Leon stared at the carved wall, frowning deeply as he pondered his problem. Eventually, he walked over to a boulder, cleared off the tiny remaining shards of ice from when he’d blown through the ice wraiths camping outside weeks earlier, and took a seat.

He needed the Iron Needle, he wasn’t leaving without it. He’d repeated that thought many times in the past few weeks, and it was as true now as it was every time it had run through his head. And yet, Tusk wasn’t going to let him through.

‘It’s not exactly in the wrong, is it?’ Leon thought. Here he was, in Tusk’s territory, attempting to break into Tusk’s own home. Tusk was perfectly within its rights to kick him right the ** out, as far as Leon was concerned.

And yet, Leon needed that Needle. He couldn’t imagine that the Needle was in Tusk’s possession, even if Tusk might disagree. Besides, the Iron Needle was a possession of his Clan, and if Tusk did lay claim to it, then Leon would only consider it stolen rather than simply lost.

‘No, I’m not leaving just yet…’ Leon vowed. ‘Just going to have to get a little more creative…’

He wasn’t here for Tusk’s treasures. He wasn’t here to steal from Tusk, he just wanted to repossess his Clan’s property… which made him feel just a little awkward about how much of his Clan’s property he’d passed on before, and his many declarations to leave all of that behind.

But those were the thoughts of an angry boy who’d just had his body stolen. He was ready to accept whatever of his Clan’s legacy that he considered necessary, and that included the Iron Needle.

And that meant that, as sympathetic as he found Tusk’s actions, he couldn’t back down. The only question that remained was how to proceed.

He kicked himself for not revealing himself sooner when his offerings might’ve won him a little more respect and leeway from Tusk, but he couldn’t imagine a few meals measured well against a Universe Fragment, even if that Universe Fragment wasn’t actually in Tusk’s possession at the moment. Or so Leon assumed, anyway.

‘Try peace again?’ Leon wondered. ‘Or just assume it will fail and proceed accordingly? Would leaving another offering and attempting one more parley on somewhat more neutral ground be a good idea? Tusk can talk, sure, but how much does it know of civilization? If it’s a solitary creature, as it seems to be, it might not have much respect for organized discussions and mutual agreements.’

Leon found it damned hard to decide how to proceed. On the one hand, he didn’t think that going the diplomatic route was an option, not anymore. The time for that had come and gone, as far as he was concerned, but was that an excuse to just give it up? He was sorely tempted to just try and blast his way through, doing away with all tact and diplomacy, but against a tenth-tier Ascended Beast—especially since most Ascended Beasts were stronger both physically and magically than their human equivalents—that seemed a method of suicide rather than a plan that might actually win him his Iron Needle.

He sat there on the boulder for a long time, debating with himself over just how to proceed. He desperately wished he could ask the Thunderbird, or anyone else for that matter, but doing so would violate the spirit of the expedition. He was here to seize the Iron Needle himself, and while asking for advice might not be beyond the pale, Leon didn’t think it was time for that yet. He still had other options.

With a deep sigh, he decided upon the diplomatic route. At the very least, he didn’t want to say that he didn’t try to make things work peacefully, even if his attempts came too late. Even if attempting to treat Tusk like Leon would another human was doomed to fail.

It wasn’t long before Leon found himself before the closest of the sacrificial altars, the carved monoliths staring down upon him, the largest depicting either Tusk or some other creature of the same species. The now-familiar magics flowing around the altar were still there, just waiting for proper sacrifice to engage themselves.

For a brief moment, Leon wondered just who had carved these monoliths, but given the lack of script, it was impossible to say. They were remarkably well-carved, and showed little signs of aging, though he supposed there was probably some magic at play in that regard. The monoliths looked like they could’ve been carved just the day before Leon arrived, or a million years before, there was no way for him to tell which.

All he did know was that the image of Tusk on the largest monolith glared down at him with what now seemed a baleful gaze, even if its face was altogether too alien for such an expression to be read into. Leon scowled lightly and reached into his soul realm, retrieving the corpses of two seventh-tier spiders that he’d killed the week before that had tried to turn him into dinner, and laid them down upon the altar. They were large creatures, their body masses each were probably ten times that of Leon’s, but they fit well enough on the altar.

Leon waited a moment, expecting the magic in the stones to activate with two strong sacrifices laid upon it.

He waited a little longer, his concern growing exponentially with every passing second the altar stayed dormant.

He waited a full minute, and then another. He waited five minutes before his scowl deepened about as far as it could. The magic in the altars wasn’t activating, despite it having done so for less than what he was currently offering before he’d passed through Tusk’s wall.

Leon, still frowning, collected his offering and hurried to the next closest altar, through many miles of tunnel and cavern, and tried again, but this time added several fifth and sixth-tier ape corpses along with the spiders.

And still, the altar remained dead. His sacrifices weren’t being accepted.

He pulled the corpses back into his soul realm, his mood dark. The corpses didn’t have much value to him personally, but he wasn’t one to waste his kills. But with his sacrifices rejected, Leon now had to ask himself again: what now?

—

Leon wandered the tunnels for two days, planning his next steps. Complicating his thoughts was the fact that Tusk never once showed itself, as far as Leon could tell. It was as if Leon’s presence had caused it to hunker down in the lower tunnels, possibly out of fear that Leon wasn’t alone or some other reason that Leon couldn’t possibly guess.

Regardless, it left Leon in a bit of a bind. He needed to get past the carved walls, but that was a losing prospect with Tusk still down there. So, if he wanted to make a chance for himself to snag the Iron Needle, then he needed to get Tusk out of those tunnels somehow.

During these few weeks in the tunnels, Leon had noted a couple things about Tusk that he planned around. The first was that, until the altars stopped working for him, Tusk always picked up its offerings in a timely manner. The second was that while it didn’t go out of its way to exterminate the ice wraiths and their pet banshees from its tunnels, Tusk always slaughtered them whenever it encountered them.

So, Leon figured if he could somehow get the remaining ice wraiths in the tunnels to act up, then perhaps Tusk might come out of its tunnels to put a stop to the violence. What had Leon more concerned about that particular plan was how to get the ice wraiths to attack him or make noise without killing them all—while their deaths wouldn’t give him trouble sleeping at night, he wanted to leave Tusk a sizable mess to clean up, with as many ice wraiths running around as possible. That meant he couldn’t simply kill them all for Tusk.

He also wasn’t sure if he could even get the ice wraiths to attack him, follow him, or go on a rampage throughout the tunnels, killing all of Tusk’s worshippers. If he provoked them, and they did nothing, then Leon would have just wasted his time.

‘Not like I’m running short of that, though,’ Leon thought with a smile. He had plenty of time to try things out, but if the ice wraiths didn’t work out, then he’d have to start getting particularly creative to get Tusk out of its caverns, and he didn’t want to out-and-out declare war on the creature. He just wanted the Iron Needle, and then he’d be out of Tusk’s metaphorical hair.

Before all of that, however, he needed another piece of context, and fortunately, that piece came relatively quickly.

By his estimation, some powerful creature made a sacrifice to Tusk at least twice per week at one of the altars, and he soon found a large snow lion dragging a large corpse of a fallen stag, clearly meant as its sacrifice. The lion dragged the stag onto the round altar, and Leon felt the ancient runes around him fire up. However, Tusk never showed itself. The sacrifice seemed to be accepted, for a drop of light appeared and entered the snow lion, but it appeared as if from nowhere, and as far as Leon could tell, it wasn’t because Tusk was invisible. It was simply as if the tenth-tier creature wasn’t there.

So, with a heavy sigh, Leon realized that his options were even more limited than he’d thought they were. He briefly wondered if Tusk was somehow tracking him, and would know if he was still in the cave system, but after taking an hour to give himself as thorough an examination as he could, he found no strange magics upon or around him that would indicate such.

‘Not that that means I’m not being tracked…’ Leon thought with a touch of bitterness.

So, he decided to go with his initial plan, and see if he could get the ice wraiths to make enough noise to rouse Tusk and get it out of its lair. But first, he would need to make a few preparations…

—

Leon stood in the mouth of the tunnel, staring out at the largest collection of ice wraiths that he’d ever seen. The massive cavern they were housing themselves in was filled with their pillars, and the ceiling choked with thick sheets of banshees, lazily floating about, just waiting for their icy masters to have need of them.

Leon was about to give them that need.

He traveled with not only several fully built and prepared Lightning Lances, but also the materials to build more. However, in this case, he’d decided to try something a little more radical, placing a great deal of trust in his armor and the strength of its enchantments.

He removed the base of a Lightning Lance and rigged up a slightly different firing mechanism. That way, he could hold the barrel and fire it over his shoulder, giving him the ability to use the weapon without setting it up first, though his aim was terrible and it wasn’t as powerful as it could be—the main power source and most of its control enchantments were contained in the base, after all. Still, he figured he could get off one very inaccurate and rather underpowered shot by wielding it by hand as he was, and when his enemies were as thickly-gathered as they were, accuracy wasn’t needed.

So, he stood there in the mouth of the tunnel, his shroud of darkness obscuring him from view—to his immense relief, as he felt like a fool hefting the large barrel of his weapon like a tree trunk—and took aim at the closest ice pillar. He did his best to stay on target, but his sights were designed for a completely different firing position, so it wasn’t particularly easy.

Still, when he thought himself ready, he channeled his power into the weapon’s enchantments, and once they were charged up, he manually manipulated them to get the weapon to fire. The barrel was a long tube of steel nestled within another long tube, encasing a series of heavily enchanted rings. These rings pulled another enchanted cylinder of iron through the barrel, accelerating it to a fantastic speed. One of the better modifications that Leon’s researchers had made was shallow spiraling grooves etched into the interior of the barrel, which caused the iron cylinder to spin, increasing accuracy.

That accuracy went to waste as Leon’s shot went wide, missing the massive ice pillar not too far in front of him. For just a moment, Leon frowned, his lightning magic still flowing through him and increasing the speed of his perceptions enough to fully appreciate that he’d just missed such a massive target. Thankfully, in such a densely-packed cavern, he still hit something, and that something was another ice pillar about two miles further back. Even with the reduced strength of the weapon and the distance it had to travel, the round still hit with force great enough to heavily damage the pillar, causing thousands of cracks to spread across the pillar’s surface and nearly bring it down completely.

And it was like Leon had kicked an ant hill; thousands of ice wraiths came pouring out of the hundreds of pillars in the cavern. The cavern was almost the size of the Forest of Black and White itself, and the ice wraiths had made it their home, so with their home attacked, they came out in force.

As was their wont, Leon noticed that most of them were seventh-tier. It seemed rather strange, but he’d not seen a single ice wraith less than sixth-tier, though he assumed they had to exist in some capacity, maybe. He’d have asked Xaphan, but the demon was still making himself scarce, immersing himself in his recovery.

Every pillar had at least one eighth-tier ice wraith in addition to the hordes of seventh-tier wraiths. Some of the larger pillars had multiple, and from the largest pillar in the center of the cavern, Leon saw the one ninth-tier wraith that he was already somewhat acquainted with emerge. The air filled with the killing intent of thousands of murder-happy wraiths, and the banshees above screeched in unison. Even encased in his enchanted armor, with a tau pearl there to provide extra support, Leon fell to his knees in pain as his magic rampaged through his body beyond his control thanks to the banshees. In the same moment, his shroud of darkness was ripped off, leaving him completely exposed for all the wraiths and banshees to plainly see.

Leon almost buckled from seeing thousands of powerful beings turn in his direction almost all at once. It wasn’t surprising that they’d found him so quickly in their own home, but it was quite frightening, nonetheless. With great effort, Leon got his magic back under control, he pulled his jury-rigged shoulder cannon back into his soul realm, and he turned around and ran right the hells away, quickly vanishing down the tunnel he’d come from.

For a moment, he wondered if his bait had been taken, but the killing intent and cold, dark auras that flooded into the tunnel not far behind him proved that it had. He smiled for a moment as he ran, noting that hundreds of banshees were flowing into the tunnel behind him, their dark smoky bodies concealing completely any ice wraiths that might be coming, too.

As a ninth-tier lightning mage, Leon knew he could easily outrun all of these creatures, and this pursuit made that abundantly clear. The banshees could move quickly enough for their power level, but they were all between the third and fifth-tier, and unable to capitalize on the natural speed of darkness. The wraiths were faster, despite water and ice magic not being suited for speed. So, Leon forced himself to slow down, always keeping himself just in sight, often turning to throw lightning bolts at the oncoming banshees whenever he led them through a long enough tunnel.

Along the way, a number of pre-arranged traps were activated, causing great explosions of fire and lightning that killed many more banshees, and in the holes his traps punched, Leon noticed that there were, in fact, ice wraiths among them, to his immense relief. He didn’t think banshees alone, no matter how thickly massed, would be enough to get Tusk off its ass.

He could’ve filled the tunnels with hundreds of traps if he wished. He figured he could fill them with enough to destroy the entire tunnel system, assuming he didn’t run into any unexpected support and reinforcement enchantments, but instead he hit his pursuers with what he hoped was just enough power to keep them hooked and on his tail. He was always just ahead of them, always hitting them hard and keeping them angry. And soon enough, he burst out into another titanic cavern.

This cavern was, like all the others, filled with life. It was hundreds of square miles in size, and the strange underground forest that grew in it provided more than enough sustenance for a thriving ecosystem—an ecosystem that was almost immediately thrown out of balance as banshees and ice wraiths came exploding out of the tunnel behind Leon. Even worse, in the distance Leon realized that the ice wraiths hadn’t been so stupid as to simply follow him, they’d sent several large forces through other tunnels to try and cut him off, these forces pouring out of other tunnels and into this cavern at almost the same time.

He smiled with the initial success of his plan, but it would all be for nothing if Tusk didn’t take this provocation. So, instead of trying to escape the wraiths and banshees, he turned to run deeper into the forest, toward the closest of Tusk’s altars. To his immense relief, even as his destination became clear, none of his pursuers elected to stop, not even as other powerful creatures began howling threats with this cold invasion of the cavern.

Leon came to a stop right in front of Tusk’s monolith at the altar site, and only a moment later, the cavern air above him was filled with banshees. A few silver-blue lightning bolts scattered them, but they didn’t put even a dent in their overall numbers. Still, it was enough to give him space, even as hundreds of ice wraiths closed in around him, with the ninth-tier wraith leading them.

This wraith locked eyes with Leon and slowed down a bit, seeming to hesitate a bit to approach Tusk’s altar. But with a few more electric incentives from Leon poking small holes in its pursuing force, the powerful wraith came forward, its aura tremendous, its killing intent thick.

It extended a hand and launched a wave of ice like a tsunami, but Leon countered with a wave of his own, his made of black fire. These two powers met almost exactly between them, causing a tremendous explosion that just about cut the entire cavern in twain. A forty-foot trench was cut almost a mile long between them, and the entire cavern shook, but what came next completely blew that out of the water.

A roar that crashed down upon them all resounded through the cavern, drowning out the shrieking of the banshees and the howling of the other beasts. The ice wraiths were largely silent creatures, but so many of them had the air just a moment before filled with the cracking sounds of water flash-freezing, but even this was completely overpowered by that roar.

With a wide smile of vindication, Leon turned and saw Tusk flying into the cavern from another tunnel, rage as etched into its alien face as Leon thought possible.

His bait had been taken, and it was time to enact the next part of his plan.