Chapter 115: Battle On The Ice
"Save our trophy for last, kill the rest!"
The words pierced Hauke’s heart like a knife. This was his fault. He’d just started to feel the barriers between them beginning to melt as they celebrated catching an enormous sturgeon when the Tuscans hurled stones shattered everything around them. They were going to kill his new friends, just to get to him.
A second behind that thought, however, his panicked mind processed the other thing the Tuscan leader had said. ’Old man Paulus didn’t lie.’ The Tuscans had come for him, yes, but it wasn’t his fault. Elder Paulus had sold them out. The realization chilled his heart, bringing an icy calm to him as his fear vanished, replaced by a cold, crystalline rage.
"Hauke," Virve, said, watching the young Frost Walker struggle to process what was happening. "Can you hurl spears of ice, or do anything else to break up their group? We can’t fight them all at once or we’ll be overwhelmed."
"I can," Hauke said. "Shatter. Windstorm. Ice Blades," he intoned, gathering a mixture of pale white and icy blue energy to his horn before forcefully making a fist as though he was crushing something in his hand. The next instant, the remainder of the icy dome shattered, transforming from a simple shelter into hundreds of blades of ice, each one as sharp as shards of broken glass.
The frigid wind changed directions, swirling around Hauke and his companions before rushing at the Tuscans and carrying the shards of ice with it.
Rather than scatter at the rushing shards, however, the Tuscans clustered behind the man with the heavy chain who began to spin it rapidly in front of them like a shield. Ice shattered as the heavy iron links smashed through the wind born blades of ice but it stopped dozens, it couldn’t stop hundreds of ice shards.
Dozens of the ice shards that made it past the spinning chain missed the Tuscans entirely, breaking against the frozen surface of the lake. Still others delivered only glancing blows to the Tuscan’s pelt-covered torsos or were deflected by the weapons they raised to protect their heads and faces from the storm of shards.
But none of the Tuscans came through the storm unscathed. Several shards of ice pierced the thick hair and tough hides of their exposed arms and even more tore at their floppy ears. Blood began to flow from dozens of small wounds before Hauke’s spell ran out of icy shards to throw.