The moment Nick and Seo-ah got close to the reindeer, it lowered its head and activated a burst of wind behind it, propelling it forward at an incredible speed. Nick threw himself to the left to avoid its sharp antlers and skidded across the snow. Rolling back to his feet, he was barely able to stand up before the tarandrus wheeled around, the wind that propelled it cutting out as it turned, stomped its hooves, and readied another charge. Nick feinted left. The creature fell for it, committing to the attack. Nick pivoted sharply, feeling the rush of air as the creature barreled past him. He sank his spear deep into the passing Tarandrus’s side. Hot, sticky blood splattered across his hands, and the beast let out a thunderous bellow of pain and rage.
Before Nick could step back, the creature swung its head wildly, and its antlers caught him, tearing through his jacket with a vicious swipe that sent the feathery down inside flying as it was torn free. The shredded armor took the brunt of the strike, but a sharp, burning pain still erupted across his ribs as he was thrown back and crashed to the trunk of a tree.
Nick slid down the tree and landed with a thud onto the snow-covered ground as he heard a loud trumpet blowing in the distance. He wanted to turn and look over at his companions, to see what was going on as he struggled to get up, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the creature in front of him. It was pawing at the ground, and he knew it was about to charge, but even with his full focus on it, he wasn’t sure he could move quickly enough to dodge it now that he was injured. But just as the wind magic flared up behind the tarandrus, six aura spears blasted into its flank. Blood burst from the points of impact, but more importantly, the attack disrupted its charge. The beast turned towards the new threat, Nick’s wife, who cursed at it in Korean while swinging her spear.
Seo-ah had cut into its hind muscles reducing its maneuverability and buying Nick a moment to down a healing potion. As the liquid flowed through him, knitting flesh and dulling the stabbing sensation in his ribs, he became painfully aware of the sound of thundering steps and the crunching of snow beneath massive weight as the snowfall around them picked up to the point that Nick could barely see a few feet in front of his extended hand. He knew just from the sound to the south that he didn’t have much time left.
He used Charge and sprinted at the tarandrus. The creature, which currently had Seo-ah on her back foot, caught sight of Nick and swung its antlers at him. Nick cut his charge short in time to parry the dagger-sharp antlers and counter with a thrust that skidded off its tough skull.
As Nick’s blow struck the beast’s head, an antler grazed his cheekbone, narrowly missing Nick’s eye. Seo-ah took advantage of the creature’s distraction and slid underneath its head, stabbing her spear up into the creature’s throat. The reindeer staggered as Seo-ah pulled the point out at an angle, widening the wound. While it was stunned by the blow, Nick drove his spear deep into the monster’s eye socket until the weapon’s tip struck the back of its skull. The tarandrus collapsed, dead, as he pulled his weapon out of its skewered brain.
Not wasting a second, Nick quickly turned to the ongoing battle. Through the intensifying blizzard, he could barely make out that his group was engaged with upwards of a hundred monsters or more, and a gargantuan wooly mammoth was charging at them in the distance. As it lumbered toward them, it conjured one ice spell after the other at the group, creating dozens of large crystal structures across the ground, each growing and then exploding like grenades. The blasts forced anyone nearby to block the ice shrapnel with their shield and back up to avoid getting torn apart.
As the mammoth’s ice grenades herded Nick’s people around the battlefield, Adele stood firm in the middle of the fray, holding the line and defending the Standard of Greatness with the aid of two conjured shields of holy light, which circled her and blocked attacks before she even had to use her physical defenses. Another ice grenade landed only a couple yards in front of Adele, forcing Tabitha, Noelle, and Oliver, who had been fighting at her side, to dash to a safe distance, the two women to the right and Oliver to the left.
“Seo-ah, how’s your mana?” Nick asked as he looked at the Standard of Greatness planted behind Adele, boosting everyone’s damage, and the monsters filling the new gap created by Noelle and Tabitha’s dash to safety.
“I’ve got enough. Where do you want it?” Seo-ah said as the two of them sprinted straight toward their waylayed healer.
“Put some holy fire between Adele and Noelle. Make it big and make it beautiful, right when you’re in range of the standard,” Nick told her.
A moment later, the second they were back under the Standard of Greatness buff, Seo-ah took advantage of the boon by casting her holy fire in the gap between their allies.
“Tabitha! Push your side back to Adele! Now!” Nick ordered as the monsters between her and Adele were instantly incinerated. “Seo-ah, hit the gap between Oliver and Adele next!”
“Got it!” Seo-ah said.
“Oliver! Your side now! Get back in line!” Nick called as Seo-ah’s holy fire scorched through the monsters, turning them into charcoal.
The righteous flames that completely cremated the monsters also engulfed Oliver, Lou, and the others as they ran through it to rejoin their companions, but the holy fire didn’t hurt them at all, being harmless to anyone other than the targets of the caster’s wrath.
Seo-ah finally stopped the flames once the line had reformed. “Nick, I’m about tapped out of mana now. That was a lot.”
“We’re good now,” he told her, tossing a blue mana vial at her as they reached their spot behind Adele. “I’ve got plenty more casting batteries here.”
“We are not batteries,” Oliver grumbled as he heard the description.
“Alright, there are too many of them. Let’s make a defensive box! Seo-ah will take back, I’ll take the middle,” Nick ordered. “Protesting mana battery one, you’re in charge of isolating the ice-grenades spells on your side. When you see them coming in, hit them with holy fire before they can explode. Tabitha, you take your side.”
“Got it,” Tabitha replied while Oliver just grunted as the group formation shifted from a line to a semicircle before fully folding into a large circle where each person’s back was to the center, protecting them from being flanked by the horde.
“We’re short on time, so if you’re not in charge of cancelling that mammoth’s spells, burn everything to a crisp with holy fire! We’ve got mana potions to spare, so don’t hold back!” Nick shouted as he took his spot in the middle of the formation, so he could see what was happening at every angle.
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Flames of holy fire erupted in all directions, instantly thinning the beast horde as it swarmed toward the defensive circle. The flame ripped through the monsters so quickly that thick, acrid smoke from their burning flesh covered the battlefield in seconds, roiling in the arctic winds. The dozens upon dozens of monsters charging at them never even got close enough to strike their shields.
“That’s it! BURN BABY, BURN!” Amanda yelled in pyromaniacal glee.
“Nnn,” Stacy grunted in agreement on the other side of the circle.
“Seo-ah! The Hwatu Spear Burst!” Nick called out the name of Seo-ah’s ranged spear attack as he saw the pressure on them melt away, pointing toward the Mammoth.
“Got it!” Seo-ah called back, conjuring multiple aura-formed copies of her weapon that shot off at the massive monster encroaching on them.
The spears struck the side of the beast and dissipated, and it seemed nearly unfazed, like it hadn’t even been hit.
What the hell? Did it use a protective spell? Nick wondered as he squinted through the whirling snowflakes and smoke, trying to figure out how it’d completely brushed off Seo-ah’s direct hits. Then the snow around the mammoth shifted, changing direction in the wind and causing the monster to look like it changed position, as if its earlier placement had been nothing more than a mirage.
“I’m starting to run out of mana here,” Elizabeth warned Nick as they continued to burn through the monsters in front of them. The pillars of fire were moving farther and farther away from the group as everyone attacked the monsters in the distance. It had been less than a minute, but they had nearly spent all their mana. Thankfully, the monster numbers had been reduced to only a few stragglers
But with the entire party left with barely an ounce of mana and needing to chug some potions, Lou shouted out the question now on Nick’s mind: “Where’s the mammoth?!”
As if summoned by the question, a shadowy form appeared ahead of them, and the woolly mammoth emerged from the swirling snow and ash. Its massive frame dwarfed the monsters Nick and the others had fought before, and two of its four wide-arching, bow-shaped ivory tusks tore through a nearby tree, easily uprooting it as it charged them.
That has to be the real one! Nick thought, but as Seo-ah’s ranged spear attack struck it again, not only did the mammoth vanish, but so did the tree trunk it had torn from the ground. As it disappeared, a loud crashing sound grabbed Nick’s attention.
Something had slammed into Adele’s two conjured shields. The true mammoth’s tusks had slammed into the formation. Adele had blocked its trunk with her physical shield as the two conjured ones intercepted the tusks, but she was still knocked back despite all the strength she possessed from her tireless workouts.
Nick reacted as quickly as he could, getting behind Adele and bracing her along with Noelle and Oliver, but the mammoth still sent them crashing back into Seo-ah and the others.
The giant woolly beast let out a thunderous trumpet and reared up in the center of the scattered fighters. Then its front legs crashed down with ground-shaking force. Snow erupted as pillars of earth shot up under the group, launching Nick skyward as his companions tried to dodge the attack. Helpless in mid-air, Nick watched as Lou was struck squarely in the chest by a pillar, hurtling the man into the air beside him.
Lou and Nick crashed into a nearby snow bank, and the creature turned and charged them. Nick’s vision spun, but he stood up, bracing for the impending blow while Lou struggled to get his breath back, clearly having had the wind knocked out of him.
Suddenly, Adele shot in front of them, her shields colliding with the attack right as Oliver’s heavy mace crashed down on a tusk and snapped the mammoth’s head downward. Its tusks dug deep furrows in the ground as they dropped, halting the creature’s forward momentum.
“Make a nail, Adele!!” Oliver yelled as he turned his downward slam attack into a full body spin. Adele conjured the nail of holy light just as Oliver requested, positioning the five-foot-long spiritual spike directly over the mammoth’s trunk. Oliver brought his mace down on the nail, the man’s full power behind the strike, driving the spike through the trunk and into the ground, almost ripping the beast’s snout from its face as it trumpeted in pain and tried to raise its head.
On the other side of the monster, Elizabeth took her aura-enhanced sword and moved in sync with Amanda, Stacy, Tabitha, and Seo-ah to savage a single target: the thick, sinewy back tendon of the mammoth’s front left foot. As Elizabeth’s sword struck, it sliced through the tough hide with a satisfying hiss. The strike was immediately followed by Amanda's two-handed sword, Stacy's maul, and Tabitha and Seo-ah's spears in a rapid succession of blows. The tendon snapped like a giant rubber band, and the mammoth bellowed in pain and rage before it toppled forward, the earth shaking with its collapse.
“Back left!” Amanda shouted out. Trumpeting falteringly through its pinned trunk, the mammoth started to cast something. Lou, having recovered, leapt through the air, smashing his glowing fist into the creature’s head, interrupting its spell.
The beast raged impotently as Oliver and Adele delivered another nail to its trunk. It attempted to rise and fight back, but the girls quickly crippled its back ankles, preventing it from taking even a single step toward escape. Exhausted and bleeding out, the monster finally keeled over.
The battle was over. However, Nick couldn’t help but feel like it was still a loss.
“Nick!” Seo-ah blurted out, immediately grabbing his attention the moment Lou landed the killing blow on the mammoth. “Nick, we need to go after Taejo.”
She didn’t have to say anything else; he already knew the urgency. He wasn’t just worried about Taejo either, or Clarissa. They were missing five people, all of whom Nick was responsible for. He had given Kaylee the okay to organize the groups. He was the one with the responsibility when it came to who went out and what happened to them, and they had been captured.
“We have to get them back,” Nick said, knowing everyone there was of the same mind from the way they all looked at him and nodded.
“Nick, I have word from the base,” Tabitha interjected as she held the comm device. “They’re sending reinforcements as soon as they can. We just need to figure out where they took them.”
“They can’t have gone too far,” Nick replied, thinking about how long it had actually been since they got word of the attacks. With how fast their Charge skills made them on top of their base run speeds, they had covered several miles relatively quickly.
“The problem is how fast they’re moving and in which direction. I don’t even know where we begin,” Lou said, looking around at the dozens of obfuscating sets of tracks left by the rampaging mammoth and reindeer that had both come in and left from both directions. But Nick wasn’t confused at all. Just looking at the ground, he knew which tracks were from the battle and the returning reindeer, and which ones were from the prisoners being dragged off. The pacing and gait was totally different.
“Tabitha, just keep the base posted. Make sure they know which direction to send those reinforcements. We’re heading out now. If the other patrol group in the area is near, have them join us, but tell them to be cautious. As for everyone else . . . follow me.” With that, Nick scanned the area and found the trail of broken snow heading southeast. Nick hated the fact that, given how southward the trail headed, there was a very real chance he could have intercepted his people’s captors if he had veered slightly eastward when rushing to the patrol team’s aid.
Gripping his weapon tightly, he took off as fast as he could while still tracking the enemy. One way or another, he was going to bring his people home.
