Velik didn’t recognize the mountain beneath him. An avalanche had dropped tons of snow down the slopes, presumably taking Torwin with it since he was nowhere to be found. A crater half a mile wide was directly below him where the ice elemental had been sitting. Velik had grossly misunderstood what he’d been fighting there, likening it to some sort of sculpture of a frozen tree that telekinetically controlled nearby ice and snow.

Now it looked more like a wyvern with a five-hundred-foot wingspan crouching on the mountain. It still had some sort of control over the frozen environment, but it was no longer absolute. That was probably a good thing, assuming Velik could survive the fall. A few hundred feet wouldn’t kill him, but this was a bit more than that. And that wasn’t even accounting for what he was going to land on.

At least the yetis are probably all dead, he thought with a wry smile. Got to keep those positive thoughts in mind. It’s not as bad as it could be.

Besides, he actually had some tools to deal with this. His ethereal cloak faded into full visibility as he pulled on the enchantments woven into it. With a surge of magic, he formed a solid platform of air, just strong enough to push off from so he could adjust his angle of descent. Trying to halt his descent with it was beyond the magic, but he could bleed off speed if he did it right.

The problem was that he still needed to account for the blizzard whipping around him. The snow was sharp enough to draw blood, even against Velik’s almost 200 physical. A normal hunter probably would have been flayed alive. That was something to compensate for, but it wasn’t what he was actually worried about. That honor went to the skull-sized chunks of ice whipping through the air in defiance of gravity.

Velik had dodged no less than six shots so far, all of them targeted. Obviously, the ice elemental was still trying to kill him, not content to let the fall do it. Fair enough. It’s not like I’m not planning to do the same to you.

Despite being half-blinded and deafened by the howling blizzard, Velik burned the magic built up in his cloak in a series of deflections that let him slow his descent and angle for a stretch of bare stone a few hundred feet above the ice elemental. He was knocked off course twice by sudden chunks of ice appearing out of the snow to strike him, but it wasn’t enough of a handicap to throw him into a freefall.

He still hit the stone hard enough to make his teeth rattle, but he touched down in a spot where he didn’t have to worry about the snow swallowing him alive. That was one part of his impromptu plan to survive an otherwise-fatal fall gone right, at least. Now he just needed to kill the massive ice elemental, find Torwin, and finish getting off the mountain.

Now that he wasn’t half-buried inside the elemental’s body, it was actually a much easier fight. Velik met it in an open field, blinded by wind-driven snow and precariously balanced on iced-over rocks, but the ability to move freely made all the difference. He chipped away at it, avoided the plumes of icy air that rolled out of its mouth or vented out of wounds he left on its body, and hammered it with repeated shots of [Dread Lance].

The yetis made a brief appearance, but there were only two. That actually worked out in Velik’s favor, since they were more focused on fighting the elemental than they were on him. For about thirty seconds, the snow hung in the air, unempowered, and Velik was free to tear apart the monster unhindered. He carved an entire wing off its body, forcing it to reshape itself.

Its body flowed like water, becoming a smaller version of itself. This time, its back and skull were covered with jagged spikes, and the edge of its wings were sharpened to razor edges powerful enough to cleanly slice through stone.

The elemental let itself be distracted by the yetis’ repeated attempts to usurp its control of the blizzard. Its maw closed around one of the shaggy monsters, tearing it in half and hurling its torso through the air. Black blood stained the snow and the toothy maw in equal measure, which afforded Velik the opportunity to unload another [Dread Lance] into its chest.

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Don’t got many more of those in me. This thing needs to die now.

He was hard pressed to think of any monster that had accepted more punishment than the one in front of him. Its offensive powers weren’t particularly strong, but it was an absolute master of its environment. He wasn’t just fighting the physical manifestation of the elemental. The whole world was alive, and it was malicious. With one of the yetis dead, it was actually even stronger now.

Velik was almost surprised to even consider it, but he needed to protect one monster from the other. That yeti was keeping the fight manageable by dulling the elemental’s control. If and when it died, the blizzard would return to full strength and be focused entirely on Velik.

A wing blade sliced through the yeti’s neck, decapitating it in an instant.

“Damn it,” Velik muttered. “You just had to do that.”

There was no more time to wear it down. He pulled on his ring’s magic, filling himself up with strength from [Power Surge], and threw himself at the elemental’s trunk. It wasn’t a flesh-and-blood monster. Trying for a heart or a brain that didn’t exist was a good way to get himself killed. What he needed was to strike the core, which was probably hidden away where the ice was thickest.

He aimed his spear at a slightly darker shadow between its shoulder blades and hoped he wasn’t wrong. [Dread Lance] exploded one more time, shaped to puncture straight down instead of expand. Nine feet of ice crunched and shattered, punched straight through from wyvern’s back through its chest to ricochet off the mountain.

The elemental collapsed, the magic holding its body together, and fell apart. Velik went down with it, but this time it was just cold weight piled on him instead of something malicious and alive trying to smother him.

[You have slain a juvenile emperor of icy skies (level 64).]

[You have been awarded 9 decarmas.]

Holy crap. Level 64? Wait. Juvenile?!

There was a rather disturbing implication to that simple line of text that Velik didn’t really want to think about. He was confident in his own abilities, but that battle would have been a lot different if the yetis hadn’t been there. Maybe he would have won, or maybe he would have been forced to flee. He didn’t think he’d have died, but he could easily see himself struggling to avoid being trapped.

Not one to dwell on the past, Velik shook his head and went to walk away. He paused when a perfectly round sphere of ice caught his eye. It was a bit over a foot in diameter, smooth and freezing cold to the touch. Picking it up, he turned it over and saw a crack halfway through its otherwise flawless surface.

Even a cracked elemental core was probably worth something to the right person, so Velik stuck it in his traveler’s bracelet, then started following the trail of destruction the avalanche had left down the slope of the mountain.

“Torwin?” he called out. “You alive down there?”

There was a movement a mile or so away as snow got shoved out of the side and a gloved, human hand broke free. A moment later, more snow went flying and Torwin’s face was revealed. “By some definition of the word,” he yelled back.

The old [Ranger] finished unburying himself, then started digging. By the time Velik had climbed down to him, he’d surfaced with his bow. The weapon’s magic must have been strong, because it appeared undamaged to Velik. “Held onto it until I hit the ground, then lost it when a yeti caught up to me in the middle of the descent, but I marked the spot.” Torwin cast a sad, plaintive glance at his empty quiver, then sighed and shook his head. “Not worth it to dig them out.”

There was a huge leather satchel with a few hundred spare arrowheads in Velik’s storage space anyway, and he knew for a fact that Torwin was an accomplished fletcher. They’d be fine once they got off the mountains, and until then, he would have to content himself with a slower rate of fire from the magical arrows his bracer generated. It wasn’t like the man was helpless. He just wasn’t at full power.

“So… I’m not sure how much you saw before the avalanche,” Velik started. He glanced back up the mountain to where there was still a giant hole in the snow. “There was an ice elemental buried up there. Level 64.”

Torwin winced. “Gods, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“The kill notification said it was a juvenile. I’m thinking that maybe we shouldn’t loiter around here, just in case the bigger version happens to be around.”

“Lower trails, or just punch right through?” Torwin asked. “The yetis are all dead now. It should be a straight shot across the slope and then back down the far side.”

“Let’s take the safer route. Neither of us is up for another fight like that right now,” Velik said.

Torwin did not disagree, and together they started the longer trek around the peak of the mountain instead of over it.