BECMI Chapter 292 – On Frost

Fighting frost giants required both finesse and brutal power.They were larger than stone giants, tougher, preferred to wear some armor, and were stronger. They were totally at home in the below-zero chill and at high altitudes, too, glacial ice and eternal icecaps their preferred homes.

As to how they got so big on the absolute paucity of things to eat that could be found at that altitude, that was a different story, although the wildlife in Jotunbrul tended to grow every bit as big as the giants themselves did.

Winter wolves, ice toads, frost salamanders, white dragons, cryohydra, ice trolls, frost spiders with their invisible icy webs, occasionally hidden white puddings, frost men slaves/flunkies, even the occasional ice or snow Elemental flitting around and causing problems were among those dangers.

No fey, however. Fey and giants tended not to get along very well at all.

The Daisho teams, and not a few of Darkmoor’s more experienced adventurers, prosecuted the attack. To not offend the Immortals, this invasive strategy did not use weapons of high technology to attack with… although self-heating underarmor to ward off the cold was used in lieu of using spells to always stave off the bitter cold in many places.

When the frost giants came out, be they in large numbers or small, someone came to confront them eventually, and they did not return home. Their bodies were salvaged of what valuables they had upon them, or from the corpses themselves, and then reduced to vivus, Fed to the Land, and nothing remained of them.

Their pets and leashed beasts died. Fearsome predators around their frozen keeps and lairs were slain. Fires Primal and Bane blazed and ate at blue-skinned brutes, borne on Arrows and Blades and Spears. Frost Giants died, and they kept dying.

There was no chasing the teams by now. All the Rangers were Tens and higher, could away from danger in seconds if required, and were preternaturally aware of danger. That those with Halcyon Magic were with the Land and finding out where all the giants and their beasts were, then informing the others, was a given, but the giants did not know that.

That they kept dying when their ambushes consistently fell upon illusions, only to be assaulted while separated, or when clustered together to charge a team in tight quarters, was not a fact that the dead were bringing back to their people.

The lock was giant-sized, a thing of fire giant craft, and so almost ridiculously easy to pick, from a technical point.

Of course, you needed lockpicks that could endure giant-sized tumblers and the kind of torque that could snap a spearshaft apart, so there was a difficulty all its own unique to the locks.

Jace had to use both hands to turn the pick once he set the pins, hearing the click as it gave way, then immediately diving to the floor.

Studs in the shell of the thick chest wall shot forth with the power of powerful springs releasing, sending a dozen darts with suspiciously pale tips on dark iron shooting about the room… and quite harmlessly over Jace’s head.

Eshauna had picked up the shield of the underjarl whose cooling corpse didn’t need it anymore, a round thing taller than she was and thicker than most human tower shields were made. She eyed the two darts buried into the coldly tempered ironwood, and the way ice crystallized on the wood and shattered it away in increments. “Are they getting clever or something?” she had to ask.

The magnet currently mounted on Jace’s helmet gave them plenty of light to operate by. Jace, flat on his face, looked at the base of the chest, then a bit closer. “Hey, think you can push this?” he asked his Daisho partner.

The chest was four foot high, built of solid black iron from the smiths of the Fire clans. Still, Eshauna was confident of being able to move it, the Girdle about her narrow waist giving her plenty of strength and power to do just that.

Except she couldn’t, even with her feet braced and pushing hard.

“Nailed to the floor?” she asked Jace, who hadn’t stood up yet.

“No, just more clever than we’re used to thinking of giants,” he replied, scooting around to the side. A Girdle nearly identical to the one around her waist was also present around his. “Try lifting it this time.”

Intrigued, she moved to the handles on the opposite side from him, and after a short count, they both heaved upwards with more than human strength.

With a groan of protest and a little stiffness, the chest reluctantly lifted itself up out of the shallow indentation it was perfectly fit into, proving to be nearly eight inches deeper than where it sat upon the floor!

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“A false bottom. Clever of them, and not likely to be discovered unless one actually tried to lift the chest perfectly,” Eshauna nodded, giving Jace a shake on his tousled brown hair. “Damn heavy, too. The thing has to weigh near a ton, I’m guessing?”

Both of them were far stronger than they looked, and their lifting power was quadrupled by the power of the Girdles they, and many of the other Daisho teams, now wore. Combat with giants became much easier when one had the strength to actually resist the force of their vastly larger weapons!

“Aye.” He watched her throw open the chest, then used her arm and levered himself up to the lip after nothing erupted out of it, standing above it all as their Disks unwound from Masspacks, ready to be put to use.

They weren’t killing the giants here just to loot and pillage them. On the other hand, leaving the loot behind was idiocy, and goldweight always, always had a use for them. The fortunes that had been spent on Girdles of Giant Strength for the Daisho teams alone was astounding, but the giants were generous in defeat that way… and Darkmoor could sell furs, hides, and Potions made from giant’s blood in some VERY faraway lands now without much trouble, bringing back rare and powerful reagents to be used as goldweight in return for their specific problems.

They had a lot of Baneskulls against Giants now, too.

“Frost spider shimmersilk?” Eshauna asked, familiar with the almost liquid crystal appearance of the stuff, woven from the webs of the great lethal frost spiders that were almost completely invisible in frozen terrain and weather.

It had to have been woven by Frost Men or bargained from the Fey, as the giants certainly didn’t have the delicacy to work such things themselves. They were more apt to use the webs as ropes or cords.

It was naturally incredibly valuable, and they quickly began to lift out the other treasures within.

There were heaps of silver and gold, a generous haul, as well as a pouch of gleaming sapphires and blue quartz pieces that would be useful for empowering cold magicks, as well as some statuettes and scrimshaw carved from mammoth ivory, some of them quite excellent and detailed.

In all, quite a store of loot, worthy of a prominent warrior, except it didn’t get into the false bottom at all.

It turned out that you needed to press the bottom down with nearly a ton of weight, then slide it to the side before it could be pulled up and out, actually requiring an Ice Elemental be Summoned in to perform the simple task and lift away the false bottom.

The thing wrapped up in more ice shimmersilk below was carefully lifted out, the glitter of lights visible right through the cloth. Very carefully, they set it on Eshauna’s Disk and unwrapped it, after dismissing the Elemental with one of the Ice Zircon stones for its trouble.

They stared at it for long moments: the display of lights, the fine lines of metal, the crystalline inlays, the impossibly sharp and detailed design and structure of it all, all wrought of strange materials on a crystalline form about five feet long and six inches by four inches thick.

None of it was natural.

“This… isn’t Green technology,” Jace said softly after his inspection of it. “And not the Ei stuff, either, from what was shown to us.” He squinted at the narrow rectangular device in front of them intently. “It still has power, but I don’t know what it’s designed to do. The giant probably thought it was studded with magical gemstones and the like…”

“Jace, it has magic on it. It might not have once, but it definitely does now. I think that’s a field emitter, and those are modulator nodes,” she pointed to the central flat pane, and then the studs situated around the thing. “Some sort of portable force field device, or something else?” She leaned in closer. “The bottom section is broken up, I think it unfolds legs if properly activated.”

“Do you think… it’s more tech of the Ancients? Like the Azure Knight’s mount?” Jace asked softly, wondering at the value of this find.

“I think that we’re going to take the head of that jarl and the clan shaman, and see what stories they have to tell us of the thing. If there’s a hidden cache of the Ancients around here, the King’s people and the Greens will want to know.”

Wordlessly, the two of them worked to wrap the strange device back up in its silks, then hide it under the other valuables they’d found it here, notably some fine furs and raw ivory hoarded by the clan leader.

Then they got out their Blades to do the bloodier parts of their scavenging, which the other two teams were working on in the other parts of this tribe’s cold and frozen lair.

Multiple explosions tore through the glacier walls as the resonators reverberated through the ice. Key structural supports were blown apart, the waves of force traveled along weakened fracture lines, grew in power, and converged on the weakest areas with magically-supported acuity.

With a great roar and groan of protest, the glacial home of the High Jarl of Jotunbrul, the Fist of Thyr, greatest frost giant warrior of this age, fell within itself, burying what remained of its former inhabitants forever.

It wasn’t precisely a siege, as the besiegers could rapidly melt or tunnel their way in through the ice, and magic gave them precise understandings of the layouts of the tunnels, hallways, and caves that existed in the ice. Other spells let them know who dwelled where so they knew what they would be facing, and so the teams came through the ice when and where they willed, very much to the detriment of the frost giants who could not follow them. If the defenders came outside, they were bombarded by a lot of fire and lightning, or swarmed by tenacious hyn Adventurers who brought them down like ants bringing down lions… only much more quickly.

One by one, the six great holdings of the frost giants, and dozens of lesser tribal and clan holdings, had been wiped away. The few survivors had fled to the stronger clans, sometimes to be denied and turned away, other times to try and prepare their merciless kin for what was coming.

It didn’t avail them. The Daisho teams and mortal adventurers came in, and patiently and thoroughly, destroyed the Jarldom of Jotunbrul completely. They offered no mercy, and in the end, those who did not fight could only flee further to west and north, carrying what was necessary… with those who carried treasures picked off in the middle of their flights impersonally and fatally, often never seeing who launched the rays of fire which tended to slay them with great speed and accuracy.

Over five hundred members of the Daisho teams of Darkmoor watched the last glacier implode, and something break in the atmosphere as it did so. The supernatural chill of the area lessened by a good thirty degrees almost instantly, and suddenly, the sun felt warm, and not just a source of light sitting wanly in the cold blue sky.