Chapter 210: Frost Sword and Ruin Sword [BONUS]

There were too many of them to strike one at a time.

Encrid understood that the moment the horde came on again. Winter Fang could kill anything. But it killed one thing at a time, and the horde was not one thing.

It was a flood.

It came across the northern end of the Span from edge to edge, a packed mass of Grinners and Reevers and Lopers, climbing over the shattered Gorehorns, over the broken bodies from the First Form, over each other. A hundred of them. Two hundred. More pouring out of the road behind.

The First Form had pressed them down. The Second Form had pierced them.

He needed something that would stop them.

And the borrowed memories gave it to him before he had finished asking.

"Third Form, Frost Sword."

It was a sweeping form. Wide. Open. Where the first two forms were single strikes, the Third was a dance, a series of long horizontal arcs, the sword turning from left to right and back again as the body turned with it.

Encrid let it come.

The first arc went left to right, low, at the height of a man’s knees.

Cold went out of the blade.

Not a shape of pressure this time. Not a point. A wave. A long, flat sheet of white cold that rolled out from the sword’s edge across the stone of the Span, and wherever it passed, the air froze.

It froze into ice.

A wall of it rose out of the stone in the sword’s wake. Jagged and blue-white, as tall as a man, running from one edge of the Span to the other in a long curve. It rose so fast that the front rank of the horde ran straight into it.

And stuck.

The Grinners at the front were frozen into it up to their shoulders. The Reevers behind them were frozen mid-leap, hanging in the ice with their split jaws open. A Loper had its long hind legs locked in the wall and its front half still thrashing on the other side.

The second arc went right to left, higher.

A second wall rose behind the first. Taller. Thicker. It caught the next rank of the horde as it tried to climb over the first wall, and froze them there too, so that the two walls were joined by a bridge of frozen bodies.

The third arc. The fourth.

Four walls of ice, one behind the other, standing across the northern end of the Darwen Span like the ribs of some enormous frozen creature. And in every one of them, Roamers. Hundreds of them. Locked in the blue-white ice with their teeth bared and their eyes wide.

Encrid lowered the sword.

The cold coming off the walls was so strong that frost had formed on his eyelashes. His breath hung in front of him.

For a moment, it was very quiet on the Span.

The front lines of the horde were frozen in their tracks.

And beyond the walls, he could hear the rest of them. Scratching. Screaming. Climbing.

The ice would not hold them forever.

It did not need to.

Thirty-one seconds.

The ice did not last as long as he had hoped.

It was not the small Roamers that broke it.

It was the Ironbacks.

Encrid felt them before he saw them. Three heavy bodies moving through the horde toward the Span, slow and steady, the smaller Roamers parting around them the same way they parted around the Elder. Each one was the size of a small house. Each one walked on legs as thick as barrels.

They reached the outer wall of ice and did not stop.

They walked into it.

The ice cracked. Groaned. Then broke apart in great blue-white chunks, and the frozen Roamers inside it fell to pieces with it. The Ironbacks walked through the first wall, and the second, and the third, their rust-grey plates scraping through the ice as if it were snow.

They came out of the last wall side by side, twenty paces from Encrid.

He looked at them.

On the Wall, it had taken two Cavel-iron bolts from the massive ballista to bring one of them down. Two bolts from a machine twelve feet long, forged by a man who had spent his whole life making things that went through other things.

There were three of them now.

And Encrid had a sword.

"Fourth Form, Ruin Sword."

It was the heaviest of the forms. The memories told him that at once. The old Gannons had used it against castle gates and siege towers and the great armored beasts of the deep forest. Things that could not be cut, because they were too thick. Things that could not be pierced, because they were too hard.

Things that had to be broken.

Encrid gathered the Star.

He gathered all of it that he could hold, and he pushed it into the blade. And along the edge of the sword, where Ysolde’s strike still burned in a thin red line, the red light flared.

He understood then what the Fourth Form was for.

Not to cut.

To release.

He stepped forward and brought the sword down on the first Ironback’s head, exactly where the plates met the skull.

-KWAAAANG!

The blade did not go in.

It struck.

And everything Encrid had pushed into it went in instead. The Absolute Star’s cold, and all of Ysolde’s red force that the Pillow had kept for him, and the weight of nine generations of Gannons who had swung this form at things that would not break.

It went into the Ironback all at once.

The Ironback exploded.

There was no other word for it. Its plates burst outward like the staves of a barrel struck by a battering ram. Its body behind them did not split. It simply came apart, into a cloud of red mist and frozen shards of rust-grey hide that flew outward in every direction and rained down across the Span like hail.

The second Ironback did not even have time to turn its head.

The third tried to back away. Encrid did not know whether the thread that compelled it had let it, or whether, for one moment, something old and animal in it had simply been afraid.

It did not matter.

Ruin Sword.

When the mist cleared, there was nothing left on the northern end of the Span but shattered ice, scattered shards, and Encrid, standing in the middle of it with his sword lowered.

The red line along the blade’s edge was gone.

He had spent it.

Ysolde’s strike had been waiting in the Pillow for almost a year, and it was gone now. He had converted the strike that he was supposed to experience into something he could use against the horde, thanks to the control over star energy he had now as an Absolute.

Then the ground shook.

Slow. Heavy. Far apart.

Encrid raised his head.

Above the ruined walls of ice, above the horde, black against the red sky, a single curved tusk was rising.

The Elder had reached the Span.

Twenty-seven seconds remained.

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