Chapter 325
Generally speaking, where would you expect to find a named elite or a boss?
Not in the middle of some perfectly ordinary stretch of road, that much was certain. Something unusual had to be nearby.
Leon scanned the surroundings.
Aside from a dead end ahead and a staircase descending behind Vordt of the Boreal Valley, there was nothing.
Did the path behind Vordt lead somewhere significant?
"A fog gate — I don't think there's one nearby?"
First time they'd fought an elite in a completely open street like this. Once Leon confirmed there was no fog gate, his attention shifted to the narrow alleys, too tight for Vordt's massive frame to enter.
"Heh."
An idea surfaced.
He shook it off immediately.
Why am I starting to think like Luluwo?
He would never have entertained something like that before.
I really need to stop reading the Skyrim Group's guides. Their sensibilities are contagious.
But if there genuinely wasn't a fog gate — could they simply skip Vordt and sprint down the path behind him?
No. He couldn't bring himself to do that. Not because they couldn't win.
The whole train of thought had cost only a handful of seconds. During those same seconds, Vordt of the Boreal Valley let out a roar and initiated a Charge, massive body barreling down the nearly straight road — functionally driving them toward the alleys on either side by force.
Vordt was a repurposed asset of Wade's, with a handful of tuning changes. His Charge had a shorter windup and recovery, edging closer to a Rathian's timing. His stamina, vitality, and general aggression had all been bumped up as well.
Given what waited at the end of this fight — his weapon, the widely nicknamed Vordt's Great Hammer, functioned as something close to a beginner-tier holy grail — the changes felt like a fair trade.
Vordt's charge was sudden but not fast enough to leave no room for reaction. Everyone dodged toward the sides. Even Terl, the group's raw muscle, had no intention of trading a direct hit with something this size.
Vordt plowed straight into a nearby building. The ground shook. The structure collapsed.
Leon exchanged a look with the others.
They pulled off the open street's exposed section entirely. As Vordt turned to reorient, they made a break for the narrower midsection of the road.
"Dodge!"
At the last possible instant, everyone dove into a convenient side alley. A second later, Vordt's massive body thundered past.
A second slower, and they'd have been paste.
Even in Irithyll's already frozen streets, the cold radiating off Vordt was enough to actually freeze the ground beneath him. The frost spread into the alley they'd taken shelter in.
Leon signaled Maru with a series of hand gestures. She caught it immediately — dashed out of cover, small frame shouting, deliberately baiting his attention.
Meanwhile Leon and Terl each chewed down a piece of Exalted Flesh, weapons raised, waiting for the opening.
Heavy footsteps closed in.
The moment Vordt's head cleared the corner —
They struck.
Great Hammer Lion's Claw.
Fully-charged Carian Greatsword.
Raw magic and raw force landed simultaneously. Right before impact, Drew had already softened Vordt's armor with a corrosive spell.
"ROOOAR!"
Vordt's furious roar cut off mid-note as the force of Lion's Claw rolled his enormous body sideways, crashing him to the ground and exposing the relatively vulnerable stretch of his neck.
The Carian Greatsword found it directly.
Nobody here could see HP bars or damage numbers. But the sensation of impact alone told them the hit had genuinely landed hard.
Vordt didn't give Leon a chance to press further.
Without warning, the hammer swung at Terl — the same creature that had been struggling on the ground a heartbeat earlier.
Suddenly berserk.
That aggression scaling is genuinely absurd, Leon thought absently.
"WHOA!"
Terl shouted, kicking Drew clear behind him and raising his own hammer to block. The two hammers collided with force enough to shatter windows across the surrounding buildings.
"Not good!"
The ground around Terl's feet cracked open, sinking under the pressure. His whole body shook, blood beading up through his pores.
Vordt's raw strength had clearly exceeded what Terl could safely absorb. On its own, that would've just meant a recovery period.
But the cold radiating from the hammer had already sealed Terl's entire body in a fine crust of glittering ice.
One more hit, and he'd shatter outright.
His companions weren't going to watch that happen.
Leon hurled a Dung Pie toward Vordt to redirect his attention.
It froze solid mid-air before reaching the target. Never even got to explode.
Getting close wasn't an option — the cold off Vordt functioned like a permanent, passive Freezing Mist field around him.
Fortunately, the throwing motion alone was enough to catch Vordt's attention. He swung the hammer backward almost on reflex, still half-berserk.
Leon barely got clear.
Seeing Drew already dragging Terl into the alley, he let himself relax slightly and pushed off with both legs, chaining wall-jumps up the alley walls until he reached the rooftops.
From above, he studied Vordt below.
One of the tactics from Luluwo's Skyrim guide — find elevation. Standing three or four stories up, Vordt shouldn't be able to reach them directly.
Once close combat was ruled out by the freezing mist danger, magic became the obvious answer.
Leon pulled the staff from his back. Fighting close-quarters was his default, but Liurnia of the Lakes had left him with a real working knowledge of magic.
Maru, Drew, and a now-thawed Terl joined him on the rooftop, staffs drawn.
Liurnia had genuinely reshaped how the group operated in fights. Outside of Drew, the trained mage with full access to the spell catalog, everyone else was locked into one or two specific spells — limited enough in raw combat that Professor Tursey's theoretical framework around magic might not have been entirely unfounded after all.
Leon: Magic Glintblade.
Drew: Great Fireball.
The others: Glintstone Pebble.
Vordt's body proved surprisingly nimble for its size, dodging left and right as though anticipating their targeting patterns in advance. The Glintstone Pebbles never connected. Only the Magic Glintblades landed with any consistency.
Low accuracy didn't matter much, though — mana potions weren't in short supply. Rooftop range, presumably safe, meant a slower kill was still a fine trade.
Right as everyone settled into the idea that this was going to be a fairly boring kite-and-shoot cycle —
A massive shadow swallowed them from above.
Leon's expression froze.
Vordt had jumped.
Directly onto the rooftop with them.
The frost-coated hammer came down without mercy.
The spot where Leon had been standing was obliterated. Buildings collapsed one after another, frost-caked wooden debris flying in every direction.
Genuinely absurd destructive output.
Half a second slower and —
Wait.
He had been half a second slower.
"Hisssss…"
The pain barely registered as pain — it was closer to pure sensation, overwhelming and total. From the knees down, both of Leon's legs had been reduced to mangled tissue, blended indistinguishably with splintered wood.
Is this the toll for trying to cheese a boss?
He'd genuinely never imagined that Vordt's ground-hugging, crawling posture concealed the ability to launch himself onto rooftops.
He downed Estus in rapid succession — seven, eight swallows — and his legs snapped back to normal.
His leg armor, though, was simply gone. Bare skin against the freezing wind.
Even someone born in the far north would find that uncomfortable.
No time to dwell on it. Below them, Vordt was tearing through the street's remaining structures like a demolition crew gone insane, forcing the group into a running battle across the rooftops.
Did Luluwo's guide genuinely not account for the monster jumping straight up onto buildings and swinging a hammer around?!
Dong. Dong.
The bell tower beside the street trembled continuously from the fighting, its bell adding yet another layer of grating noise to everyone's already-shredded patience.
Then —
The bell stopped ringing.
Frozen solid.
Chasing the fleeing party, Vordt had practically converted himself into a spellcaster — every hammer swing sent out waves of vicious freezing mist. His aggression bordered on the deranged.
Small mercy: Wade hadn't given him Hoarfrost Stomp on top of everything else. That would've made the encounter genuinely unwinnable.
Leon ran while turning strategy over in his head. Judging by Vordt's overall pattern, a full party of dedicated fire mages was probably the intended solution here.
Right now, though, Drew was the only member of the group producing meaningful fire damage.
"Should we start considering recruiting?"
But the group had more resilience than they looked like they had. And Vordt, for all his terror, wasn't unbeatable either.
After a rampage of destruction turned half the street into a frozen wasteland, exhaustion finally caught up with him. He braced both hands against the ground, panting hard, the freezing mist around him thinning noticeably.
Exactly the window Leon had been waiting for.
Everyone dropped from the rooftops and unloaded everything they had, packing in as much damage per second as possible.
Unfortunately, the exhaustion window lasted only a few seconds before Vordt recovered and roared, a fresh blizzard erupting outward and pushing them back again.
"Keep dodging. Wait for the next exhaustion window."
Leon settled on the most conservative possible strategy. What followed was a genuinely dull cycle of run-away-and-punish, run-away-and-punish, over and over.
Even Luluwo probably would've approved.
Nobody kept track of how much time actually passed. The group had nearly exhausted every Warmthfruit and hot drink in their supplies by the time —
Vordt's final moment arrived.
BOOM!
The bell tower gave out and collapsed entirely, the falling bell itself delivering the finishing blow.
Vordt's massive frame crumbled into ash and dispersed.
A notification surfaced before all of them:
[Soul of Boreal Valley Vordt]
The standard reward from the source material, transposable into either Vordt's Great Hammer or the Pontiff's Left Eye.
Everyone stared at it with utterly numb expressions — literally numb, faces frozen too deeply by the extended cold to actually form real reactions.
And that wasn't even the full damage report.
Estus supplies: completely exhausted. Even with the most cautious strategy available, they'd come within inches of a full wipe multiple times. The single closest call had been Maru's lower body getting caught and crushed outright.
"The monsters here run a little hot, don't they…"
Leon felt like his entire body was quietly disassembling itself. The last time he'd felt this drained had been the Wolnir fight.
"Let's go see what this thing was even guarding."
They pushed to the road's end.
A building stood there with an entirely different character — taller, more refined, radiating something distinctly sacred. Not church-sacred, though. Closer to residence of an important person — a house that had somehow absorbed its owner's prestige into the architecture itself.
Could this be Pontiff Sulyvahn's residence?
"No way…"
Leon shook it off and led everyone inside.
Inside, a floating elevator platform ran upward. When it delivered them to the second floor, everyone reflexively touched their own arms in surprise.
"It's actually warm in here."
"Can't even hear the wind anymore."
They circled a folding screen and found a quiet, pristine room beyond it — furniture simple but clearly high quality, floors polished enough to reflect light. The whole space felt recently, actively lived in.
An undeniably sacred atmosphere hung over everything. Everyone instinctively softened their footsteps.
What genuinely caught Leon's attention were the paintings on the walls. From the second floor, most were still too distant to make out clearly.
Then —
Maru noticed something first. She pointed toward the first floor, already drawing breath to shout —
"Black Kni—"
Leon clamped a hand over her mouth and signaled quiet.
The figure downstairs wasn't a Black Knight. On closer inspection, it was clearly a Silver Knight — similar armor silhouette, entirely different coloration.
The Silver Knight hadn't registered them at all. Its back was turned, fully absorbed in staring at the largest painting mounted on the far wall.
Curiosity got the better of Leon too. He pulled out his telescope for a closer look.
His whole body went rigid.
"What'd you see?" Maru whispered.
Instead of answering, Leon just handed her the telescope, his face turning faintly red.
What? Something worth blushing over?
Maru took it and looked.
Her mouth fell open, involuntarily.
She didn't want to describe it in a way that felt disrespectful.
But that painting genuinely was —
Very —
Very—
Her limited grasp of high culture failed to produce an adequate word for it. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to keep looking.
At the same time, she finally understood exactly why the Silver Knight had been staring so intently.
A painting of a woman that beautiful — practically divine — hanging directly at eye level, there was no realistic way to look away from it.
Especially considering the pose in question was, in the words of a certain other franchise entirely:
"A giant treasure chest ahead."