NOVEL NEXT 298 – AbsoЯute Zero
Raising a hand, the great general produced several dozen hardened stones, shaped into fine points and tipped with artificial cold-iron, launching them in a barrage towards Zefaris, a defiant gesture meant to parody her own projectiles. In the moments it took him to do this, the three-meter jet of rigormantic energy escaping the blonde’s left eye vanished as she projected a vastly downsized, simplified version of the Great Seal of Eternal Snow onto the ground beneath her feet. Its outermost ring contained glyphs keyed to activate the seal the moment something beyond an arbitrary velocity passed through the boundary, and the moment Ubul’s iron-tipped stone arrows did, the seal vanished in a burst of snow from beneath, the flakes coming to a cease, hanging in the air… Alongside Ubul’s arrows.
It was a flicker, a fraction of a fraction of a second, perhaps one-fifth, before the seal had already taken effect and ended, the snow simply continuing on its parabolic trajectory while Ubul’s iron-tipped stone arrows ripped through it without resistance, hitting nothing, flying over an open trench.
Zefaris had vanished out of sight.
Three seconds passed. Four. Five. The general turned restlessly where he stood, hands ready in gesture, defensive walls rapidly revolving around him. The inner layer clockwise, the second counterclockwise, the third clockwise again. This was the ideal middle-ground between a weaker solid wall or stronger, smaller plates, the gap in the defense infinitesimal. Smaller than the eye of a needle.
This was the best option as he was, for the influence of the spear skewering him slowed his body still, even as he worked at counteracting its magic.
An ice arrow flew out from a trench and stuck into the single empty knife-slot on Ubul’s back, threading the eye of his defenses.
By the time he reacted, another already flew at him from a different angle. Another, from an entirely different angle still. Again, and again, and again, a seemingly omnidirectional assault, one whose origin in a trench Ubul quickly caught onto, despite the fact that at the same time, he was also being assaulted by and defending against the ballistic onslaught of several tankmen, Collier among them. If he couldn’t catch her, he would just bury her in that trench - such was his train of thought. He channeled his strength and stomped the ground, raising five stone walls covered in blades of raw, half-rusted iron, segmenting the trench and preventing the snow devil from traversing the trench, boxing her in. As the great general prepared to hunt her down, a silver coin flew into the air, drawing his attention with its flashing, an ice arrow immediately striking it from below and bouncing off towards Ubul, causing him to focus his defenses there while still mostly covering his flanks and back… But it still opened wider gaps in his defense, more than enough.
What he hadn’t seen was the fact Zefaris had used Eternal Snow not only to dodge his attack, but to obscure both his mundane and arcane vision with a burst of physical snow and unstable essentia, dropping down into a nearby open trench, one which had been split apart and mended over the course of the battle. It had long, straight corridors, with turns at relatively shallow angles, which Zefaris exploited by carving kinetic miror glyphs into its walls and bouncing shots off the very tops of them at awkward angles whilst also ensuring only her own actual gunshots would be within Ubul’s field of view.
It didn’t matter what he had segmented the trench as he had, it was far too late by that point. For each shot she had fired at him, Zefaris had also set up another, locked in mid-air by a seal of stillness, this act rendered all the easier by the fact she was doing it to something of her own making, something already soaked in Gelum, and thus had next to no resistance to overcome. Each was pointed at a flash-carved kinetic mirror seal, one which would do nothing more than send the projectile on its intended path, but the lack of extreme velocity or even loss of precision meant little considering the number of ice arrows she had set up in this way, even in such short a time, for she had usurped a great deal more time than it seemed to facilitate the complex glyphwork necessary for this act. For the effort she had exerted, the quantity of Gelum she had gathered and burned, she could’ve set loose a barrage grander by an order of magnitude, but that wasn’t the point.
Ubul could marshal a functionally impenetrable defense if he managed to gather his focus, so the only way to strike him was to subvert him at every turn.
By her estimates, the next barrage of supporting fire was to come in a few seconds. Timed without error, coordinated by Collier’s masterful hand, shots were set loose upon him from several different angles, but not too many. The gunfire, too, was not too intense, an effort to not make him summon up a grand, omnidirectional defense. They were just harrying him, distracting him, just sufficiently for Zefaris to play her card.
A single coin thrown above the trench to get his attention, a trigger that set off every suspended ice arrow, simultaneously sending each and every one flying at the general, targeting his joints. His defense stopped dead the vast majority of even this barrage, with several arrows slipping through - one through his right shoulder, one through that same arm’s elbow, another in his left thigh. A single anti-cultivator shell also pierced his defense and lodging in his stomach, showing that he wisely prioritized defending against Zefaris over a tankman.
All this had played its purpose, in subtly pulling open a gap in his defenses for her to slip a very special ice arrow into. It was formed around a silver bullet, wrought to destabilize the Glacierglass Spear skewering him through the chest, to make it expand and entomb him in ice.
Click.
CLANG.
Bullet passed through glyphic seal, becoming an arrow, ripping the air. It struck true, lodging itself into his core right alongside the great spear. There came a sound from within the spear akin to the sound of cracking black ice, reverberating for a moment. The general lunged towards Zefaris, but the spear erupted into insidiously-spreading ice that encased him in a moment.
Zefaris was no fool. It wouldn’t hold him for long, only buy some time.
A dangerously short amount of time.
