It hit the shield line first: a screaming wall of cold that punched through like an invisible fist that rattled through the soldiers' ranks. Snow blew sideways in curtains; splinters of ice stabbed at faces. Shields buckled.

A house on the street edge exploded outward in a spray of white timber. Planks tore free from frames like the petals of a shattered tree, with a cloud of powdery snow and dust billowing up, swallowing the nearest sentries.

Fires from torches were snuffed in a freezing hiss. Where fire had been, there was now only frost crawling across the cobbles.

Sinolto didn't wait to feel the full impact. He planted his shield and pivoted, voice raw, ordering, "Hold! Brace and anchor the line!" But even as he shouted, the gust knocked him off balance. He staggered, armor clanking, and a chunk of a shattered beam caught the shoulder of his shield, sending a shock up to his teeth.

Clemens felt the shove and was yanked off his feet. He tumbled through the churned snow, spear clattering out of reach. Snow mixed with splinters rained down onto him.

Men screamed. Not one, not calm cries of courage, but sudden, sharp animal alarms that split the air.

A guard nearest the broken house tried to pull a child—a little thing with a wool cap—back from the doorway.

Another man, with a crossbow still leaking steam from a spent bolt, was thrown up on his heels and slammed into am abandoned cart. The cart's wheel snapped and a cascade of empty crates tumbled onto the snow.

Across the line, the torchbearers tried to reignite their torches—now nothing but smoking sticks—and spat curses as the wind flattened their efforts.

The remaining crossbowmen tried to re-aim, but the gale sheared their trembling hands; bolts flew uselessly into the white, blown aside before they could fly true.

Even those who were not struck physically felt the blow. The cold seared lungs like a chemical, making each breath small, vain, and painful. Faces went pale under lips already blue. Frost gathered at the edges of beards, at the rim of helmets and tips of spears.

Even the majesty of the village bell—which continued to ring warning—was now a thin presence, muffled in the storm's roar.

For a long, terrible beat, the Oni hung in the storm above them, indifferent and massive, watching the ripple of chaos it had made. Then, as quickly as it had struck, the air fell into a brittle, hissing silence. The storm continued, but its direct blast receded like a beast satisfied after a first strike.

Sinolto spat snow and blood from the corner of his mouth, grit in his teeth. He wiped his hand across his brow and barked orders without waiting. "Casualties! Check the line! Clear the houses! Get those with injuries behind the shield wall!" His voice had been shaken, but not broken; the man's command gave the terrified soldiers something to latch onto.

Slowly, clumsily, they obeyed. They gathered the wounded, dragged the unconscious, trying to bandage a split cheek or a bleeding scalp with strips torn from capes.

Clemens, scraping himself up from the snow, stared for a long second at the blackened hole where the house's wall had been. His hands trembled as he found his spear again. Around him, the village was alive with noise and movement—but instead of what he usually heard, it was all frantic and raw and human.

The Oni hovered above the village like a colossus, wind roaring in its ears as the people below moved in erratic clumps—shuffling, yelling, scurrying like insects. Irritation rose first, slow and cold, a physical nausea at the sight of them beneath it.

Why cling to this cramped nest of wood and smoke? Why make so much noise and fuss each and everyday? Why are they so annoying? Why are they everywhere? Why do they fight despite being so weak, expendable, insignificant.

Why can't they just leave? Leave it and its child alone?

That was the question that the Oni asked itself everyday ever since coming to the mountains of Briarstone.

As it watched, the irritation soured into something darker: memory, sharp and alive. The world around the Oni receded and the present became thin.

Faces changed into shapes beneath black hoods; the black cloaks were always the same, the sigil stitched upon their backs like a brand. It could see them now as if the wind itself conspired to lift a curtain—boots in mud, the glint of iron in the reign of night, the quick, practiced movement of hands that took and hurt without hesitation.

The first blow flashed in the Oni's mind: the crunch of flesh and the wet scent of blood, the way its mate had bent and then stopped being the creature he was. They had beaten him until the fire in his eyes was doused, taken him away to God knows where, and when they returned him to her—he was not the same.

He came back hollowed, as though the cloak-men had rewired him—body and soul, all to answer to their commands. Watching that play out, where a thing she treasured returned but with a new hunger that was not its own, was the worst.

Worse still: the child—their child. The Oni remembered how the small body pressed to her side, shivering and wide-eyed as it loomed behind its mother.

The cloak-men had reached for it with the ease of those who take what they consider useful. However, they were met, obviously, met with the fury of not only a mother, but also a mate looking at the ones who hurt the one they loved.

Each recollection stoked something that was not merely anger, but a profound, gnawing grief, one that sloughed off into animal rage.

The Oni's features tightened as the storm around it swelled, echoing its emotions. Fingers curled into claws, nails chiseling frost from their own edges. The wind answered, keening higher, whipping at the village below as if the air itself wanted to rend the world asunder.

Beneath the fury lay a cold, viscous hatred—less a thought than a living ache that throbbed in the Oni's chest whenever it looked at the tiny, frantic humans scrambling under its gaze. The sight of them now—of their noisy fleeing, their futile attempts at courage, their pathetic strength compared to that specific cloaked man with crimson eyes—sickened the Oni.

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To think these humans and that man were the same thing, possessed the same potential for callous destruction despite being everywhere.

It wasn't fair.

The Oni lifted its hands to the gray bruised sky and the wind obeyed like an old servant. The howl around it tightened, coiling upward in a column that pulled breath into itself.

At first the air simply glittered. Tiny ice motes winked into being and rode the updraft, catching the torches' sputtering light and turning it into a swarm of pinprick stars. Then, the motes began to knit together, threads of frost snagging on one another, bonding, hardening.

A single filament lengthened, became a shard, and the shard was suddenly an icicle the size of a pinky.

The breath of the storm above the village thickened. The icicle grew, and grew—pinky to fist, fist to boulder—dragging the storm's weight with it. Snow and sleet spun in a frenzied spiral around that dark point. People below craned their necks, mouths open in the vacant, animal way humans have when they see something far too terrible to belong to the world.

On the front line, Sinolto's jaw made a hard move. He watched the icicle grow and felt the blood leave his face. He barked orders as if shouting could outpace the encroaching footsteps of death. "Crossbows—again! Keep your aim, fire when I say!"

The crossbowmen fumbled in the wind. They shoveled bolts into their machines with shaking hands; torches flared and guttered as men tried to keep the fletching alight.

Clemens stood with both feet planted, spear useless in his numb grip. The monstrous shadow of the forming ice stretched across his face and swallowed the light around him. He stumbled backwards on the snowy cobbles, the world tilting, words stuck in his throat. "T-There's…no way..." he managed, the sentence breaking like a twig.

Sinolto didn't give himself time to be astonished. He saw the math—icicle the size of a house, trajectory from the Oni's hands, and the tiny group of men in comparison—so he moved before thought had a chance to catch him.

He sprinted backwards and grabbed a spare crossbow from a younger guard whose fingers were trembling so badly he almost dropped it. "Fall back!" Sinolto shouted as he shoved the young man backward, voice grinding like a bell. "Get the villagers, injured, and everyone else moving!"

Sinolto's orders threw the formation into motion. Shields turned; men who were frozen by fear remembered their training and pushed toward the rear. Mothers clutched babes and ran, carts were driven, and children were dragged by frantic hands to the chief's house.

When it came to Sinolto, he did not retreat. He dropped to one knee, leveled the crossbow with the calm of a man who had steadied himself in worse places, and began to fire.

He loaded, cocked, aimed, and each shot he let go carved a short white line into the swirling air. The bolts did not find the Oni—they had no business doing so. The storm bent them around it, whisking the shafts aside and making them arc into odd directions that thudded into walls or the frozen ground.

Still, Sinolto kept hammering the trigger. The crossbow repeated in his hands like a desperate metronome—each bolt a stuant punctuation in the wind's wail.

He was not trying to kill, he was buying time, diverting attention. Each click and pop and whine of the crossbow put a shadow of thought into the Oni's awareness, forced a reflex, perhaps diverted the creature's aim the tiniest fraction.

While the looming spear of winter, the size of houses, was poised to fall, guards rounded up the last of the straggling villagers. In order to try to light the way and provide warmth for those braving the storm, some of the torchbearers tried their best to reignite their torches.

Each attempt to give life back into their torches, however, was to no avail. The best they could muster were weak sparks. All five guards grit their teeth and cursed in their heads.

That is, until their torches miraculously began to crackle to life. It was only small little pops, like those of oil on a hot pan, but then quickly rose in intensity to that of a firecracker.

Each guard looked at each other, and when they did, the torch each held suddenly blazed to life. The sudden fires felt like living things—not the hungry, leaping flames of a hearth but something woken and eager, lashing out with emotion.

Instinct made the guards jump back and let go of the torches, leading to them clattering on the ground and sending sparks into the air.

As all five continued to back up and murmur amongst each other, one noticed something peculiar: even after hitting the snowy ground, the torches didn't extinguish. In fact, the fires began to grow and spread, as if the snow was a field of grass.

Normal fire did not behave like this, of that there was no doubt in the guard's head.

Before he could question his own reality, a young, but determined voice would thunder through the storm. "FINALLY!"

A hundred faces turned in a single motion toward the last thing they expected to see: a figure running straight for the falling mountain of ice, legs pumping, breath steaming like a beast's snarl in the cold.

The growing flames bent as if pulled by the figure's motion, and when he shouted, the word cut through the storm with the clear, furious authority of someone who has had enough. "FINALLY YOU SHOW YOURSELF!!!"

It was Miuson, his legs almost a blur as he ran. The village guards, who'd been gawking at the fire, swallowed their fear. Clemens' head spun. Even the Oni paused, the shadow of its head tilting as if to locate the thundering voice.

Despite the reactions, it was the snow devouring flames that had the most interesting reaxtion to Miuson's voice. Conforming to his very will, the flames moved, ignoring the roaring storm, and formed a ring of fire with walls up to Miuson's knees.

Miuson didn't slow down, not one bit. His eyes reflected the ring of flames, and with spear in hand, ran through as though through a field, and the fire obeyed—it climbed the shaft of his spear and licked the wood until the weapon smoked and glowed.

Once he cleared the ring of flames, Miuson skidded to a stop with a spray of snow, planted his feet, and spun. The motion was clean, a practiced arc born of long drills: the spear screamed through the air and the flames obeyed, snaking, a living halo that wrapped and flowed around the shaft like a pair of hungry serpents.

Then, with one mighty stomp, Miuson hurled the spear.

It flew like an arrow loosed from a bow, almost impossibly straight through gusting wind. The fire around it tightened into a column that trailed the metal, coalescing at its tip until the point blazed with a blazing heat. When the spear bit into the monstrous icicle, the contact detonated.

The explosion was not flame, but sound: a crystalline show that ran through bone.

Ice sheared into vapor and shards, a white blossom of mist and glittering splinters that sprayed outward in every direction. The shockwave threw snow into the air like flung powder; for a second the world was a cyclone of frozen sugar and wind.

The Oni reeled. Even its shadowed composure cracked as chunks of the icicle scattered and dissolved in the sudden heat. Snow and tiny crystal needles rained down around the thing as the impact cut a ragged slice through the storm it had been weaving.

When the air cleared enough for them to see, the square stood in a ragged hush. Sinolto was there—coughing, stiff, and half covered in snow—but alive.

A few guards staggered forward, hands to mouths, half-laughing, half-sobbing at being alive themselves.

Clemens could only stare in awe at Miuson's back, his mouth looking as if it would reach the ground if it could. "So that's...Miuson's Fire Affinity...? That icicle was the size of a house, yet he destroyed it...with a single throw..." he said, breathlessly.

Miuson stood at the center of it all: chest heaving, shoulders rising and falling like bellows. He was wind-battered and glowing with exertion. For a moment he simply panted, eyes locked on the Oni, the fire around him sputtering, but not quite dying.

Then he clenched a fist and, voice ragged with fury and prideful triumph, he shouted up at the hovering shape: "You don't belong here!"

-

Next: (Chapter 96) Okun vs. The Oni

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