As I reviewed the gains from my last fight, I sighed in relief. Funny how the pain suddenly didn’t feel so bad, the fear of death suddenly a little further away. I shook my head, bracing myself for the rush as I put 3 points into agility, 2 into endurance and another 5 into strength.

  Ancestry: Human (unevolved)

  Level: 43

  Class: Blood of the Hills

  Titles: God-touched

  Attribute allocation:

  Strength: 50

  Agility: 35

  Endurance: 35

  Perception: 35

  Cognition: 40

  Available attributes: 0

  Current skills:

  Guerrilla Warfare: Level 9. Passive.

  Tilt: Level 2. Active.

  Heart of the Hills: Level 9. Active.

  Check Step: Level 10. Active.

  Indomitable Prey: Level 10. Active.

  Skirmisher of Antiquity: Level 10. Passive.

  Mountain-Born: Level 11. Passive

  Faultline: Level 10. Active.

  As I moved slowly through the cavern and into the tunnel beyond, I kept my senses peeled. I strained my soul, searching for any hint of mana moving nearby.

  It was a strange feeling, to attempt to feel with your soul. I was used to turning that sense inwards by now, feeling the flows of mana as it bubbled up within my core and flowed along the pathways of my skills. But I had started to gain flashes of instinct during battles, moments where just before my opponent’s powerful skills were released I would sense a disturbance in the air; as if charged with static as before a storm.

  After perhaps a quarter bell of careful movement and even more careful sensing, I heard a faint ringing. Surprised, I acknowledged the system’s notification.

  Skill gained – Mana Sense. No open skill slots available, skill discarded.

  As ridiculous as it was, I hadn’t actually asked Jorge about how skills were gained or incorporated once one already had a full suite of them. Nathlan had given me a rundown, in that lecturing way of his where he meandered through about 5 different academic disciplines to answer my simple question, and the answer was frustratingly simple; you didn’t.

  8 skills was the limit, and if you wanted to incorporate new ones, you needed to drop old ones to make space in your soul for the new. Didn’t mean picking up new skills was useless however, since when it came to classing up into a new tier, the class skills you gained from the new class could be influenced by the skills you currently had and the ones you had learned but discarded.

  It was also apparently possible to incorporate small new skills into a general skill, much like a merger. The trouble was that it had to fit with the skill it would merge into. If I still had Wilderness Endurance Hunter, then perhaps I could fold in a tracking skill of some kind and possibly then add Mana Sense into it as well…

  But that was the trade-off I was taking with my path. I hadn’t spent decades laying a steady foundation, agonising over every choice and planning meticulously. If I had, perhaps I would be a match for Sandent Varselli level for level. Instead, I made rapid, unsteady progress and lurched from opportunity to opportunity, guzzling down any wisdom and experience I could get my hands on.

  She was among the brightest of the clan’s future fighters while still a dozen levels beneath the peak of 1st tier. But here I was, having just killed a powerful 2nd tier beast, and soon to breach the tier gap that held so many back from true greatness. Slow and steady might win the race, but I didn’t want to run a race through busy streets. I wanted to run free, on my own time for my own reasons.

  Right now, that was supporting my friends and making the world a better place, one toppled tyrant at a time. Nominally, we would only be involved in toppling the first such tyrant in the Sunset Kingdoms, but such an action was sure to set off a chain reaction in my opinion.

  I personally also doubted Vera would leave it at just the one. Despite her cynical airs and professed desire for vengeance, I knew that what truly motivated her was a revolutionary love for the people of her home. The various principalities that ruled the Sunsets may care very much for their borders, but from what I had heard, the people who lived on and worked the land considered them arbitrary.

  In any case, I had chosen this path to power, and I would continue to walk it as long as I was able. Sure, I could spend time building more skills, hoping to gain more powerful and well-rounded general skills and have my class skills evolve in a more optimised way, but that wasn’t the way I was wired. A headlong sprint into danger without the appropriate forethought was more my kind of thing.

  Speaking of, I moved forward. I slipped through caverns and tunnels, heading inexorably deeper into the subterranean labyrinth that was the ice caves beneath the Hollow Mountain. Drawn on, as if by fate, by whatever waited for me in the depths.

  It should come as no surprise that a powerful treasure would be found deep in a place of power like this, not discarded carelessly at the surface for anyone to find. Power draws power, and like draws like. As I traversed the frozen caves – a predator seeking its prey – so too did something crouch at my destination, waiting for me to draw close.

  I couldn’t lie to myself, and pretend I saw no danger. The Hoarfrost Bonesinger could clearly have made use of the Heart of Winter, so the fact that it hadn’t told me that either Sadrianna’s information was incorrect, or that something worse currently stood guard over the natural treasure. Still, I wouldn’t abandon my task without at least glimpsing failure with my own eyes.

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  I’d be happy to run if I could determine that the obstacle – for there was sure to be one – was beyond me, but I wouldn’t turn and run without that confirmation. Perhaps a guardian would be in slumber, and I could sneak past without a confrontation? Stranger things have happened, after all.

  In the penultimate chamber, I found a corpse. I knew this chamber to be the last one before my destination, because I could feel power boiling forth from the tunnel at the back in my undeveloped mana sense. There was a palpable sense of threat emanating from that carved entrance, and I spent long moments examining the cavern before me to make sure that it wasn’t produced by anything in the chamber itself.

  Satisfied, I crept forwards to examine the corpse in more detail. It resembled a spider, with eight long legs splayed out around a long tubular body. The legs rose some 4 meters into the air before angling back down to the earth and were thick around as my wrist. The entire body looked to be carved from white marble, or bone – it was hard to be sure which – and it was no larger than my own, out of place amidst the giant legs.

  A single fine seam split the body from top to bottom along the middle, and as I drew closer, I realised that the slender body looked surprisingly human. Surprisingly feminine. There was no head, simply a jagged nape of a neck, but beneath was a torso that wouldn’t have looked out of place within a town square in Colchet as part of their classical art scene.

  The delicate collarbone and shoulders were formed with exquisite detail, as were the slight arms splayed on the floor to either side. The body had eight pairs of breasts lining its undercarriage, like the teats of a wolf, but its lower half was less defined. Two lumps of flesh that could have been legs were fused together to give the impression of a half-melted statue.

  The lack of head was a blessing, as I couldn’t decide whether I’d be more disturbed with a humanoid one or that of a spider. Eight legs, eight teats, but only two spindly arms – more grasping claws than anything, too short to be much use as real limbs, especially considering the creature would have stood at least a few meters off the floor when standing on its long legs.

  It was only as I stepped next to the corpse and tapped my spear butt against its bone-white exterior that I realised what this was. It was an exoskeleton, discarded by a creature as it grew to even more titanic proportions. The seem along the back, the lack of head…it all spoke to a process of ecdysis on a scale I’d never before seen.

  I relaxed a fraction, thinking of the crabs I had seen in a rock pool in the DragonSpines a week or so ago. Jorge had lectured us on the correct way to identify the young males; the older males were no good as the poison sacks along their front claws would give the claw meat an offal-like flavour, while the older females were rare and should be left alone to keep up the population levels stable. They would crack their shells down the middle, crawling from them only to hole up nearby and grow a new one. Bigger, stronger. Harder.

  I picked the spear up in two hands, shifting my shield up my forearm to give space, and then swung hard at the leg nearest to me. The magical haft of my spear slammed into the hard shell and sent a sharp crack! echoing around the small cavern. I waited with bated breath to see if the great power beyond the tunnel mouth would respond, but there was no change.

  After I was satisfied, I inspected the damage. There was no mark on my staff, as to be expected of material that had spent generations absorbing power from an existence too mighty for this world to fully hold. The worrying thing was that I could find no mark on the shell either. I had wound up for a powerful swing, and still there was nothing.

  The creature in the next room, if it was the same as had left this exoskeleton behind, could be wreathed in material even more impenetrable. I wondered then about whether I truly wanted a Heart of Winter to crown my spear with. Was I willing to die for one? No, definitely not. Was I willing to risk dying for one though? That was harder to answer.

  Sadrianna had confirmed that they were simply natural treasures, formed from mana that had aspected to its environment over hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years until concentrated to such a degree that the immaterial gained physical presence in the world.

  I preferred the explanation Nathlan had suggested though; he’d read somewhere – he’d told me where, but I certainly didn’t care to remember – that a Heart of Winter was formed by the tears of mountain giants as they strode the empty peaks of the DragonSpines, calling out in mournful wailing at their isolation. That was apparently also an explanation for where the howling northern wind came from, and thunder too. It was a versatile myth, that of the mountain giants.

  I thought of a single solitary tear tracking down the craggy features of an ancient giant, akin to the one I had met in the Wandering States so many moons ago, falling to the ground and tinkling its way down a frozen mountain side. To sit, for generations beneath the mountain in a frozen world, a terrible spider-creature the only one that could behold its beauty.

  No, I didn’t think I could walk away from the opportunity to liberate such a treasure from this frozen hell. Not without seeing its guardian with my own eyes, at least. I turned back to the marble bone skeleton before me and focused on Faultline. I fed a sliver of mana to the skill and reached out to one of the legs. A tiny crack appeared, imperceptible to my vision but felt heavily within my stone-sense, wending its way along the underside of the leg, and I smiled. It was mana intensive, but I could affect this material.

  I strode onwards, moving through the tunnel with purpose and poise, until I stood at the mouth of the final cavern. It was enormous, at least a hundred meters high, with stalactites hanging from the ceiling as tall and thick as buildings. I wouldn’t be risking using my Faultline skill on those then. It was a few hundred meters in diameter, shaped like a large teardrop, with the tunnel emerging into the narrow end.

  Surprisingly near the entrance, I saw my prize. It would have been easy to miss given its size, if it wasn’t for the great spiritual weight it carried to my senses. A pedestal made of blue ice, shockingly bright and almost glowing with a light of its own, grew from the floor. On top, a small basin filled with water. It wasn’t frozen, which surprised me, but my attention was taken by what rested within that small bowl of water.

  A shard of ice. The purest expression of the element I had ever seen. It was around a foot long, and bobbed and spun in the water almost playfully, the clear liquid glistening as it rolled off its deep blue surface.

  I had spent bells walking through these frozen caverns. I’d fought spirits of ice itself, frozen insects, and spent near a full day walking through a snowy blizzard to get here. And yet, this small crystal was the most perfect encapsulation of winter I had ever seen. I couldn’t even conceptualise anything more deserving of the title. From this day forward, if I was asked to describe winter itself, this item is what I would draw from for inspiration.

  Eventually I managed to wrench my gaze from it and look around the cavern. Nothing of note jumped out, just a large cavern filled with stalagmites littering the floor and stalactites and thick brilliant white pillars of ice spreading across the ceiling in a strange pattern.

  I then noticed the spider hanging above the pedestal. My eyes had skimmed straight over it, hovering as it was against the backdrop of the frost-rimed wall behind it. Once I had noticed it though, I struggled to look at anything else, even the magnetic pull of the Heart of Winter below seeming less important right then.

  The spider was enormous, at least a dozen meters tall when standing on its many legs. They were thick around as my thighs now, and I had no doubt that they were suitably reinforced too.

  Then I saw its face. If the body could be said to be that of an idealised human, but melted and twisted with animalistic traits, then its face was the opposite. It was a nightmarish cross of spider and human, with spider as the clear base template. A dozen eyes set within a curved forehead, and strangely human nose below, and then two interlocking seems splitting its lower face and neck.

  I knew that if – when – it woke, that face would split open along four corners, and gape horrifyingly at me. It was an arachnid aberration on the world, and I felt a primal revulsion at its very presence. I cared not whether it was sentient, sapient; whether it experienced love and joy just like myself. I hated it from the moment I saw it, and I wanted it dead with all my heart.

  It hung there, a mere four or five meters off the ground, legs splayed out protectively around the pedestal and supported by a thick weave of webbing attached to the ceiling far above. I guessed it be at the peak of the 2nd tier at least, based on its size.

  Size alone wasn’t everything, and there were many small creatures that were comparatively deadly. Rakshasa for example never grew more than a few meters in length or height, but they were the unquestioned sovereigns in many biomes.

  But to reach such a size necessitates a certain strength; the food demands were massive and the ability to meet those demands was only one factor. Another was simply the strength to move around such great bulk as well. Humans, some of the other enlightened races, and Rakshasa again, were relatively rare for their ability to stay forever the same size even as they increased in strength, whereas most other beats progressed in scale and power together.

  I was fairly confident then in my assessment that this creature was at the peak of 2nd tier at the least.

  I settled in to plan my ambush.