Chapter 680: The Spire [2]

Moon pressed his hand against the gate and pushed it.

The gate didn’t so much as budge under his weight. It was sealed, and no amount of soft pushing was going to open it.

"Looks like we do this the loud way," Moon said. "We break it down."

Theo’s expression furrowed with worry. "Are you sure? If we force it, the commander will feel it. Sealing the gate is tied to the spire, and the spire’s tied to the elf. Break it and we lose whatever’s left of the element of surprise before we even set the explosives."

Moon shrugged.

"The element of surprise is already gone. They will likely come to an agreement soon, and the southern commander will be wary, even if he doesn’t believe the northern one. And we don’t need surprise for the explosives to work. What we need is to get inside, and this is the only way in."

He took a deep breath and stepped back, then raised his leg and drove a kick into the gate.

~BAM~

The gate shuddered under the impact, a deep boom rolling through the ice.

Theo stared in silence.

That’s a physical attack from a mage...That kick alone could kill a three-star beast outright.

Moon kicked again, and the gate shook harder, cracks spreading across its frozen surface.

He kicked a third time, and this one did it.

The gate buckled and gave way, collapsing inward in a shower of shattered ice, the entrance to the white spire yawning open before them, cold and undefended.

Moon lowered his leg and looked into the opening.

"I’ll go in alone. You stay out here on the periphery, keep watch, and let me know the second you see anything coming from the north."

Theo nodded and pulled out his communication device, testing it against Moon’s.

"Hello."

"Hello."

His voice echoed clean through Moon’s device, and Moon’s came back just as clear on his end. The link was solid.

With the communication settled, Theo peeled away, distancing himself from the spire until he reached a vantage point on a low rise that gave him a wide view north, the direction the commander would come from. He crouched into cover and pressed the device.

"Comms check. You reading me?"

"Loud and clear," Moon answered. "Keep your eyes north. I’ll be quick."

He turned and stepped into the white spire.

The interior was colder than the wasteland outside, if that was possible. The walls were pale ice, shaped and smoothed out with mysterious patterns of some sort of calligraphy that ran along the corridor.

The work of something with an eye for beauty.

Faint light filtered through the ice itself, giving the whole space a soft, ghostly glow that came from everywhere at once.

Moon moved deeper, and the place became more spacious as he went.

The narrow entrance corridor widened into a larger chamber, and here the elf’s personality showed itself more fully.

Furnishings carved from ice and bone. A raised platform that served as some kind of seat or throne, draped with thick pelts.

Weapon racks along one wall, holding spare bows and arrows fletched with care.

Everything arranged with an order and intention that no normal beast could have managed.

"These...are trophies."

Bones lined the far wall as a display. The skulls of beasts, cleaned and polished, mounted in careful rows by size, the largest set at the center like prizes of honor.

Between them hung hides, the pelts of creatures the elf had killed, stretched and preserved and pinned to the ice in a gallery of conquest.

A massive head was mounted above the throne, some apex predator the commander had brought down, its frozen expression staring down at the chamber as a monument.

The lesser elf was proud of its kills. It surrounded itself with them, lived among them, displayed them the way a warrior displayed the spoils of a lifetime of battle.

Moon took it all in as he moved through the chamber.

He pulled the explosive runes from his storage ring and began placing them in strategic parts of the spire.

He kept three to spare for his own use, and used a total of ten on the spire, spreading them out to deal the most damage.

Back at the igloo, Marek couldn’t stand still, moving back and forth, uneasily at the entrance, his eyes fixed on the distant north.

Not long after Moon and Theo had taken off, the two commanders had reached their agreement.

The fighting between the hordes slowed, and then the northern commander had turned whatever remained from its army around and started back toward the black spire, the misunderstanding apparently settled.

The southern commander had long since made his way back to the exact place Moon and Theo had gone.

The Southern Spire.

"Vela." Marek kept his voice low. "Should we have gone after the white commander? Slowed it down somehow? It already took off to the spire and Moon and Theo shoulder be close or there by now. If we’d tailed it, we could’ve warned them, or bought them time, or...helped them fight if things went wrong."

Vela shook her head, "No, we stay put. That was the plan, and we hold to it."

She glanced at him. "Think about what Moon told us before he left. Don’t take any risks, at all. He didn’t say that just for himself. He said it because a group our size, moving to shadow a commander across open snow, is exactly what he warned us about. If we follow that army, there is a chance we could be spotted, and then we’re not saving anyone. We’re just adding our bodies to the pile."

Marek frowned, but he was listening.

"They trusted us to stay out of trouble," Vela went on. "So we trust them to handle their end and come back the same way they’ve handled everything else in here."

"Moon has outrun every problem this gate has thrown at him. And Theo’s the best scout we’ve ever worked with. If the white commander moves, Theo will see it coming a mile off, and the two of them will be gone before it arrives."