Chương 104: Hi there

Vera was starting to wonder if using Mark of the Stillbound Veil had been a mistake. Binding Coil. Stillwake spun around her as a storm of jagged ice lanced through the snow, each shard striking the vortex of halberd and Resonance with sharp, crystalline cracks. Fragments burst apart around her in glittering sprays, vanishing almost immediately into the white haze. Vera's eyes locked onto the direction of the attack. Her Resonance answered in kind. Crescent Wake.

Stillwake slashed horizontally, leaving a ghostlike trail in its path. A beat later, a crescent of force tore through the wall of snow and wind in front of her. The sound of splintering trees, cracking stone, and breaking ice rolled out as several large shapes collapsed beyond the brief opening she had carved in the blizzard. Not that it bought her any lasting peace. A roar shook her surroundings, too sharp to be thunder but too deep to hail from the storm itself. Vera reacted instantly. Mark of Hollow Reach.

She teleported herself a dozen or so meters back. That gave her enough space, but the storm was so dense that she could barely see the space where she'd been standing a moment before. She did feel the impact, though, as something massive slammed into the ground, and the snow-crusted stone beneath her boots cracked in a spreading web. A great wing moved through the blizzard, its outline just barely visible for a second before it was swallowed again. Then two cold, burning blue eyes fixed on her.

Vera almost wanted to sigh at the part of herself that got way too excited meeting that intense gaze. Fun as this was, she wasn't here to fight every frostbitten horror the Thryne Passes had to offer. Unfortunately, that seemed to be exactly what invoking Mark of the Stillbound Veil had earned her. She had sort of been assuming that there was a risk. Higher-level monsters could probably detect the Mark if she pushed it hard enough, and she had accepted that it might draw some attention.

Since she was looking for someone in the middle of a hostile mountain storm, she hadn't cared much. Besides, she hadn't expected searching the Thryne Passes to take long. For an army, moving through the pass might require days, sure. For her, though, that was nothing. A handful of Marks should have been enough to find Mira's trail. That had been the plan.

Then she had discovered that this damned storm apparently messed with the Mark so badly that using it felt like using someone's prescription glasses while someone shoved an entire library through her eyes. She could still feel fading pulses of the headache it'd caused. So where did that leave her? Another roar ripped through the air. A gale of freezing wind crashed into Vera hard enough to make all the snow around her explode outward.

The storm wall ahead split apart, revealing the creature that had deemed her its new target. It was a dragon. Or it had been one, once. Now it just looked sad. Carved more from bone than flesh, its body was both long and gaunt beneath jagged plates of ice, with ribs of almost pale blue crystal jutting through torn patches of frost-blackened hide. What had been its wings were nothing but ragged sheets of frozen membrane stretched between spurs of bone. It wasn't undead in the strict, technical sense.

Not the way that the Silent Lords and their Tetherborn were. It was more like a body piloted by another, with its original owner forced along for the ride. Vera peered up at the dragon as it loomed over her, easily two or three times Vorthalor's size. Its maw opened, and white-blue light gathered in its throat, bright enough to turn the falling snow into sparks. Vera shifted Stillwake in both her hands and lowered her stance. Well.

If the storm had made her more 'subtle' means of searching impossible, that left her with one of the things she had learned she was apparently best at. Making a mess large enough that no one nearby could miss it. The ice dragon released its breath. Sigil Thread. Vera's Resonance snapped into the familiar yet unfamiliar structure of the Fifth-Seal Form, threading the next workings together before they could fully take shape. Mark of Hollow Dominion. Mark of the Entombed Star.

Two Fifth Seal techniques bloomed in sequence without the usual channeling they should have needed, their patterns pulled tight and anchored by the first Form. The dragon's breath reached her, but just as the torrent of white-blue annihilation was about to swallow her, Vera closed things off with a single Hollow Reach. She reappeared in midair, surrounded by blasting snow and little else.

A few uses of Breaksteps that were much harder than they looked caught her fall, each one cracking softly beneath her feet as she steadied herself. Her gaze cut through the blizzard and easily found the place where she'd been, drawn there by the Resonance she'd left lingering in the snow. A furious bellow tore through the storm below. She heard the snap of the dragon's wings beating against the gale. Presumably, it had already found her new position. But it wouldn't get the chance to reach her.

A muted pulse of Resonance spread outward from where she'd stood, rippling through the storm in concentric waves. The rings expanded for several dozen meters before stopping just short of her current position. Inside their reach, the raging snow went still. Wind died. Hail hung suspended in the air. The blizzard softened into a slow, dreamlike fall, and through the white curtain, Vera could make out the dragon's shape more clearly. It had already launched itself upward. It didn't get too far.

The moment it reached the edge of the Resonance border that had formed, it was knocked back, falling along with the snow. It landed with a crash and a roar before quickly spreading its wings wide, claws gouging trenches through the frozen ground. Light flared beneath its ribs as its head twisted toward Vera, jaws opening around another gathering breath, but Vera easily dodged the attack from here. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

She smiled at the sight of its struggling. Mark of Hollow Dominion had kept a Silent Lord from escaping. Sure, she had used a lot less Resonance this time, but this dominion would still be enough to keep the dragon stuck there for at least a minute. That was more than enough. Honestly, she had been really excited about testing this for a while, but there had never been an opportunity where she felt like she could justify it.

Thinking about it, maybe using Mark of the Stillbound Veil had actually been a stroke of genius. The snow at the center of the dominion began to glow. Pale radiance spread beneath the frozen ground in branching fractures, like distant starlight trapped under it. The light deepened quickly, swallowing the color around it, until the entire dominion looked as if it had been caught beneath a wan eclipse. It took another moment for the dragon to realize what was happening.

Its neck turned, but by then it was already too late. The ground dropped. It was as if the whole world inside the dominion had suddenly caved inward around an impossible weight. Snow, stone, ice, and everything within collapsed toward the center in utter silence, dragged downward by a force Vera could feel tightening in her chest even from outside the boundary. At the heart of it, a buried star opened.

For a single instant, Vera saw a massive sphere of pale-white Resonance beneath the earth, like a dead sun lowered into a grave. It didn't truly shine, though, and all contours became only a black silhouette against that depthless white. Then the sphere tightened. The light drew inward, and the world went with it. The frozen ground buckled in rings. Shelves of ice snapped free and slid toward the center. Stone folded over itself like soft metal.

The dragon spread its wings, either to leap or to claw its way free, but the motion was swallowed halfway through. Its body stretched for one impossible instant against the pull, outlined in the pale, before the star took it whole. Then it imploded with pure absence. The entire dominion folded into the point where the star had been.

Snow, stone, ice, and beast vanished together, and what remained was a huge circular crater, its edges sheer and glass-smooth in places, while its floor lay hidden beneath motes of fading Resonance that drifted upward like ash from a dead pyre. The star's afterimage lingered for one more heartbeat before a vast, grinding groan rolled out, like the stone door of a city-sized tomb being forced shut.

With that, a single pulse of Resonance burst outward from it, washing well past Vera and stilling the blizzard for thousands of meters in every direction. She let herself drop to the ground, catching the landing with a light Breakstep as she studied the aftermath of what the Fifth Seal Mark had wrought. It was a good thing she'd limited its reach with Mark of Hollow Dominion. Honestly, Mark of the Entombed Star had always been a bit overtuned. By the numbers, it was probably her strongest attack.

The tradeoff was that it was effectively a self-AoE. It could only be cast on yourself, and most players could get clear of its radius before it triggered. That was why players like her, who'd invested deeply enough into the House Hollow path to build around the Ashen Channeler archetype, had come up with this strategy. She'd used it often in one-on-ones back in Ashen Legacy. It had been one of her most reliable answers against players who didn't have a counter to hard area crowd control.

The setup relied on Sigil Thread, the Fifth Seal Form that let you link two Marks together and activate them in a delayed sequence. Which was exactly what someone like Vera needed to turn Entombed Star from a semi-suicidal area denial tool into someone else's problem. The memory of all the players who'd cursed her out after dying to this nonsense brought another smile to her lips. As for whether she'd really needed to go this far against that dragon… Probably not. Almost definitely not.

This had been about as much overkill as she could manage, short of dumping all of her Resonance into one technique and seeing whether or not it cut a mountain in half. While she had just been up against the vestiges of a true dragon, she could tell this thing hadn't been anywhere close to the proper adult ones that could literally cradle mountaintops. But this did serve to create a scene. And in the end, wasn't that what she wanted?

That said, she'd need to have a proper think about whether telling Serel about this would be a good idea. Would the girl be horrified or awed? Vera kept her eyes on the crater for a little longer, watching the lingering effects as the blizzard slowly began to stir around her again. The Resonance driving the storm had clearly been disrupted by hers, but this was still a storm that covered most of the passes. Her blowing open one tiny part of it wouldn't make much of a difference.

She lifted her gaze to the clouds, watching the churning masses of snow and shadow hanging low across the sky like mountains of their own. What would it send after her next? Would it be repetitive if she killed that one with another Entombed Star? She'd barely had the thought when she sensed the approaching Resonance. Breakstep. Crescent Severance. The air cracked beneath Vera's feet as she launched herself forward.

Stillwake came sweeping down with a shriek of force, six pale crescents trailing in its wake as the attack tore into the new threat. Steel rang against steel. Vera blinked.

"Wait, Cin?" Stillwake's blade had slammed against the flat of a sword black as night, its edge flickering with ember-red light. Below it, a pair of equally black eyes looked up at her from beneath a head of almost offensively bright blond hair. The faintest frown touched the man's face.

"Vera, you're causing a mess," he said. The crescents from Vera's attack had either carved deep scars into the ground around him or crashed against his dark coat and failed to pierce through. On his left hand, a fingerless glove glowed crimson from a tiny gemstone set into its back, and Vera realized the Resonance she'd mistaken for an enemy was his.

She had still been riding some of the high from killing the dragon, apparently enough that she'd forgotten there were supposed to be others in these passes besides her and the storm. Though she hadn't been expecting him specifically. She drew Stillwake back, letting the crown of the halberd lower toward the ground as she stepped away and took in the man before her. Her gaze moved over every detail of his appearance, then to the thin, subtle Resonance surrounding him.

It shimmered close to his body, forming a faint barrier of heat that kept the surrounding blizzard from touching him directly. He was exactly like she'd imagined he would be. Nothing about his appearance had changed from what she remembered in the game. His Resonance felt familiar too. So did his presence, like something in her bones was insisting this was someone she knew. But that was exactly what had happened with Syl as well.

"What?" the man asked, his tone painfully neutral as he noted her staring.

"…Nothing," Vera said after a few seconds.

"Fancy seeing you here." She pointed Stillwake back toward the crater she'd created.

"I'm guessing that's the mess you're talking about. In my defense, that was sort of the goal. Cause a big enough mess, and eventually someone will show up to clean it."" Entombed Star?"

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Because I felt like it?"

"Once again, why?"

"Well, I had to kill that dragon somehow."

"Dragon?" His frown deepened.

"So that is what I sensed. But this is the first appearance of a monster that strong. Why would it suddenly emerge now?" Vera eyed him, then glanced up. The blizzard had already thickened enough that she couldn't see the source of the storm above.

"I'm guessing you haven't had to deal with legions of monsters hounding you at every step, then," she said. He shook his head.

"No. There are few Rimebound that will stalk you through the storm if you are careless, but unless you're near a rift, it never grows excessive. Even with the attention you drew to yourself, this is strange."

"I don't know about that." Vera's eyes lingered on the white chaos above for a few seconds longer.

"That one up there isn't my biggest fan, so it's not that surprising they're all gunning for my throat."

"What do you mean by that?" She looked back at him, her expression quieting. It was that feeling again. The same thing she'd felt when she first met Syl. She was plenty confused about what CinderCtrl was doing here when Vera was actually looking for Mira. From what she'd heard, Cin was supposed to be investigating the deaths of their guildmates, and there hadn't been any indication that he was anywhere near the Thryne Passes. But that really wasn't the most pressing thing on her mind.

With Syl, she had deliberately delayed contacting Last Hearth until she could visit in person because she'd been afraid to confirm that the people there might not be like her. That they weren't players from her old world, and not the friends she'd once had fun with. Even if they ended up being friends of a different kind, people she genuinely felt bonded to, it wasn't the same. With Mira, though, she had decided not to do that. Not to delay, not to hide behind excuses, and not to be a coward.

Because whether it was this world's version of her or Vera's, Mira was still her closest friend. She felt like she had to respect that connection. But things got more complicated now that she'd run into Cin first. Really, that decision had only been made regarding Mira. She didn't necessarily have to handle things the same way with Cin, especially since she hadn't been ready for this. However… She looked into his black eyes.

Sometimes, even when things didn't pan out quite the way you wanted, it was best to just rip the bandage off.

"What do I mean?" she asked, pointing upward.

"Are you asking about what's going on up there, or are you asking what I meant by 'gunning'? Because I'll only answer one or the other."