The Ice Lands

by William Dickey

  You gained 1492 EXP

  Seeing how much more experience this ice anaconda provided compared to the others of its weight class, a part of me wanted to make more of them grow additional heads so they’d be worth more. I imagined a fifty head monstrosity that could give me five levels in one go. But unfortunately, it was then that Rose and Zelus finished off the last anaconda and I didn’t have the guts to suggest attempting such a strategy on the big one.

  Having finished off all the mid-sized snakes and most of the small ones, everyone turned their intention to the remaining giant two-headed Jormungandr.

  “Let’s try doing it just like we handled the last one,” I suggested to Izusa. With multiple heads, it was too difficult to get a fire blast past the serpent’s defenses. Only by removing one or more of those heads could we create an opening.

  “I was thinking similar but how are we supposed to chop off that thing’s heads,” she replied.

  It had taken several perfectly targeted strikes for Izusa to take an anaconda’s head. Jormungandr was at least three times as thick. It would take many blows to the same spot to get the job done, impossible while the ice snake was moving.

  “I have a way to slow the body of that thing down. Can you chop off its head if I can keep it still for a minute?” I asked.

  “Does not hurt to give it a shot,” said Izusa. “Rose, Zelus, when Isaac does his thing, we are going to need you two to keep its heads busy. The rest of us are going to focus on severing heads and we cannot have that thing breathing ice on us. Does everyone understand?” After a series of nods, I started up.

  “Inventory,” I called up the screen but only in preparation for later. My gravity spear had two buttons, one that initiated its weight modulation and one that activated the flames out its butt, and a dial that controlled the degree to which the weight was changed. Normally, this dial was turned to its maximum so I could swing the spear with ease and press the button to quickly bring things up to maximum force, but instead I turned the dial the other way to its minimum. On its minimum setting, the weight of the spear didn’t return to its normal weight, nor did it fall to zero, instead the weight of the spear became negative.

  Rose and Zelus each fired a geyser of flame from different positions, occupying the Jormungandr’s heads with defense. Meanwhile I pressed the weight modulation button. The spear jerked upward. I had to work hard to keep it from flying away.

  “Here’s to hoping this works,” I nodded to Izusa just before I charged. I only took a few steps, to allow myself to get some horizontal motion before I jumped. I thumped my legs against the ground as hard as I could trying to get as high as possible.

  I’d calibrated the spear’s minimum setting to be just a bit less in magnitude than my weight. As far as the Earth and its gravity were concerned, the combination of me and my spear was nearly but not quite weightless. I soared fifty feet up in a long arc over the Jormungandr. When I was directly overhead, I tapped an icon on the open inventory screen.

  A stream of water rained down from the inventory screen, falling straight onto the ice serpent and covering it in a thick layer of water. As I finished crossing over, I tapped the screen again to cut off the water flow before returning to the ground.

  The water was a fraction of the store I kept for the journey. I stored quite a bit since water didn’t cost anything and my inventory had plenty of space.

  It should go without saying the ice serpent was extremely cold, well below freezing. When the water hit, it quickly froze, encasing the Jormungandr’s body in a layer of ice.

  With the heads still preoccupied with the human mages and its body frozen to one spot, Izusa and the other Othans were free to whack away at the creature’s necks. The Jormungandr shrieked in pain but there was nothing it could do, if it turned away from the mages for a second it’d be shattered to death. Eventually, Izusa and the other Othans chopped off both heads, allowing Rose and Zelus’ flames to shatter the creature’s body.

  You gained 11243 EXP

  You gained a level.

  After the Jormungandr died, Rose started a big bonfire so that we wouldn’t freeze out in the cold. Everyone gathered around and after a few minutes, once everyone caught their breath, Izusa addressed us all.

  “Okay, I know things did not go perfectly, but thankfully, we are all alright,” Izusa began.

  “No thanks to some people,” whispered Bearballs as he glared at Titania. Izusa didn’t hear but I and several others who happened to be nearer did. Several gave faint nods in agreement. Izusa was technically correct that no lasting damage had been done to any of us, but that was only because of a run of luck. If any one of a hundred things went wrong, if there had been one or two more anacondas, if the Jormungandr had been just slightly faster or got a lucky blow, one or more of us wouldn’t have survived. And this was only the end of our second day, most of which had been spent in the air. We had weeks left on the ground. Things were definitely not going well and when things don’t go well, people find something to blame.

  Luck, fate, god, people have a hard time placing blame on such incorporeal things. It’s just hard to hate something you can’t visualize in your mind, it slips away to be forgotten even though they are frequently the culprit. So instead, people find something more physical.

  Blaming ourselves is difficult for everyone. We are all heroes of our own story. We all see things from our own perspective. We all know whether we did our best, or at the very least, the best that could be expected of us, and for the most part that is exactly what we do. It’s easy to expect the impossible from someone else and not of oneself.

  So we find fault with someone else. Titania was a Fallen, an outsider and a perceived and known failure. It was easy for all the Othans to blame their problems on her.

  Titania had made things worse by chopping the serpent heads without properly disposing of the bodies, but there was no way she could have known the creatures had such an ability. None of us had seen such things before. Any one of us could have made that mistake. But still, many blamed her. Perhaps worst of all, it looked like Titania blamed herself.

  ‘This group is sick,’ I thought to myself. In my mind our problem was group cohesion not any individual member and placing blame on Titania would only make matters worse. At the same time, I didn’t see how I could fix the problem. If I tried to defend Titania and failed, I could be added to the problematic outsider list and the situation would grow worse.

  “Now that we have all had some rest,” Izusa continued. “It is time we set this camp back in order.”

  “You mean we’re still staying here,” said Rose. We’d set up camp, before the fight broke out. Now, most of that stuff was scattered and trampled on.

  “Of course,” said Izusa. “We know that this place is clean now, if we change locations who knows if we bump into something else.”

  Ch. 21: Catch

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  ‘No, must focus, must not listen to the voices, must keep hold of self,’ James struggled to hold onto his mind. The voices were growing with every day and James felt a little bit more of himself wear away. He could barely remember them anymore, the boisterous warmth of a middle-aged woman, the proud and stern set of a man with a wisp of grey in his hair, a goofy little girl bouncing at the edge of his bed. James knew them to be his parents, his sister, his family, but he’d forgotten their names. It felt like another life, one filled with memories of peace and prosperity. Those old memories didn’t stand a chance against the newer ones filled with pain and cold and death.

  James feared the day that all his old memories were gone. He felt that perhaps these memories were the only things separating him from the monstrous men who’d arrived in this world with them.

  To that end, James had done whatever he could to reduce his suffering in this world. At first, it was mostly suffering from the cold but that was all behind him, he didn’t feel t
he cold at all anymore. At this time, his only concern was hunger and the endless pain it brought. To keep away that hunger, James was willing to do anything, even obey the commands of a monster like Truant.

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  James shrieked with all his might, doing his best to mimic the rest of his kind. As always, it worked. James saw a few of the bony monsters, rushing towards him through the trees. When they reached James side they looked around eagerly for what they were expecting, anything edible, but there was nothing and after a minute, they’d return to their random wandering. Of course, by that point James would have moved another few hundred yards north and would have screeched again, keeping the beasts close to him.

  At his last count, James still had around sixty of the creatures. He’d started with eighty, but as he lured them further and further into the boonies, it became more and more difficult to keep them in line. The desiccated men and women may have lost most of their intellect, but after driving them so far, even they were starting to realize how long it’d been since they’d last eaten and were growing frustrated.

  James was growing frustrated as well. When he set off a week ago, it’d been with a full stomach and the promise of a rich reward when his mission was completed, but things weren’t going well. James had obeyed Truant’s instructions to the letter, he’d led the squadron of monsters to the coast than followed it north looking for the band of humans and beastmen, but so far he’d found no one.

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  James bit his cheek and greedily slurped up the trickle of blood it produced in the hope of easing his suffering. It worked, but James knew he would pay for it later. Whatever he gained his body would spend twice as much to repair the damage, but that was an issue for another time. For the moment, the voices quieted back down.

  Through the process, James kept his mouth clamped shut. He couldn’t risk the others catching the scent of his blood. James was similar enough to them that they let him walk around in his presence and were drawn by his shrieks but he wasn’t sure how they’d react if they saw him bleed. With bodies so skeletal and desiccated, he wasn’t sure that they could bleed.

  James continued his march. As he took his time, a few of the monsters got ahead of him, hoping the last shriek they’d heard indicated something further ahead, even though all it did was lead them further from all the lush lands to the south.

  ‘I better release another shriek soon,’ James thought. He couldn’t let any of the monsters fall too far behind, James was already worried the sixty of them wouldn’t be enough. They were supposed to be going against twelve people. The monsters had incredible stamina and pain tolerance, but they weren’t particularly strategic. Against an organized band of soldiers, their only path to victory was to swarm.

  James opened his mouth to shriek but suddenly found he didn’t need to. One of the monsters ahead of him had already beaten him to the punch. A bunch of the monsters surged onward towards the noise.

  ‘One of them must have found something. Is it what I’ve been looking for or something else? I have to know.’

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  ‘Hunger… pain… hunt… kill… feed…’

  For once, James accepted the voice. He let it in and felt a surge of power enter his muscles. James flashed onward in pursuit of the noise, just like all the others.

  “Dammit, Bearballs. Can’t you go and do that somewhere else,” said Rose.

  “What now? Never mind, you’re always complaining about something,” said Bearballs as he returned to what he was doing, shaking the last few amber drops out of his junk. Bearballs had only taken a couple steps to the side of our path before relieving himself.

  “Could have gone downwind,” said Titania.

  “You’re the last one who should be complaining,” said Bearballs, to which Titania quickly went silent. She hadn’t forgiven herself for the trouble she’d caused with the ice snakes.

  It’d been a week since we started walking. During that time, we mostly hugged the ocean. The jagged coastline made our journey longer but the coast was warmer, relatively flat, and void of trees, making our task easier. Even so, it wasn’t a simple walk. Many times, we came across weird frozen beasts similar to the ice serpents. Most of the time the beasts were simply confused by our presence, they’d probably never seen warm blooded creatures before, and we were able to simply go around them and avoid conflict, but twice the beasts became aggressive and we were forced to fight.

  Both times the fights were relatively easy, but both underscored the underlying problems of our group’s cooperation. There was the division between the beastmen and the ‘humans,’ Titania was considered to be on the human side, whose different views towards the optimum path to victory led to confusion on the battlefield. The beastmen preferred charging ahead and bashing the enemies while the humans preferred to use a defensive wall to buy enough time for mages to do the heavy lifting. The clash between the two methods inevitably led to a few beastmen over committing and either accidently running into the mages’ spells or forcing the mages to withhold their full force in fear of friendly fire. All this hurt team morale, which had fallen precipitously since Jutmaek’s rousing speech and the Doragan residents’ gratifying sendoff.

  Of course, the foul weather didn’t do us any favors. No snow came down from the sky, nor rain or sleet. In fact, even the snow that was on the ground wasn’t very thick, at least not where we were walking. The only thing wrong, the only thing that was necessary to ruin the whole trip, was how cold it was. It was cold in the day, it was cold in the night, and it was cold when you huddled near the fire even when buried under layers of fur. My Low Temperature Resistance cut the cold’s effect on me by more than half, yet I still felt like a feeble old man as I struggled my way across the land.

  Worse still was the wind. Hugging the coast for navigation, we benefited from the relative warmth of the ocean water, but paid for it in the greater wind that was able to build tremendous speeds over the water’s flat surface. The wind was especially bad right around sun up and sundown so we had to tailor our movements to ensure we were under the protection of our tents during those times, which also cut the amount of time we could travel each day by a couple hours.

  In short, we were all cold, tired, grumpy, and spent half the time at each other’s throats. The only thing that kept us from breaking and giving up was the knowledge of how important our mission was and the risk that came with failure.

  “No, you’re the one who’s in no position to complain. You’re the one starting all this shit in the first place,” said Rose.

  “It is not me. It is her. She has messed things up so bad that every time I see her face I cannot help but want to slap it,” said Bearballs.

  “The same could be said of you.” Rose stomped over to Bearballs and raised a hand to slap him, but before she could, Wy-2 grabbed her hand.

  “You cannot blame a guy for feeling that way,” said Wy-1, explaining his brother’s action.

  “Of course I can,” said Rose as she struggled to pull her arm free. “Now let me go.”

  It looked as if a major fight was about to break out, but it was interrupted by a loud shrill shriek that echoed across the barren landscape. Rose was released. The Othans immediately went for their weapons. They knew what made that noise, although they wouldn’t have thought it possible, at least not out here.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Zelus. Rose and Titania looked confused as well.

  “It’s the New Fallen,” I explained. Zelus, Rose, and Titania hadn’t run into the New Fallen during their crossing through the Othal Confederation, but they learned about them when I told the story of my journey.

  It was strange that the New Fallen were this far north because while their immunity to the cold made them able to surviv
e in this harsh terrain, it always seemed that they moved in regards to a single, almost mindless pursuit of food and if there was one thing this place lacked it was food sources. The ice beasts lacked flesh and all the vegetation was dead or frozen. Other than us and what we carried, I wouldn’t have been surprised if there was nothing edible for several hundred miles.

  A couple more shrieks filled the air. Each one was of slightly different volume and direction though all came from the south. The degree of concern rose as we realized about how many we were up against.

  “This is no surprise. You know those things tend to move in groups. Form up everyone. I want a nice forward line,” said Izusa. Everyone slowly clustered together, the larger beastmen kept out front while Zelus and Rose pulled back behind them.

  “Get the hell out of my way. I don’t know why someone like you is even trying to help. You should just hang in the back and try not to fuck anything up.” Bearballs grabbed Titania by the neck gap in her armor and pulled her back a couple steps while he advanced to the front.

  “Titania is more skilled a fighter than you. All you’re good for is muscle,” said Rose, sending a small fireball that flashed across Bearballs’ side. Bearballs ignored it and her. The fireball wasn’t meant to do any harm, but Bearballs ignoring it inspired her to try again. Another fireball formed in Rose’s hand.

  “Don’t,” Titania pulled back Rose’s hand until the fireball vanished. A series of screeches, louder and far more numerous than before, filled the air. Rose gave up. We had bigger problems.