middle of a fight. He rose to a knee, then his feet as his shelter opened.
It revealed a substantially changed landscape.
Nearly half the shelf they'd been fighting on was gone - broken away and fallen down the mountainside. Massive icicles clung to the cliff face above and below them, only occasionally cracking and falling. The intact portions of the shelf were covered in inconsistent, thick mounds of ice. That coating rose at the cliff's edge, into a nearly thirty-foot high mass that stretched the edge's entire length. Reid took only a moment to marvel at that display - proof of the power of the creature he faced.
The lizard itself was distracted, chomping through glacial remains sitting in its food pile. The way it moved and ate - it seemed... slower. Slightly less precise in its motions, and it was favoring the side of its body that Reid hadn't done damage to. It also hadn't noticed Reid. Or, it was more accurate to say it assumed he was dead. That was the only explanation for its current behavior.
For a tiny moment, thoughts about retreat and further rest flickered in Reid's mind. They were crushed under his conviction.
Reid shifted Requiem to his off hand, and started charging a shrapnel brock as he casually walked over the ice towards Crinoptera.
Heat churned within him. He wanted this fight.
Reid whipped his projectile forwards, and it caught Crinoptera near its front shoulder. Tension-cable snapping sounds echoed off the rocks as shards of bone buried themselves deep through the lizard's skin.
It let out a massive screech, and whipped its head away from its meal. A half-chewed torso fell from its open maw as it leveled angry eyes at Reid.
He flexed his hand around Requiem's grip.
"Round two, motherfucker."
