Chapter 62: The Underbelly

Gravity was the one law that even Isaac Glacium could not fully ignore yet.

When the floor supports snapped, the entire central platform of the turbine hall plummeted. It was a chaotic descent of screaming metal, shattered ice, and falling bodies.

Vane did not scream. He tucked his chin to his chest and curled his body into a ball. It was a reflex learned from falling off rooftops in the Slums. Relax the muscles. Protect the head. Let the impact happen.

They fell twenty feet.

Crash.

Vane hit a cluster of insulated pipes. The insulation tore, cushioning his fall before he rolled off and slammed onto a metal grating. The breath was knocked out of him. Pain flared in his shoulder, sharp and hot, but nothing felt broken.

He scrambled to his feet instantly. In the Slums, lying down meant dying.

The world around him had changed.

Gone was the high-ceilinged, open space of the turbine hall. They had fallen into the sub-level. It was a maze of high-pressure steam pipes, rusted catwalks, and churning machinery. The air here was thick, humid, and smelled of sulfur and old grease. It was dark, lit only by the flickering red emergency lights that had triggered upon the collapse.

Vane wiped oil from his cheek. He grinned.

This was not a duel arena. This was a rat’s nest.

“Filth,” a voice spat.

A beam of pale blue light cut through the gloom. Isaac Glacium stood atop a mound of twisted metal. He had created a slide of ice at the last second to catch himself, but the landing had not been graceful. His pristine uniform was stained with soot. There was a smear of grease on his cheek.

He looked around at the cramped, dirty space with undisguised disgust.

“This is unacceptable,” Isaac muttered.

He raised his hand. The air temperature plummeted. He intended to sanitize the environment the same way he had the floor above. He wanted to turn this dirty boiler room into another white cathedral.

[Authority: Pale Eternity]

Frost raced out from his boots. It climbed the rusted pipes. It crept over the puddles of oil.

But the sub-level fought back.

Hiss.

A steam pipe, ruptured by the freezing temperature, burst open. A jet of superheated vapor shot out, colliding with Isaac’s cold front.

The result was instant, blinding chaos. The steam didn’t just freeze. It turned into a dense, heavy fog of suspended ice crystals. It filled the cramped space instantly, reducing visibility to less than three feet.

Isaac paused. He lowered his hand. He realized his mistake. By trying to force his order on this chaotic environment, he had only made it messier. He couldn’t see the walls. He couldn’t see the Elites.

“Cowards,” Isaac called out. His voice sounded flat in the dense fog. “Hiding in the smoke will not save you.”

“Who said we are hiding?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere.

Ashe Razar burst out of the fog.

She didn’t have room to swing her greatsword in a wide arc here. The pipes were too close. So she used the weapon like a battering ram. She coated her shoulder in the black aura of the Warlord and slammed into Isaac.

Isaac brought up an ice shield, but the footing was uneven. He slid back, his boots grinding against the rusted grating.

“Get him!” Valerica roared.

The Titan emerged from the steam on Isaac’s left. She ripped a heavy iron valve wheel off a pipe and threw it like a discus.

Isaac tilted his head. The valve wheel whizzed past his ear, missing him by an inch, and smashed into a pressure gauge behind him.

More steam erupted. The noise was deafening. It was a cacophony of hissing gas, clanging metal, and shouting.

Vane stayed low. He moved through the shadows of the catwalks.

This was his advantage. Isaac was a wide-range caster. He needed lines of sight. He needed open space to build his fortresses. Down here, amongst the clutter, his massive ice walls would just block his own path.

Vane looked for the beacon.

It had fallen with them. It had to be here somewhere.

He squinted through the swirling ice-fog. He saw a faint red glow pulsing near the ceiling of the sub-level.

The beacon had landed on a maintenance gantry hanging above the main boiler. It was thirty feet away, across a gap filled with broken machinery and venting steam.

Vane looked at the Elites.

Ashe and Valerica were pressing Isaac. They were forcing him into a brawl. Anastasia was hanging back, firing precise beams of light through the fog to harry him.

Isaac was annoyed. He was blocking their attacks with small, efficient shields of condensed ice, but he was being pushed back. He couldn’t unleash a massive area-of-effect spell without bringing the ceiling down on his own head.

’They are buying time,’ Vane realized. ’Without realizing it, they are acting as the perfect distraction.’

Vane crept forward. He stepped lightly on the grating, testing each foothold for loose bolts. He moved with the rhythm of the hissing steam, masking the sound of his movement.

He reached the base of a vertical ladder leading up to the gantry.

He put his hand on the rung. It was cold. Isaac’s influence was spreading, cooling the metal even through the heat of the boiler.

Vane began to climb.

He made it ten feet up before the air shifted.

The hair on the back of his neck stood up. It wasn’t the cold. It was the pressure of being watched.

Vane froze. He looked down.

Isaac was not looking at Ashe. He was not looking at Valerica.

He was looking up. Through the fog, through the chaos of the fight, those pale blue eyes had locked onto Vane clinging to the ladder.

“I told you,” Isaac said. His voice cut through the noise of the steam like a razor blade. “I do not like rats.”

Isaac ignored the black sword swinging at his ribs. He ignored the gravity crushing his shoulders.

He pointed a finger at Vane.

[Skill: Flash Freeze]

The moisture in the air around the ladder didn’t just get cold. It snapped into solid ice.

Vane didn’t think. He let go.

He dropped from the ladder a split second before it was encased in a pillar of jagged frost. The ice consumed the space where he had been hanging, snapping the steel rungs like twigs.

Vane hit the grating hard, rolling to his feet.

He was alive. But he had lost his route to the beacon. And now, Isaac knew exactly where he was.

Ashe capitalized on Isaac’s distraction. She landed a heavy kick to Isaac’s chest.

The ice armor over Isaac’s uniform cracked. He stumbled back, his eyes flashing with irritation.

“Enough,” Isaac stated.

He slammed his foot down.

The floor of the sub-level didn’t freeze. It erupted.

Hundreds of ice spikes shot out of the grating in every direction. It was a forest of needles.

Ashe was forced to jump back. Valerica smashed the spikes near her feet with gravity. Anastasia shielded herself.

Vane scrambled up a pile of pipes, the spikes chasing his heels. They punched through the metal grating where he had been standing milliseconds ago.

Isaac stood in the center of his thorny garden. The fog swirled around him, but he looked untouched. He brushed the soot off his shoulder.

“You want to fight in the mud?” Isaac asked. The air around him began to vibrate. The mana density spiked, causing the red emergency lights to flicker. “Fine. Then I will simply bury the mud.”

He raised both hands.

The ceiling of the sub-level began to groan.

Vane looked up. The frost was spreading rapidly across the overhead pipes. Isaac wasn’t aiming at them. He was aiming at the infrastructure. He intended to collapse the rest of the facility on top of them and freeze the rubble.

’He is resetting the board,’ Vane realized. ’He doesn’t care about the environment. He is just going to crush it all into a ball of ice.’

Vane looked at the beacon on the gantry. It was still there. But the ladder was gone. The path was blocked by spikes. And the roof was about to come down.

Vane gripped his spear. He looked at Isole, who was hiding behind a pump housing.

“Isole!” Vane shouted, breaking his silence.

She looked at him.

“The boiler!” Vane pointed to the massive, spherical tank behind Isaac. “Hit the tank!”

If Isaac wanted to freeze everything, Vane would give him something that refused to be cold.

Isole didn’t question him. She raised her staff. She didn’t use necromancy this time. She used a simple, brute-force mana blast.

She fired a bolt of dark energy into the side of the main boiler.

The tank was under immense pressure. The metal was already stressed by the thermal shock of Isaac’s cold.

The bolt hit.

BOOM.

The side of the boiler blew out.

It wasn’t just steam this time. It was an explosion of scalding water and superheated gas. The blast wave hit Isaac from behind, knocking him off his feet. The sudden injection of massive heat shattered his concentration. The ice spreading across the ceiling halted as the thermal energy fought the magical stasis.

The room descended into absolute whiteout conditions.

Vane didn’t wait for the visibility to return. He knew the layout. He had memorized it in the split second before the fog rolled in.

He ran blindly across the pipes, trusting his balance. He leaped over the gap where the grating had melted.

He wasn’t running away. He was running toward the explosion.

Toward the gantry.

Toward the win.

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