Rimelion: The Exploiter

The warriors charged, and the chamber erupted into chaos.

Katherine met the first one head-on, her greatsword sweeping in a wide arc that should have cleaved the golem in half.

Instead, the blade slammed into the warrior’s shield with a clang that rang through my skull. The impact traveled up Katherine’s arms, and she actually had to brace against something.

“Oh,” she said, her grin deepening. “These fight back.”

The golem’s counter-strike came faster than the miners’ clumsy swings. Katherine pivoted, letting the blade whistle past her shoulder, and brought her sword around in a tight arc that caught the warrior’s arm. Sparks flew and metal screamed. But the arm didn’t sever, it dented, gouged, kept moving.

“Tough!” Katherine barked approvingly.

Lucy was already engaging the second warrior, her hammer sweeping low to catch its legs. The golem stepped over the strike and thrust its blade toward her chest. She caught it on the hammer’s haft, muscles straining, boots scraping stone as she was pushed back an inch.

Then two.

“Strong buggers!” Lucy laughed, shoving the blade aside and bringing her hammer around in a crushing overhead blow. The warrior raised its shield. The impact rang like a bell, but the shield held.

The third warrior ignored both of them. It walked past the melee, amber strip fixed on me.

Of course. They identified the healer.

I threw up an ice wall between us, frost crystallizing in a barrier six inches thick. The warrior didn’t slow. Its blade punched through the ice like it was paper, showering me with frozen shards, and kept coming.

Then Lucas was there, pushing me aside.

“By heart and horizon—let the wind remember me!”

The transformation erupted in a swirl of petals and ribbons. Light cascaded over Lucas’s form, and where the grumpy mage had stood, Windprincess hovered—small, light, flowing skirts and streaming ribbons catching wind that came from nowhere.

The warrior’s blade met empty air as Lucas danced aside, and a curved wind blade sliced across its sword-arm. “Kiss of the wind!”

The Heartcleave didn’t sever the limb, but something inside the joint cracked. The blade drooped, sparking.

“Ooh, a kiss!” Lucy called from across the chamber, blocking another strike. “Careful, Luka, ye might make the tin man blush!”

“Not now, Lucy!”

“Aye, aye, Princess!”

Katherine’s laugh boomed through the chaos. “Luka is fighting! So pretty!”

Lucas’s face, delicate and feminine in this form, flushed red. “I will let the next one kill you both.”

“No ya won’t!” Katherine split a golem’s shield with a two-handed overhead strike, flames beginning to lick along her blade. “Ya love us!”

“I tolerate you. There’s a difference.”

More amber lights flickered to life in the tunnels. I counted them with growing unease, two from the left passage, three from the right, more from the tunnel we’d entered through. The workers must have spread the alert.

Or the warriors had some way of calling reinforcements.

“We’ve got company,” I announced, already throwing ice walls across two of the smaller passages. The frost crystallized thick and fast, sealing them with barriers that would buy us minutes at best.

“How much company?” Frozna asked, her bow singing as an arrow punched into a warrior’s neck-joint. The golem staggered but didn’t fall.

“Enough to make this interesting.”

The first wave of reinforcements hit us thirty seconds later.

Five warriors poured from the main tunnel, spreading into a formation. Their shields overlapped, covering gaps, creating a wall of dark metal that advanced forward.

Katherine threw herself at the formation.

Her greatsword swept in a massive horizontal arc, trailing sparks, and two shields caught it simultaneously, stopping the blade cold. The third warrior’s blade was already thrusting toward her exposed side.

Lucy’s hammer intercepted it with a crash. “Watch yer flank, ye mad woman!”

“Flank is fine! Ya watch yer own!”

They fought back-to-back, hammer and greatsword weaving a pattern of violence that should have been devastating. Against normal enemies, it would have been. But the warriors adapted, rotated, covered each other’s weaknesses with the same efficiency they’d been built with.

Lucas activated his field. “Wind, favor me.”

The Heartstorm erupted outward, stormwind swirling through the chamber. I felt it: a constant pressure against my skin, air currents tugging at my clothes and hair. The warriors felt it too. Their movements stuttered, coordination degrading as the wind interfered with their precise positioning.

And Frozna’s next arrow flew as if it had been shot from a ballista.

The shaft punched through a warrior’s joint, and the golem toppled backward, amber light flickering out. Frozna was already nocking another arrow, her face unchanged, but I caught the slight upturn at the corner of her mouth.

“Better,” she said simply.

“Ye’ve got good aim for a landlubber!” Lucy called, ducking a blade and countering with a hammer strike that caved in a warrior’s knee.

Frozna bantered too. “I am from the forest. Not land or sea.”

“Same thing! No water, no sailing, landlubber!”

“If you say so.”

Another warrior broke through Katherine’s guard, not toward Katherine, but toward me. Again. These things really didn’t like healers.

I met it with frost.

Ice erupted from the ground, encasing the golem’s legs up to the knees. It kept moving, upper body twisting, blade swinging toward my head with indifference to its trapped limbs.

Wait.

The ice was too weak and broke in a spray of crystals.

“Not fair, over-leveled bastard!” I ducked, felt the wind of the strike ruffle my hair, and drove an ice spike up through its chest.

The warrior looked down at the spike not penetrating its torso. Looked back at me. Raised its blade again.

“Oh, come on,” I muttered, and froze its arms too.

For a second before it also failed, but Katherine’s greatsword took its head off before it could recover. “Good trap!”

“Thanks. Duck.”

She ducked. My ice lance took the warrior behind her in the face, doing basically zero damage.

The battle settled into a grinding rhythm. Warriors poured in from the unsealed tunnels, two or three at a time, and we cut them down.

But every kill cost effort, energy, attention. My frost walls cracked under repeated impacts. Lucy’s armor collected new dents with every exchange. Katherine’s flames burned brighter, but I could see the strain in her shoulders, the way her swings were losing some of their wild abandon in favor of efficiency.

Frozna’s wolfie harried the flanks, darting in to hamstring warriors and dancing back before they could retaliate. Lizzie swooped overhead, occasionally diving to scratch at sensor strips with her talons, more annoyance than damage but enough to create openings.

Lucas was everywhere and nowhere, Flutterstep carrying him through gaps in the melee like wind through leaves. His Heartcleave found joints and weak points, and every warrior he touched moved a little slower afterward.

“Serein,” he murmured, and a faint aura of charged light settled around him. The next warrior’s strike missed him by a hair’s breadth; he’d moved before it even started the swing.

“Now she’s glowing!” Lucy laughed, crushing a golem’s shield-arm. “Proper fairy princess, that one!”

“I will remember this,” Lucas promised, wind-blade slicing through a knee joint. “Every word. Forever.”

“Promises, promises!”

Then everything went wrong.

One of my ice walls shattered—not cracked, shattered—and four warriors poured through the gap simultaneously. They didn’t spread out. They charged directly at Frozna, who was positioned near the back, raining arrows into the melee.

Wolfie saw them first.

It threw itself into their path, snarling, trying to slow them down. The first warrior’s shield caught it across the ribs and sent it tumbling. The second warrior’s blade came down.

“No!” Frozna’s arrow took the warrior in the neck, snapping its head back, but the blade still fell.

Wolfie yelped, a sound I’d never heard it make, high and pained and wrong, and collapsed, blood spreading across the stone. Frozna’s face went pale. Her hands kept moving, nocking arrows, shooting, but her eyes were fixed on her wolf.

“Charlie!” Lucas shouted.

I was already moving. Ice formed a barrier between Frozna and the advancing warriors, buying seconds, and I dropped to my knees beside the wolf. The wound was severe, a deep cut across its shoulder, blood pulsing with each heartbeat, but not fatal.

Not yet.

Golden light flowed from my hands, sinking into fur and flesh. The bleeding stopped and muscle knit together. Maybe mud armor wasn’t such a bad idea…

“He’ll live,” I told Frozna. “Keep shooting.”

Her next arrow took a warrior through the slit.

But the seconds I’d spent healing the wolf cost us. Without my heals, the warriors had pressed the advantage, pushing Katherine and Lucy back toward the center of the chamber. Lucy caught a blade across her side; her armor took most of it, but I saw her stumble.

Katherine’s fury was burning hotter now, flames wreathing her entire body, but she was breathing hard, each swing slightly slower than the last.

“Lucy!” I threw healing at her, golden light splashing across her armor, and felt the drain in my reserves.

“Much obliged!” Lucy planted her feet and swung her hammer in a wide arc that sent two warriors staggering. “But we’ve got a problem, Yer Majesty!”

I saw it. More amber lights, deeper in the tunnel. More warriors. This would not stop until we killed them all, or they killed us.

“Funnel them!” I shouted. “Everyone to me—single tunnel, backs to the wall!”

We collapsed toward the chamber’s far end, giving ground. I threw up ice walls to seal every entrance except one, pouring frost into barriers thick enough to hold. The warriors tried to break through, hammering at the ice, but they couldn’t match the rate I was building.

One tunnel. One killing ground.

Katherine and Lucy planted themselves side by side, greatsword and hammer forming a wall of violence that nothing could pass. Warriors came two at a time, the tunnel was too narrow for more, and died two at a time.

Frozna’s arrows flew past Katherine's shoulders, each shot finding a gap in armor, or a joint, or a sensor strip. Lucas’s wind blades curved around Lucy to strike warriors still waiting their turn. His Heartstorm Field made every attack hit harder, every enemy movement slightly wrong.

And I healed. Lucy took a hit; heal. Katherine caught a blade on her arm; heal. Lucas miscalculated a dodge and got clipped.

Heal.

My mana dipped, recovered, dipped again. The battle became a grinding war of attrition, each kill costing us effort we couldn’t spare but had to spend anyway.

“How many more?” Lucy gasped, crushing another warrior’s head.

“I don’t know! They don’t exactly wear numbers!”

“Well, count faster!”

A warrior’s blade got past Katherine’s guard and scored a line across Lucy’s shoulder, right where the armor was already dented. She staggered, and for a moment the line almost broke, but Katherine stepped into the gap, her fiery aura forcing the warriors back, and I poured healing into Lucy until she could stand again.

“Thanks,” Lucy breathed.

“Thank me later. Keep fighting.”

Three more warriors. Then two. Then one, which Lucas dispatched with a wind blade that carved through its neck joint like paper.

Silence.

I leaned against the wall, breathing hard. The chamber was littered with broken metal, dozens of warrior golems reduced to scattered limbs and sparking cores. The dust tasted like copper and iron.

“Is...” Katherine looked around, sword still raised. “Is over?”

No more amber lights. No more footsteps. Just the settling of metal and our own ragged breathing.

“I think so,” Frozna said. She’d moved to Wolfie. Her hand rested on its head, gently.

Lucas landed, actually landed, heels touching stone, and the wind around him settled. He looked exhausted, but weird. Satisfied, maybe.

“That was—” he started.

Then the notification hit us all.

“LEVEL UP!” Katherine roared, throwing her arms wide, sword still in hand.

“Level up!” Lucy echoed, pumping her hammer overhead. “The sea provides!”

“We’re still on land,” I said, but I was smiling.

Frozna’s expression changed little, but her wolf’s tail wagged once. “Level up,” she confirmed quietly.

Lucas let out a long breath, and something that might have been a smile crossed his delicate Windprincess features. “Level up.”

I felt it too, that warm rush of growth, the system acknowledging what we’d earned.

[You are level 25]

[Frost weaving advanced to 4-exceptional]

[Healing advanced to 3-rare]

[Mana manipulation advanced to 3-rare]

[Attention your class can evolve!]

[Class: Queen of Frost]

Type: 7-legendary

Description: A true crown is not worn upon the head. It is carried in the heart of one who would give everything for those she shields.

The Queen of Frost does not seek war, but she will not flee from it. She extends her hand in mercy to the fallen, offers pardon to those who kneel, and welcomes the repentant as her own. Yet let no kindness be mistaken for weakness. She has stood before the God of War himself and did not bow. She has looked upon divine will and answered:

No.

There is no throne she was given. There is no blessing she was granted. What she holds, she earned through sacrifice, through fire, through the love of those who chose to follow her. And for them—for every soul who placed their trust in her—she will become winter itself.

Empires may come. Gods may command. It does not matter. She has made her people a promise, and heaven itself cannot make her break it.

Upon class evolution, you may select one combat-related skill and one protection skill.

She kneels to no throne above. She rises for every soul below.

I grinned reading what Cloudy thought about me. This class was tailored to me and despite there being others broken, or even some mythical classes… I couldn’t refuse.

I did not want to refuse evolving my class and be stuck on class-level again.

[Congratulations! Your class had evolved.]

[You can now pick two new skills]

[Crown of Winteradvanced to 7-legendary]

[Physical stats advanced to 3-rare]

[Magical stats advanced to 4-exceptional]

[You are level 27]

I checked my stats again.

[Name: Queen Charlie]

[Race: Steppe Elven]

[Gender: Female]

[Level: 25]

[Life path: Sovereign Ruler 7–Legendary]

[Class: Queen of Frost 7–Legendary]

[Physical stats: 3-rare]

[Magical stats: 4-exceptional]

[Skill Limit: 8/10]

[1. The Exploiter - 9-godly]

[2. Mana manipulation - 3-rare]

[3. Frost weaving - 4-exceptional]

[4. Healing - 3-rare]

[5. Identify - 2-uncommon]

[6. Inventory - 1-common]

[7. Crown of Winter - 7-legendary]

[8. Strife’s Versatility - 6-marvel]

I grinned at the others, who were still in their level-up screens. So I glanced at the skills… and there was one class skill that outclassed the rest, though.

[Sovereign’s Rime]

Type: 7-legendary

Effect: Conjure frost armor as light as falling snow and as unyielding as glacial ice. Movement remains unhindered. Incoming damage is reduced. Enemies who make contact with the armor feel winter’s bite, slowing on first strike.

Duration: 60 seconds.

Cooldown: 180 seconds

Info:Light enough to dance in. Strong enough to defy the gods.