Chapter 404: Strategy
With the arrival of the anomaly, the storm slowly returned to motion, and then continued to increase in intensity. Heavy, wet snowflakes descended from the clouds in billowing gusts of winter, sticking to my hair and clothes. One made its way into my nose, and I sneezed, rubbing my nose furiously as it began to numb.
"Spirit, could you do something about this?" I asked, waving my hand in the air.
It tilted its head and frowned. "This?"
"The snow. Please, can you hold it back a bit?" I asked, drawing my cloak as tight as I dared across the sunpurge as another shiver coursed through my flesh.
"Ah, I see," it said, understanding dawning in its sapphire eyes. "But what you ask is one of the few things I cannot do. Beings of my strength often have an effect on the world, elementals even more so. It’s all I can do to restrain my impact on the immediate surroundings, perhaps within a couple of hundred miles radius. If I were to completely release my aura, plunging this kingdom into eternal ice wouldn’t be impossible."
His explanation was...lacking. I’d been around other ninth-level humans before, admittedly rarely, and never noticed anything particular about them. Of course, they had an oppressive aura, but nothing like the anomaly. Humans were relatively neutral, though, with no inherent attributes or presence of their own. Could it be it was as he said, and elementals were more in tune with the world? Perhaps the same would be true for monsters and maybe even demons.
I shivered, daring to imagine what that might look like. A ninth-level fire demon capable of plunging entire continents into ash was almost too much to think about. I had the church’s promise demons of such strength were not capable of descending through gates into Enusia, though that did beg the question of where the Lord of Ash–an eighth-level demon–had come from.
But the gods had lied to me before, and they’d been able to send an archon. If they could bypass the world’s laws with their magical amulets, wouldn’t their opposites, the demons, be able to do the same?
Fyren had one of those amulets.