The Frost-Scar Peaks did not welcome visitors. They devoured them.
The wind here was not merely air; it was a physical assault, a relentless, shrieking wall of ice shards that scoured exposed skin raw in seconds. Visibility was less than five meters. The world had been reduced to a suffocating, blinding white void.
Fyrion trudged through the waist-deep snow, his breath steaming inside his fur-lined cowl.
'Temperature is forty below,' his mind noted, checking the internal readings of his body.
'Wind chill pushes it to sixty. Without the Sun-Bricks in the portable braziers, these men would be dead in an hour.'
Behind him, the twenty men Gregor had hand-picked were struggling. Even Grom's massive sons, usually bursting with brutish vitality, were huddled in their furs, their heads bowed against the gale.
They were dragging sleds loaded with supplies, mining picks, and the precious, burning bricks that kept their blood from freezing solid.
"My Lord," Gregor shouted over the wind, stepping up beside Fyrion. The old soldier's beard was a mask of ice, his one good eye squinting against the glare. "The men are flagging. We've been marching for six hours. If we don't find shelter soon, the frostbite will take their toes."
"We don't stop," Fyrion said, his voice not raised, but carrying clearly through the storm thanks to a small, precise application of aura to his throat. "Stopping is death. The Crawler nests are beneath us. The vibrations of a stationary camp will draw them."
Gregor grunted. "Crawlers? Here? This high up? The scouts said—"
"Your scouts are idiots who never read the old geological surveys," Fyrion cut him off. "This isn't just a mountain. It's a hive. And we are walking on the roof."
He pointed his gloved hand forward. Through the swirling snow, a jagged, black rock formation jutted out like a rotten tooth.
"We make for that ridge. Solid rock. They can't burrow through it."
They trudged on. The fear in the ranks was palpable. It wasn't just the cold; it was the silence. The unnatural, heavy silence that fell between the gusts of wind.
CRUNCH.
It wasn't the sound of a boot on snow. It was the sound of ice shattering from below.
Fyrion stopped instantly. He held up a hand.
"Defensive circle! Now!" Gregor roared, his instincts honing in on Fyrion's signal.
The men scrambled, abandoning the sleds to form a ring, spears pointing outward. They were terrified, shivering, their breath coming in short, panicked gasps.
The snow ten meters to their left exploded.
SCREEEEEEE!
A nightmare erupted from the white earth.
It was massive—easily thirty feet long. A segmented, chitinous horror that looked like a cross between a centipede and a scorpion, covered in jagged, translucent ice-armor. Its mandibles clicked with the sound of snapping bone, dripping a blue, freezing ichor.
[Glacier Crawler (Tier-2 Beast)]
A Tier-2 beast. In the current era, where most knights were barely Tier-1, this was a catastrophe. It was a monster that required a full squad of veteran aura-users to suppress.
"Hold the line!" Gregor shouted, charging forward to draw its attention. He swung his heavy steel sword, his aura flaring.
CLANG!
The sword struck the Crawler's ice-armor and bounced off with a jarring, metallic ring. It didn't even leave a scratch.
The Crawler thrashed, its tail whipping around like a siege engine.
WHAM!
Gregor took the hit on his shield, but the force launched him backward. He slid twenty feet through the snow, coughing blood.
"Captain!"
The men panicked. Spears wavered. If the Captain couldn't scratch it, what could they do?
The Crawler reared up, its many legs clattering, preparing to dive into the center of the formation and feast.
"Out of the way."
A calm, cold voice cut through the panic.
Fyrion stepped past the trembling spearmen. He wasn't holding a shield. He was holding his Northern steel sword in his right hand and a thick glass vial in his left.
The vial was filled with a viscous, yellow-orange liquid.
'Tier-2,' Fyrion analyzed, his eyes locking onto the beast's segmentation. 'Thick ice-carapace. High physical resistance. Immune to cold. Vulnerable to extreme thermal shock.'
He uncorked the vial with his teeth and poured the contents over his steel blade.
The liquid clung to the metal like syrup. It smelled of rotten eggs and hellfire.
Refined Liquid Sulfur. Volatile. Highly reactive.
"You can't cut ice with cold steel," Fyrion muttered.
He took a stance. [Stance One].
He didn't just channel aura into the sword to strengthen it. He channeled his aura into the liquid. He used his mana as a spark, agitating the alchemical mixture at a molecular level.
FWOOOOM.
The sword didn't just catch fire. It erupted with a roaring, vibrant blue flame. It wasn't normal fire; it was a chemical plasma, burning hot enough to melt stone.
"Alchemical Sword Art," Fyrion whispered. "Sulfur Flash."
The Crawler hissed, sensing the sudden, impossible heat source. It lunged, its mandibles snapping toward Fyrion's head.
Fyrion didn't retreat. He stepped in.
He slid under the creature's strike, the ice-cold wind whipping his coat, and swung his sword in a rising, crescent arc.
The blade met the monster's underbelly.
There was no metallic clang this time.
HISSSSSSS-CRACK!
The thermal shock was instant. The freezing ice-armor touched the superheated chemical fire and shattered explosively. The blade sliced through the chitin, through the flesh, and deep into the creature's vitals.
Blue ichor sprayed into the air, instantly boiling into steam as it touched the flames.
The Crawler shrieked—a sound that vibrated in their teeth—and thrashed wildly.
Fyrion didn't stop. He pivoted, carrying the momentum of his swing, and brought the flaming sword down on the creature's head.
SPLAT.
The heat melted through the skull plate like wax. The brain boiled.
The massive beast convulsed once, twice, and then collapsed, twitching in the snow. Its blue blood sizzled on the frozen ground.
Silence returned to the Frost-Scar Peaks, broken only by the hiss of Fyrion's cooling sword and the wind.
Gregor pulled himself up from the snow, staring at the dead Tier-2 beast. He looked at the melted armor. He looked at Fyrion, who was calmly wiping the steaming sludge from his blade.
"My Lord..." Gregor wheezed. "What... what kind of sword art is that?"
"It's not an art. It's chemistry," Fyrion said, holstering the weapon. He walked to the beast's head and began to dig through the melted mush with a knife.
He pulled out a fist-sized, pale blue crystal.
[Glacier Crawler Core (Tier-2)].
'Excellent quality. Cold-aligned mana. This will fetch a high price at the Water Magic Tower.'
He tossed the core to a stunned Silas, who nearly dropped it in the snow.
"Harvest the meat," Fyrion ordered, addressing the frozen men. "Crawler meat is tough, but it's packed with mana. It'll keep you warm better than the bricks."
He looked up at the jagged peaks looming ahead. The real danger wasn't the wildlife.
"Move quickly," Fyrion said, his voice grim. "The smell of this blood will attract more than just beasts."
"More?" Gregor asked, limping over. "What could be worse than a Tier-2 beast in this hell?"
Fyrion pointed toward the high ridges, where shadows seemed to move against the white backdrop.
"The locals," Fyrion said. "The Frost-Blood Guardians Tribe. They guard the meteorite. And unlike the crawler..."
He checked his sword, ensuring the edge hadn't warped from the heat.
"...they have weapons."