Reid coughed a mouthful of blue blood that melted down through the snow.

One hand was pressed hard against his face. The other pushed against the ground and prevented him from falling completely prone. He blinked one eye, and probed a half-shredded tongue over his mouth. He was missing a few teeth - and a good portion of his cheek. Part of his lips were also mangled and bleeding, and he had cold pain near his ear that was making him dizzy. The eye - felt wrong in his hand. He took another two breaths, first a painful one through his nose, then a less painful one through his mouth, and bounced his arm to get himself onto his knees.

Ice explosion magic was surprisingly more effective when it happened right on your face.

The offending party whip-snapped its tail and then held the appendage nearly straight up in the air. It could have been some territorial behavior, or a sign of aggression or communication. In a different setting, Reid would have wondered what message it was trying to deliver.

Instead, he used the momentary pause to stop some of the blood flow to the mangled side of his face. Healing wasn't an option in the few seconds he wasted, so he settled for work that effectively cauterized some of the larger blood vessels.

When he opened his eye again, the skink was closing in towards him - thankfully slowed post-magic-use. Long fingers moved it smoothly over the intact crust of the snow, and dug towards the ground when it encountered the patches crushed by Reid or the battle. He could hear other beasts around him screeching and crying in pain. One was ineffectively blasting a cone of ice from too far a range to reach him. The fight was still on, and he didn't have time to waste.

Reid flexed his legs and rose to a standing position, without his shield or his weapon. He could see both of them clearly - the shield was close where he'd dropped it, and his mace was a dozen feet away where it landed when he threw his right arm out to catch his fall.

He wanted to kill this goddamn lizard with his bare hands.

The skink tried to hit Reid with a breath attack as it closed, but Reid was ready. He ducked sideways, and sprinted forward faster than it could readjust its aim. It stopped shooting off magic when he closed within striking distance, and chomped out at him. Reid flooded both his arms with power.

Short teeth clacked against his gauntlets as he caught the beast's jaws with his hands, and the skink tried to recoil at its foiled attack. Reid didn't let it.

He held the top jaw steady, and forced the bottom jaw to the left. The skink thrashed in his hands, desperate to free itself. It pulsed with light - but not quickly enough.

The lizard's lower jaw cracked and splintered in Reid's grip as it partially tore away from the creature's face. The unnaturally blue tongue fell free from the new empty space and nearly reached Reid's boots. Blood steamed against the snow.

No notification had chimed - and he still had the top jaw secure in one hand. The lizard had stopped its magic attack out of shock, and was now instinctively trying to claw at Reid. Trying, because its stubby legs couldn't reach far enough to hit him - the tips of its fingers could barely reach his arm.

He lifted his free hand, and punched the lizard in the eye. It pulped easily, and Reid's arm flew freely into its skull.

You have defeated Arctic Skink, Spawn of Crinoptera - lvl 49. Experience awarded.

Reid tried to call the dead beast a stupid fucking lizard, but missing one cheek, part of his lips, and some of the movement in his tongue had the line come out as near-unintelligible noise.

During the fight he had... gotten comfortable with the idea of his superiority over the beasts. That was the only reason he'd gotten into this situation, and the fact frustrated him more than anything. He understood the implications - the wound he allowed himself to take was something that could have posed a serious and immediate risk if he had gotten it earlier in the fight.

Even though he was more on-guard earlier in the battle.

He just hadn't realized that the creatures could boost the power of their skills based on how long they held and charged them - and that lack of understanding coupled with his waning concentration led him to overextend and pay for the mistake.

The whip-like snap of a tail caught his attention. In the distance, a skink with three working legs was trying to hobble its way through the snow. Reid summoned a brock, took aim - and summarily missed. The shrapnel variant he'd made sailed wide and landed ahead of the creature where it mostly-ineffectively shattered into empty air. Reid swore at himself. One eye meant a lack of depth perception. Another oversight on his part.

Reid paced over and picked his weapon out of the snow, then set off at the far beast. He was frustrated - and there were plenty of lizards left to finish.

#

#

A happy whistled tune rang out over a mostly-frozen section of wasteland, dotted with odd and lumpy mounds of fallen snow. His lips, cheek, and teeth were all regrown on day one, and he enjoyed the sensation of whistling - no matter how bad he actually was at doing it. Reid slowly turned a bone-crafted spit over the fire, and breathed in the enticing smell of the cooking meat. It was hard earned. Not because killing off the rest of the wounded beasts had been difficult. That part was actually quite easy - especially because he kept himself alert and avoided the few last-ditch attacks they managed to muster.

No, it was difficult because having one eye was a real issue - and regrowing an eye was absurdly hard.

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Reid had been forced to live the past weeks without depth perception. That included dressing the dead creatures - where he lost a bit of blood in cutting up the meat. It included stumbling on the snow because he had trouble gauging the terrain. It also meant that every time an eyelash got into his eye - which happened more frequently than he'd realized - Reid either had his entire vision go blurry or had to deal with zero visibility as he picked the damn thing out. Regrowing the eye was at the top of his list, really - except he'd failed to do it with his usual method.

Eyes were complex. They had a ton of components Reid wasn't used to working on, and even with Nyx trying to help him he was out of his depth. Even just attempting to 'supercharge' his normal level of regrowth and healing had some... unfortunate consequences. Focusing too long in a specific area threw off the entire process, and made it so he had to start over. And starting over was... less than ideal. After completely overgrowing the thin translucent layer that was supposed to cover his eyeball, Reid had to physically remove that newly created covering. That was the end of day one, and it was also the time where Reid decided he was going to let his eye heal naturally.

Since his awakening, Reid's injuries tended to have three outcomes. First, if he had a healer like Win or Susan, they would help him and either resolve or assist in resolving the damage. Second, if he was not near a healer, he just took care of himself, and dealt with the fatigue and resource depletion that came with it. Third were the times where Reid was so ravaged by damage that he was forced to take longer just to get back to using his mana and directing his internal nutrients and resources. He'd sort-of forgotten that he, technically, had advanced his 'natural' rate of healing - and that such natural healing tended to work pretty well when he wasn't recovering from near-death.

Yes, the process was slower, but it was working. Heck, the speed of it had even increased once he topped off his stats and stopped working on himself internally.

Constitution: 630 Dexterity: 630 Intelligence: 626 -> 630 Perception: 629 -> 630 Power: 630 Control: 630

He had truly focused on rest, and his mind wandered with the downtime. His most recent musings had started from his thoughts that, because he'd nicked himself more than once dressing the meat, there was a decent chance he'd consumed some of his blood with the lizard meat. That idea of blood consumption rolled into the idea of auto-cannibalism, and Reid's mind went to a humorously dark place where he tried to figure out whether he could eat and regrow his own appendages if he was in a dire situation that required it. It was an interesting thought exercise, but had a truly simple conclusion. There was no way he could actually gain anything by doing it. It took more energy to grow an appendage than someone would get from consuming the appendage, so it would be the same type of effect one would get from drinking seawater to stave off dehydration.

Part of him wanted to pester Nyx with his ideas, but she'd asked for some focus time herself once the eye project went downhill. She'd also requested to 'use' a good portion of the xp from the skinks for her work, which Reid happily told her she could have. He was getting quite close to level 50, which meant E grade, which meant another attempted system assist to help him evolve. He had little doubt Nyx's work was to make sure he didn't end up with another massive power-up to the thing slowly killing him.

Sure, it would still naturally catch up to him, if Nyx's old 'airport people-mover' analogy was correct. But Reid wanted to have more time and less pressure after this. The entire tutorial was a fit of quick progress and slow recoveries, and he wanted to smooth out that growth curve if the cosmos would allow him to.

So, Nyx was working herself while he recovered, absent from his autocannibalism theories, she was absent for the reveal of the enormous snow-capped mountain in the distance that doubtlessly held the final beast lord, and she was absent when he made his morbid finds.

Reid could only take so much sitting around, so he'd started to walk around the area in the hopes of pushing off boredom and getting to know the area and his mapping bangle a bit better. The boredom was only mildly reduced, but he got a good bit better at using the bangle and its maps. It was the use of his map that pushed him to check out an odd, seemingly rocky stretch of otherwise flat plains.

Under a thin layer of snow, Reid found the corpses of roughly twenty Belar goons and four skinks. Roughly, because he couldn't find the entirety of all the corpses, and had to do some math about arms, legs, torsos, and heads.

Of course the organization had been there. A patrol had set out to try and find information on him from the Duke's location, so it only made sense they'd do something similar with the final beast lord. They'd just gotten more than they bargained for. It took almost two days of tinkering, but Reid managed to get one of the mostly-intact helmets to play back a recording. The video was of lesser quality than he expected to see in advanced cosmic technology - but maybe that was the nature of who the gear belonged to.

Mitchell - based on what others in the recording called him - was a sonomancer. Reid saw the man spent a simple morning in a barely-snow-dusted field, eating some sort of ration and double checking the power armor his squad mates wore. In the late morning, they came upon skinks at nearly the same point Reid had. Seven of the things were arrayed in the area, and Reid watched on in curiosity as the creatures used their breath to freeze and explode sections of the ground. They then rooted through the frozen rubble to snack on the remains of some underground-dwelling creature Reid couldn't figure out from the video alone.

A few tongue-flicks were ignored by the Belar team, and they only reacted when the creatures were already partway towards the group. The sonomancer was one of the better fighters - or at least, the environment worked in his favor. Reid saw a fire mage struggle to make impactful strikes, but Mitchell seemed to be surprised at the power of his own attacks. It made sense. Cold air was denser than warm air, so sound would've been conducted better and farther. Still - their guns and magic weren't enough. Two of the skinks hadn't even died to Belar - but to being overzealous and trying to explode their frozen targets too close to themselves during the fight. In the end, Mitchell had his arms torn off at the elbows, and was halfway through bleeding out when an ice attack froze him completely. They only took town two of the things, with a group of twenty. Reid smiled. He watched the video again and again to pass the time, and made it through a dozen viewings before he picked up a detail in the background.

That detail was part of the reason he was patiently waiting for his eye to fully heal, and why he hadn't tried to close more distance to his target - the mountain.

It was an oddly shaped, enormous thing. One side sloped seemingly naturally towards the peak, with a steep but probably climbable incline. The other side looked almost like half of the mountain itself had split off and fallen away, and it was now simply a series of cliff faces and crags, with some parts curving back in towards the mountain itself. Grey clouds seemed to cling near the summit, and when they broke, the sun reflected off a series of massive ice caps as large as strip malls that dotted the cliff faces and shelves on the mountain's broken side. He looked up from his roasting meat, and stopped whistling.

His eyes strained. His regrown eye wasn't back to full yet, but it had healed enough that he could see.

Just like in the video, it was visible, even at this distance.

One of the giant ice caps was moving.

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