Chapter 146: Her Element

Theo got up out of the water with the rain coming off him in sheets and did the most unreasonable thing he had done all night.

He stopped fighting.

He put Raindrop point-down in the mud, and he stood in the open in front of a thirty-metre creature with both hands loose at his sides, and he closed his eyes.

Asterion’s voice came down out of the dark.

"Lord Theo. Move."

"Give me thirteen seconds."

"You do not have that—"

"Then buy them."

The dark elf said something short in a language that had never been spoken on Earth, and went.

Theo did not watch him go. He was busy with something that had been sitting in the bottom half of his own status for a hundred days, under a heading he had read a hundred times and never thought about properly.

Secondary. Ice, Moderate. Fire, Moderate. Wood, Moderate.

’Ice. Fire. Wood.’

’...That’s Sesan. That’s Estea. That’s Thall.’

He had been carrying his wives around in his affinities since the day the System gave him a status, and in all that time he had never once touched the two he couldn’t cook with.

Theo laughed once in the rain, which hurt his ribs a great deal.

Then he reached for the cold.

It did not fight him the way the fire had fought him. It was worse than that. It came the instant he asked, all at once and far too much of it, and it came up his arms and into his jaw and behind his eyes, and his breath went white and stayed white and his teeth locked so hard he thought he had broken one.

’THAT’S TOO MUCH THAT’S TOO MU—’

[Affinity: Ice — Moderate]

[First draw successful]

[Warning: you have no control whatsoever]

’I KNOW.’

He threw it upward, because it was the only direction that did not have a person in it.

And the rain stopped.

Not the weather. The weather went on exactly as it had, black cloud rolling over the top of a flattened forest and dumping everything it had. But in a circle sixty metres across, with Theo in the middle of it, every single drop of falling water arrived at a height of about four metres and simply stopped being water.

They hung there. Tens of thousands of them, a whole ceiling of small frozen beads with the light of the half moon coming through them wherever the cloud tore, and under that ceiling the air went dry and very cold and absolutely still.

Nothing fell on Theo at all.

He stood in the quiet with his own breath smoking and looked up at a roof made out of weather.

’...Oh, that is beautiful.’

Uthed, forty feet outside the circle and still getting rained on, had gone down on one knee without noticing that he had.

’He froze the sky.’

Theo did not have time to admire it and he admired it anyway, for about a second and a half, and then he went and got the cylinder.

The valve was still open. He dragged it on its side into the middle of the dry pocket, and six kilos of gas came hissing out of the hose and did what gas is supposed to do when the air is dry and nothing is moving.

It hung.

It went out across the churned ground in a low grey shelf and stayed exactly where he put it, and Theo stood in the middle of a cloud that would have killed him three hours ago and felt his heart going like a bird’s.

Then he put his hand out flat and asked for fire for the fifth time that night.

It came.

A yellow flame the size of a birthday candle, wobbling, ordinary, standing up out of the middle of his palm in a place where there was no longer any rain to put it out.

’Hello again.’

Out past the ceiling of frozen rain, Asterion came off a trunk at the height of the creature’s shoulder with both daggers out, and he put them in and dragged them down forty feet of slick black to make it turn.

It turned.

Theo dropped the flame into the gas.

The shelf went up.

It did not explode outward, because there was a lid on it. Sixty metres of frozen sky held the burn down and threw it flat along the mud in a running sheet of orange that went out in every direction at once, and the Hollow Serpent stood in the middle of it with its darkness coming off it in strips.

The sound arrived a moment later, and it was enormous.

Theo went over backwards for the third time that night, and this time he was grinning inside the helm like something unwell.

’IT BURNS. IT ACTUALLY—’

[Affinity use recorded: Fire]

[Affinity use recorded: Ice]

[Warning: Mana expenditure critical]

The creature screamed, and the scream was different. Everything else had made it angry. This made it loud.

The unnatural darkness that had eaten every javelin, every flood and every sharpened sea of obsidian Theo owned could not eat fire. It shrank from it.

Whole sections of the body cooked away into nothing and did not come back, and the tail thrashed across the clearing and took down what was left of the standing timber, and for the first time since midnight Theo watched the thing get smaller.

Soon enough the frozen ceiling came apart in the heat and fell on all of them as warm rain.

And then the burn ran out of gas, and the fire went down, and what was left of the Hollow Serpent knelt in the smoke with half its mass gone.

And began, slowly, to fill back in.

Theo lay on his back in the steam and watched the rags of black drift home out of the trees.

’...You have got to be joking.’

The cylinder was empty and rolling in the mud. He could not raise the cold again, and he knew it the way a man knows a leg has gone. And the flame in his palm, a flame the size of a candle, had cost him everything that was left in the tank.

[Limitless Body — Adaptation complete]

[Resistance acquired: Unnatural Darkness]

’That’s lovely. That’s genuinely lovely. What do I hit it WITH.’

He got a knee under himself.

The Serpent turned its head toward him, hollow and half-made and rebuilding, and Theo braced to run at a thing he could not hurt with a sword he could not lift.

And the armour came off his shoulders.

He had not called it. It went anyway, exactly the way it had gone in the flooded cistern under the stockyard, when it had come up out of his coat and strained on the end of nothing like a dog on a short lead.

The obsidian peeled away in a single sheet and stood out in front of him in the smoke.

[Shadow Fragment — Integrity: 2 of ?]

[Function unlocked: Consumption]

[This plate was not forged to be worn. It was forged to be filled]