Ar'Kendrithyst

The South Central Tribulation Mountains formed a barrier much larger than that of the Songli Highlands' western flank. This land of relative peace only claimed about 3000 kilometers of the range. To the north of that claimed space, the mountains continued on for another 2000 kilometers, before the South Central Ridge joined the curving Eastern Ridge. To the south of the Songli Highlands’s staked-out land, the South Central Ridge continued on for another 4500 kilometers.

The South Central Ridge was nearly a thousand kilometers wide in some places, but it was mostly only 500 kilometers wide, on average. Near the Highlands, the Tribulation Mountains were, on average, 700 to 400 kilometers wide.

Some of those mountain peaks soared 20 kilometers into the sky. Some of those valleys plunged just as deep into the surface, where parts of the Underworld were exposed for all to see.

A man could get lost in those mountains.

Not Ezekiel, though. He knew right where he was:

In the middle of a battle of life and death.

He smashed his staff into the head of a charging Mist Stone Glutton, deflecting the multi-ton monster with a [Strike] made of pink fire that burned the beast and sent him scurrying, into the ground, leaving behind wisps of flame on the surface. No time to finish off that beast; another one was coming up from behind, directly at his head.

Without turning, or even acknowledging the new monster, he fired off a magenta [Firelight Beam] from the back of his head, right down the glutton’s throat. Pink fire erupted inside the monster and burst out of breaks in the rocks here and there, briefly filling the air with steam before more fire came forth. The beast roared in pain, and tried to bite down on the thing making it hurt. Instead, it bit down on a pink shield made of thorns and reflections. Stone teeth fractured.

Ezekiel turned his body, just in time to let the raking claws of the monster scratch along his edges instead of where they had been aiming, turning possible major injury into lesser damage to his renewable defenses.

Ah.

But.

The creature was still several tons of stone. And that stone was coming for Ezekiel with the inexorable force of weight with nowhere else to go but through. It was still on Firelight fire; Ezekiel’s beam was still trained on the monster, still damaging it for 4x Willpower per moment. It didn’t seem able to transform back into mist while it was on fire.

Good to know!

He was still going to get crush—

Odin, already in pink-lightform, grabbed Ezekiel and moved him out of the way in a moment of shifting light.

The glutton fell to the ground, phasing into the mountain, leaving behind glowing pink fire.

Ezekiel’s beam was still trained on that spot, which was helpful, because the first monster came back, transforming from mist to stone while it was still in the air on Ezekiel’s left. He trained the beam on that one as it lunged at him. Stone caught firelight. The beast burned.

Ezekiel stepped to the left, out of the monster’s attack vector and without Odin’s help this time. The glutton sailed past, unable to become mist while it was on fire, and unable to escape into the ground because it was a meter above the ground.

With another second to cast, Ezekiel purged the water from the on-fire glutton, which… Had the effect of instantly putting out the flames. But also hurting the monster! He did manage this much! He had not fucked up; he just didn’t think that the mundane water would put out the magical fires.

Yes. That was what he was going with.

Stop it! He’s learning.

And quickly, too.

The [Firelight Beam] was still going; it had five seconds left in its 10 second duration. It was still trained on the beast, who was now not-on-fire and not getting there any time soon. But something had changed after he purged the water.

The [Firelight Beam] carved through the beast’s forehead, then across the body, splitting the monster in half. Small droplets of burned sand scattered across the battlefield. A notification came. [Firelight Beam] ended on its own.

There had been a few fuckups on his part. Some non-ideal action. But he had taken care of his targets. Mostly. Where was the first one? Not here, not bothering anyone else…

He could have done better. There was just something about being actually in the fight that made it all so much more confusing and him all that much more clumsy.

But as his daughter had said: No way out but through!

He glanced his daughter’s way. Now she was good in a fight. Look at that giant hammer in her hands! Swinging it like it was nothing. And surrounded by monster corpses, too. It had only been twenty seconds since the start of the fight, and only ten minutes since they landed, and already Julia had taken out three gluttons, in this glutton-filled canyon.

Tiffany was surrounded by corpses, too, but hers were completely demolished. If he didn’t know any better, the scene would have made Ezekiel think that Tiffany was breaking rocks in a quarry for fun. She looked so happy.

Paul was easily avoiding the monsters and had even caused two of them to crash into each other, twice. Those gluttons apparently didn’t like getting in each other’s way. They had started tearing into each other right after that. Last Ezekiel saw, Paul’s opponents were rolling down the mountainside—

Whoops!

He lifted an arm and his shield caught the jaws of the other glutton he had been fighting. He brought around his staff for a Firelight [Strike], directly to the side of the beast’s head, experimenting to see if Firelight, or rather, Radiance, was particularly good against these guys. That last glutton went down rather easily, and this one had taken a good twenty seconds to get back in the fight.

The grey-blue stone cracked. The monster went limp. Ezekiel stepped to the side as the glutton fully fell out of the mist like a puppet with its strings cut. It landed with a heavy, burning thud. Had he somehow dazed it? But they were elementals? Could you do that to elementals, if you used the proper Element against them? That wasn’t true for many Elementals, and most people were cautioned against trying to rely on elemental weaknesses...

These were weird monsters. Maybe Radiance was good against mist—

… That made sense.

Oh. Well. It couldn’t be that easy, could it? A little bit of elemental weakness? Like how fire was weak to water, water was weak to ice, and ice was weak to fire… Mist might be weak to Radiance? Best practices on combating elementals was based upon the idea of transforming the base Element which composed the targeted elemental into something else, in order to kill that elemental.

So in that way, ‘burning’ away the mists of a mist stone glutton seemed to be right on track for best practices.

Anyway.

There was a monster, stunned, not frozen with a Stop-effect, at Ezekiel’s feet.

Julia was suddenly there with her giant hammer. That glutton became dead stone after a few heavy attacks.

The fight was over seconds before that, anyway.

The bodies of eight more Mist Stone Gluttons lay scattered across the mountainside.

Ezekiel stood tall, and scanned the land with his eyes and his mana sense, watching the gently curved mountainside for any more threats.

There were lots.

But they kept back, like prowling shadows, twenty meters away, thirty, thirty-five. Most were at the very edge of his own senses. He counted maybe seventy.

Tiffany, giddy, said, “I count a hundred twenty.”

Paul spoke softly. “This is a great area for rigorous combat training. I’m not denying this. But maybe we should pick a different valley. One less populous. While we can.”

The original target of the day had been a valley a bit south from this one. The four of them walked around there for a good half hour and only got three gluttons to give a probing strike. They killed one of those gluttons, but the other two retreated, oddly enough.

This valley, three valleys over from that first one, had some nice mostly-flat areas for easier fighting, and a lot more gluttons. The four of them had barely spent any time at all in one of those flat spaces before the gluttons began to come up for a bite. While the gluttons were weird monsters, this land was also pretty weird.

If Ezekiel would have had ten extra minutes of rest, he would have tried a [Witness] in the area, just to see if all these flat spots actually used to be foundations for houses; if this land used to be a mountainside village. It well and truly could have been. Except for the monsters, and the mists, and how deadly the Tribulation Mountains were, there was a nice river down in the valley, the sun could show whenever the clouds decided to play nice, and [Grow]ing food here would have been easy with the mists providing all the necessary water. This would have been a nice space for a little town.

You know… except for the monsters.

Always monsters. Everywhere.

Ezekiel held his staff in both hands, since he didn’t need to hold his shield, as he stared out into the gloom. “Firelight seems to work exceptionally well,” he said, as he walked to regroup with his party.

“It does. I started using [Radiance Strike], too.” Julia stared out into the mist, holding her hammer like she was ready to strike at anything, as she repositioned herself, too “Seems like a standard Elemental interaction.”

“Standard?” Ezekiel said, “There’s nothing standard about these guys.”

Tiffany punched a gauntlet into the other, eliciting fire from the air. “Plain fire does better.”

“Any sort of heat-based attack would work fine, for the dryer they are, the more damage you can do. That is what you are seeing.” Paul said, warily watching the world around him, as he stepped closer to everyone. “The problem is that they can wipe off the fire and purge the heat by diving into the stone.”

The gluttons circled in the mist, their blue eyes flickering like ghostly fireflies.

Ezekiel had a few thoughts.

He thought back to Kiri, and her [Firelight Defender]; the automated turret-like summon that spawned countless [Firelight Bolt]s at designated enemies. And then he considered something else.

Was Ezekiel a Fire and Light kinda guy? Wind and Mercy, yeah… But firelight?

Or rather, Radiance?

No no. Not Radiance. Firelight; that other term for the same thing. Yes. Erick would have spoken of Radiance, but Ezekiel?

Clan Phoenix was about Fire. Maybe a bit of Light. Ezekiel could be about Firelight, too, or at least some of his spells. He would have had a history of fire and light in his family, anyway, right?

Yeah. Sure.

And besides that, he recalled meeting a Riftcaster, once, who cast Rifts into the air to bolster certain elements and deny opposing elements. That man had a brother who had learned incantations from the Songstresses of the Songli Highlands in order to adjust his [Healing Beacon]-derived healing and harming spell into whichever was needed at that moment.

Ezekiel was getting off track.

Neither Ezekiel nor Erick had ever made a Rift, he decided. There was something of a need for an actual Rift, but Erick had already made the precursor to a Rift a while ago, and that would do, for now.