I Can Copy And Evolve Talents

Chapter 1483: The Breaking

In the dark of the Tempest Spire, Northern’s mouth settled back into a flat line. He let the thread to the capital slip away and threw himself back across the continent, across the deep ocean, and into the freezing skin of his clone.

’Alright, Father. Let’s see how you like it when someone collects from you.’

Rian opened his eyes.

The wind howling off the pack ice was sharp enough to draw blood.

It was late afternoon, nearly six months into the Northern Expedition, and the open black water of the Grey Mile had finally run out. The Sixth Legion fleet had reached the Ice Line.

It was a jagged plain of frozen ocean that ran from one end of the horizon to the other. Huge floes of pack ice had crashed together and frozen where they lay, a broken country of white and pale blue that groaned and shifted underfoot. There were no natural channels. There was no open water to sail. The sea had simply hardened into a wall and dared the Empire to cross it.

A lesser navy would have dropped anchor and waited for the spring thaw.

Captain Ysolde Vaertia stood at the bow of the flagship with her breath pluming white in the freezing air, and she refused to wait.

"Break it," Ysolde ordered.

The Empire did not wait for the seasons. It made its own geography.

A cohort of Fire-Sages and Tide-Sages moved to the prows of the vanguard ships. They did not attack the ice blindly. They worked the way the Imperial war machine always worked, in order and in unison. The Fire-Sages stepped forward first, raised their hands, and poured out steady beams of burning essence. They didn’t try to melt the whole ocean. Instead, they cut deep, glowing red fault lines into the pack ice and carved out a channel block by block.

The moment the ice cracked, the Tide-Sages took over.

Blue light flared across the decks as they took hold of the freezing water beneath the floes and drove hard currents through it, shoving the severed blocks aside.

It was a staggering display of raw power and organisation. They were cutting a road through the frozen sea, one block at a time, while the heavy warships ground forward into the narrow channel behind them.

But the work was slow, and the ice was not empty.

Rian walked down the wooden boarding ramp and stepped out onto the frozen sea.

The vanguard infantry had been sent onto the ice to hold a perimeter while the Sages burned their essence. The Eleventh Squad took its place fifty yards off the flagship’s port hull. The ice beneath their boots was uneven and treacherous, crusted with shifting snow and jagged rime.

Han hugged his heavy wool coat around himself, shivering hard as he stared out at the endless white.

"This is madness," Han muttered, his breath catching in the freezing air. "We’re standing on the ocean. If the ice cracks, we die. If the Sages mess up, we die. The Legion doesn’t pay us enough to fight water."

"Keep your voice down and your eyes open," Doron said. His shadow-fog clung close to his boots, and against the white glare of the snow it hid nothing at all.

Baletta stood perfectly still with her feet planted wide and her hand resting on the pommel of her sword. Iren flanked her, sweeping the jagged ridges of ice with his eyes and saying nothing.

Rian stood a few paces behind them with his hands still buried usual.

He didn’t look at the snow. He kept his Shingan locked deep behind his soul gates and sent his passive flow perception straight down through the soles of his boots.

He felt the density of the ice. He felt the freezing currents rushing beneath it.

And he felt the huge shadow gliding underneath the floes, hunting.

The pack ice wasn’t only a barrier. It was a ceiling, and something down there was using it to trap its prey.

A hundred yards down the perimeter line, a vanguard legionary vanished.

There was no scream. There was no splash. One second, the heavy infantryman was standing on a patch of clear blue ice. The next, a shadow slid fast beneath the translucent surface, the ice gave way with a muffled crunch, and the soldier was dragged straight down into the freezing dark. The water in the hole skinned over with fresh ice almost at once, leaving nothing but a dark, swirling stain trapped beneath it.

The perimeter erupted into shouting. Sentries drew their weapons and pointed them uselessly at the ground beneath their own feet.

Rian didn’t look toward the shouting. He kept his attention locked on the flow of the water.

It was a Glacial Leviathan, a Devil-danger predator built to hunt in the freezing dark. Its broad, flattened carapace was made to scrape silently along the underside of the pack ice, and its crushing mandibles could punch through three feet of solid ice in the blink of an eye.

It was moving fast, circling the perimeter and picking off the men in the heaviest armour.

And it was turning toward the Eleventh Squad.

Rian didn’t take his hands out of his pockets. He didn’t shout a warning. He felt the Leviathan’s great, cold mass bank sharply through the water and speed up, straight toward the patch of ice where Han and Baletta stood.

The ice beneath Baletta’s boots began to darken.

Rian moved.

He didn’t run. He slid across the treacherous ice with a Paragon’s perfect balance and crossed the ten yards in a single blur, drawing his heavy ironwood broadsword from its scabbard with his right hand as he came.

"Move," Rian said calmly.

He drove his left shoulder into Han’s chest and knocked him flat on his back. In the same motion, he hooked his right boot behind Baletta’s ankle and swept her leg out, dropping her heavily onto the snow outside the darkening patch of ice.

The ice beneath them shattered.

A pale blue mandible the size of a warhorse burst up through the frozen surface and snapped shut on the empty air where Baletta had just been standing.

The Glacial Leviathan didn’t breach. It stayed submerged beneath the ice, groping at the edges of the hole with its claws to drag its prey down.

Rian didn’t back away from the hole. He didn’t hack at the armoured mandible with plain physical strength. He wanted the Echo, and he wanted the thing dead before Ysolde could see how much power he was holding back.

He reversed his grip on the ironwood sword.

He drove the heavy, lead-weighted blade straight down through the open hole, plunging it into the freezing, churning water.

He didn’t call up a storm. He didn’t let a single spark escape into the air above the ice.

Instead, Rian poured the raw, crackling power of Lightning Rod down the ironwood blade and forced all of it into the water beneath the floes. He packed the charge into one dense spike of yellow light and drove it straight into the Leviathan’s submerged carapace.

The water beneath the ice flashed a blinding yellow.

The shock of it rolled through the pack ice and shook it for fifty yards in every direction. The pale mandible jutting from the hole went rigid, locked open in a sudden rictus of death.

A plume of steam and boiling seawater burst from the hole and showered Rian in a fine, hot mist.

Then the beast went slack. Its armoured body slid slowly away from the hole and disappeared into the dark water beneath the ice.

[Your clone has slain Devil Leviathan - Glacial Leviathan]

[You have gained +27 talent fragments]

[Echo acquired: Glacial Leviathan]

The blue panels flared in the freezing air and vanished.

Rian pulled his sword out of the steaming water, shook the boiling droplets from the blade, and slid it back into its scabbard.

Baletta pushed herself up from the snow and stared at the steaming hole in the ice, her breathing ragged and fast. Han scrambled backward on his hands and knees and didn’t stop until his back hit a ridge of ice.

Rian looked out across the wider perimeter. The Eleventh Squad was safe, but the Empire had paid. Further down the line, three more jagged holes had been punched through the ice, and the water was already freezing over the places where vanguard soldiers had been standing.

’The Empire builds a road, and the monsters set the toll.’

"Back to the ship," Rian ordered, turning away from the hole. "The ice is rotten."

The squad didn’t argue. They broke formation and hurried back toward the boarding ramps of the flagship with their weapons drawn, their eyes fixed on the ground beneath their boots.

By the time they reached the main deck, the Sages had cleared another hundred yards of channel. The flagship ground its way forward, its reinforced hull crushing the loose floes as it pushed deeper into the ice.

Captain Ysolde stood on the quarterdeck with her jaw set as the casualty reports from the ice detail were brought up to her. She looked down at Rian. Her gaze lingered on the steam still curling faintly off his coat, but she asked no questions.

The flagship lurched hard.

A horrible screech of tearing wood and grinding metal echoed across the deck as the port hull scraped against something hidden beneath the surface.

Rian stepped to the rail and looked out at the towering, jagged iceberg they were squeezing past.

Frozen deep inside its sheer wall of ancient blue ice, preserved like a fly in amber, was the crushed and splintered wreck of an Imperial warship. Its sails were shredded and its masts snapped, but the Imperial lion was still visible on its battered prow.

It was a ship from an earlier crossing.

Rian looked at the frozen tomb for a long while, the wind biting at his face.

The Emperor had been sending fleets north for a long time.