Chapter 1476: The Ice Harvest

Captain Ysolde Vaertia gave Rian one long, sideways look across the frosted deck of the flagship.

She knew her Ascendant aura had failed in the fog. She knew the Drowned Choir had breached her lines. And she knew the lazy, black-haired mercenary standing by the rail was the only reason she was still breathing the cold northern air.

Even so, honoring the unspoken rule of border veterans, she asked absolutely nothing.

She turned her back on him and walked toward the center of the ship.

Midday brought no real warmth to Skell’s fjord. The grey sky hung low over the ruins of Grimhaven and laid long, hard shadows across the blackened stone and the unnatural frost. The wind carried the scent of crushed pine and deep ocean brine, and it cut straight through the wool coats of the legionaries.

Bosun "Mother" Grael stood at the base of the mainmast.

The old sailor was running her scarred, two-fingered hand along a splintered fissure in the timber. The mast groaned each time the ship shifted its weight, shaking small shards of ice loose onto the pitch-sealed deck.

Grael spat a dark wad of tobacco over the rail.

"We don’t sail open water with this, Captain," Grael said, her voice grinding over the howl of the wind. "The deep sea will snap it like a dry twig in the first storm."

Ysolde stopped beside the bosun, her face as dry as parchment.

"Can you bind it?"

Grael shook her head and pulled her salt-stained coat tighter around her thick shoulders.

"Binding won’t hold the sail weight," Grael answered bluntly. "We need seasoned ironwood to brace the core, and three barrels of hard pitch to seal the rot. The navy ships don’t carry that much spare lumber. We have to pull it from the fortress storehouses."

Ysolde looked past the rail at the ruined courtyard of Grimhaven.

The drag marks ran straight from the broken gates down into the black water. She had ordered her men to stay on the ships. The garrison was gone, and whatever had taken it could still be waiting in the ice.

Slowly, she turned her head until her eyes settled on the Eleventh Squad by the starboard crates.

"Rian."

For a second, Rian did not move. He kept his hands tucked loosely in his pockets while the grey sky shone flat in his dark eyes.

He did not sigh. He did not complain. He only walked across the deck, his boots thudding evenly on the cold boards.

"Captain," Rian said, stopping two paces away.

Ysolde pointed a gloved finger at the blackened ruins on the shore.

"Take your squad into the fortress," Ysolde ordered crisply. "Locate the primary storehouse. Secure the ironwood and the pitch. Do not engage anything you cannot kill quickly, and do not linger."

Rian tipped his chin half an inch.

She was breaking her own order. And out of everyone on the flagship, she had handed the most dangerous job on the board to the one man she suspected was more than he looked.

"Understood," Rian said flatly.

He turned away from the officers and walked back to his squad.

Han had propped himself against the crates with his teeth chattering and one hand pressed to his cracked ribs. Baletta waited beside him with her palm resting on her sword hilt. Doron’s shadow-soul fog was already coiled tight around his boots against the wind.

Rian stopped in front of them.

"We’re going for a walk," Rian said.

The ruined courtyard of Grimhaven smelled of old copper and frozen rot.

Rian led the salvage detail up along the drag marks, his boots crunching over the rime that crusted the stone. Up close, the gouges were enormous. Stone blocks the size of wagons had been shoved aside like loose cobbles, and the trenches left behind cut down to the raw bedrock under the fortress.

Han rubbed his arms, his teeth still chattering.

"This is ridiculous," Han complained, his voice echoing off the shattered watchtowers. "We survive the Leviathans, and now we’re fetching wood in a graveyard. The Legion doesn’t pay us enough for this."

"Shut up, Han," Doron muttered, his eyes flicking toward the dark doorways of the barracks.

Rian walked at the front of the formation with his hands still in his pockets.

He did not need to look around. He kept Shingan locked down deep behind his soul gates, so that not a thread of aura bled into the air. Even held entirely inside, though, the Third Eye and Flow Perception drew the ruins out for him stone by stone.

He felt the cold stone. He felt the brittle ice.

And he felt the heartbeat.

It was slow and heavily muffled, coming from a mound of jagged ice beside the storehouse doors. Each deep, rhythmic thud pulsed with Calamity-level danger.

Rian stopped walking.

"Fall back," Rian said levelly. "Three paces. Now."

Baletta moved at once, stepping backward and drawing her sword in the same motion. Iren and Jalsket followed a second later, their blades clearing their scabbards with a sharp metallic ring.

The mound of ice exploded.

A grotesque fusion of deep-sea angler and glacier crab burst from the frost and flung chunks of hardened rime across the courtyard. The Frost-Rime Crawler’s pale carapace was the color of the ice it had hidden in, and razor-sharp icicles lined every plate. Two crushing claws snapped at the cold air. Above its multi-jointed mandibles, a glowing lure swung from a fleshy stalk.

The Calamity beast shrieked, a sound like grinding glaciers, and lunged straight at Rian.

Rian did not take his left hand out of his pocket.

He drew the heavy ironwood broadsword with his right and fed a thin, tightly controlled thread of yellow lightning into the blade. He did not touch his Paragon-level output. He did not use Eclipse Step or Full Impact.

He relied entirely on the quiet, internal feed of Shingan.

Rian twisted his torso an inch to the left.

The Crawler’s right claw snapped shut on empty air, a finger’s width from his ribs. Rian stepped inside the beast’s guard and dragged his crackling blade across the weakest joint in its armored leg.

The yellow lightning flared. The beast shrieked again as the leg buckled under its own weight.

Rian did not stop moving. He fought like a seasoned sellsword running low on luck, and so he stumbled backward on purpose to slip a sweeping blow from the left claw. Then he rode the momentum forward and drove his blade straight up into the glowing lure.

The lightning discharged into the Crawler’s brain stem.

The beast convulsed once, and its carapace crashed down onto the frozen stone with a deafening thud.

Afterwards, the courtyard was quiet, except for the last of the lightning crackling down Rian’s blade.

Rian stood over the twitching corpse with his chest heaving slightly for the benefit of the onlookers. He wiped the glowing ichor from his sword onto the beast’s pale armor.

’I really need to start charging her more.’

[Your clone has slain Calamity Beast - Frost-Rime Crawler]

[You have gained +6 talent fragments]

[Echo acquired: Calamity Beast - Frost-Rime Crawler]

The panels flared in his mind and vanished.

"Area clear," Rian called back to the squad, keeping his voice appropriately breathless. "Baletta, get the storehouse doors open. Han, stop shivering and find a cart."

The Eleventh Squad hurried past the carcass, giving its claws a wide berth. Iren gave Rian a short, sharp nod as he passed.

Rian sheathed his sword and walked around the back of the Crawler’s ruined nest.

The ice was thicker here and stained with old, dark blood. The beast had been lying in ambush, feeding on whatever scraps were left behind when the garrison was dragged into the sea.

Rian kicked a heavy chunk of rime away from the base of the wall.

Something metallic clattered against the stone.

He crouched and brushed the loose frost away with his gloved hand, his eyes narrowing slightly.

It was a severed arm.

The limb was frozen solid, its fingers still locked around a shattered piece of an imperial legionary’s breastplate. It was not a monster’s limb. It was human.

Rian turned the forearm over. It was wrapped in thick northern furs, crude leather stitched with bone needles, nothing like the Empire’s standard-issue wool.

A heavy iron bracer was bound tightly around the wrist.

Rian ran his thumb over the freezing metal and felt the grooves stamped deep into the iron. They formed a single, open eye.

It was the same mark as the Astrinite token in his coat.

Rian rose slowly and looked out across the ruined courtyard, along the drag marks running down into the dark water. Leviathans had not been the only thing to come for the garrison.

The fierce people of the North had already been here.