Beneath the Dragoneye Moons

“Are we worried about Fenrir yet?” I asked. I was huddled in front of the fire, wrapped in a dozen blankets and drinking hot tea by the gallon. It was the perfect hack. I was immune to fire, not a hot cup of tea, and it was warming me up nicely. I occasionally shot fowl looks at everyone else. Auri was content in the fireplace, being the great heater. Iona and Titania had stripped down in the heat, and Raccoon had thrown modesty to the wind. To them, it was warm and balmy, practically tropical.

Me? The tea was going straight through me. A series of hot water bottles strategically tucked around me was helping warm me up, and I could easily teleport them to Auri to be reheated.

I had no idea how Auri warming the air didn’t count, but me shivering in the blankets did. Or why heating up the air didn’t warm me, but heating up water did. More magic nonsense. It made perfect sense to me.

“Nope.” Iona said with complete grace, sipping her own tea.

I missed hot chocolate. We needed to speed run civilization to get it back. First things first… we had to find some cows for milk…

The howling wind and winter slurry was the reason why Raccoon was in, and not performing some chore. Iona’s armor was so polished we didn’t even have a quarter of an excuse to make her polish it again, and adamantium-alloy or not, if Raccoon spent the entire winter doing nothing but polishing, she’d shine it away to nothing.

Somehow. That’s just how these things worked.

In spite of the howling gale trying to rattle our door, in spite of the snow absorbing noise and the rain battering our roof, I was able to hear thousands of sounds and pick up unusual ones.

“Something wrong?” Iona asked, noting the puzzled look on my face as I tilted my head towards the sea.

“Sounded like an unusually large wave crashing down. Not getting the after effects like I would for a tsunami or anything like that though.” I frowned.

Iona distantly looked out, as if she could see through the thick and solid walls we’d built the cabin with. Which she couldn’t. No windows. Too difficult at the level we were operating at.

“I don’t want to check it out… which means we should look at what’s going on.” She sighed. “Flip you for it?”

That was when the screaming started.

“Trouble! Let’s go!” I shouted. I debated just teleporting out and going for it, but no. The problem was inside my healing radius, it was my snap judgment that it was better to properly tackle the problem than go after it piecemeal.

Raccoon and Titania flung themselves to the corners of the room, starting to wrap themselves in blankets, trying to stay out of our way. Auri went up through the chimney, and I felt myself once again soft-locked out of my tower. Whatever was going on - I could sense something big over there - a moment of inattention, of my presence not blanketing the area, could result in casualties.

I made a mental note to reassess my armory in the new world I found myself in. Threats came right up to my neighbor’s doors these days.

Iona geared herself up in a second with [Telekinesis], and we were out the door a moment later. The howling wind and driving rain slammed the door shut behind us, and my wife latched the door shut with another application of her skill.

“That way.” I pointed towards the bay, and the three of us shot off in the freezing cold. I closed my inner eyelid, giving myself goggles to see clearly with. It didn’t work nearly so well in rain versus simply keeping dust out - raindrops on my eyelids effectively blurred my vision. The difference between being fully underwater, and looking through a rain-splattered window.

Cold - and by rare extension, heat - had an unusual interaction with my healing. I could get deeply uncomfortable as a result, but it couldn’t get to the stage of harming me. Rather, as I got cold enough that problems and harm started to occur, I simply healed it away. I did get on the slow and sluggish side, and I shivered like a half-naked woman thrust into a blizzard, and it sucked, but I was at no risk of hypothermia or freezing to death. Assuming I never turned off [Persistent Casting].

Auri’s [Domain of Fire] had a clear radius, the snow and ice mixed into the freezing rain melting and steaming as it neared her. The droplets popped and hissed as they met her, some brrrpts! of indignant outrage coming from the growing steam cloud around my little phoenix friend. That seemed to irritate her, and with a flex, she started to ‘carry’ an umbrella of Lava. In many ways, it made things worse… but she was flying dry.

I could see well in the terrible light, but it took me a moment to process what, exactly, I was seeing. Only when the monster moved did I realize the size and scale of what we were dealing with.

“Fuck, that’s big.” I shouted, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was like a hill on the move, a great mobile mound. I could [Identify] it, but Iona beat me to it.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“Whoa!” Iona shouted. She needed to sort of know that she was looking at something to activate her blessing. The Valkyrie quickly gave us the breakdown.

“Snapping turtle, level 963! Water, Mirror, Arcanite! High vitality and speed. Modest strength, shit dexterity. It’s got spells, but it doesn’t have the magical stats to back it up. It’s literally out of water right now, most of its skills don’t apply. Defensively, it’s a monster. Careful hitting it, [Reflection] looks particularly ugly. Elaine, hold fire. Our best bet is to try and drive it off.”

“Brrrpt!” Auri took it as a challenge. “Brpt!” We were going to be eating turtle soup if she had any say in it, and wanted Iona to expand on the turtle’s capabilities.

“Liquid layers of Arcanite between plates of the hard shell. Obviously a size skill. It’s not made out of Arcanite, its true body is nestled deep inside. A…” Iona started to describe everything she could tell in great detail, talking so quickly she sounded almost like a chipmunk.

We were almost there, and Iona’s order to hold fire chafed at me. I got it, I really did - with [Reflection] and with how hard Mirror could counter Radiance, I was more likely to hit a friend than an enemy. Between the wind and rain, and the innate defenses being described, my list of wizardry tricks didn’t look great. I tasked part of my mind with going through them anyway, trying to find a spell I could use to turn the tide.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The vast physical bulk made my physical attacks or efforts unlikely to work either. Iona could do far more than me in that department.

We were close enough now that I could get a good look at our foe.

‘Big’ was something of an understatement. ‘Mobile hill’ was pretty accurate. I couldn’t see the ‘true’ turtle under layers upon layers of Mirror-reflective Arcanite coating the monster. It was like the beast was made out of crystals.

I had my doubts that it was ‘true’ arcanite… but if it was, what a fortune. A huge number of enchantments could be maintained off such a quantity, and, well, it was an ancient, high level turtle. It very well could’ve accumulated so much Arcanite over the centuries.

There were thousands of little details on the turtle that made me think it was reflective of the ‘true’ turtle underneath. Dry flakey skin, an overgrown beak, and some deformation on the shell suggested to me that the turtle was starving, and had left its usual stomping grounds to try and find dinner. Its massive size made it sink into the ground with every step, and I imagined one of the skills Iona hadn’t mentioned was a simple ‘you can be this large without screwing yourself over’.

Auri opened the battle by igniting a third of the turtle in flames. Dark black flames ate away at the shell as she tried to [Burn Magic] and cook the turtle alive in its shell. Similar flames erupted around Auri, which was roughly as effective as trying to drown a fish. With a silvery flicker, all of the flames seemed to slide off the turtle’s shell, before getting caught by Auri again.

It was indescribably frustrating to be holding my fire, but even if the crystalline Arcanite didn’t diffract my beams into nothing, the reflection would cause dozens upon dozens of smaller beams of mine to radiate out like a disco ball, hitting my wife, my companion, and my neighbors.

Speaking of, most of them were running away as quickly as they could. Smart people. We could probably repair their homes in a day, and if they were out of the way, this became easier.

The turtle retaliated by flinging a thousand tiny, sharp shards of Arcanite at us, and I could see what Iona was talking about. They were slow. Ridiculously lethal to fish, animals, and other low level creatures, but it was on the scale of an artillery mage in the mid to late 200’s, not a monster over level 900. If I wanted to, I could simply pluck the shards out of the air with my bare hands and ‘catch’ them, and the only way they were damaging was due to how sharp they all were.

I used the dusk aspect of my shield to absorb the fragments that were heading towards our running neighbors, one of the clearest examples I’d seen where destroying an attack would be far cheaper than healing the damage it could cause. The pounding rain made the shield far more expensive than normal - it was indiscriminate, it destroyed the water and hail as easily as the Arcanite - but I’d practiced in worse conditions, and knew the math.

My healing and magic wasn’t being taxed at all, and the show of strength protecting my neighbors far outweighed any ‘well, you got hurt, but you got better’ arguments. And it was still cheaper.

I was going a little nuts not being able to attack.

Iona didn’t try any fancy or dramatic moves like flinging herself through the air to hit the turtle with her glaive. It would’ve been cool, but she didn’t have the leverage while flying. Instead, she drifted up the side of the turtle, sharp spikes of Arcanite breaking against her adamantium alloy. Beams of magic swirled and fired from deep inside the turtle’s shell, deflecting wildly off Iona’s armor and being almost contemptuously burned away by Auri’s flames.

I was still going down my list of spells. Grease and messing with friction was always good for knocking larger creatures off balance, and Iona had mentioned poor dexterity. It was the first spell I thought of, but one look at how deep into the ground the creature sank with each footstep gave me pause. It wasn’t exactly using friction to move so much as raw leverage. An option to be sure.

A variant was the ‘greased ball bearings’... but those would just get sunk into the ground, and extra-ruin the fields for the next eight years or so. Damn. Four legs was simply unfair, that was well-balanced. Two legs were much easier to trip up.

I had a number of canceling spells, but canceling internal fortifications was a more specialized trick. If I could disable whatever was letting the turtle ignore the downsides of being super large, it would fall apart. The one-two punch of ‘overcome vitality’ and ‘wizardry has steep penalties’ put it at the bottom of my list.

Ah! A Mirage, Sound and Darkness skill!

“Iona! Any sight skills?!” I bellowed.

“Water vision! Go for it!” She shouted back, knowing exactly what I was thinking. Bless her, and cheers to eight decades of marriage. She was trying to slip her glaive between the cracks on the turtle’s shell. She must’ve spotted a weakness with how easily it could be reformed, assuming she could get enough leverage to move it.

I activated one of my never-used bone runes, creating a metal shell around myself. I’d imagined sandstorms when I designed the spell, ripping sand preventing me from drawing a rune to cast a spell. It worked just as well in a vicious winter storm, and I was strong enough to keep it hovering in the air, although I was buffeted back and forth as I grabbed my spellbooks and opened them up to four different spells designed to mess with the senses. Mostly sight, but also sound. A layer of darkness, a layer of illusions, and a dozen sirens going off all around the turtle. I broke through the shell a moment later, my spells cast.

Auri changed tactics, seeing what I was doing and choosing to go along a similar route. The dark and stormy night was messing with her flames. She conjured up huge swathes of Lava around the kaiju’s legs, trying to trap him. The turtle simply pulled his legs free with no indication of pain and carried on.

The turtle’s attacks started to go wild, but they weren’t exactly the threat. It was the turtle’s lumbering bulk, combined with his unassailable defenses that made him a tough nut.

“Brrrpt!” Auri squeaked out in frustration, then was hit by inspiration. A new roaring inferno was lit under the turtle, and Auri fluttered up to my shoulder.

“Brrpt.” She proudly told me. Directly burning the turtle was too difficult… but as a water creature, Iona hadn’t mentioned anything that would prevent him from being indirectly cooked. It might take a while with his bulk, but Auri was sure she could manage it in time. Given the ever-expanding half-sphere of raindrops being evaporated, I could visually see the heat she was pouring into it.

With a crack Iona snapped off one of the turtle’s scales. I could see the frown in her body language before she slid down the monster’s back, grabbing him by the tail. With a grunt and a heave she started to drag and started to spin the enormous turtle.

I continued running down my list of spells, seeing what could work.

I could conjure rocks up high - or grab literal anvils from [Tower], nobody was in immediate danger - and drop them on the turtle. The monster's size and speed made them likely to hit, the wind was going to foul my aim, but if Iona on the turtle’s back couldn’t break through I doubted a rock was going to help.

The gaps in the turtle’s shell opened a bit, and evaporated Arcanite hissed out between the cracks. The turtle opened his mouth and a ball of energy started to form, getting bigger and bigger with every moment he channeled. I wasn’t quite sure exactly where he was aiming, it looked like empty air to me.

“BRRRPT!” Auri redoubled her flames, and a sharp crack went up and through one of the turtle’s legs. Iona started to get some real swing, dragging the turtle through the mud.

I didn’t think I had a rope thick enough to tangle the turtle’s legs with. If a hundred pounds of Lava couldn’t slow the beast down, I didn’t think rope would work much better.

A stray thought crossed my mind, and I cursed the impossibility of it. I would’ve loved to conjure up a cow’s worth of meat and poison the heck out of it. The monster was clearly starving, put out some poisoned bait and call it a day. Heck, Arthur had done it back in the day against a similarly leveled sea monster! A particularly nasty runic language, under lock and key in the School, was dedicated to conjuring up all sorts of ugly poisons. It was the meat that was the problem.

The turtle fired the Arcanite beam into the sky, nowhere close to any of us. I chalked it up to how I’d blinded him.

With a fantastic sense of timing, some of the storm clouds parted, giving a glimpse of the starry night sky above.

“Brrrpt!” Auri hopped up and down in excitement as she saw Fenrir dive down through the clouds, Nina on his back. My heart swelled at seeing the two again.

“My territory!” The wyvern roared before hitting the turtle like sixty four tons of bricks. I literally could see the earth buck and ripple at the impact, shockwaves emanating from the epicenter. Iona managed to jump back just in time to avoid getting squashed.

Fenrir had more bulk than the turtle, and the brains and willpower to use it. A vast sheet of Ice coated the ground, strong enough to support the turtle’s weight and utterly destroying his ability to stand. Then Fenrir flipped the turtle over onto his back, and started to apply his jaws to the problem.

In one massive bite he ripped away huge chunks of solid crystal plating, liquid Arcanite dripping out from his mouth and from the turtle like blood. Large gashes appeared on his stomach for the briefest of moments before my healing obviated them, Fenrir always being included in my healing image.

Eight more bites later, and the turtle was dead.

[*ding!* Your Party has slain a [Turtle (Water, 963) - (Mirror, 912) - (Arcanite, 898)]]

Iona couldn’t tell if she wanted to hug Nina or Fenrir first.